7 Exercises To Create Psychological Safety

According to the latest research by Gallup, 78% of employees worldwide are disengaged at work. Low engagement costs the global economy $8.8 trillion, according to Gallup.

Creating psychological safety is critical to improving employee engagement and achieving high-performing teams. Psychological safety is a work environment where employees feel safe to express their questions, concerns, ideas, and mistakes.

Leaders and managers play a crucial role in psychological safety. At the same time, it is the responsibility of all employees to contribute to a psychologically safe workplace.

In this article, you will find seven effective and practical psychological safety exercises to help you build psychological safety.

Psychological Safety Exercises #1: Speak Up

Imagine you have a leadership or management position at a new company and have inherited a team. You notice that your team members do not feel safe speaking up. This is due to various reasons, such as the previous manager’s command and control management style.

You tried some approaches, and none of them worked. Here is a practical method to encourage employees to speak up.

In your weekly team meeting, bring a green card. Explain to your team that everyone will have a green card at every meeting. Whoever has the green card will play devil’s advocate, indicate risks in a project, and express dissenting views. As a leader or manager, you encourage and appreciate team members with the green card and play the devil’s advocate.

Repeat the same process in the next weekly team meetings with other team members. Once team members see that they can express dissenting views and point out risks, it will create a team environment where others feel safe speaking up.

It can take some time to create a speaking-up culture. It is essential to do this practice consistently.

Psychological Safety Exercises #2: Vulnerability

Vulnerability became a popular topic, especially with the research of Brené Brown. Vulnerability means that we are all human beings. No one is perfect. We all make mistakes.

Mark Costa, the former CEO of Eastman Chemical Company, once said: “Be open about your mistakes so others feel safe to report their own.”

The main point is to learn from our mistakes and not repeat them.

In this exercise, you share:

• a mistake you made at work

• your main learning from it

• what you did or will do based on your learning

Then, you ask your team members or colleagues to write a mistake they made at work, their main learning from it, and what they did or will do based on their learning.

Later, you can put employees in groups of 2 or 3 and have them share their answers to enable social learning. 

Remember to emphasize the point: We learn from our mistakes so that the same mistakes are not repeated.

Psychological Safety Exercises #3: Mistakes

There is confusion in the minds of business professionals about how to deal with mistakes. Certain people believe that all mistakes should be celebrated. This is what they read somewhere on the internet. Other business professionals think there is nothing to celebrate about making mistakes and that there is no place for making mistakes at work.

This exercise will help your team members distinguish different types of mistakes, deal effectively with them, and boost psychological safety.

First, explain four types of mistakes. Two of these mistake types were taken from the work of Amy Edmondson, and the other two were created by Mehmet Baha.

• Unacceptable mistakes: Despite all the training, hardware, guidance, support, and resources, if we do not wear a safety helmet in a factory and suffer an injury, this is an unacceptable mistake. Or we work at a bank and can access a large amount of data. We get this data and sell it to a third party. This is gross misconduct. Both of these examples are unacceptable mistakes.

  In the case of unacceptable mistakes, we need to warn employees and consider sanctioning them for gross misconduct.

• Improvable mistakes: Let’s say we have an unfinished product or service. We present this product or service to customers to get their feedback. Customer feedback reveals that we made some mistakes and have areas for improvement.

  Concerning improvable mistakes, use the feedback and learn from the mistakes to improve the product or service.

• Complex mistakes: They are caused by unfamiliar factors in a known context. A typical example is a superstorm in New York in the 1990s. Due to the superstorm, one metro station in New York is flooded. When investigated, complex mistakes are not easy to point to one person. Reasons for complex mistakes can include personal, team member, organizational, and systemic factors.

  When complex mistakes happen, the right approach is to investigate all possible causes thoroughly to prevent them from happening.

• Intelligent mistakes: These can happen when we aim to create a breakthrough product or service. For instance, we make this very innovative and unique product or service, launch it into the market, and do not have the expected success. Still, we get significant insights from the market that can help us in the future.

