Description
While the benefits of psychological safety are well established, a new survey suggests how leaders, by developing specific skills, can create a safer and higher-performance work environment.
Leaders can build psychological safety by creating the right climate, mindsets, and behaviours within their teams. In our experience, those who do this best act as catalysts, empowering and enabling other leaders on the team—even those with no formal authority—to help cultivate psychological safety by role modelling and reinforcing the behaviours they expect from the rest of the team.
Program Learning Outcomes
People come to work to make a contribution, with the aim of doing their best. When individuals don’t feel safe it’s hard to do their best work. It is one of the reasons why psychological safety is important.
One of the key elements and cornerstones of psychological safety is feeling included. People all want to feel a sense of belonging. Humans crave social connection. There is research that suggests that being socially excluded is as painful as any physical pain that one feels.
Think about a time where you felt left out or where you were excluded from a group. Not much fun was it? Exclusion and not being part of something impacts on people’s mental health. It can feel shameful, embarrassing and generate lower levels of self-worth. If we want to improve mental health outcomes in the workplace then creating a safe environment where everyone feels included is vital.
It’s more than just feeling included. A psychologically safe environment enables individuals to feel safe to learn. They can dive into the discovery process, make mistakes and occasionally fail knowing that the environment is safe to do so. People are encouraged by others in their learning. It doesn’t mean that they can keep making mistakes, it just means the focus is on learning so that mistakes and failures reduce over time. Learning and growing amplifies an individual’s self-worth and increases their sense of resilience. Both lead to positive mental outcomes.
Psychological safety doesn’t just help create the best conditions for positive mental health, it also makes good business sense. High levels of psychological safety leads to greater business performance, employee engagement and innovation. Without psychological safety individuals won’t feel comfortable in challenging the status quo, nor will they look for new ways of doing things. If an individual doesn’t feel psychologically safe, then they will stay in their comfort zone rather than take calculated risks. The result is less innovation and progression.
On successful completion of the program participants will be able to understand and manage several mental health strategies that managers can implement to build a more psychologically safe environment.
