I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we build and maintain psychological safety over time.
Psychological safety is the sense that it’s safe to admit you’ve made a mistake, don’t know the answer, or are struggling, and that you can challenge authority or the status quo without fear of negative consequences. It’s also a key ingredient in successful teams, supporting everything from well-being and inclusion to creativity and overall effectiveness.
So how do we make sure we’re creating and sustaining psychological safety on our teams?
Dr. Timothy Clark, author of The Four Stages of Psychological Safety, recently shared a list of questions he recommends leaders ask themselves each week to assess whether their actions are supporting a culture of psychological safety. Here’s his list:
- Did anyone end up on the outside of a conversation I was in?
- Did I look away or sigh while someone asked me a question?
- Did someone who knew the answer stay quiet in my meeting?
- Did I present someone’s work without naming them?
- Did an idea someone gave me disappear without a reply?
- Did I cut someone off to save time?
- Did I make a call about someone based on their group?
- Did someone pay a price for questioning my plan?
- Did I ask for pushback after the decision was made?
- Did I correct someone in front of others?
- Did an honest mistake cost someone more than the fix?
- Did I explain something in a way that made someone feel small?
I love this list. It’s a practical reminder of how much our everyday interactions matter. For me, the questions distill down to one central consideration: Did the people I interacted with come away feeling seen?
I once spoke with the head of corrections for a large urban county. He has hundreds of employees, and has been in the role for more than twenty years. He told me that he tries to remember as he’s walking down the hall, for instance, that he may pass someone who is a stranger to him, but that fleeting moment might be his only interaction with someone who has worked for him for a decade.
He aims to ensure that each interaction is a positive one. Even if his mind if halfway stuck in the meeting he just left, he makes eye contact with the person, smiles, asks about their day, and shows a willingness to listen.
That’s empathetic leadership in practice: recognizing the humanity of others and making an effort to provide the support they need to thrive.
Concepts like psychological safety and empathetic leadership can be difficult to quantify. Building and maintaining them takes sustained effort, and we don’t always know the impact of a single interaction. But we can pay attention to how we show up for others, and we can make small choices every day that help people feel respected, included, and safe to speak up.
Those small moments add up. And they’re worth the effort.
