Simple Rules: Psychological Safety | Project Management Essentials

My article, Simple Rules for High-Performing Teams outlines steps managers can take to build effective, committed, and creative organizations where collaboration is the norm. Simple rules are universal principles that are easy to remember, apply, and more likely to be followed.

To create high-performing teams, managers should:

Create psychological safety,
Empower the team, and
Make it simple.

Google’s Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the most critical factor contributing to high-performing teams. These teams were more productive, innovative, and engaged. They had more open communications, were willing to take risks, and learn from their mistakes.

This article explores psychological safety, which is the necessary first step in achieving high performance. Without it, team members avoid making decisions (empowerment) or innovating (simplification).

Psychological safety is often misunderstood and conflated. I present a model and key actions to create a safe environment and improve team performance.

What is Psychological Safety?

Contents

What is Psychological Safety?
Creating Psychological Safety

Physical safety and security are easy to understand. Unfortunately, psychological safety lacks a universally accepted definition. McKinsey describes it as “an absence of interpersonal fear.” Anyone who has been picked on or bullied knows what that feeling is like.

Tim Clarke describes psychological safety as a four-stage progression: inclusion, learner, contributor, and challenger safety.

Inclusion safety is the feeling of belonging to a group. Loneliness, isolation, and feeling marginalized are the opposite experiences. In 2023, the Surgeon General issued a report highlighting the loneliness epidemic and its negative effects on individual health and society.

The significance of affiliation and belonging is central to many leading theories of team and group motivation. Abraham Maslow places “Love and Belonging” in his Hierarchy of Needs. The needs for physical and psychological safety must be fulfilled before someone can become “Self-Actualizing” or live and work at their full potential. David McClelland’s Three Needs Theory states that people are motivated by the need for affiliation, achievement, and power.

Learner safety occurs when team members feel comfortable asking for help or clarification about an assignment. When learner safety exists, people are not afraid of being judged or perceived as incompetent for seeking help. New hires in remote or hybrid work environments often struggle because asking questions about how to do their job can be difficult, according to the Harvard Business Review. Building a generative, innovative, and continuous improvement culture depends on making people comfortable with asking questions.

Contributor safety reflects the willingness to participate and openly engage with the team. People feel empowered to share their ideas, voice their opinions, provide feedback, and make decisions. This stage signals a shift to active engagement and participation. According to Gallup, employees who feel encouraged to contribute their ideas are six times more likely to be engaged.

The final level is challenger safety, which involves team members feeling secure enough to question the status quo, voice concerns, and dissent without fear of retaliation, humiliation, or retribution. This openness is essential for high-performing teams.

A leading factor in the crash of Korean Airlines Flight 801 was a lack of challenger safety. The co-pilot was unwilling to question the pilot’s poor judgment. The fear of speaking up is also a source of errors in hospitals, where junior staff and nurses feel disempowered to question their superiors.

Patrick Lencioni describes a five-level hierarchy that ultimately leads to a high-performing team in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He integrates Clarke’s model into the bottom two levels of his pyramid: “an absence of trust” and “fear of conflict.” Without trust, teams will not engage in healthy debate, stay engaged, hold each other accountable, and therefore fail to achieve results.

Creating Psychological Safety

Managers and leaders create their teams’ culture. They shape the environment through their actions. Teams mirror the leaders’ behaviors and readily identify disingenuous statements.

Employ Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence drives team performance. Leaders with high self-awareness foster a positive, energetic, and high-performing work environment. Teams with high emotional intelligence are more adaptable, better handle stress, and are more productive. They feel valued, understood, are comfortable sharing ideas, and constructively challenge their colleagues.

Emotional intelligence is a skill that can be improved through training and practice. Self-awareness can be developed by recognizing and understanding emotional and physiological responses to situations. Learning to pause before responding to stressful situations increases self-regulation. Asking thoughtful questions, actively listening, and trying to understand other perspectives build empathy. Social skills are developed through effective communication and conflict resolution.

It’s About the Team

At the core of high-performing organizations is the team. Sports metaphors abound. Teams of average players win championships because they work together and support each other.

The Scrum Values of courage, focus, respect, openness, and commitment set aspirational standards for the team. These high-performing teams are more productive, experience lower turnover, and achieve higher Net Promoter Scores.

Traditional performance management and incentive systems that prioritize individual achievement over team success can hurt performance. Microsoft abandoned its stack-ranking of employees in 2013, and many leading consulting firms later shifted to team-based compensation structures to encourage teamwork.

Hero cultures tear at the fabric of the team. Heroes are expected to fix problems, are assigned the best projects, and are disproportionately recognized for their work. While heroes may relish the attention, they often feel over-committed. Meanwhile, the rest of the team is disengaged.

No Assholes Rule

The “no assholes” rule promotes an inclusive and fair environment. There should be zero tolerance for bullying and intimidation. Accepting toxic behavior undermines psychological safety by reinforcing fear, exclusion, and mistrust.

Leaders who use meetings to showcase their expertise or interrogate subordinates cause harm. The result is rarely a better solution—it’s just their solution. Collaboration, seeking different perspectives, experimentation, and fostering shared ownership are more effective. Criticizing others normalizes destructive behaviors and creates a climate of fear.

Mistakes are Opportunities

Mistakes happen. Berating, humiliating, and punishing people for making mistakes does not prevent them. Instead, they are hidden, and when they are uncovered, the damage is worse.

No one goes to work thinking, “How am I going to mess up today?” Decisions are made with the best available information. Execution doesn’t go as planned. Accidents happen. Mistakes should be opportunities for reflection, learning, and finding better ways of working.

When I worked in competitive telecommunications, the product development team launched new and innovative offerings every other month. Some were wildly successful, while others were flops. Failures were not punished. If they had been, creativity would be stifled, and bold ideas would never be proposed.

Foster Dissent

Great managers foster an environment where different opinions and views are not only tolerated but encouraged. Patrick Lencioni explains how healthy conflict leads to better solutions. Great leaders, according to McKinsey, seek diverse perspectives and use thorough analysis to reduce bias in their decision-making.

Most of my management team had worked together for years. After a reorganization, a new manager joined the group. She was quieter and brought fresh perspectives. When we debated solutions, I intentionally created space for her to share her thoughts. She offered valuable insights that the rest of us had overlooked.

Creating psychological safety isn’t optional—it’s essential to building the trust, engagement, and performance needed in today’s collaborative workplaces.

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