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The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation
Timothy R. Clark • Berrett-Koehler © 2020 • 192 pages

Human Resources / Healthy Workplace

Human Resources / Diversity & Inclusion
Human Resources / Learning & Development / Organizational Learning

Take-Aways
• Psychological safety enhances team performance and your organization’s ability to remain competitive. It
can be achieved in four stages.
• Stage One: Prioritize inclusion – which creates a sense of belonging.
• Stage Two: Create an environment that encourages curiosity and learning.
• Stage Three: Offer employee autonomy based on performance.
• Stage Four: Protect employees who challenge the status quo.
• Respect and permission must coexist in equal measure.

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 Recommendation
Research reveals that money can’t compensate for a lack of psychological safety in the workplace – that is,
a sense of belonging, and freedom to speak up, learn and contribute. Your organization gains a competitive
advantage when your employees feel comfortable enough to create and innovate. Leadership consultant
Timothy Clark outlines four stages through which your company must progress to become inclusive
and visionary – inspiring your employees to do their best work.

Summary

Psychological safety enhances team performance and your organization’s ability to

remain competitive. It can be achieved in four stages.

To stay relevant in today’s economy, companies need to maintain their competitive advantage.
Organizational leaders must promote a forward-thinking culture, one that inspires collaboration and
innovation. They must learn how to remove the psychological barriers that inhibit their teams’ performance.
Companies must create an environment where workers feel safe to take initiative and create solutions.

Effective leaders understand they must encourage connection and collaboration to spur innovation. Team
members must feel respected and have permission to think and grow. Innovation relies on intellectual
friction – which occurs when team members can question the status quo, scrutinize existing systems and
develop new, more efficient processes. At the same time, social friction that inhibits collaborative efforts or
breeds fear of retribution must be minimized.

“If you can banish fear, install true performance-based accountability, and create a
nurturing environment that allows people to be vulnerable as they learn and grow, they
will perform beyond your expectations and theirs.”

Humans require food and shelter to live healthy lives; beyond these basic needs, however, people have
a drive to fulfill their psychological needs. Leaders in the postindustrial economy must understand how
these needs play into creating a collaborative and innovative workforce. Modern leaders must disregard the
traditional authoritative hierarchy where those at the top dictate and workers follow. Instead, they must
recognize and pursue the four stages of psychological safety, understanding that satisfying these needs will
improve team performance and nurture a creative, engaging workplace.

Psychological safety gives people the freedom to learn, to contribute and to challenge the status quo – the
three necessary building blocks of an innovative workforce. Along with each of these foundational elements
comes respect – the basic regard people show others – and permission – the degree to which people can
participate. First, however, people must feel connected with others; thus, psychological safety begins with
inclusion.

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 Stage One: Prioritize inclusion – which creates a sense of belonging.

Humans crave connections in both their work and personal lives. While children naturally include others,
regardless of their differences, as people get older they grow more judgmental and exclusionary. Inclusion,
in its most basic form, involves respect for each individual’s humanity, regardless of personality, ability,
ethnicity or gender. Differences between people and groups exist, but communities both in and out of the
workplace should use these differences to deconstruct barriers. When people do not get the acceptance
they need, they lash out for attention. As active shooters and suicide victims illustrate, feeling excluded can
even become a life or death proposition.

“Inclusion safety is created and sustained through renewed admittance to the group and
repeated indications of acceptance.”

Inclusion safety can fluctuate, and team dynamics and competition influence how it evolves in a community
or workplace. Sport teams exemplify the tendency of a group to naturally segment itself into smaller clusters.
Those players that must work together, the front line of a football team for example, unite, while those
competing for the same positions keep their distances.

Theories of superiority disguised as personal or political ideologies also influence people’s attitudes toward
inclusion. Throughout history, writings from Aristotle, Hitler and John Adams reveal how some groups and
so-called leaders justify elitism. The US Constitution, likewise, boldly asserted that all men are created equal
while declaring slaves as three-fifths human and denying women the right to vote. As evolved as humans
have become, people today continue to cling to feelings of superiority, manifested in stereotypes, prejudice
and resentment.

You can help remove bias from the community or workplace by improving members’ self-esteem.
Studies show that people who value themselves and their abilities show less bias and more social
cooperation. People can learn to welcome diversity as the new norm when they realize their own self-worth
is not under threat. Leaders can also encourage inclusion by diversifying teams and offering peer mentoring
opportunities.

Stage Two: Create an environment that encourages curiosity and learning.

In an unsafe learning environment, fear trumps the desire to learn – not fear of failure, but fear of the
response to failure. In a school setting, students turn away from their instinct to learn largely because of
neglect from either parents or teachers. In fact, most students who drop out of school do so because a lack
of support and investment in their success saps them of confidence in their ability to succeed. In the work
environment too, top talent leave – and those who stay go silent – when failure is met with scorn and the
process of asking questions invites ridicule. In a safe learning environment, the leader – whether a parent,
a teacher or a team manager – encourages inquiry, and team members don’t fear being disrespected for the
desire to learn.

Learning requires the student or employee to remain focused and resist the distractions and impulses that
divert their attention. Much of this ability to engage intellectually rests on a person’s emotional status.

