Building Psychological Safety on Day One

How do I make my team feel safe sharing mistakes?

Have you ever experienced a team or working environment where people just didn’t feel comfortable sharing different things, mostly to do with the mistakes they are making? Ever wondered why so many employees all over the world have this strange feeling of not wanting to share the things they are not doing right? What about those pesky employee feedback surveys where some lie and say things they don’t actually think?

Why do you think this is happening?

Well, the easy answer is this: fear!

Behind the word, however, we have much more to uncover and go over, especially for the first-time manager. Building this psychological safety for your team is essential if you plan on creating a good working, nurturing, and healthy workplace. In this article, we will go over the basic concept of safety, how to deal with blame and mistakes, how to be honest, and how to help keep that communication open and going:

• Why psychological safety matters from day one
• Lead with your own mistakes
• Blameless environment
• Honest dissent and different perspectives
• Open and ongoing communication

Why psychological safety matters from day one

What a great question, and to really give a complete answer, we need to look at the multiple perspectives that feed into the concept. So, let’s start with a simple exercise: I want you to imagine how it would feel (or how you felt) when working in a place that checks one or more of the following:

• Make a mistake and you get yelled at (best-case scenario) or have HR coming to you to discuss “options.”
• Don’t contradict the boss – it’s very bad, they get mad, and they will remember you.
• Don’t think on your own; just follow the procedure and you will be fine.
• Never say things are not going well, or you will end up the black sheep of the team.
• Always smile, even when you don’t feel like it. The manager doesn’t like to see angry or sad faces.

You know, I could continue with this list… just keep the entire article about all these things, but I’m sure by now you get the picture. If you’ve experienced at least one of these things, or if you think about how you would actually feel in such a place, then you understand most of this article. The sad part is that for some people, there are not many options: they need this job and have to suck it up and deal with it – and not many people think about them.

When it comes to safety, the answer is simple: everyone wants to have a nice, quiet, and peaceful life at work. Why come to work in a place where you get yelled at or have a very angry, easily offended manager?

The actions you take as a people leader, from the simplest smile to the way you conduct your meetings and give feedback, will impact the safety aspect of your team. In my very first article, The First-Time Manager Starter Pack: Days 1–30, I talked a lot about leading people and how, because we deal with humans, we need to pay extra attention to the small details. For you, the person reading this and maybe wanting to better understand how leadership works, remember this: it will come in handy.

Another part of this topic is the danger that a silent team creates: when people are too scared or not encouraged enough to speak up, you create a framework that allows bad ideas and mistakes to prosper. Because it’s the team doing the hard work, if they don’t voice their concerns, you end up with really bad ways of working.

Do me a favor and think about this for a while today: what would a team that works in a safe environment from a psychological perspective look like? When you have the answer, you will understand most of the things you need to do as a people manager from this point of view.

Lead with your own mistakes

The biggest mistake new managers make is not letting the team see their mistakes. In part, they want to showcase strength and experience; they think that by hiding mistakes, people will not think less of them, or they just don’t want to look inferior.

Total BS! The best thing you can do for both you and your team is to show them how to own up to mistakes and how to turn them from a failure into a success. I know it sounds a bit too LinkedIn or TED Talk, but it’s true – and not just because I say it. The truth is, the best managers lead with their own mistakes. They show people that they are also human, demonstrate how to handle it when a mistake is made, and create a good precedent that actually helps bring errors into the light, rather than hiding them until they explode.

You don’t need to have all the answers, and if you think people actually want that from you, this is not the job for you. People don’t need or want someone who is a great process expert or a human SOP; they need a leader – someone they can look up to who can help them, guide them, and show them what to do when things are not going as planned. If people really needed a human SOP, we would just replace all managers with a robot and voila, problem solved.

When you share your own mistakes with people, you do two very important things:

• You signal: It’s OK to mess up – don’t worry too much about it, we are all human.
• You demonstrate: Let me show you how I handled it, so you know how you can deal with it too.

These actions create the perfect framework for a safe environment that encourages people to bring up problems and find solutions (fostering both personal and professional growth).

Normalizing failure is the best lesson you can teach people. Failure isn’t about what you did wrong; it’s about what you learn from it and how you use that information to do better in the future. Without this, people will never learn. Think about it like a baby crawling and bumping into things and at some point they learn head + wall = ouch.

Blameless environment

While we all enjoyed the famous “Shame, Shame, Shame” scene from Game of Thrones, in reality, that is the worst approach you can take with your team. The more pressure people feel about getting blamed (by either you or their peers), the worse things get. Fear of blame keeps people from talking, prevents them from generating ideas, and builds the toxic workplace everyone hates.

