Cultivating a Culture of Psychological Safety Across Your Organization
How can we bring psychological safety to everyone in our organization, and how do we make it a cultural norm that sticks? These are the kinds of challenges that forward-thinking leaders like you face: You know that fostering psychological safety is essential to high performance and engagement, but how do you make it stick? How do you move beyond a one-time effort to something that’s woven into your organizational fabric?
As you work to elevate your teams and drive innovation, creating a culture of psychological safety will be the foundation that makes everything else possible. Let’s explore five key steps that can be implemented in any order, each designed to help you build and sustain psychological safety across your organization.
1. Create Awareness
The first step to lasting change is creating deep, organization-wide awareness of psychological safety—not just as a concept, but as a strategic priority that drives performance. Without this awareness, efforts to promote safety can be misunderstood or dismissed.
- Measure and assess psychological safety: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Use regular tools to assess the level of psychological safety in your organization. Identify teams or groups that show high levels of safety, and learn from them; pinpoint areas by department, tenure, or other demographic data where safety is lacking and provide targeted support. This data-driven approach ensures that you’re strategically addressing the right areas.
- Make it personal and practical: Ensure that everyone—from top leadership to frontline employees—understands why psychological safety is relevant to them. Show how it directly ties to team innovation, problem-solving, and better outcomes.
- Share success stories: People connect with stories. Share examples from your own company or others to show how psychological safety has led to breakthroughs, stronger collaboration, or innovation. Storytelling not only builds buy-in but also makes the concept tangible.
2. Look at the System
Psychological safety isn’t just about changing individual behaviors; it’s about shifting the entire system. What’s rewarded, ignored, or celebrated in your organization shapes its culture. Systems-level changes are essential if psychological safety is to thrive.
- Make psychological safety part of your strategic plan: Incorporate psychological safety into your organizational or team strategic plan. It’s not a “nice-to-have”; it’s a competitive advantage that impacts performance, innovation, and retention. Outline clear goals and metrics around how you’ll cultivate psychological safety, measure progress, and integrate it into your broader strategy.
- Audit your cultural signals: What behaviors get rewarded? If risk-taking or speaking up is met with silence or criticism, people quickly learn to stay quiet. Take a hard look at your decision-making processes and meeting dynamics. These invisible forces shape team behavior.
- Embed safety into your processes: Ensure that psychological safety is part of your feedback loops, team meetings, and performance reviews. These moments should consistently reinforce that safety, collaboration, and constructive feedback are core to your organization’s success.
3. Develop the Thinking and Skills
The conditions must be right for psychological safety, but we also must have the right mindsets and skills to support psychological safety. This requires teaching your team how to create and sustain it.
- Invest in skill-building: Psychological safety doesn’t happen by accident—it requires specific skills, like giving and receiving feedback, creating productive conflict, and listening to learn. Equipping your team with these tools will require an investment of time and possibly dollars if you don’t have this expertise in-house already.
- Foster a growth mindset: Psychological safety thrives in environments where learning from mistakes is the norm. Help your team understand that errors are part of the process, not something to fear. When employees believe they can grow through failure, they’ll take more risks and contribute more innovative ideas.
4. Change Small Habits
Cultural change doesn’t come from big roll-outs and grand gestures—it happens through the small, everyday habits that shape behavior. Leaders set the tone, and small, consistent changes can lead to significant cultural shifts.
- Model the behaviors you want to see: Your team watches how you handle failure, engage in conversations, and ask for feedback. By consistently modeling that you don’t have all the answers and being curious and open to new thinking, you send the message that it’s safe to take risks and speak up. Small habits, like pausing for reflection before responding or making a decision, thinking out loud, asking juicy questions to gather feedback or create productive conflict in a meeting make a big difference over time.
- Take a look at your own habits: One of the best ways to change small habits is through one-on-one coaching. A coach can provide accountability, feedback, and personalized strategies to help you develop the behaviors that foster psychological safety. Another powerful tool is self-reflection. Spend time reflecting on how your actions impact your team’s environment. Some questions to start with:
- How am I creating space for all voices on my team to contribute?
- What behaviors am I modeling that may unintentionally signal a lack of openness?
- Celebrate moments of psychological safety: When team members speak up, challenge ideas, or admit mistakes, acknowledge and celebrate it. Recognition reinforces these behaviors and helps them spread.
5. Make It a Leadership Focus
To make psychological safety a cultural norm, it must be a central focus for leadership. Without intentional leadership, it’s unlikely to take hold across the organization.
- Ensure all leaders know how to foster psychological safety: Psychological safety isn’t just the responsibility of senior executives—it’s something every leader, from emerging managers to seasoned executives, needs to know how to cultivate. A structured, intentional leadership development plan that ensures that new, aspiring, and current leaders understand how to create conditions where everyone feels safe to do their best work is critical.
- Champion it consistently: Psychological safety needs to be woven into daily leadership conversations, one-on-ones, and team meetings. As a strategic leader, consistently champion it across the organization. When it’s a regular topic, it will become a regular practice.
- Align safety with leadership goals: Make psychological safety a core metric in leadership performance reviews and team assessments. Leaders should be evaluated not just on what they achieve, but on how they create environments where their teams feel empowered to contribute and take risks.
As a strategic leader, you have the power to shape your organization's culture—and it starts with creating psychological safety. But lasting change takes more than just good intentions; it requires thoughtful, intentional action.