Edit: I noticed this comment was rather controversial and reread the article. The author is actually saying most people misunderstand psychological safety to be an environment where people don’t disagree. Their understanding of psychological safety however is correct. Not sure why the framing flipped my understanding in the first read.
This article completely misunderstand psychological safety even after including the definition. “Nice” teams are not psychologically safe. If everyone is nodding along they do not feel safe.
Conflict and safety are not at odds with each other. The whole point of psychological safety is that everyone feels safe enough to get into productive conflict.
Not all conflict or agreement is productive. The point of the work around psychological safety is to build a team where people agree and disagree willingly because they feel safe to do so.
Comments
Edit: I noticed this comment was rather controversial and reread the article. The author is actually saying most people misunderstand psychological safety to be an environment where people don’t disagree. Their understanding of psychological safety however is correct. Not sure why the framing flipped my understanding in the first read.
This article completely misunderstand psychological safety even after including the definition. “Nice” teams are not psychologically safe. If everyone is nodding along they do not feel safe.
Conflict and safety are not at odds with each other. The whole point of psychological safety is that everyone feels safe enough to get into productive conflict.
Not all conflict or agreement is productive. The point of the work around psychological safety is to build a team where people agree and disagree willingly because they feel safe to do so.
Exactly - the teams where everyone agrees are generally the least safe.. thats why everyone just nods along to every word from the boss.