Psychological Safety: How to Create Fearless Teams

Speaker: Elyce M. Wolfgang, MRA, CRA, R.T. (R)

Psychological Safety is defined in Amy Edmondson’s 2019 book “The Fearless Organization” as “a climate in which people feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution.” Creating a work environment that supports learning is essential in today’s ever-challenging healthcare environment. Team-based learning includes sharing knowledge, offering suggestions, and brainstorming better approaches, all while destigmatizing failure. Psychological Safety is an essential aspect of creating a High-Reliability Organization.

Psychological safety promotes diverse views and perspectives, but it’s difficult to change the perception that critical discussions are synonymous with conflict. It’s also difficult to change the perception that mistakes are synonymous with failure. How can we help our team members embrace mistakes/problems and critical discussions? Then, taking it a step further, how do we learn from the discussions and mistakes, and create solutions that solve the root cause of the problem?

In this session, we will explore what psychological safety is, and what it is not. We also explore the tools we have in our Imaging Leadership toolbox to help us along the journey to a High-Reliability Organization.

Learning Objectives: 

• Understand why & how cultivating psychological safety and team-based learning is directly related to increased employee engagement, patient experience, and financial gains.
• Describe how psychological safety & the concepts of High Reliability are intertwined
• Demonstrate methods and tools we can utilize to create a psychologically safe environment – a case study

This session qualifies for 1 hour of CE Credit.