Practice : Psychological Safety Practices
Purpose and Strategic Importance
Psychological Safety Practices enable team members to speak up, take risks, and contribute ideas without fear of embarrassment or retribution. These practices form the bedrock of high-performing teams by fostering inclusion, creativity, and resilience.
When teams feel safe to challenge assumptions, admit mistakes, and ask questions, they innovate more effectively, learn faster, and build stronger, more trusting relationships - all critical for sustainable delivery and improvement.
Description of the Practice
- Psychological safety is not a single event - it’s reinforced daily through behaviours, rituals, and team norms.
- Practices include inclusive facilitation, blameless postmortems, open feedback loops, and visible vulnerability from leaders.
- Trust is built through consistency, fairness, and empathy - not just good intentions.
- Teams with strong psychological safety recover faster from setbacks and adapt more effectively to change.
How to Practise It (Playbook)
1. Getting Started
- Establish team agreements around respectful dialogue, turn-taking, and equal voice.
- Encourage leaders and senior engineers to model vulnerability (e.g. admitting mistakes, asking for help).
- Start meetings with small rituals to foster presence and connection (e.g. check-ins, wins, gratitude).
- Invite questions, concerns, and dissent - explicitly.
2. Scaling and Maturing
- Conduct regular team health checks or safety surveys - and follow up on insights.
- Run blameless post-incident reviews where learning, not blame, is the goal.
- Use anonymous channels (e.g. forms, retrospectives) to surface hidden concerns.
- Pair this with open forums, skip-levels, and psychological safety champions.
- Reinforce safety in hiring, onboarding, and performance feedback processes.
3. Team Behaviours to Encourage
- Ask: “What am I missing?” instead of defending assumptions.
- Thank people for speaking up - especially when it’s uncomfortable.
- Treat curiosity as strength - not ignorance.
- Celebrate learning, not just outcomes.
4. Watch Out For…
- Silence - it often signals fear, not alignment.
- Dismissing ideas too quickly, especially from quieter voices.
- Leaders who appear invulnerable or infallible.
- Retrospectives or feedback sessions that don’t result in change.
5. Signals of Success
- Team members contribute ideas freely and raise concerns early.
- Feedback is frequent, respectful, and multidirectional.
- Mistakes are treated as opportunities for learning - not punishment.
- Engagement, retention, and wellbeing improve over time.
- Psychological safety becomes embedded in how the team works and leads.