Great post as usual Bruce. I think the main thing most organisations get wrong is thinking psychological safety is something that you can create: when the reality is it’s something you have to earn. It’s very difficult to fake. And most organisations don’t care enough to prioritise it.
What I find fascinating about the psychological safety convo in a work context is the leap to treating safety as a team/collective attribute without considering it first on an individual level. For team PS interventions to work, we must start with each person's safety baseline and capacity to increase that.
100% - psychological safety is deeply personal, like joy (or misery). An organisation can no more mandate for it (or government legislate?!) than happiness. It might be something we all want or aspire to, but organisations can only set the conditions for it by their behaviours and hope it flowers.
Great post as usual Bruce. I think the main thing most organisations get wrong is thinking psychological safety is something that you can create: when the reality is it’s something you have to earn. It’s very difficult to fake. And most organisations don’t care enough to prioritise it.
said it better than I ever could - love it
What I find fascinating about the psychological safety convo in a work context is the leap to treating safety as a team/collective attribute without considering it first on an individual level. For team PS interventions to work, we must start with each person's safety baseline and capacity to increase that.
100% - psychological safety is deeply personal, like joy (or misery). An organisation can no more mandate for it (or government legislate?!) than happiness. It might be something we all want or aspire to, but organisations can only set the conditions for it by their behaviours and hope it flowers.
Thank you for this inspiring post, I'll be thinking about it all day.
Thoughts about - the power of belonging is DNA level stuff (like dogs needing pack approval) and
Why we continue to tolerate school bullying.