Psychological safety is related to trust—yet differs in important ways. Trust is often we experience toward others. “I trust Jimmy because he makes me feel safe and speaks honestly and reliably with me.” My own psychological safety, however, is an internally available state that requires all my local relationships are safe from my perspective. I might trust 3 people on my team fully and not trust one, and so my team is not safe for me.
Psychological safety is a higher threshold that takes more time and effort to achieve because all of us have different thermostats of safety based on our own life experiences. For example, if I experienced a deeply traumatic event with someone from a particular ethnic, gender, or religious background, that may make me feel unsafe with anyone from that particular background—unless and until I make myself vulnerable and am self-aware enough to realize I am stereotyping to protect myself in a dysfunctional way. I must open up and make myself vulnerable, which means others on my team must do the same. Vulnerability-based trust (Lencioni, 2005), then, is essential to achieving full team psychological safety—starting with the leader(s) who must be willing to be vulnerable to help the team achieve full psychological safety.
This can be a very tall order for leaders who have relied on being resilient overachievers who appear invulnerable in their pursuit of promotions and higher levels of leadership in healthcare or any other environment. Leadership focus on cultivating team-safety, then, far outweighs command-and-control mechanisms when engaging with complex adaptive systems. Without psychological safety, it’s unlikely the other 4 key characteristics of high-performance teams identified in the Aristotle Project can be manifested.
It would appear, then, that simple, self-organized local relationships must be awash in a sea of psychological safety to begin to produce more adaptive emergent influence on complex adaptive behaviors to improve overall performance. Vertically integrated, hierarchical industries such as healthcare often struggle to increase psychological safety as titles, positions, and professional silos often reduce safety in ways that can resist the introduction of team-safety as a new system cultural priority. It is no surprise, then, that many healthcare organizations have turned to executive and team coaching to begin to shift the culture in direction of team-performance over individual performance goals, metrics, and outcomes.
