What really creates psychological safety

“How do we create and maintain psychological safety within our teams?”

It’s a question that always sparks meaningful and idea-rich conversations in our Positive Leadership programmes.

While most leaders agree that a safe, supportive team environment is essential, what does that really look like? It’s a space where people feel free to speak up, share concerns, and challenge ideas without fear.

The strategies leaders often list include building trust, encouraging open communication, and leading by example.

Yet one powerful ingredient is often left off the list: optimism.

The impact of optimism on psychological safety is subtle and intricate.

When we demonstrate optimism, we offer reassurance and spark solution focused thinking, which holds an energy to it that helps propel us forward, as opposed to being stuck.

Optimism itself can positively affect mental and physical health, while keeps teams looking ahead and moving forward, and able to tackle challenges with resilience and determination to overcome. In the absence of optimism, teams can lose their motivation and sense of purpose, while finding similar challenges insurmountable.

Martin Seligman, widely regarded as the father of Positive Psychology, talks about Learned Optimism. His Learned Optimism model and test (you can access this at www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu) allows us to develop the skills of optimism. It is not just about whether we are an ‘optimist’ or a ‘pessimist’, it is about the explanatory style we use.

His model encourages us to challenge our thinking or beliefs in order to dispute them, and then shift them into new thoughts or beliefs.

What does this look like in practice?

• If a leader or team are always jumping to conclusions, we can challenge our beliefs around them and train ourselves to check in on what evidence there is to back up these conclusions
• If a leader or team tend to externalise, and assign blame to others while not recognising their own role, we can train them to look inwards – and ask is this all about them?
• If a leader or team have tunnel vision, and therefore miss important stuff because they are focused on other things, we can train them to ask the critical questions of what are they missing? What else is happening?

When leaders bring a good dose of optimism with them to their workday, it successfully encourages their teams to ask more critical questions, offer different perspectives and exercise agile thinking. And when teams are doing this, they are automatically creating an environment of psychological safety.