Blog

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 that you thought was a casual, lighthearted remark and been surprised when it triggered anger or...

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 to reflect on how they feel about something, but the person leading the meeting would rather...

“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 in 1999, psychological safety has gained widespread recognition as a foundational aspect of healthy group dynamics,...

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, we are taking an interpersonal risk, and it’s that very feeling of risk which can signal...

Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) During my ecology degree, whilst studying ecosystem and habitat change, I learned about Self-Organised Criticality (SOC), and I was fascinated by how it explained the precursors to seemingly dramatic changes. More recently, I’ve been pondering how the concept of SOC can be applied to organisational change as well as the frequency and severity...

We all are. Do only leaders influence psychological safety? Is psychological safety “done to us”? Well, yes and no. Leaders have a significant influence on psychological safety, but they’re not the only contributor, by a very long way. Firstly, psychological safety is also influenced by the structures, systems, incentives, pressures, history, culture, neurodiversities and experiences that...

by Jade Garratt At Psych Safety, our focus has always been on psychological safety in the workplace – helping teams and organisations become more inclusive, equitable, and high-performing through psychologically safer, more human ways of working. But what we work on at work isn’t neatly separated from our personal lives. In our workshops, we often see...

Types 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 power gradients is one of the first things to do in order to improve it. The...

The 2024 Psych Safety Book List In case you’ve managed to avoid the onslaught of marketing emails from companies trying to sell you every conceivable product, it’s Black Friday today! Instead of trying to sell to you, we thought we’d share our Psych Safety Christmas 2024 Booklist. It’s an eclectic selection (would you expect anything less?!), and...

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 to share our Psychological Safety Youtube Channel!  Currently at about 18 videos and growing, we dive...