Most high-stress work environments require employees to make high-stakes decisions in short timeframes. Triaging medical emergencies, operating heavy machinery, and managing personnel budgets are all examples of workplace scenarios where in-the-moment decisions can have significant impact.
For the best decisions to be made quickly, it is essential that employees trust themselves. Being able to attune to the expertise and intuition that got them their job is essential. Being out of tune with those assets (being in a state of self-doubt), can lead to hesitation or miscalculation that can be extremely consequential to the world around them.
What Psychological Safety Really Means—and Why It Matters
Psychological safety is loosely defined as a shared belief within a team that it is safe to take risks. A sense of psychological safety allows employees to deploy their inner knowing and collective wisdom to take well-calculated risks. The absence of psychological safety leads to a workforce that is uncertain, insecure, and disempowered.
So how do leaders create a culture of psychological safety? By demonstrating that successes and mistakes will be met with appropriate responses.
The Science of Learning from Mistakes
Studies show that humans learn at an exponentially greater rate from our "mistakes" than from our "successes." If we miss a note while performing a song, we are less likely to miss it again in the future than if we got lucky and nailed it the first time.
When members of a team are rewarded for risk-taking and given constructive feedback and guidance to improve their calculations, it creates an optimal environment for growth and improvement. When employees become fearful of making mistakes, they are more likely to hide, hold back, or cover up their actions- leading to potentially greater and unnecessary damage.
Celebrating the courage it takes to make a mistake and the openness it takes to learn from it is one of the greatest things a leader can do for their team.
How Leadership Behaviors Shape Team Culture
Many of us have been socialized to be fearful of mistakes; the fear of "messing up" and the consequences that might come with that can be deeply engrained and hard to shake. But leaders can begin to shift that culture by demonstrating their own willingness to make mistakes, and by celebrating the learning opportunities that mistakes and risk-taking creates.
Normalizing humanness- in all its fallibility and excellence- and demonstrating that our teams are valuable not because of their perfection, but because of their wholeness- is a practice that can radically transform workplaces and support people in bringing their strongest selves to any effort.
