The psychological safety core principles

Summary

Psychological safety is an emergent property of conditions: not a programme, a metric, or an individual attribute. Those conditions are shaped primarily by structural power, collective responses, and the substrate of norms and history that precede any particular interaction. Because the costs of speaking up are disproportionately higher for those with the least power, psychological safety is first and foremost a matter of equity and rights, not performance optimisation. The work is therefore ecological and about changing the conditions for psychological safety to emerge, rather than exhorting people to speak up, and the work is never finished.

Tom Geraghty shares 10 core principles.

Content

1. Fostering psychological safety is the right thing to do.
2. Power and its unequal distribution is at the heart of this work.
3. The cost of speaking up is not equally shared.
4. Psychological safety is different for everyone.
5. There is no such thing as too much psychological safety.
6. How we respond shapes what follows.
7. We change the environment and support the people, together.
8. We all hold responsibility for psychological safety.
9. Evidence includes experience.
10. Psychological safety is always in flux.