Part 1: The Power and Peril of Naming Over the past five years of our work in psychological safety, it has transformed from a little-known term, understood and explicitly practised by only a small group of researchers and practitioners, to […] The post Reflections on Psychological Safety: Five Years of Learning appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety There really is some bad advice and research around in respect to psychological safety, in particular how it relates to aspects of neurodiversity and culture. In this piece, we’re going to dive […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety Isn’t Enough We hear this sometimes, and well… Obviously. It’s rather like saying that having a fully functioning car isn’t enough to make a road trip – and of course it isn’t. We need lots more things to […] The post Psychological Safety Isn’t Enough appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Every year we hold Psych Safety Days and other events for our wonderful community to come together, share insights, learn new practices and examine emergent research and evidence. We’re currently putting together ideas for Psych Safety Day 2026, so if […] The post Psych Safety Day 2026 appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
The Amagasaki Derailment In our workshops and training, we often use real-world stories as a way to explore the dynamics of both failure and success. Stories are a powerful tool to help us reflect on our own experiences, and sometimes […] The post The Amagasaki Disaster appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
There isn’t a “one-size-fits-all”, cookie-cutter, road map approach to psychological safety. There are some foundational practices and principles, but the experience of psychological safety, and how it manifests, is different for everyone. Our background, culture, neurodiversities, abilities, needs and preferences […] The post Psychological safety isn’t the same for everyone appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety Books for Children In 2020, we shared a collection of the best books about psychological safety. As new books were published (and there have been a lot of them about psychological safety!), we’ve added to and refined the […] The post Psychological Safety Books for Children appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2025 – the largest global survey on psychological safety ever! Psychological safety is the core ingredient behind high-performing, innovative, and happy teams. It shapes whether we feel safe speaking up, sharing ideas, […] The post The State of Psychological Safety Survey: 2025 appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Updated June 2024 The switch to remote and virtual teams Cast your mind back to 2019, before the Covid 19 pandemic. Remote working was still relatively rare, with the vast majority of workers travelling to physical locations and office spaces […]| Psych Safety
Lean Coffee and Agenda-less Meetings Welcome back and Happy New Year! I hope 2023 has started well for you and you’re excited for the year ahead. Next week, we have some big announcements to make, but to keep you going until […]| Psych Safety
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses 1-1 meetings, diversity, experiments, scrum masters and design principles. 1-1 Meetings Every great manager I’ve ever met adhered to a strong and principled practice of regular […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety Online Training & Workshops Open Enrolment Online Workshops Booking open now for 11th-21st November 2025 Looking to deepen your expertise in psychological safety – whether for your team, your organisation, or your own practice? Our flagship Complete Psychological […]| Psych Safety
Jade Garratt Biography Full version Jade is a highly respected thought leader and recognised expert in psychological safety and education. With 17 years’ experience spanning teaching, charities, higher education, consultancy and the private sector, she brings a unique blend of […]| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt It will probably come as no great surprise to those of us who work with the concept of psychological safety that one of the earliest references to the term in academic and psychological literature comes from Carl […] The post Psychological Safety and Creativity appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Barriers to Psychological Safety There are many team-level, organisation-level and broader barriers to speaking up, including (most significantly) steep power gradients, cultural norms (organisational or otherwise), and others. But in this research we wanted to examine the experiential barriers to […] The post Barriers to Psychological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
We’re currently planning Psych Safety Day 2025! Likely location is Malaga, Spain, in September or October. Contact us for more information and to be on the “find out first” list!| Psych Safety
Our team of experts around the world will help you make psychological safety real. We are psychological safety. Training Online Workshops Resources Organisational Safety and Performance Psychological safety is more than just a corporate tick-box. It’s a journey to creating […]| Psych Safety
Inclusion is at the core of psychological safety, and must be defined as a central team value. Any individual behaviours or beliefs that don't align with the principle of inclusion must be addressed.| Psych Safety
About us The Psychological Safety Collective We’re a collective of people from all over the world, with a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences.We believe in helping to make the world of work a safer, higher performing, more inclusive and […]| Psych Safety
