Workplace Wellbeing: How honest talk among colleagues sparks growth
Creating a culture of psychological safety starts from the top, with managers willing to admit they do not have all the answers. Picture: iStock
Have you ever been in a meeting and thought about sharing an idea, asking a question, or speaking up but ultimately opted to stay silent?
Clinical and coaching psychologist Martin O’Connor often asks this question when working with organisations. The answer he receives is almost always the same.
“It’s to do with the all-too-human fear of losing face,” he says. “Nobody wants to look stupid, feel embarrassed, or seen as incompetent.”
This fear of speaking up can be overcome when there is psychological safety within a team, says O’Connor, who defines the term as: “What we feel when we know we can express our thoughts and feelings openly because we won’t be punished or humiliated if we ask questions or share suggestions, worries, or concerns.”
Professor of leadership at Harvard Amy Edmondson coined the term in the 1990s when studying the relationship between teamwork and mistakes in US hospitals.
“She expected the most effective teams to make the least mistakes, but found they made the most,” says Annette Clancy, assistant professor of management at UCD's School of Art History and Cultural Policy.
“When she delved deeper, she realised this was because the teams that struggled were afraid to admit mistakes because they worried about the repercussions, but the teams that thrived were willing to report their mistakes so they could learn from them.”
Research carried out since then has proven how crucial this safety is to a team’s success. In 2012, Google started Project Aristotle — which followed 33,000 employees in 180 teams over two years to identify what led to high performance. Psychological safety emerged as one of the most critical factors.
According to Clancy, a key reason for this outcome is when a team’s fear of owning up to mistakes is reduced, we allow them to take creative risks.
“Instead of viewing mistakes as failures and cause for shame and disappointment, it’s better to see them as opportunities for growth,” she says.
“All research and development is based on years of so-called failure, but that’s how advances are made. In organisations where people can’t admit to mistakes, they become ridden with anxiety. Creativity and innovation are suppressed.”
Psychological safety also encourages all team members to contribute.
“When different viewpoints are heard, there’s more diversity of ideas, more perspectives are considered, and ultimately better decisions are made,” Clancy says.
Knowing you’re psychologically safe can bolster your mental health.
“Think about it,” says Clancy, “If you’re fearful of speaking out, your mental health will suffer, and to compound the situation further, you won’t be able to talk about the toll it’s taking. But in a workplace where you can speak out, you’ll be more likely to seek support.”
O’Connor adds that psychological safety also leads to greater transparency and accountability.
“When managers react to things going wrong by seeking people to blame, eventually employees stop reporting problems and are swept under the carpet until they can’t be contained there anymore,” he says.
“In organisations where it’s accepted that mistakes are only human, they won’t be covered up and lessons will be learned so that people do better next time.”
For those who want to create psychological safety within their organisation, Clancy says it’s helpful to know that it generally starts from the top.
“The manager has to demonstrate they are willing to be challenged, that they aren’t afraid to admit they have things to learn, and meet mistakes with a spirit of curiosity rather than disappointment and blame,” she says.
O’Connor recommends that managers carry out an employee survey.
“Amy Edmondson has seven questions that determine how psychologically safe people feel, and you can ask people to respond to them anonymously,” he says.
“They address issues like whether people feel mistakes are held against them, whether they can bring up problems, and ask others for help. You’ll find these questions on Edmondson’s website [exa.mn/Test-Psychological-Safety].”
The survey results should help identify departments or projects where employees do not feel they can speak up. “Then you have to decide what to do about it,” says O’Connor.
“Psychological safety is all about how people treat one another, and leaders need to reflect on how they treat employees. Do they make themselves accessible and approachable? Do they value contributions? How do they respond when things go wrong?”
Dubliner Michelle McDaid has first-hand experience in helping to establish a safe psychological workplace.
In 2024, she founded The Leading Place — a consultancy that supports businesses in building high-performance workplace environments.
Before that, she spent decades working in tech.
“In my last role as senior director of engineering, I led software engineering teams and worked hard to create an inclusive working environment,” says McDaid.
“I’d always read a lot and came across the concept of psychological safety in an article about Project Aristotle. I realised it might be missing from the engineering team, so I started to do something about it.”
She worked with other leaders and HR to design a series of workshops on trust, psychological safety and candour.
“We wanted to make people aware that by silencing themselves or others, they weren’t allowing the potential for development and growth,” says McDaid.
“So our workshops looked at things like the importance of sharing information and the effect the language we use can have on encouraging or discouraging people to do that.”
She took several practical steps to ensure that all voices were heard. One was creating smaller groups within meetings when possible.
“People open up more in smaller groups,” she says.
Another was opening up different channels of communication. “Not everyone likes speaking in front of a group, and some people need to think about things before they speak,” she says.
“So, as well as inviting people to speak up in meetings, I also had Slack channels where people could contact me and others when they needed to.”
The biggest takeaway was that she needed to be conscious of how she responded to bad news as a leader.
“I had to start valuing the learning that can come from mistakes,” she says. “I also needed to understand that it’s not good when everyone always agrees. Healthy conflict is necessary in any organisation.
“People have to be able to share how they are feeling if they aren’t happy or if something feels off.”
There’s a common misconception about psychological safety that Clancy wants to dispel. “People think it’s about creating a workplace where everyone is relaxed all the time,” she says. “But it’s not that.”
Nor is it about everyone being nice all the time, says O’Connor.
“I’ve worked in places where there’s been a tyranny of niceness, where everyone remained in their comfort zones and important topics never got discussed.
"In psychologically safe workplaces, it’s more important to be honest than to be nice. People know it’s OK to disagree and have been shown how to do that respectfully.”
It’s a huge win when teams manage to do this. “I’m sure I’m not alone in having worked in psychologically safe and unsafe workplaces, and there’s no comparison between the two,” says Clancy.
“The former is such a productive, nourishing way to work. You spark off others, get great ideas, and become much more creative. There’s nothing better.”
