What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is the “shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” – without interpersonal consequences (Amy Edmondson, 1999).
Psychological safety supports a productive and constructive culture of error – being able to openly discuss mistakes and learning from failure. Such a culture is something that many organizations strive for, but often fail. Why is that?

Success factor number one for cooperation

In 2016, Google conducted a study with more than 180 teams. It showed that the construct of psychological safety is the most important success factor for teams. To be clear: An atmosphere of psychological safety implies that every team member feels safe to speak up, even on uncomfortable topics, so as to enable collective progress. Team members acutally speak about mistakes and constructive criticism is offered.

Back in 1999, Amy Edmondson was already able to show the successes that are achievable when team members can address mistakes without sanctions. The only way to learn from mistakes is by openly talking about them. Other studies (e.g. those by Anderson & West) were able to show the effects of similar concepts (participative safety) on outputs such as innovation capacity.

We’re your partners

Most of us have already experienced how important it is to be able to address or admit mistakes, or at least to voice one’s opinion freely, without fear of humiliation. The road to get there might require some changes, but it is achievable.

Psychological safety as the basis for change

As Dostojewski said: “Change is what people fear most”. In order for individuals to perceive change as positive, they need psychological safety – a culture based on trust that encourages everyone to actively contribute and to advocate their own ideas and points of view.

Career coaching – supporting you on the way to your dream job

An experienced team of psychologists advises you in matters concerning your profession and career and supports you in detecting your strengths and competences as well as marketing them effectively. Pave the way to your dream job with us.

Successful leadership thanks to leadership development

Successful leadership means bringing an organization’s goals and its human resources together, no matter how rough the world of globalization and digitalisation may be. In our leadership development, we focus on the human being as the success factor for organizational growth. In this context, we train leadership skills ­– including goal formation, feedback and communication, competency management, talent development and coaching.

Innovation with Design Thinking

New ideas and better solutions are displacing existing, less sought after offers. The capability to innovate beyond the conventional product and process management, is urgently required.

At the root of each innovation is an organizational culture that is creative and built upon an environment of psychological safety.

We’ll support you in bringing your ideas to flourish and in developing a culture of innovation, for example using Design Thinking.

Design your Life

Our daily work life offers a variety of opportunities – within or outside a company. Never before (theoretically) was it so easy to take so many chances. Many people nowadays have completely different ideas about how their work life could look like. Surveys on work satisfaction show that many wish for more freedom to create their work life, for more job variation and meaning in what they are doing. All this shows that many people do not live up to their potential in their jobs.

The wish to use different skills at work – regardless of the job description – is, more than ever, within and out of reach at the same time. This paradox can be explained by the multitude of opportunities and the fact that we ourselves very often make it difficult for us to further develop. To find the answer to the question how a good work life could look like, is an individual process, the approach of how to find the answer, does not have to be necessarily.

Design your Life offers opportunities for companies to lay their development in to the hand of their talents so that these can commit even more and plan their career for the benefit of their company.

With private individuals we help to find out which opportunities arise from the individual combination of experience and skills and how they can be implemented.