How you respond matters. “Everything you do is important to your organization. People are watching you. The people in your organization determine how to move forward after both successful work and how to recover after failure by watching how you […] The post How you respond matters. appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Practices that Foster Psychological Safety There are many behaviours that (depending on the context) can help to foster psychological safety, over 170 of which are listed in our big list of psychological safety behaviours. However, there are also many practices […] The post Practices that Foster Psychological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Feedback in the workplace In our “Delivering Effective Feedback” workshops, we explore participants’ experiences of feedback, and we find, of all the feedback they’ve received so far in their career, roughly: So this seemed like an excellent avenue to explore […]| Psych Safety
Job Security and Psychological Safety In a lot of “What Psychological Safety Is Not” articles, we often come across statements like “psychological safety is not job security”. And that’s true, to a degree. Psychological safety is not the same as […] The post Job Security and Psychological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety Research Pulse Last week, we asked “Typically, how familiar are people in your workplace with the concept of psychological safety?”. 121 people responded, and the distribution across the whole sample looked like this. The most common responses were […] The post Research: how familiar are people with the concept of psychological safety? appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
How We Think About Learning at Psych Safety At Psych Safety, we care deeply about how learning happens. Not just what people take away from a session, but how it feels to be there – what kind of space it […]| Psych Safety
Why do We Foster Psychological Safety? By Tom Geraghty and Jade Garratt It’s easy, when considering why we should work on psychological safety, to go straight to the organisational benefits: improved learning, greater innovation, higher quality products or services and […] The post Why do We Foster Psychological Safety? appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Cultural Diversity and Cockpit Communication Here’s a classic paper from 1999 – Cultural diversity and crew communication, by Fischer and Orasanu. They examined how cultural background, rank and gender influence pilots’ corrective communications in the cockpit. Analysing over 500 pilots […] The post Psychological Safety in Aviation – Special Edition appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt Which of these do you think might damage psychological safety in a team? The answer, of course, is that all of them can. Sometimes it’s individual behaviours that cause harm to the psychological safety experienced by members […]| Psych Safety
Why Just Culture Isn’t Sticking by Tom Geraghty What Do We Mean by “Just” Culture? The concept of a “Just Culture” was first developed in James Reason’s 1997 book Managing the Risks of Organisational Accidents. When we say “Just Culture”, […] The post Just Culture appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt Have you ever found yourself reacting to something a colleague said as if you were a child being told off by their parents, even though you’re both adults and peers? Or ever said something to a teammate […] The post Transactional Analysis appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Comfort vs Need by Tom Geraghty What do we do when the things that help some people in the team feel psychologically safer don’t work for everyone? Perhaps one person says they need time away from the main meeting group […]| Psych Safety
“Sociological” Safety By Tom Geraghty The term psychological safety has been in use since Carl Rogers’ work in the 1950s and was applied to organisational contexts by Schein and Bennis (among others) in the 1960s. Since Amy Edmondson’s influential research […] The post Sociological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Guest Post By Jason Rawding Humour and Psychological Safety Being funny at work can feel a bit risky – especially in front of a group, or in an email that many people will see. In trying to make others laugh, […] The post Humour and Psychological Safety appeared first on Psych Safety.| Psych Safety
Meetings, whether in-person or virtual (or the worst kind – a hybrid of the two, where some attendees are together in a room, and the others are remote), are a fact of life for many of us. In fact, many […]| Psych Safety
Psychological safety is created through shared values and positive behaviours, where a culture of trusting, helping, and elevating means that all members of the team can work productively and be their true selves, without fear. There are great benefits to […]| Psych Safety
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses power, rituals, 360 feedback, and psychological safety in the military. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other […]| Psych Safety
The Organisational Fabric of Psychological Safety (AKA psychological safety is more than just a team phenomenon) By Tom Geraghty When we talk about psychological safety, the definition we usually use is something along the lines of “a shared belief that […]| Psych Safety
All Feedback Is Subjective By Jade Garratt … And Why That Matters for Psychological Safety “No person in the world is so privileged as to have access to a ‘ground truth’ against which all other people’s understanding can be proven […]| Psych Safety
Déformation professionnelle By Tom Geraghty “Every specialist, owing to a well-known professional bias, believes that he understands the entire human being, while in reality he only grasps a tiny part of him.” Alexis Carrel, Nobel laureate We all see the […]| Psych Safety
by Navya Adhikarla When we talk about creating inclusive workplaces, we often discuss accessibility and psychological safety as separate initiatives. Accessibility (also abbreviated as a11y) focuses on removing physical and digital barriers, while psychological safety addresses the emotional and social […]| Psych Safety
