What Is Psychological Safety?

What exactly is psychological safety? It’s a term that’s used a lot but is often misunderstood. In this piece, the author answers the following questions with input from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase No one likes to deliver bad news to their boss. But that’s exactly what I had to do when a project I’d been working on wasn’t delivering the results we expected. I’d been a big advocate for our team taking on the initiative and, personally, I’d invested a lot of time into it — and convinced others to do the same. When I met with my manager to present the data, which showed that we hadn’t recouped our investment and the initiative had performed worse than planned, I was nervous. I would’ve understood if she had been frustrated or even angry and I expected her to at least ask “What went wrong?” or “How could we have prevented this?” (both questions I’d prepared answers for). Instead, she asked a simple question: What did you learn? I now understand th

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