You’ve hired an excellent team, set lofty but realistic goals, and implemented efficient processes—so why aren’t your employees reaching their full potential?
It could be that they’re afraid to make mistakes or contribute new ideas.
“Overcoming challenges requires a strong sense of psychological safety and disciplined learning practices,” says Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson in the online course Dynamic Teaming, which can be taken individually or as one of seven courses in the Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB). “As a leader, it’s your job to unlock the potential of your team and create the best possible chance for breakthrough performance.”
Here’s a primer on psychological safety, why it’s important in the workplace, and how to build it in your organization.
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DOWNLOAD NOWWhat Is Psychological Safety at Work?
Psychological safety encourages people within a group to offer opinions, suggest ideas, ask questions, raise concerns, and admit mistakes without fearing negative consequences.
According to Dynamic Teaming, psychological safety has four key elements:
- Willingness to help: Employees believe asking for help is appropriate, and their colleagues are willing to provide it
- Inclusion and diversity: Employees feel a sense of belonging and that their diverse experiences and expertise matter
- Attitude to risk and failure: Employees view mistakes and failures as acceptable in favor of learning
- Open conversation: Employees perceive conversations as open, candid, and safe to contribute to
For a workplace to be psychologically safe, it must meet all four dimensions.
Explore why psychological safety is essential to building high-performing teams—and how it fuels innovation, trust, and growth in the video below. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content.
The Importance of Psychological Safety in the Workplace
Psychological safety means employees feel comfortable speaking up, taking risks, and making mistakes. This can help boost satisfaction, creativity, performance, and efficacy—especially within dynamic teams.
Dynamic teams have fluid membership that can span industries, functions, time zones, and languages. They vary greatly in size and scope and often operate under constantly changing conditions and tasks.
As the world becomes more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA), dynamic teaming becomes increasingly crucial for navigating new challenges.
“To move from traditional management to managing in a VUCA world requires adopting a new mindset,” Edmondson says in Dynamic Teaming. “Today’s world requires cross-functional and dynamic teaming. It’s your job—the leader’s job—to move your team and organization toward that mindset.”
One key attribute of dynamic teams is their ability to experiment, leverage diverse backgrounds and expertise, and work creatively to find innovative solutions.
In Dynamic Teaming, Edmondson explains that while diversity and inclusive leadership offer significant benefits, their foundation lies in psychological safety. Without it, diverse teams can underperform compared to their homogeneous counterparts.
To help unlock your team’s potential, here are five ways to create a culture of psychological safety.
Establishing Psychological Safety in the Workplace
1. Talk About It and Prioritize It
While it may seem simple, the first step to creating psychological safety is talking about it. By openly prioritizing psychological safety as a leader, you can define and dispel misconceptions about it.
“Too many people think that it’s about feeling comfortable all the time,” Edmondson says in the Harvard Business Review, “and that you can’t say anything that makes someone else uncomfortable or you’re violating psychological safety. Anything hard to achieve requires being uncomfortable along the way.”
2. Push Beyond Impression Management
Psychological safety thrives when people feel free to speak openly and make mistakes without fear. Yet, fostering that kind of environment requires taking risks. This can be especially difficult for managers, as it often clashes with team members’ internal impression management.
Impression management refers to how one navigates interpersonal risk by shaping how others see them, often to avoid appearing incompetent, uninformed, or negative.
“For an employee, managing personal risk by remaining quiet is an easy solution, and works incredibly well as a means of self-protection,” Edmondson says in Dynamic Teaming. “But it's a terrible solution for the organization.”
To help mitigate impression management's effects, Edmondson recommends emphasizing the following points:
- It’s about the group, not the individual
- Overcoming existing cultural norms can be challenging
- It won’t prevent mistakes, but it enables you and your team to learn from them
- It doesn’t mean everyone agrees; it encourages team members to welcome disagreement to find the best solution
- Not every idea is implemented, but all ideas are considered
Shifting workplace culture requires team buy-in to succeed. Embracing these perspectives can dispel a culture of interpersonal fear and drive strategic goals.
3. Implement the Psychological Safety Scale
Before making changes, assess your organization’s psychological safety performance.
One tool you can use is the psychological safety scale. Created by Edmondson, it’s a series of statements that employees indicate to what extent they agree.
For instance, for the statement, “I'm comfortable asking other members of my team for help,” the employee checks off their answer on a scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”
Once all employees have filled out the scale, you can average the score for each question to identify the areas your team is strongest in and which need improvement.
The scale also highlights where the organization falls as a starting point between one and 10 to help you determine how you're tracking toward business goals.
4. Promote Conversation with Jazz Dialogues
A critical part of fostering psychological safety is actively seeking employee input. Until it becomes an ingrained part of your team’s culture, employees may hesitate to offer feedback unless explicitly asked.
To promote open expression, active listening, and collaborative thinking, Edmondson recommends a process known as the jazz dialogue in Dynamic Teaming, drawing on the work of strategic advisor Per Hugander and Swedish banking giant SEB. In jazz dialogues, participants are encouraged to speak up, share ideas, and thoughtfully engage with one another’s contributions. The rules are simple:
- Listen more, speak less
- Build on others’ contributions
- Respond to what’s emerging, not pre-planned ideas
This intentional structure creates the conditions for meaningful dialogue and co-creation, where every voice matters and new insights emerge through collective engagement.
5. Continually Reassess and Adjust
Finally, remember that a psychologically safe work environment requires constant reassessment.
Dynamic Teaming likens an organization’s psychological safety to muscular strength in the body. Just as you must work to maintain strength over time, you need to put in effort to keep your organization psychologically safe.
If you use the psychological safety scale, revisit it periodically to track whether your efforts yield the desired culture. You can also regularly solicit constructive feedback from employees one-on-one about how they feel about the team culture and adjust accordingly.
Unleash Your Team’s Potential
Creating a psychologically safe workplace takes time, effort, and vulnerability—making some leaders shy away from it.
If you’re courageous enough, you can unleash your team’s full potential by cultivating a culture that values open communication, sharing ideas, supportive discussions, and growing from mistakes.
Are you interested in building psychological safety in the workplace? Explore our Dynamic Teaming course, which offers unique strategies to foster trust and collaboration. You can take it independently or as part of the Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB). CLIMB consists of seven courses for leading in the modern business world. Download our CLIMB brochure to learn more about the curriculum, admissions requirements, and benefits.
This post was updated on May 20, 2025. It was originally published on March 28, 2024.