All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Useful By Tom Geraghty This is one of my favourite, and most often used, aphorisms. It’s attributed to George Box, a British statistician, from a 1976 paper on Science and Statistics, though the […]| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt How do you feel when you hear the words “You have a body“? And how do you feel when you hear it in a work context? You might find it confusing – a kind of “well, obviously”, or […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety Doesn’t Mean Feeling Comfortable By Jade Garratt There are many misconceptions about psychological safety. One is that if we “achieve” psychological safety, it means that people will feel comfortable all the time. It’s understandable to see how that […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety and Micromanagement By Jade Garratt Those who have followed our work at Psych Safety for a while will know that we believe exploring not just what to do – the behaviours and practices that support psychological safety – […]| Psych Safety
The Spectrum of Participation by Jade Garratt Engagement and participation are terms we often throw around to mean “getting people’s take on issues that affect them.” But not all participation is created equal. Sometimes, “inviting participation” amounts to little more […]| Psych Safety
Psychological Safety in Practice Team Learning in the Field: An Organizing Framework and Avenues for Future Research This excellent paper from Amy Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey affirms that teams learn most effectively when members feel safe to speak up, take interpersonal risks, […]| Psych Safety
by Navya Adhikarla I am a neurodivergent engineering manager who loves to innovate and solve problems. But, I am also a neurodivergent person who navigates daily hurdles that stem from processing social cues differently, managing sensory sensitivities, and requiring support […]| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt In our experience, the most effective lever for increasing psychological safety within a team is flattening the power gradient – the gap between those with the most power and those with the least. In practice, this usually […]| Psych Safety
The Speaking up Myth By Jade Garratt In the world of psychological safety, we focus a lot, maybe even too much, on the speaking up side of the equation. How do we make sure people speak up with their ideas, […]| Psych Safety
The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. One of the (many) barriers to speaking up is the knowledge or perception that your voice doesn’t carry as much weight as someone else’s. This can be particularly common when in the presence of those […]| Psych Safety
“what you love,” “what the world needs,” “what you can be paid for,” and “what you are good at”, the idea being that the intersection of all of these is where we find Ikigai.| Psych Safety
Addressing Power through “Flattening” Organisations Steep power gradients are one of the most significant factors that contribute to reducing psychological safety. These steep differentials in perceived power have contributed to many disasters including the Tenerife Airport disaster in 1977, Chernobyl, […]| Psych Safety
Work doesn’t have to suck By Jade Garratt The start of a new year seems like a good time to reflect on how work feels, and how we feel about work. For too many of us, going to work isn’t […]| Psych Safety
Typologies of Power In a few previous newsletters, we’ve gotten into power dynamics, power gradients, “power over” vs “power for” and “power to” (see Mary Parker Follett). Steep power gradients are the number one inhibitor of psychological safety, and addressing […]| Psych Safety
We’ve been rather busy this week, in the midst of this round of psychological safety online workshops, including fundamentals, practices, leadership, measurement, advanced, and workshop design and facilitation. With that in mind, we thought it would be a good time […]| Psych Safety
The Chatham House Rule By Jade Garratt We always begin our workshops with a social contract. These are important because they make sure at the very beginning, that we’re on the same page in terms of our expectations of each […]| Psych Safety
A team is only as safe as the least safe person When measuring the psychological safety in a team, we often are asked which measurement should be considered the “group measurement,” given that different individuals will likely experience rather different […]| Psych Safety
Being Approachable By Jade Garratt Most of us would probably like to think of ourselves as approachable at work. We might have bad moments, or bad days, but we will likely think that on the whole, we are approachable. Approachability […]| Psych Safety
The Definition Of Psychological Safety Psychological safety is defined as the belief, in a group, that we are safe to take interpersonal risks. It’s the belief that we are able to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes, and […]| Psych Safety
The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety I recently tried to work out how many people have attended one or more of our workshops on psychological safety, including our workshops for teams and organisations, our online workshops, and any we’ve […]| Psych Safety
How to foster psychological safety with your own manager. By Jade Garratt Psychological safety isn’t only the responsibility of those in leadership positions. We believe that if you have the power to destroy psychological safety for someone – if you […]| Psych Safety
By Jade Garratt, Bea Poyton and Tom Geraghty In our leadership workshops, we often talk about failures of psychological safety – what happens when, in an absence of psychological safety, concerns are not raised, questions remain unasked, mistakes are hidden […]| Psych Safety
Experiments, bets and probes One of our mottos at PsychSafety is “everything is an experiment”. The outcome of work shouldn’t just be getting the thing done, it should be learning how to do it better next time. Experiments don’t mean […]| Psych Safety
(DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) We’ve recently seen more and more people (almost always white, straight men) jumping on the “DEI didn’t work” bandwagon, even some who are prominent in the psychological safety domain. And it’s really worrying, so […]| Psych Safety
How psychological safety captured the world’s attention For a while, from around 1999 to 2014, the term ‘psychological safety’ was relatively well known in academia, but barely mentioned, let alone understood in the world of practice, the world of work […]| Psych Safety
