Lately, I am being constantly reminded that psychological safety is one of the cornerstones of highly efficient teams.

Today, I came across an audio book about the 4 stages of psychological safety. It was so insightful that I decided to keep a note about it here.

In summary, psychological safety is built in 4 steps:

• Inclusion safety: before anything else, people first need to be welcome in a group setting and feel they belong as an equal member.
• Learner safety: after becoming part of a group, the next natural evolutionary step for a human being is to seek learning and growth. So, we need to create the necessary environment for people to feel safe asking questions, experimenting and potentially making mistakes or revealing lack of knowledge in some areas.
• Contributor safety: as a person becomes a more integrated member of a group, the sense of belonging can be bolstered by feeling they contribute to the prosperity of the group. The leader of the group needs to ensure they have the right opportunities to contribute back to the group, which are commensurate with their skill set and abilities while also providing space for them to grow and get outside their comfort zone.
• Challenger safety: last and definitely not least important, a group will be able to improve its operation of its members feel comfortable challenging the status quo and things that are amenable to improvement. Members need to feel safe that they can challenge and questions things without being penalised even in cases where they might be wrong.

An interesting personal observation of mine is that these might seem like 4 linear steps to psychological safety. But, in reality they can be thought of as a virtuous cycle, where each one feeds to the next. As people get comfortable and feel safe challenging things in a group setting, members that are involved in the decisions or processes that are being challenged also need to feel safe asking questions to get a good understanding of other points of views in order to reach the best decision (i.e. have “learner safety”).

Here is a link to the book to go have a read, if you want.