A lot of energy is wasted on pointing fingers instead of finding solutions. It is wasteful because nothing good comes from it. Think about it: what actual benefit do you get by blaming someone for a mistake? Will it fix the issue? No. Will it make things better? No. Will it stop the issue from happening again? No. So why do it? Why spend 30 minutes in a meeting talking about blame when you could use that time to actually work on a fix?

In your first weeks as a new manager, it is very important NOT to blame people for mistakes. Make sure whatever you say, however you act, and whatever email you write remains as blameless as possible. This passes on the feeling of, “Ah, OK, this person is not that type of manager, so I feel a bit safer.”

When people make mistakes (and they will, regardless of how you feel about it), your reaction must be balanced. Here are the things you need to focus on:

• Focus on the Root Cause: Find out what happened and why it happened. (More information on this topic is available here: Root Cause Analysis (RCA): The Starter Pack).
• Collaborate: Talk to your SMEs and the person (or people) who made the mistake, and have a good old-fashioned brainstorming session to find solutions. Let people work on finding them.
• Stay Calm: Do not react aggressively, especially if this is the first time they are making this mistake.
• Prevent Recurrence: Think about how to prevent this from happening again.

The FIRST question you need to ask each time this happens is: What happened? Not Who did it? Remember that!

Honest dissent and different perspectives

Another classic mistake first-time managers make is not giving people space to challenge ideas. Listen, this is not about your authority; don’t take it personally. This is about your team trying to figure out if your idea is indeed the best fix for the problem. If people aren’t allowed to question you, how will you know if an idea is good or bad? You’re not the one doing the work, they are. The more you push back on this, the worse it gets for you.

Make time for meetings where people can discuss whatever options you have on the table and (as hard as it might be) let them rip the ideas apart. Only by getting constant feedback on why something won’t work will you learn and improve. Otherwise, you can just do whatever you want and let things crash and burn, it’s fine. No, it’s not fine, and you should never do that! Only leaders who manage through fear or deep insecurity act this way; it is not a trait found in high-performing teams and great leaders.

Always make sure you ask open questions that invite and reward pushback. I know it sounds counterproductive, but you get far better insights this way. These are the types of questions that make it easier for people to say what isn’t working, instead of just nodding along with a “Yes, this is fine.” Here are some examples:

• If we change the procedure, what is the impact on the customer?
• If we increase the volume, what would your day look like?
• If the AHT is decreased, how will your quality be impacted?

Make room at the table for people who aren’t as vocal; everyone needs a voice. It happens often in implementation meetings that extroverts take over and overshadow quieter team members. Make it a habit to let everyone speak: do a round-table check, ask each person directly, schedule at least 3–5 minutes for each team member to talk, and keep time.

Open and ongoing communication

This is the final – and probably most effective – habit for creating a feeling of safety on your team: open and ongoing communication. Many teams and managers struggle here due to bad habits that discourage people from reaching out, such as responding defensively when asked questions or failing to create a framework for gathering feedback.

To make communication open and ongoing, let’s start with the absolute basic: accessibility. Yup, you read that right: people need to be able to reach you when they have something to say. If you act like you have 10,000 things to do and no time to talk to them, you shouldn’t be in leadership. Your role is to be there for the team first; everything else comes second. While you can’t be 100% available all the time, you can set up different ways to manage this:

• Tell people to send you a message on Teams, and let them know you’ll read and respond as soon as you are free.
• Have them send an email with their feedback, and ensure you reply.
• Set up a weekly check-in specifically for feedback and open discussion (or daily if needed).
• The Rule of “Burning”: If someone comes to you wanting to talk, unless whatever you are doing will crash your team, customer, or performance right that second, you have time – so make time. Don’t blow people off just to write an email; you can write the email after.

While not every idea will be a winner, always respond with empathy and curiosity. Let them see that you have a genuine interest in their perspective, that you care about the issue they are raising, and that you are truly listening. Mind your facial expressions, body posture, gestures, and tone, they make up a huge part of your interactions. People won’t come to you if you’re always sitting with your arms crossed looking like Grumpy Cat.

Finally, show them that giving feedback is normal, welcome, and healthy. The more you encourage them to discuss how things can be improved, the better off everyone will be, yourself included. It’s through this feedback that you will gather your most valuable asset: ideas. They will make processes better and faster, cementing your position as a true Leader, not just another manager.

Until the next article, stay safe, healthy, and happy!