10 Reasons Why We Need Psychological Safety

For those of you who are Psychological Safety veterans and are further along the path with superheroes and advocates having made inroads and companies who now prioritise it thanks to their hard battles, this article may be too much of a return to clarity and you can skip it and instead, come back next week when we are talking about the intricacies of learning how to predicate your strategy on the people-work and have that reflect into translating OKRs/KPIs or objectives into rewarded and recognised, compensated efforts so that we see big wins.

For everyone else - we said this over and again and we’re not afraid of repeating it in particular since there’s an influx of new subscribers to this newsletter who have just joined us on this big journey: Psychological Safety is essential, it needs intentional building and it needs constant people-work investment from all of us, it isn’t a nice-to-have but a business imperative and simply chatting about it is insufficient.

Innovation - there is no innovation in the absence of Psychological Safety. When team mates don’t engage and don’t take risks, communicate openly, admit mistakes, learn and grow, they can never think out of the box and experiment so innovation is simply impossible in psychologically unsafe environments.

Productivity or better yet, high performance - Both of these are largely taboo topics in most enterprises. In an ill-understood effort to not put pressure on people we largely dropped them both from the business vernacular, but their absence is not making employees’ lives better, on the contrary. Every organisation that finds they’ve all but banished productivity metrics needs to open a real dialogue with their people and redefine them openly before they can hope to have the high performance Netflix or Google have. Once done, the next step is to put a number on the increase in performance and see the same 20-40% gains others enjoy one they invest in PS.

Sustainability and success- All of the enterprises that put their people and their psychological safety first, will ultimately stand the test of time and accomplish great things whereas all the ones who pay it no mind will not. Don't believe us? Simply look at corporate history so far for examples of the grave Boeing-level failures.