“How does psychological safety add value to my workplace? Does investing in psychological safety reduce the ability to deliver on quarterly deadlines? There’s no time!”
These are actual questions and statements I’ve heard recently from leaders who are so concerned about delivery they feel like they can’t invest in the value of their people. The fear of not hitting dates and deliverables becomes the driving factor of decisions, and things like psychological safety get looked at as an “extracurricular activity,” or perhaps a function of HR. Many individuals don’t recognize that by enabling and empowering people they’re actually immediately creating high performance teams, helping them get to what they’re looking for faster.
Psychological safety is directly related to performance and is something actionable that can be practiced every single day, as certainly a lack of psychological safety is often felt by people every single day as well. Scoping projects, creating stories, roadmapping sessions, code reviews - let alone performance reviews and tracking velocity - all require us to interact with other people. Real psychological safety is something we can build a consciousness around within our ecosystems.