How To Start Practicing Psychological Safety
As the world grows more complex, so do the expectations for leaders. Gone are the days when autocratic leaders passed orders down the chain of command, and thank goodness for that. As employees push for more compassion, respect, and fairness, and those demands continuously improve bottom lines, leaders are expected to reach goals and cultivate the psychological safety that gets teams to those goals together. More than that, heart-centered leaders want to be safe — leading their teams with openness, self-awareness, and intentionality.
Why Practice Psychological Safety
Data consistently backs the idea that psychological safety improves communication, retention, and performance. But for anyone actively trying to be safe, that’s likely secondary to your true goals. Goals like getting the wins that help your team shine without constantly compromising your values. Making yourself a safe oasis in a sea of toxicity. Or simply trying to be a better boss than the ones you’ve had.
One of the first mistakes we make is believing psychological safety is something we have the power to create. This language implies that we can build it with tools, other people, or possibly magic. But since we can’t infuse a whole group with a single feeling without venturing into cult territory, creation misses the mark. Instead, it’s more accurate to think of psychological safety as a daily practice of thoughtful actions, or “safe” as something you aspire to be to as many people as possible through how you lead.
Growing Self-Awareness & Relationship Management
Most definitions of this concept tend to be vague references to reasons not to be afraid: “Everyone can make mistakes without fear when we’re all psychologically safe!” How-tos leave us hanging with instructions like “practice showing vulnerability” and no examples of how actually to. Those guides skip the very first steps that form the foundation for becoming a safer leader — growing your emotional intelligence skills of self-awareness and relationship management.
Within those big, broad topics are a handful of practices that can help you establish the confidence and connections that promote safety in your leadership style.
Daily Self Check-Ins
Always consider your own safety first. Clear-eyed self-awareness can help you gauge how your well-being might impact your ability to help others feel safe each day. Find time to check in with how you’re feeling mentally and physically, and what might be a drain or boost for your day personally and professionally and adjust accordingly. Effective boundaries start here.
Personal Coping Strategy
Being safe for other people isn’t necessarily warm and fuzzy. It sometimes involves difficult conversations about uncomfortable things with people you might prefer to avoid. That takes courage — and coping skills. You can’t provide safety in a vacuum, so make sure you have a sounding board partner, therapist, mentor, or friend. Know when to spot your personal signs of stress and how to address them. And create routines that support your physical and mental health.
Learner Mindset
While learning by doing is extremely valuable, making safety a priority requires prioritizing your leadership development, too. That means learning how to manage conflict, coach, and overcome implicit biases. It involves growing emotional intelligence and understanding the purpose and function of anti-racist and DEI efforts. Find podcasts, read books, take classes, or find a coach. Do the work to gain the skills to solve the challenges you and your team face.
Human-Centered POV
Everyone around you is a person who just happens to play the role of an accountant or an intern. No one deserves more consideration than anyone else. Explore your views on a hierarchy based on tenure or title. Make an effort to always look at everyone as a person before their position. And take responsibility for the position you put yourself in, which includes having a real influence on other people’s lives. Don’t forget that you and all those other people sometimes make mistakes.
Embracing an egalitarian view of your coworkers doesn’t mean treating them exactly the same way. To embody safety, create a daily practice of taking an interest in each person through a combination of intentional exploration, casual conversation, and spending time on common ground. Aim to learn what makes each person feel safe, how they receive feedback, process information, and approach collaboration.
Active Listening
Active listening helps to avoid conflicts, impress a feeling of value and autonomy on the speaker, create stronger bonds, improve productivity, and catalyze personal and collective growth and development. To practice active listening, try to be as prepared as possible for any conversation, minimize distractions, lead with curiosity, and use reflections to stay present. Remind yourself to listen with the intent to understand first, not to plan your next response.
Empathy
Cognitive empathy at its core is doing your best to take on other people’s perspectives. That involves looking past a person’s behavior to what you know about them to better understand what might motivate that behavior.
Compassionate empathy is then sharing that you understand their point of view. For example, when an employee makes a choice you don’t agree with, practice getting to a place where you can understand why they made it, and start your conversation from the point of understanding, not disagreement.
Putting Safety Into Practice
As you can see, psychological safety isn’t a single action or idea, but an ecosystem of thoughts and behaviors that become intrinsic to how you lead. It’s a lifelong commitment to do what you can to intentionally lead from where your head and heart meet.
Inspired to put theory into practice? Try this:
- Explore the stories of times when you felt safe enough to be vulnerable to get something you needed, and times when you felt fear at work. Think of how these stories inform your views on what safety looks like, and how everyone has their own variations.
- Create a list of categories that are meaningful to your sense of well-being — physical health, family dynamics, amount of meetings, time to work out. Start your day by running through the list to get a sense of how much capacity you have to manage other people’s needs in addition to your own.
- Track your triggers. Spend a few days making a note every time you’re negatively triggered by a person or event at work and begin developing coping strategies to manage your most common triggers.
- Practice shifting from fixer to coach with your team. Remind yourself to try to prove your curiosity, not your competence, the next time a team member presents you with a challenge. Focus on their ability to come up with a solution rather than your certainty that you know the best one.
Psychological safety is more of an “I know it when I see it” kind of thing than something you can easily define. It encompasses how we show up and how we respond to countless small moments every day. When in doubt, ask yourself, “Am I being open, self-aware, and intentional?” And try your best.
Liza Dube is a career and leadership coach with 20 years of experience as a marketing communications leader across several industries. Using the fundamentals of emotional intelligence, she helps socially conscious leaders create more compassionate workplaces, starting with themselves.
