Building Psychological Safety
How to build a team where people speak up, admit mistakes and ask questions, and how to show you have done it.
Overview
Psychological safety is a team's shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks: to ask a basic question, admit a mistake, disagree or raise a problem without being embarrassed or punished. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School introduced team psychological safety in a 1999 study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company, where it was associated with how much those teams learned.
Google's Project Aristotle made the idea widely known. Google studied 180 of its own teams, 115 in engineering and 65 in sales, and found five dynamics that set effective teams apart: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. Google lists the five in order of importance, with psychological safety first. It also reports that how the team worked together mattered more than who was on it; factors such as team size, seniority and tenure were not significantly connected with team effectiveness at Google.
Psychological safety is not about being nice or avoiding conflict. A safe team argues more openly, because disagreeing is not risky. Interviewers ask about it most for senior, lead and manager roles, but any engineer can build it: by how they react to bad news, how they run a review, and how they admit their own mistakes. The example story on this page is fiction.
- Definition — Safe to take risks: questions, mistakes, dissent — 'Everyone is nice to each other'
- Actions — Specific habits: reactions, reviews, postmortems — Values and slogans
- Own example — Admits their own mistakes in public — Only asks others to be open
- Hard cases — Addresses a person who makes others unsafe — Avoids the conflict
- Evidence — Behavior changed: earlier escalation, more dissent — 'The team seemed happier'
What you will be able to do
- Define psychological safety correctly, and say what it is not.
- Describe concrete habits that build it, starting with your own behavior.
- Explain how a blameless postmortem works and why it helps.
- Handle a strong performer who makes others afraid to speak.
- Name signs that show whether a team feels safe.
Interview questions
- How do you build psychological safety on a new team?
- How do you run a blameless postmortem?
- How do you handle a strong performer who makes others afraid to speak up?
- How can you tell whether a team feels safe?
- Tell me about a time you made it safer for someone to speak up.
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