Psychological Safety (Leader Slides)
This gives leaders Amy Edmondson's psychological safety model as their own diagnostic - plotting their team on safety versus standards, and naming exactly which zone their behaviour is producing.
A square splits along two axes, climbing toward safety on one side and toward standards on the other, with a name in each corner.
Reach for this when…
- Feedback keeps landing badly however carefully you word it.
- People agree in the meeting and do something else afterwards.
- You suspect your own behaviour is why nobody challenges you.
How to run it
- Leaders learn to model safety: admit fallibility, invite input, take challenge without getting defensive.
- Introduce the four zones: Comfort, Anxiety, Apathy, Learning.
- Leaders diagnose which zone their own team currently sits in.
- Pick two or three specific behaviours to shift toward the Learning Zone.
- Practise taking challenge without getting defensive, in pairs.
A worked example
Situation. Faisal Al-Otaibi managed a 12-person engineering team at a logistics software firm in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where standards were high but nobody flagged problems until they were unfixable.
Applied. Working through the diagnostic, he placed his team squarely in the Anxiety Zone - high pressure, low safety - and traced it to how he responded in stand-ups when a deadline slipped.
Result. He changed one specific behaviour: asking what got in the way before asking why is this late. Within two sprints, problems were being raised a week earlier.
The catch
A leader's self-diagnosis of their own safety climate is exactly the judgement most compromised by their own blind spots - the person creating Anxiety Zone behaviour is often the last to see it that way. Pairing it with real team data catches what self-scoring misses.
If your team scores you higher on safety than they score each other, trust the second number.
Origin: Amy Edmondson (theory); adapted here for leader-facing facilitation