Psychological Safety Needs the Whole Organisational Village

Whose to-do is Psychological Safety? Increasing it in the organisation to become so high performing you compete with Silicon Valley? Is it leadership’s? HR’s only and if so is it L&D? Engagement? Performance? What about comms - should they help? What about Ops? Comps?

So far it has been the tech department’s to-do in our experience at PeopleNotTech but really it should be everyone’s.

To do this right, to work on it with diligence and intentionality, we have to make it big. No more “Friday initiative level”. No more “that would be nice”. No more afterthought levels. No enterprise can boast having increased their Psychological Safety by doing a couple of workshops on the topic.

What is needed is a massive and sustained effort to comprise of a well laid out awareness campaign as we have detailed examples last week, and then a major organisational push around a strategic level KPI of either increasing teams’ productivity and therefore the need for Psychological Safety, or, a more laudable and general goal of starting our people on the people work.

The effort is worth a good piece of exploration that should really start with a Human Debt Audit or at least a partial exploration of what all else has ever been done in communicating the need to comprehend, take into account and explore emotions so that it becomes evident what it would take in terms of heavy lifting to avoid the natural resistance of our ever-mistreated teams.