# The clinical definition of psychological safety (from Amy Edmondson)

- **Episode:** [15](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/15.md) (2022-12-06)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** psychological-safety, amy-edmondson, definition
- **Time:** 10:40–14:18 (start 640s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/15?t=640](https://truthliesandwork.com/15?t=640)

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[10:40] Leanne Elliott: So, as I mentioned earlier, psychological safety is a belief held by employees in engaging and supportive workplace culture. But what is it exactly? And Stephan's actually got a really good clinical definition
[10:58] Stephan Wiedner: I'll start with the clinical definition, if you call it that, the one provided by Amy Edmondson. She's a Harvard professor. She's really the thought leader in this space. I'm sure I call myself an expert, but She's the real expert, and I'm just learning from her and others in the field. Her definition is that psychological safety is a belief that within your team, within your work environment, you can speak up, say what's on your mind, admit mistakes, and you could do all of that without any fear of some form of negative consequence. To make that a little more tangible in our training, what we say is that the definition for psychological safety is that you're trying to create a culture in which Your people have the courage to speak up and the confidence to know that when they do speak up, they'll be heard
[11:48] Al Elliott: Now, our Zoom recording there did break up a little bit when he said a really important thing, which was Amy Edmondson. Is that correct, Leanne? Yeah
[11:55] Leanne Elliott: Amy Edmondson is a Harvard professor and a real pioneer and thought leader in, in psychological safety. And she did say, you know, it's— and she does so much reading. We're gonna leave a link in the show notes that if you wanna, you know, dive into her TED Talk, into her papers, it really is fascinating reading. But she summarised it by the psychological safety as a belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Or in other words, that they just, people feel empowered to question the status quo without that fear of being judged or embarrassed or punished. In its simplest terms, it's creating an adult-to-adult environment. I think that's what we were kind of saying before, it's that, You know, you should want me to work for you as much as I want, you know, to work for you. It's that adult-to-adult transaction. Um, and, you know, as Stephan said, it's not just about allowing people to speak up, it's about doing something with that feedback. Um, and it's by making sure that that employee voice translates into organisational action that you're going to get the most impact out of psychological safety, as Stephan explained
[13:05] Stephan Wiedner: And what we knew looking back was that all of the leaders that we were coaching wanted to improve their ability to lead their teams, inspire their teams, et cetera. Gosh, they're all really just trying to improve psychological safety, and we can measure that. And if we can measure it before and after, then we can point to something that says, hey, this is good evidence that the behaviors of this leader are changing and psychological safety is improving. And because we know psychological safety is linked to performance and high, high performance, Then we can assert that this team is performing better
[13:38] Leanne Elliott: So, as Stephan says, again, we're talking about a predictive model. This is how the RX-7 works. It's how any great employee engagement model or wellbeing model is going to work, in that, you know, if we understand the foundations, the drivers of employee engagement, and the associated beliefs and behaviors, we're not only going to know where to make changes, but we can measure the impact of these changes too. Um, as I said, from, from individual wellbeing to profitability and even happier customers
[14:08] Al Elliott: Now, I'm always asking, how does this make a difference? It all sounds lovely, but how does it make a difference? Uh, Stephan's got an amazing example of how it made a difference at Google