Psychological Safety (Team Slides)
The team-facing counterpart: instead of a leader diagnosing themselves, the whole team names its own norms, agrees how it will behave differently, and appoints someone to hold it to that.
Follow the team through five stages, starting with naming it as a team issue and ending with a safety keeper named to hold the agreements.
Reach for this when…
- The team blames the leader for low safety but has never looked at its own norms.
- Meetings are polite and nothing risky ever gets said out loud.
- You want agreements the team wrote, not rules handed down.
How to run it
- Introduce psychological safety as something the whole team builds, not just the leader.
- Run the team through a safety survey.
- Identify the norms that are helping or hurting safety.
- Co-design three to five team agreements for how you'll behave.
- Nominate a safety keeper to call out when the agreements are broken.
A worked example
Situation. A ten-person claims team at an insurer in Izmir, Turkey, scored badly on a safety survey despite a well-liked manager, Elif Yildiz.
Applied. In the workshop the team traced the problem to their own norm of never disagreeing with whoever spoke first in a meeting, and wrote an agreement to always ask for a dissenting view before deciding.
Result. They appointed a rotating safety keeper whose only job was to ask who disagrees before a decision closed. Processing errors caught before sign-off rose within the quarter.
The catch
Team-designed agreements only bite if someone is actually empowered to enforce them, and rotating the safety-keeper role can mean nobody feels it's really their job. A single bad survey score also tells you safety is low, not why.
An agreement nobody is willing to enforce in the room is a poster, not a norm.
Origin: Amy Edmondson (theory); adapted for team facilitation practice