The Psychologically Safe Healthcare Team

Psychological safety creates a workplace culture where employees feel free to express their ideas, take interpersonal risks, and solicit feedback without fear of embarrassment, humiliation, rejection, or punishment. This article explores the role of the healthcare administrator, leader, or manager in building and fostering their employees’ psychological safety. It provides a brief history of psychological safety in the workplace and its role in more current research. It explores the four stages of psychological safety and offers five guiding principles leaders can follow to increase psychological safety within their teams. This article then provides leaders with 15 strategies they can use to build psychological safety and describes and debunks the most common psychological safety myths. It provides leaders with nine hands-on exercises they can facilitate for their employees to develop a culture of psychological safety. Finally, this article suggests 20 survey or conversation questions leaders can ask their employees to assess the level of psychological safety in the healthcare organizations.