An Introduction to Psychological Safety

1. Introduction to
Psychological Safety
Richard McLean, July 2023, @mcleanonline

2. What we’re going to cover today
• How are we going to run this session?
• What is psychological safety?
• Why does it matter?
• How do we build it in Elsevier?
• How can you build it in your team?

3. What we’re going to cover today
• How are we going to run this session?
• What is psychological safety?
• Why does it matter?
• How do we build it in Elsevier?
• How can you build it in your team?

4. My ask of you:
• Please speak up with ideas, questions, or concerns

5. My question for you:
• How do we set the conditions for you to speak up
with ideas, questions, or concerns?

7. “This is a safe space!”

8. What we’re going to cover today
• How we’re going to run this session
• What is psychological safety?
• Why does it matter?
• How do we build it in Elsevier
• How can you build it in your team?

9. What is psychological safety?
“A belief that one will not be punished or
humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions,
concerns, or mistakes.”
Professor Amy Edmondson,
Harvard Business School

10. There are a number of key indicators for when people don’t
feel psychologically safe

11. Conversely, you know when people probably feel psychologically
safe when they:
• feel safe to speak up, offer ideas, and ask questions
• bring up problems and tough
• ask for help
• take a risk
• accept and appreciate diversity (eg of skills and talents)
• challenge ideas and support one another as people

12. Psychological safety is not
about being nice
It’s about building a human high-performance culture

13. There is no trade off between psychological
safety and accountability

14. CARE
PERSONALLY
CHALLENGE
DIRECTLY
Risk: manipulative insincerity
Risk: ruinous sympathy
Risk: obnoxious aggression
Overlay:
Kim Scott,
‘Radical Candor’

15. What we’re going to cover today
• How are we going to run this session?
• What is psychological safety?
• Why does it matter?
• How do we build it in Elsevier?
• How can you build it in your team?

16. It matters to each of us
Individuals on teams with high Psychological Safety:
• Feel safe to speak up, to offer ideas, and ask questions
• Are more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates
• Are less likely to leave

17. It matters to teams
Reminder: In a team with low levels of psychological
safety, people are not comfortable speaking up
and/or feel that there may be consequences if they
question things.
Patrick Lencioni:
Psychological safety is the
basis of building a high-
performing team

18. It matters to teams
Teams with high PS perform better

19. It matters to companies
Companies with high psychological safety perform better on almost all KPIs/metrics.*
“In study after study, psychological safety predicts outcomes ranging from
creativity to error reporting to performance.”
“it is worth noting the consistency of psychological safety as a predictor”
* Research from Harvard, Microsoft, and Google

21. Sweet
spot

22. There’s a link between psychological safety and
workload/wellness/stress/burnout
There are reasons we say "yes" to work when we probably shouldn't,
including:
• Nobody wants to be the person who lets the team down
• We like to work on shiny new things, not the boring old things
• Everything takes longer than we think it will. Especially other people's work.
• It's much easier to say yes than it is to say no. Especially to people whom
we like and respect.
Fundamentally, increased psychological safety increases the ability to be
candid about your capacity to take on more work. Increased psychological
safety means we feel safer in asking for help/support or even I telling team
members things they don't want to hear, such as "No, I can't do that now." or "I
can do that, but we'll need to delay X or Y to do so.")

23. What we’re going to cover today
• How are we going to run this session?
• What is psychological safety?
• Why does it matter?
• How do we build it in Elsevier?
• How can you build it in your team?

24. 05.07.2023

25. https://mcleanonline.medium.com/building-psychological-safety-c46844cb918

26. Don’t focus on the numbers –
focus on the meaning
“It [the survey] is always meant to be a
conversation starter; not some kind of
absolute measure, like body
temperature, with a right answer.
Surveys are always measuring
perceptions relevant to something. And
that something varies based on a variety
of contextual factors.”
Amy Edmondson

29. What we’re going to cover today
• How are we going to run this session?
• What is psychological safety?
• Why does it matter?
• How do we build it in Elsevier?
• How can you build it in your team?

30. • How to build psychological safety “remains an area for future
research”
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-055217

31. Questions?