It’s time we start getting more precise about how we talk about and foster “psychological safety” on teams. Because our efforts can backfire if we don’t.

While I was watching the Seattle Seahawks (whom I love dearly), a simple football analogy came to mind that makes this distinction clear.

It's no secret that mistakes are part of learning—but why are errors so crucial? According to neuroscientist Andrew Huberman (Stanford School of Medicine) and organizational behavior scholar Amy Edmondson (Harvard Business School), our brains and organizations benefit when errors are openly explored rather than hidden.

Spending trust means leaning into the things we tend to avoid: conflict, disagreement, feedback, and accountability.

It’s crucial to understand that cultivating a psychologically safe environment does not equate to an unhealthy leniency in terms of behaviors, processes, or outcomes.

In a healthy leadership team all leaders, from supervisors to executives, are singing off the same sheet of music with best-practice leadership and management behaviors.

It’s important to keep in mind that when we give someone corrective or critical feedback, it will likely trigger a "fear response" in that person. Here’s how to mitigate that defensiveness.

Four immediately actionable ways (as in, you can do these today or tomorrow) you as a manager can create psychological safety with your team members…and why you should.

These days, self-compassion and “growth mindset” are terms used frequently in the business word, but frequently disregarded as irrelevant factors of performance.

Feeling defensive is human. It’s a manifestation of a fear response that takes place in our amygdala fear and triggers our “fight, flight, or freeze” instincts.

The SCARF model gives us insight on how to intentionally engineer the work environment so employees feel safe to bring their best, authentic selves to work every day.

The only thing worse than a poorly run meeting is a poorly run meeting filled with people who are behaving poorly. So how do you get people to bring their best selves to meetings?  Here are a few tips.

Meetings are a microcosm of the broader organization’s culture, which leads to a piece of really good news: In many ways you can actually reverse engineer an organization’s culture by improving their meetings!

For employees to become fully engaged, they need to know that the person they report to directly cares about them as a human being, and not just as a cog in their system. 

Any time a group of research subjects are asked what they want or need from their manager/boss at work, some version of “caring and respect” usually comes out on top.

One of the only contexts in which we as adults consciously enter into relationships characterized by actual “authority” (where one person is “superior” to the other in rank and decision-making control) is at work.

When someone is in relationship with someone else who has power over them AND that person believes that the more powerful person doesn’t really care about them…well, that’s (literally) scary.

Morale isn’t the only thing that matters in the workplace, but here’s the bottom line: If employees aren’t “volunteering” their hearts and minds – if they’re just showing up to get a paycheck – you’ll never get the things you really want.