Building Psychological Safety At Work
A customisable course to equip your leaders, managers and team leaders in better developing
emotionally safe and productive work groups.
Psychological Safety – Neglect or Development?
Psychological safety refers to the degree to which people feel they can express themselves without fear of negative consequences. There are two aspects, and it’s vital to be alert to both.
When psychological safety is neglected, the risks of harm increase. Potentially, an organisation can find itself in trouble legally. Yet when developed – as research at Google demonstrated in 2014 – psychological safety can be potentially the most potent aid to team and workgroup effectiveness and an engine for achieving desired organisational outcomes.
Psychological Safety: Development or Neglect?
The course is designed to be run in your organisation to help your leaders, managers and team leaders grow their skills and practice in enabling psychologically safe and productive team environments while averting/reducing risks of harm.
The standard course comprises a one-day workshop (or two virtual half days) plus e-learning modules and a follow up 90-minute virtual session one month later. We can, however, tailor the course to your requirements, including with length and scenarios to ensure applicability in your business context.
Note: this is not a course in counselling skills nor in mental health first aid, nor in the law related to psychological harm. It is a course in optimising psychological safety and minimising risks.
Psychological Safety: Development or Neglect?
Participants Will Learn About
Which Groups Will Benefit Most?
The course is designed primarily for people who lead, manage or supervise others, though anyone for whom creating a more open and trusting team environment is important can benefit. One example is facilitators of change.
Help your people tune-in to the power of psychological safety!
Contact us to find out more about conducting this course in your organisation.
Basis and Format of the Course
Rather than being primarily a content-oriented course, the emphasis is on experiential learning through small and large group work on specific psychological safety-related challenges. From these situations, we draw out learnings and assist participants to apply these insights in making progress with their own challenges.
The underlying model for the course is the OBREAU conversation model (Observation, Reasonableness and Authenticity), developed by Don Dunoon and increasingly recognised internationally.
We use the OBREAU model to explore scenarios provided as well as actual situations participants bring to the table to frame the issues with greater clarity, to take account of different perspectives, and to identify potential actions/interventions.
Following the initial one-day workshop (or two virtual half days), participants have access to a set of e-learning modules to extend and deepen their learning and consider different scenarios and possible responses.
The concluding (90-minute, virtual) meeting, ordinarily about one month after the workshop day (or virtual sessions) is designed to help participants:
- Reflect on and share their experience so far in fostering psychological safety
- Explore and discuss intervention strategies with challenges they have encountered
- Consolidate, deepen and extend their skills in nurturing safer work environments
- Embed their practice, to assist them in their work in enabling safety and high performance.
How Can We Help?
Remember, building psychological safety and tapping the benefits requires conscious intent. Your leaders, managers and team leaders are unlikely to get there by accident. Yet if they work at developing an emotionally safe work environment, outcomes like trust, innovation, collective learning and quality will all be potentially much more within reach – and the organisational will minimise the dangers of neglect. Contact us to find out how the course can help your organisation.
