Topic

Create a Psychological Safe Environment

Response

Creating an environment where individuals and teams feel they can be themselves is part of a Psychological Safety Strategy. Ensuring individuals or teams are not punished for speaking up or challenging authority, or for making mistakes as they take the initiative, plays an important role in creating organisational agility.

In such environments, individuals are encouraged to use their initiative and take risks, and believe their views are valuable. Organisations benefit greatly from fostering a strong sense of Psychological Safety, including,

Individuals and teams are given the opportunity to unlock their potential, solving long standing challenges and breaking new ground.
Mistakes are seen as great learning opportunities and the freedom to experiment, and the feeling of empowerment increases employee engagement.

Leadership must take positive actions to create a psychological safe environment for all their employees. Within an Agile organisations the types of actions include:

Empowering teams to determine how they meet the objectives, having received clear ‘what’ Business Objectives and Key Results from leadership as part of a servant leadership philosophy.
Everyone acknowledges the protection adopting an iterative process (e.g. sprints) provides, by limited the investment made before a review of the performance is made.
Take practical steps are taken to ensure lessons learnt across several iterations are turned into new best practices as part of an intelligent retrospective approach.
Leadership sets moonshot objectives that encourage teams to pursue breakthrough opportunities, in favour of achieving incremental improvement.
Create a culture of experimentation by granting individuals and teams the opportunity to pursue personal interests within a controlled-risk environment, as part of planned individual business experimentation framework.
Recognise an organisational-wide Growth Mindset emerges by combining the adoption of several Agile Leadership & Culture shift traits, creating a psychological safe environment, encouraging individuals to speak truth to power and the adoption of several specific Being Agile characteristics.

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Additional information, including working examples and templates are available in the Monetical knowledge base.