Psychological safety at Google

People need to feel safe talking about failure before they are willing to speak up about incidents.

When Google studied their teams to learn what behaviors made groups successful, they found that Psychological safety was the most critical factor for a team to work well together. ¹

They also found that high-performing teams with strong psychological safety share two key behaviors. First, these teams demonstrate conversational turn-taking. Team members speak in roughly the same proportion. When everyone is able to share their perspective, the collective intelligence of the group increases.

Second, good teams have high social sensitivity or empathy. Successful teams are able to sense when someone is feeling upset or left out based on nonverbal cues.