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Interview – McKinsey Quarterly
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Harvard’s Amy Edmondson coined the term “psychological safety” in a 1999 journal article exploring its relationship to team learning and performance.
What is psychological safety?
In times of anxiety, depression, fear, and stress, how can companies create the psychological safety that employees need?
Is it safe?
In this edition:
A quick briefing in five—
or a fifty-minute deeper dive
Teams need safety, too
Psychological safety is also crucial for the performance of teams, which are the lifeblood of today’s organizations.
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Psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and leadership in a time of flux
Psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and leadership in a time of flux
Needing safety
Employees believe that psychological safety in the workplace is essential.
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Make it healthy
Promoting mental health, and combatting the stigma that keeps people with mental-health or substance-use disorders from seeking care, are essential to psychological safety in the workplace. Employers can take action in six ways.
Make it safe
To boost psychological safety at work, leaders must first turn inward to understand and integrate their own emotions and fears, and then turn outward to support others.
The five keys to
a successful Google team
The five keys to
a successful Google team
re:Work with Google
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Many Americans say women are better than men at creating safe, respectful workplaces
Many Americans say women are better than men at creating safe, respectful workplaces
Pew Research Center
Psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and leadership in a time of flux
Psychological safety, emotional intelligence, and leadership in a time of flux
Interview – McKinsey Quarterly
Dive deeper
National employer survey reveals behavioral health in a COVID-19 era as a major concern
National employer survey reveals behavioral health in a COVID-19 era as a major concern
Survey
Dive deeper
Many Americans say women are better than men at creating safe, respectful workplaces
Many Americans say women are better than men at creating safe, respectful workplaces
Pew Research Center
Dive deeper
The five keys to a successful Google team
The five keys to a successful Google team
re:Work with Google
National employer survey reveals behavioral health in a COVID-19 era as a major concern
National employer survey reveals behavioral health in a COVID-19 era as a major concern
Survey
Tuning in, turning outward: Cultivating compassionate leadership in a crisis
Tuning in, turning outward: Cultivating compassionate leadership in a crisis
Article
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—Amy Edmondson
Psychological safety means an absence of interpersonal fear. When psychological safety is present, people are able to speak up with work-relevant content.”
“
“psychological safety”
—Julia Rozovsky, people analytics manager at Google
We learned that there are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google. . . . Psychological safety was far and away the most important.”
“
Leverage analytics and employee feedback to identify behavioral-health needs and care practices.
Offer evidence-based behavioral-health services at the same level of affordability and access as physical-health services.
Improve the behavioral-health literacy of your organizational culture to help reduce stigma.
Establish workplace programs that promote mental health and prevent substance-use disorders.
Create novel points of access, such as digital, through product and network design.
Deliver behavioral and physical healthcare together and adopt value-based behavioral-health payment models.
Identify
Ensure
Shift
Implement
Enable
Integrate
Act with compassion to make individuals and groups feel genuinely cared for.
Demonstrate empathy to better tap the emotions that others are feeling.
Be bold in exhibiting vulnerability by lowering your guard and confronting what is unfolding.
Start by creating space to attain a keener awareness of what is going on within and around you.
Tuning in, turning outward: Cultivating compassionate leadership in a crisis
Tuning in, turning outward: Cultivating compassionate leadership in a crisis
Article
9%
Important, but not essential
2%
Not important
say it’s essential
89%
Responsibility of business leaders to create a safe and respectful workplace, US respondents