LEADING AND MANAGING PEOPLE

Creating Psychological Safety

The behaviours in the table below show how you can demonstrate the skill of Creating Psychological Safety at each of the competency levels in which it appears. Click on the plus sign to show the behaviours at that level.

Click here to read more about how the competency levels work.

Resources

Below you will find learning resources to help you develop the skill of Creating Psychological Safety. Click on the links to access the resources.

PDFs
Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is one of the most important conditions that you can create to contribute to the effectiveness, productivity, motivation, and growth of a team or an organisation. This PDF explains what psychological safety is, and how you can create it, and what stops it.

Negative and Positive Evidence
This PDF explains how we unconsciously filter information depending on biases we might have and how this can impact how we feel about receiving recognition. Use this to check whether you are more sensitive to a lack of recognition than instances when you are recognised, and learn ways to change this if necessary. 

Trust in Self and Others
This PDF covers the nature of trust and trusting relationships and why they are important. It will help you to understand why and when we look for evidence that we are safe in a group and the effect this has on our ability to cope.

Task Positive Task Negative
This PDF provides an explanation of a fundamentally important network in your brain – your attention network. You will learn how to differentiate between the two (Task Positive/Task Negative), why each is essential and for what, recognise if you are neglecting to use either, and understand how and why you can develop greater flexibility. This will improve your effectiveness.

VIDEOS
Breaches of Trust
If you have members of your team who feel they have been treated unfairly, or if you find yourself in this position, this video will help to explain how this can damage trust, why trust is crucial for psychological safety, and what you can do to build and maintain it. It provides an explanation of the neuroscience behind trust and how this impacts relationships.

Task Positive Task Negative Leadership
This video provides an explanation of a fundamentally important network in your brain – your attention network - that impacts how you interact with others, particularly members of your team when in a leadership role. It explains how to balance this network to create psychological safety.

ON THE JOB ACTIONS
Review
Read What Is Psychological Safety? and How to Create Psychological Safety. Reflect on your own behaviour. Are you treating everyone with respect? Are individuals able to be themselves without any unkind banter or comment.


Respect
Try to learn what each member of the team is proud of about themselves. Make sure that you comment favourably when they have demonstrated this aspect.


Disagreements
Read Resolving Conflict in the Communication competency and the Skill of Conflict Resolution. Use the recommended techniques appropriately, especially Chunking Up to Agreement as this is useful if you have to facilitate and resolve conflict between members of your team. Doing this successfully will strengthen psychological safety.

Are you biased?
Read Negative and Positive Evidence to understand if you have a bias towards either, and, if you do, how this might affect your own psychological safety and your judgements about others, which, in turn, might affect theirs. 

Build trust
Read Trust in Self and Others for a neuroscientist’s explanation of how trust is created in the brain and practical ideas for building it.