  Celebrate intelligent mistakes.

Then, put your team members in groups of 3 or 4 and request that they answer the following questions:

• Based on the four types, what kind of mistakes do we see in our team or department?

• What are the reasons for each of these types? Go deeper and try to find the root causes.

• What can we do to deal with each type of mistake effectively?

It is essential to emphasize the following points as you finish this exercise:

• Do not automatically punish people who make mistakes

• Distinguish between different mistake types

• Ensure that acceptable mistakes do not happen at all. In case they happen, they should also occur rarely

• Celebrate only intelligent mistakes

• Intelligent mistakes, if any, rarely happen

Psychological Safety Exercises #4: Fail Forward

In simple terms, failing forward means that we make mistakes, we learn from these mistakes, and we improve.

Thanks to the wonderful work of Ashley Good, we have four stages of Failing Forward. Mehmet Baha added names to these stages and slightly changed their meanings.

First, explain the below four stages to your team.

Stage 1 - Hiding: Most mistakes are hidden in this stage because employees do not feel safe reporting mistakes, talking about them, and sharing their learnings. This is the lowest level of failing forward.

Stage 2 - Discussing: At this level of failing forward, some teams in an organization feel safe to report mistakes, talk about them, and share their learning. Compared to stage 1, more mistakes are reported, communicated, and shared in this stage.

Stage 3 - Internal sharing: Employees in the organization feel safe to report, talk about, and share their mistakes and learnings from them. 

Stage 4 - Internal and external sharing: This is the highest level of failing forward. Mistakes are shared internally and externally to inspire competitors, partners, and the whole ecosystem. This way, the same mistakes can be avoided. Here is an inspiring example from McGill University, which published a failure report.

Then, ask the following questions to your team members:

• At which stage is our team or department? Why are we here?

• At which stage is our whole organization? Why are we here?

• What are 2-3 actions to improve the fail-forward culture at work?

A team or an organization can fail only when employees have psychological safety

Psychological Safety Exercises #5: Standards

Psychological safety exercises are vital to creating high-performing teams. Such teams have high standards, and their team members feel safe to express their ideas, questions, concerns, and mistakes.

The psychological safety and standards concept is taken directly from the book “Fearless Organization” by Amy Edmondson. Mehmet Baha turned the idea into an exercise.

First, explain the four zones below to your team.

Apathy zone: Low standards and low psychological safety define the apathy zone. Employees in this zone have unclear and unambitious goals (low standards) and do not have psychological safety at work. They are not engaged at work and have a lack of interest. This is an undesirable zone.

Comfort zone: Here, employees have a high level of psychological safety but very low standards (unclear and unambitious goals). Employees feel safe expressing whatever they want to their managers and even saying “no” when given tasks. They might get their jobs through nepotism, and no one can fire them due to low performance. They do not have any accountability at all. This zone is far from the high-performance zone.

Anxiety zone: This is where most teams and organizations are stuck: high standards (clear and ambitious goals) and low psychological safety. A toxic team culture, where employees have high standards and are constantly stressed by a command-and-control type manager, is an example of an anxiety zone. In the short term, a team might achieve its goals. In the long term, this can cause employee burnout and turnover, among other problems.

High-performance zone: This is the ideal zone where we have both high standards (clear and ambitious goals) and a high level of psychological safety. This is where we can innovate, surpass our team goals, and achieve a collaborative work culture. 

Afterwards, ask your members to stand up. By pointing to the room's four corners, you can say, “Please stand here if you think your team is in zone 1”. Repeat this for each zone, indicating a different corner. You can see where your team members stand, showing their perceived team zone. 

Later, request team members to go back to their seats and answer the following questions:

• What three actions can I take to move my team to the high-performance zone?

• In case the team is already in the high-performance zone, what can I do to ensure that my team stays in the high-performance zone?

Lastly, ask a few team members to share their action items with the whole group.

