#203 – Psychological Safety in the Team

Especially in the Nordic countries, we’re proud that we have flat organizational hierarchies without any noticeable social distance between the organizational layers. Here, it’s often totally fine for professionals to challenge their boss—actually, it’s even expected that, if you have any knowledge or experience that can improve the situation/challenge/project/product, you bring it forth, no matter if it doesn’t align with your boss’ opinion or decision.

Therefore, if we want to look for symptoms of a lack of Psychological Safety in these organizations, we shouldn’t only look for employees that are afraid of getting negative reactions from their superiors. 

Also, let’s focus on how people feel about their peers’ reactions when making experiments, trying out new things and taking chances. The feeling of whether we’re good enough in the eyes of our professionally like-minded colleagues is what we should start uncovering—and how we can change this notion (e.g., through role models and mentoring).