Psychological Safety - What it is NOT

Series is a new product that LinkedIn is piloting to help members build community around the topics they care about by writing regularly about those topics. I’m part of a pilot invitation-only group that is helping LinkedIn to launch Series. Which, I must say, I find very cool indeed. I’ll be discussing “Chasing Psychological Safety” a series about the concept of safety at team level, The Future of Work, Agile and Ways of Work, Technology, Leadership, AI,and most of all - People" every week, so subscribe to my series to be notified of new articles and join the conversation. You can find Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 under these links. This week, I’ll be talking about “Psychological Safety - What it is NOT”

< Before you read some of these musings be sure to go read what the original thinker behind the concept the brilliant Dr. Amy Edmondson has written about it - an article I only discovered after posting this but which -thankfully!- says the same things, if better articulated. And of course, go buy her book "The Fearless Organization">

Over the past year while we have been hard at work making teams’ lives better by diagnosing and improving Psychological Safety through what we're building at www.peoplenottech.com but more importantly, by advocating that it counts, and that it can be correlated with the success or failure of any team effort in any enterprise but in particular that of Agile teams, we have seen all of the eye-rolls, the dismissive comments and, at best, incredulous looks of the disbelievers.

A lot of the objections regarding psychological safety center around one or several of these topics and some are not even formulated as such in the minds of those offering the “yes but…” but more of a cloudy feeling of the many organizations have when we talk about the fact that it’s about the humans not the tech. If anyone reading this has been on the same crusade of showing the transformational value of the concept and has heard or experienced other objections please leave them in the comments. We won’t ever be an effective team unless we learn together :)

This is perhaps the most infuriating misconception regarding the applicability of the concept.