How to Create Psychological Safety

Faithful on the Clock

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In this episode...

How to Create Psychological Safety

https://faithfulontheclock.captivate.fm/episode/episode-81-how-to-create-psychological-safety

Timestamps:

[00:04] - Intro

[00:31] - If you had a good experience learning to ride a bike with supportive parents, you have experienced psychological safety and understand it. Psychological safety can be defined as the feeling that you can learn, make an effort, and be yourself without being humiliated or unable to recover if you present ideas or concerns.

[01:24] - Neurologically, psychological safety means you’re set up so you don’t go into fight-flight-freeze.

[01:51] - Considering the neurology related to psychological safety, when you don’t have psychological safety, it can become hard to focus, make good decisions or engage well in relationships.

[03:00] - Organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmonson proposed three key things people can do to create psychological safety in teams: 1) Frame the work as a learning problem. 2) Acknowledge your own fallibility. 3) Model curiosity and ask plenty of questions.

[5:43] - Distilling Edmonson’s recommendations, making people feel safe is about building trust. But everyone is different regarding what they need to start trusting. So there’s no one way to approach building psychological safety. You just have to spend time with people and figure them out.

[07:09] - Trust requires integrity, which allows for the consistency people need to feel like you’re stable enough to approach.

[08:07] - Trust also requires empathy.

[09:00] - Psalm 91:4 is a wonderful demonstration of the psychologically and physically safe environment God is willing to provide. Moses compares God to a hen who gathers her chicks under her. If you watch chicks, you will see that they will scurry back under the mother’s wings as she moves. They know the consistency of her safety and trust it.

[11:09] - Challenge yourself by asking yourself what you can do to gather others under you, or conversely, what you need to trust them and go under their wings.

[11:48] - Creating psychological safety is critical as Christians because it connects to our ability to draw people to God. If people do not feel safe, they will not experience God as safe and, as a result, will not hear us. Speak up about what you need and about any problems you see.

[13:40] - Prayer

[14:18] - Outro/What’s coming up next

Key takeaways:

• Most people can relate to the sense of psychological safety in the memory of learning to ride a bike. Psychological safety is the feeling or mental awareness that, despite some risks, nothing seriously bad will befall you. You will not be humiliated or unable to recover.
• From the neurological perspective, psychological safety means that you are in an environment or circumstance that doesn’t activate your sympathetic nervous system and the fight-flight-freeze response. This response can shut down the cognitive areas of the brain, activate your emotional reasoning, and make it hard to be productive or connect to others.
• Organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmonson first connected the idea of psychological safety to teams. She came up with statements that can clue people in about how psychologically safe they or others feel, and she recommended three ways to create psychological safety: Frame the work as a learning problem rather than an execution problem, acknowledge your own fallibility, and model curiosity and ask questions.
• Psychological safety, on a basic level, is about building trust. But what it takes to build trust will be different from person to person.
• Creating trust to build psychological safety requires both integrity, which permits consistency, and empathy, which involves understanding and validating each other.
• Psalm 91:4 and Matthew 23:37 both use the image of a hen protecting her chicks. This image portrays God as someone who is capable of providing both physical and psychological safety. Little chicks who learn to trust in the hen will run back under her wings. In the same way, we can learn to trust and come back to God when we need protection or a sense that everything is OK.
• Ask yourself what you can do to gather others under your wings. Conversely, ask what you need from others to feel like you could take shelter under them.
• Psychological safety is important in being able to serve and represent God. If you want to serve him well in the office or your church, be proactive about building it. Speak up when you see something amiss, both for yourself and others.

• Pursuing Psychological Safety Within Your Church | Breeze ChMS
• re:Work - Guide: Understand team effectiveness
• Building a psychologically safe workplace: Amy Edmonson

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