Psychological Safety
5 min readJun 7, 2024
Do people feel safe with you?
I’m privileged to spend time with leaders and groups frequently. While the topics, discussions, and ambitions often change, if I had to recap the issues most teams deal with, it always boils down to the same two foundational elements:
- How do we build and grow trust between us?
- How do we align ourselves and our teams with our ambitions?
When trust and alignment are absent, you will witness the following atmosphere within the organization:
- A lack of clarity regarding ambition, direction, and goals.
- A lack of collaboration within teams and cross-collaboration between teams. Often also paraphrased as silo thinking.
- A lack of collective thinking, robust conversation, feedback, creative and inspiring debates, and positive tension.
- A lack of time to communicate direction, decisions, stories, results, failures, and expectations to the broader organization.
- A lack of energy, enjoyment, engagement, and connection.
- A lack of ownership, commitment, accountability, and attention to results.
Clarity, Collaboration, Collective Thinking, Conversation, Creativity…