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 Creating an environment where employees participate without fear helps them connect their intellect with
their emotions, encourages curiosity and builds confidence.

“Your team may be exquisitely endowed with brilliant people and abundant resources,
but if individuals don’t feel free to probe, prod, poke, pilot, and prototype, ask silly
questions, stretch and stumble, they won’t venture. ”

Today’s economy relies on the knowledge worker: those who process concepts and create value within the
organization. The legacy of the industrial age lingers in many organizations, however, where only a segment
of workers – usually the top echelon – offers ideas. Other workers contribute by making those ideas
realities. Meeting the challenges of the modern competitive market requires that all employees within an
organization engage in learning. Leaders must view failure as a learning tool, not an opportunity for derision
and ridicule. Those who deliver on creating a safe, learning-rich environment are rewarded with teams
motivated to thrive and able to realize their full potential.

Stage Three: Offer autonomy based on performance.

This learning stage involves preparation and skill development, just as athletes practice for the opportunity
to play. At the “contributor safety” stage, it’s time for employees to get off the bench and into the
game. Leaders must offer workers the chance to contribute to their teams in self-directed ways; at the same
time, the workers must accept the responsibility to perform. Picture, for example, a teenager who, having
spent the time practicing with his or her learner’s permit, now earns the right – and the responsibility – to
drive solo. Individuals shoulder more responsibility at this stage, yet leaders must continue to invest in these
people, and the team culture, to cultivate their drive to succeed.

Some leaders are unwilling to grant their employees autonomy due to insecurity, prejudice or an
unwillingness to see others succeed. Yet, in withholding this investment in others, such leaders dampen their
team’s performance and stifle their own success.

“A toxic environment shuts down performance because people worry about psychological
safety before they worry about performance.”

Performance encompasses both execution and innovation. Execution delivers value by standardizing
production and creating efficiencies. Innovation delivers value for the future by doing the opposite –
unleashing creativity and embracing deviation. Organizations need both types of performance to achieve a
competitive advantage.

Leaders can measure their ability to provide autonomy by tracking their tell-to-ask ratio, that is, how often
they tell people what to do versus asking them for input. Leaders who ask for help generate a wealth of
benefits:

• They foster collaboration by inviting all team members to participate.

• They uncover and promote their teams’ talents.
• They mitigate the anxiety some employees might feel when deciding whether to offer ideas.

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 When managers ask their people for help, employees feel safe to think beyond their job titles and offer
new perspectives on their teams’ challenges.

Stage Four: Protect employees who challenge the status quo.

Organizations rely on innovation and forward-thinking contributions to succeed. To get there, leaders
must create a culture where employees feel safe to challenge the status quo. At this stage, teams not only
contribute, but they also have the confidence – and permission – to challenge current processes and
ideologies. Respect and permission combine to create a culture where exploration and experimentation
thrive. Since individuals risk the most at this level, leaders must provide protection.

“The challenge with challenger safety is that it takes time to create and no time destroy.”

Innovation happens under the pressure of competition, but it need not happen with fear of
retribution. When innovating new products or services, people attempt to discern the future using divergent
thinking patterns. They will often use existing knowledge as a springboard to new ideas. Netflix, for example,
connected two existing ideas – the postal service and DVDs – to disrupt the video rental market. James
Dyson used the image of a natural cyclone swirling dust to create his bagless vacuum.

In giving employees “challenger safety” – the exchange of candor for cover – leaders take steps
toward future innovations and make their organizations more resilient to change. Leaders create this culture
of innovation through a few key actions:

• Understand that the leader sets the tone.

• Exchange transparency, where all sides share knowledge freely without jealousy.
• Acknowledge publicly that some efforts won’t succeed.
• Offer explanations when disagreeing with a team member’s direction.

Respect and permission must coexist in the workplace.

Respect – the appreciation of people’s humanity and value to the organization – and permission – allowing
individuals to participate – must coexist in the workplace. Respect without permission creates a paternalistic
structure; permission without respect produces an exploitative one:

• Paternalism – In this framework, leaders respect others but fail to give them the autonomy to work
independently. While necessary in some instances – safety rules, for example – paternalism creates
dependency and disallows the contributions and challenges necessary for creativity and innovation.
• Exploitation – In this framework, leaders use employees and their output but show no appreciation
for their talents and contributions. Employees in this environment often work overtime with no regard
for their needs outside of work. Exploitive leader behavior can also surface in less obvious instances of
incivility and verbal abuse, which demoralize the workforce and dampen productivity.

“In the days ahead, you will see a swelling demand for leaders who create a high level
of psychological safety on their teams and in their organizations. This demand is the

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 natural consequence of competing in a highly dynamic environment that relies on
constant innovation.”

Psychological safety creates a foundation of respect and permission where people value and appreciate
others, and allows them to belong, connect and participate. Today’s leaders must have the emotional
intelligence to recognize and value others in the workplace without jealousy or ego. At the same time, they
must lead with the knowledge that, by giving workers the safety to learn, contribute and challenge, they
create an environment ripe for innovation.

About the Author

Timothy R. Clark is the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, a global leadership consulting, training and
assessment organization. He is the author of five books and the developer of the EQometer™ emotional
intelligence assessment.

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