In this article:
Esther Crew is Founder of Inclusion Live and an executive HR leader with 25+ years of UK and global leadership and culture development experience partnering with some of the world’s biggest organisations.
In this article, Esther shares her perspective on why psychological safety is one of the most overlooked drivers of performance.
How do you measure up?
Think of your biggest screw-up at work. When you realised that you had made a mistake, how did you feel? Did you worry about what would happen if someone found out? If you did you are not alone.
In our recent research into 593 PE-backed companies, only 12% of employees surveyed believed their company leaders empower people to contribute fully, speak freely, collaborate and challenge.
If you are a senior leader wondering how your workplace would measure up the research revealed another interesting take. When asked the same question senior leaders were over four times more likely (52%) to believe their company leaders empower people to contribute fully, speak freely, collaborate and challenge.
In this large slice of UK companies, it’s clear that there is a chasm between the perception of leaders and how supported and empowered team members actually feel. This is the psychological safety gap.
Lack of psychological safety is executional risk
Psychological safety is a shared belief that it’s okay to take risks. That team members and leaders can speak candidly and brainstorm out loud, have questions, make mistakes and contribute ideas and concerns – without fearing negative consequences.
You can consider psychological safety like the canary in the coalmine – it’s an early warning system that all is not well with your employees. By monitoring and acting to strengthen psychological safety, you can see when performance and engagement are about to dip and course correct before a crash.
Without psychological safety shared between leaders and teams you have a real and present execution risk.
Closing the psychological safety risk gap
Managing internal and external risks are already baked into your investment strategy and the management of the psychological safety risk should be no different.
Establish an understanding of psychological safety
Engage with your teams on the importance of psychological safety for everyone in your company and how, when present, everyone can perform at their best and enjoy fulfilling work.
Once understood by everyone you can implement your psychological safety risk management strategy starting with the assessment of whether psychological safety is a gap and the size of the challenge you are facing.
Follow your assessment with the building of a proactive strategy to turn the executional risk into an executional advantage.
Measure psychological safety as a performance risk
Unless you track the level of psychological safety in your business you can’t manage the execution risk it creates.
A simple quarterly survey establishes the psychological safety gap as an assessment on how free people feel to:
- – Take risks
- – Speak candidly
- – Brainstorm out loud
- – Ask questions
- – Contribute ideas
- – Make and learn from mistakes:
- Ensure you set up the survey so you can segment data, for example by grade, team and department.
- Analyse the responses to create key insights that reveal the current status of psychological safety.
- Cut the data results by role (whilst preserving anonymity of responses) and compare leaders vs non-management employees to define your psychological safety metrics.
Your one-minute weekly pulse survey
Now you know where your organisation stands, you need to identify how psychologically safe your employees feel on a week-by-week basis.
Leaders can make an instant assessment and identify opportunities to minimise operational risk by asking two key questions of everyone, every week.
Q1: In the last week, have you felt able to take risks and speak out candidly? (yes/no)
Q2: What one thing could we do to make you feel more able to do so?
Tracking these two weekly metrics gives you a direct read on how prepared your company is to deliver urgent operational priorities.
Psychological safety is a vital enabler for high performance
Understanding where your business is, monitoring your psychological safety dashboard and taking action to improve this key metric will enable you to manage executional risks and build positive momentum that improves your bottom line.
Psychological safety isn’t a “soft” measure. It’s a performance and risk hidden lever. The organisations that choose to measure and strengthen it deliberately will be the ones that outperform sustainably.
Download Your Free Action Tool: Advancing Psychological Safety Diagnostic
Access the tool