Psychological Safety Is An Inside Job

Psychological Safety Starts with You, Not Your Workplace

Amy Edmondson brought the concept of "psychological safety" into modern research. In her TEDxHGSE talk (2014), she opens with three stories of smart, well-trained professionals who don't speak up and instead stay quiet. She describes these as episodes of "workplace silence when voice was necessary." She goes on to explain that most professionals don't want to look "ignorant, incompetent, intrusive, or negative," and so, she says, we spend our days on what psychologists call "impression management."

Taking a Stand Requires Courage

But here is what most professionals never realize: the psychological safety that decides whether you rise is not the kind your workplace hands you. It is the kind you build inside yourself.

Click here to read the full article and meet two executives who learned that lesson the hard way... one inside a healthy culture, one inside a toxic environment, and both of whom discovered that courage, not comfort, is what finally set them free.

Amy C. Edmondson, "Building a Psychologically Safe Workplace," TEDxHGSE, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhoLuui9gX8