Psychological Safety Exercises #6: Behaviors

To embrace psychological safety, we must understand specific behaviours that damage or contribute to psychological safety. Once we are aware of those behaviours, As a result, we can consciously work towards building psychological safety. 

Below, you can see two categories of behaviours. Category A includes behaviours that contribute to creating psychological safety. Category B has a list of behaviours that can damage psychological safety. 

Category A:

• Appreciating others

• Feeling safe to play and laugh

• Freedom to express dissenting views 

• Sharing constructive feedback without personally attacking others 

• Asking employees in meetings, “How are you feeling?” and acknowledging their emotions and needs.

• Organizing events or activities where employees can get to know one another personally.

• Analyzing the root causes of mistakes first instead of punishing the person making the mistake 

• Not allowing racist or sexist comments at work 

• Keeping our promises to others 

• Involving employees in the decision-making 

Category B:

• Not saying “Hi” to our colleagues when we see or meet them

• Making fun of or imitating employees in front of others

• Sharing mainly the negative sides of employees in front of others

• Punishing employees when they come late to a meeting

• Interrupting employees when they talk with us   

• Too many and too strict rules 

• Unclear communication 

• Not giving your full attention to others when they talk with us. E.g., checking our mobile phones

• Reprimanding employees in front of others

• Not allowing employees to ask questions in meetings   

First, mix these lists of behaviors so that it is unclear which behaviors correspond to which category. 

Then, form groups of 3 or 4 and ask your team to define which behaviors contribute to or damage psychological safety. 

Through constructive discussions and explanations, ensure alignment around the behaviors that damage or contribute to psychological safety. 

Afterward, give your team members post-it notes (you can also do this online with a collaborative tool like Padlet) and request that they share their answers to the following questions:

• What does a high level of psychological safety look like in our team? Please mention specific behaviors.

• What are 3–4 actions I can personally take to contribute to psychological safety?

Before finishing the exercise, give each team member 4-5 minutes to write their action items precisely, mentioning what to do, how to do it, when, with whom to do it, etc.

Psychological Safety Exercises #7: Habits

Habits are repeated behaviours that become almost automatic for us. Especially when we are stressed, we go back to our habits.

“Stress turns the habit button on. So, when we are stressed, we do what we are used to doing,” states Dr. Srini Pillay.

Unfortunately, we can have certain habits that can negatively affect the psychological safety of our teams.

This practice is about identifying and replacing our suboptimal habits with optimal ones to promote psychological safety in our team member.

First, explain to your team how habits are formed based on the example below:

According to Charles Duhhig, the author of “The Power of Habit,” there are three aspects of habit formation: cue, routine or behaviour, and reward.

Let’s say an employee is delivering their work late. This is a cue for us. Our routine or behaviour in this situation is to shout at an employee. The reward for us at that moment is to feel in control. This behaviour, however, damages the psychological safety of our team.

Then, request that your team members write down one of their habits that negatively affects psychological safety at work. Then, ask them to write the cue, routine (behavior), and reward of that specific habit. Team members can do this part individually without sharing their answers with others.

Remind team members that sometimes we replace a suboptimal behavior with another suboptimal behavior (instead of smoking frequently, eating chocolate excessively). The main point is to replace suboptimal behaviors with optimal ones.

Later, ask them to write an optimal behavior to replace the suboptimal behaviour or habit. Returning to our example above, the optimal behaviour would be to talk constructively with the employee who delivered work late. Maybe we take a walk and deep breaths before talking with the employee.

Lastly, the team members write the cue, the new routine or behaviour, and the reward for the new behaviour. For instance, cue: an employee submitting work late; new routine or behaviour: taking a short walk before talking with the employee and talking with the employee in a way without personally attacking the employee; reward: maintaining the relationship with the employee while giving our feedback constructively.

Regarding the new routine/behavior, ask a few team members to share their answers with the whole group.

This inspiring and effective psychological safety training includes these exercises and many more.

Want to promote psychological safety in your organization?

Reach out, and we can discuss the strategies together.

FAQ On Psychological Safety Exercises