Psychological safety in teams: the condition for honest feedback

What the notion covers

The expression comes from the work of Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School. It describes the shared belief that a team member can take an interpersonal risk, that is, ask a question, flag a mistake or voice a disagreement, without being punished or ridiculed. Google's Project Aristotle, which studied the company's own teams, presented it as the most important of the five factors it identified.

What it is not

It is often confused with niceness. A psychologically safe team is not one that avoids difficult subjects, nor one without standards. It is a team where difficult things can be said, precisely because people know they will be heard. The strongest teams combine high standards with high safety.

How to recognise it

In a team where psychological safety is strong, four signs show quickly:

• mistakes are flagged early, by the people who made them;
• simple questions are asked without apology, including by the most experienced;
• disagreements are voiced in the meeting, not afterwards in the corridors;
• bad news travels quickly, before it has grown.

Conversely, a silent team is not a team without problems. Silence is often a warning signal.

What destroys it in one meeting

A single episode can be enough. In a meeting, an experienced colleague cuts across a younger one who is proposing an idea, replying: "we've tried that before, it doesn't work". The room visibly closes up. The idea is lost, but above all everyone present has learned something: proposing has a cost. That lesson lasts far longer than the episode, and it is the manager's reaction that fixes its scope.

This is one of the scenarios I have people play in my feedback workshops. It lets them practise the reaction of someone who witnessed the scene: saying, straight afterwards, what they observed and what it did to the team.

Five leadership behaviours that build it

1. Admit your own mistakes first. A manager who says "I misjudged that" gives others permission to do the same.
2. Ask questions rather than conclude. "What am I missing?" invites people to speak; "I think…" closes the discussion.
3. Thank people for bad news. Whoever brings it has taken a risk. Correcting them on the form is a way of making sure you receive no more.
4. Treat a mistake as information. Look for what it teaches about the system before looking for who made it.
5. Show what has changed. When feedback led to a decision, say so. Feedback with no follow-up discourages the next.

In an international group, the risk does not look the same

In organisations where hierarchical distance is large, an employee will not contradict their superior in front of others, whatever their conviction. This is not a lack of courage but a social rule that Geert Hofstede described as power distance. A leader who wants honest feedback in that context has to create explicit channels: one-to-one conversations, questions put in advance, feedback gathered in writing before the meeting.

How to measure it

It can be measured with short surveys, such as the seven-statement scale proposed by Amy Edmondson, or simply by observing the four signs above. The figures are only worth anything if they are collected in a setting where answering has no consequence for the person who answers, which brings us back to the starting question: the climate in which the question is asked.

To practise acting on that climate, the feedback training course I offer devotes time to the leader's behaviours and to the response to a remark that goes wrong.

FAQ

Going further

• Feedback culture: how to build one
• The SBI model for constructive feedback
• Wording positive and adjusting feedback
• Taking criticism without defending
• Radical Candor: care and frankness together
• A one-day feedback training course
• Executive coaching for senior leaders

This article was written by Marc Prager.