3 Habits Great Leaders Use to Build Psychologically Safe Workplaces
I’m opening 2 ghostwriting slots for December. If you’ve been wanting to build your presence on LinkedIn but don’t have time to write, I can help you share polished, professional content that attracts clients and builds trust. DM me for details.
Hello and Welcome to this week’s edition of Safety Pro Weekly.
Amy Edmondson is a professor at Harvard University and a world leading expert on psychological safety.
For more than 25 years, her research has shown how workplaces perform better when team members are encouraged to speak up, share their opinions and ideas and admit mistakes without fear or blame.
In this article:
· Psychological safety is crucial for high performance teams.
· There are 3 key mindsets great leaders use to level up psychological safety in the workplace.
· i) Frame work as a learning problem, not an execution problem
· ii) Admit mistakes
· iii) Model curiosity
When it comes to workplace health and safety programs, psychological safety is crucial.
Without it:
Employees who are afraid to speak up fail to report hazards that can lead to injury or property damage.
JHSC members with great ideas may fear that those ideas will never be adopted, causing the business to miss out on significant improvements.
Incident investigations may be low quality because people fail to ask the right questions.
Trust breaks down between workers and leaders.
Even safety leaders themselves may feel that their voice is overlooked and their efforts are wasted on employees and leaders who don’t see the importance of what they’re trying to do.
Let’s take a closer look at Edmonson’s 3 part framework for building psychological safety in the workplace:
1. Frame Work as a Learning Problem - Not an Execution Problem
When work is framed as a learning challenge rather than something to be executed perfectly, people feel safer to speak up, ask questions, and admit uncertainty.
Every situation at work incorporates ideas and frameworks that bring new variables. Even if you had a similar problem yesterday, conditions have changed since then. Maybe it’s a new customer, maybe it’s a different group of workers, maybe it’s a different location.
When you approach every task as a new puzzle to solve, it takes pressure off your team and builds curiosity and engagement.
The impact of this from a safety perspective is beneficial in many ways:
Workers feel less pressure to hide hazards or near misses.
Reporting improves.
Teams collaborate more.
People admit when they don’t know something rather than guessing.
Example:
“Today’s lift involves some unusual angles. We’re treating this as a learning situation. Let’s talk through what we know, what we don’t, and where things might bite us.”
2. Be Willing to Admit Mistakes
Leaders who openly admit their own mistakes signal that fallibility is normal, not shameful. This is one of the strongest predictors of psychological safety. Leaders who admit to being less than perfect give their employees permission to admit vulnerabilities themselves and this opens up your team’s communication quality in a massive way.
When leaders are willing to admit mistakes:
Workers feel safe to admit their own mistakes rather than hide them.
Shifts the focus from fixing the blame to fixing the problem.
Builds trust among leaders and workers.
Opens conversations that prevent recurrence of similar accidents.
Example:
“I should have communicated the new SOP earlier. That was my oversight. Let’s fix the process so it doesn’t happen again.”
3. Model Curiosity
Psychological safety grows when leaders ask questions rather than simply providing answers. Curiosity encourages open dialogue and surfaces hazards early. Having an open mind reduces knee-jerk reactions and helps you dive deeper into the true root causes of the problem you’re solving.
Here are some practical questions you might ask to model curiosity:
“What are you seeing out there that I might be missing?”
“If you were in my role, what would you change to make this job safer?”
“Where exactly does this process feel risky?”
“What might go wrong with this plan?”
“How can we do this better?”
Building psychological safety at work is not a simple or easy process. It takes time to build trust, create new expectations and truly allow people to feel safe sharing their opinions. But the benefits can be transformative for the health and safety of your team and your business.
That’s it for today, let me know in the comments how you’re building and supporting psychological safety among your team.
Safety Pro Weekly is published every Tuesday morning on LinkedIn and Substack. Visit www.safetyproweekly.com to subscribe and view 30+ back issues on all aspects of workplace health and safety.
Cheers,
Dan.
