The first step in building more psychological safety is getting an honest read on where your team currently stands. This provides essential insights and starting points for actively building or repairing it.

Determining the Team's Current Psychological Safety

The psychological safety ocean: Safe to Belong at the surface, Safe to Speak Freely in the mid ocean, and Safe to Innovate in the deep ⤢ Click to enlarge
The Psychological
Safety Ocean

Think of psychological safety as a deep ocean. It's easier for teams to feel safe swimming at the surface compared to scuba diving or deep-sea submarine exploration. Teams aiming to perform at the highest level must strive to go deep, where the risk (and reward) is greatest. But there's no point doing that before safety is established in the shallower areas:

And this can require addressing tensions, limiting beliefs, and establishing new team norms and strategies.

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When whole teams take surveys, it reveals where they need to focus their efforts to build more psych safety. One of the items from the survey above reads "If I need help from members of this team, I feel comfortable reaching out." If the majority answer "No," or there's a big split among team members, we have a clear area to zero in on. The team objective becomes, "how can we make our team a safe place to reach out for help?" — and the team gets there through jointly identifying strategies and co-creating behavioral agreements.

Constructing New Team Agreements

Psychological safety (or lack thereof) is often obvious when the team is all together. Likewise, it's through inclusive group work, discussions, and co-created agreements that psych safety is best repaired and built.

Let's take the example of a team that wants to make it safer for members to ask each other for help, and how they do this through a "Never, Sometimes, Always" exercise. The team brainstorms behaviors they would Never, Sometimes, and Always want to see in response to a teammate asking for help. Behaviors should be observable, not too vague, such as "Be Supportive." A helpful prompt might be: "If I were watching, what exactly would I see or hear?"

A whiteboard with sticky notes sorted into Never, Sometimes, and Always columns for how a team responds to requests for help ⤢ Click to enlarge
A team's "Never, Sometimes, Always" agreement for responding to requests for help — click to zoom in and read

To establish comfort with the team, this activity can start off as a solo brainstorm, move to paired discussions, and then group comparisons and synthesis of the most significant behaviors. Ideally, the activity ends with the team agreeing to several behaviors they ALWAYS and NEVER want to see, strategies for how to surface these behaviors or address them when someone makes a mistake, and plans for periodic check-ins to sustain momentum in following new codes of conduct.

A note from Anna

I built Otis AI (sign up for the beta) to take some of the leg-work out of measuring psychological safety and designing that first structured "Never, Sometimes, Always" conversation and Team Agreement.

Making Use of External Consultants and Facilitators

The more members of a team are accountable for building psychological safety, the better. However, those in leadership positions are best positioned to help teams make this a priority. Yet, few leaders receive coaching on the mindsets, skills, and strategies needed to guide teams in cultivating a psychologically safe culture.

External consultants can help uncover why team performance or engagement is blocked by considering multiple factors. Psychological safety isn't the only element governing team success, as illustrated in the graph. Psychologically safe teams can still perform sub-optimally if members aren't motivated or held accountable (The Comfort Zone). High motivation and accountability without psych safety often result in a stressful, distrusting, high-pressure, low-(interpersonal)-resource environment (The Anxiety Zone). Low motivation and low psych safety get us teams with little engagement or interest in outcomes (The Apathy Zone).

A matrix of psychological safety against motivation and accountability, showing the Apathy, Comfort, Anxiety, and Learning zones leading to high performance ⤢ Click to enlarge
Psychological safety against motivation & accountability — click to zoom in

The strategies needed to move teams towards the best of both worlds — the Learning Zone — are completely different. "Comfort Zone" teams already have strong psych safety, but need healthy provocation to push them to excel. Those in the "Apathy Zone" often need to rediscover meaning and purpose in their team's work, and may benefit from stronger social bonds and connection along with incentives and motivators. "Anxiety Zone" cases are some of the most formidable, as members may have experienced traumatic events, toxic practices and behaviors, and unsafe organizational cultures that must be addressed before team trust can be rebuilt. External facilitators may be particularly warranted in these cases to help leaders navigate these situations.

Skilled consultants and facilitators will identify the specific needs and blockers of your team, and how to navigate them. The table below provides some additional interventions that consultants might choose from, depending on which "zone" teams start off in.

Intervention Mapping by Psychological Safety Zone
Starting Zone Team Profile Suggested Action How (Implementation) Why (Rationale)
Apathy Low Safety / Low Standards. Members are disengaged, "shirking responsibilities," and feel like "replaceable cogs." Inclusion & Purpose Workshop Facilitate a session to co-define the team's "shared meaning" and "line-of-sight" impact. Implement "warm onboarding" for all new members. Satisfies the "basic human need to belong." Without a "reason to care," safety efforts feel performative rather than foundational.
Comfort High Safety / Low Standards. A "relaxed" environment where people feel safe but lack "creative drive" or accountability. Devil's Advocate Rotation Formally assign one person in every meeting to find flaws in the current plan. Use "Red Team" drills to identify potential failure points. Increases "intellectual friction" without increasing "social friction." It uses existing trust to "provoke" higher performance.
Anxiety
(Low Safety)		 Low Safety / High Standards. High pressure to perform but "punished vulnerability." Mistakes are hidden to avoid blame. Blameless Post-Mortems After failure, map a "Second Story" factual timeline. Use the "5 Whys" to find systemic gaps rather than individual faults. Shifts the focus from "human error" to "systemic vulnerabilities." Makes honesty "survivable" for competent professionals.
Anxiety
(High Danger)		 Active Threats. Characterized by "abusive supervision," gaslighting, or a history of "punishment for honesty." Restorative Circles & Skip-Levels Utilize external facilitators for voluntary "circles" focused on "repairing harm." Establish channels to bypass direct managers. Provides "protection from harm." Standard workshops are unsafe; traumatized teams need "structural mechanisms" to restore physiological safety.
Learning High Safety / High Standards. The "Innovation Threshold" where teams experiment and learn fast. Failure Résumés & "Real Talk" Leaders model fallibility by sharing their own "Failure Résumés." Start meetings with: "What barrier are we avoiding?" Prevents "premature consensus" and "groupthink." Sustains the "Idea Meritocracy" required for breakthrough innovation.

Many of these draw on established practice: the Five Whys comes from Toyota's production system, blameless post-mortems from software engineering and aviation's just-culture tradition, the "second story" from human-error research, and restorative circles from restorative justice (Edmondson, 2012; Latessa et al., 2023).

Sources

Edmondson, A. C. (2012). Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate, and compete in the knowledge economy. Jossey-Bass/Wiley.

Latessa, R. A., Galvin, S. L., Swendiman, R. A., Onyango, J., Ostrach, B., Edmondson, A. C., Davis, S. A., & Hirsh, D. A. (2023). Psychological safety and accountability in longitudinal integrated clerkships: A dual institution qualitative study. BMC Medical Education, 23, 760. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04622-5