What Does Psychologically Informed Leadership Look Like?

What is a leader?

When you think of a leader, or leadership, what or who comes to mind?  What kind of emotions does it bring up? 

We might think about our boss, or previous bosses, who have held positions of authority, titles, or have been “above us” in the hierarchy. Depending on our experience with these bosses, these thoughts might bring up positive feelings of inspiration, support, and care, or they might bring up feelings of distrust and fear. 

But there are other leaders in our personal lives or at work, who aren’t necessarily above us in the team hierarchy but who we have seen take charge of a situation and manage it compassionately and skilfully.
Grace Hopper, a computer pioneer and naval officer, once said that you manage things, but you lead people. Good management and good leadership are connected and work together, but in this blog we will be focusing on the human aspect of leading people.

We believe that good leadership comes from a place of understanding. It is less about the tasks someone completes, or the motivational tips and tricks they have picked up along the way, and much more about how they go about doing the things they do.
When we take the time to really listen and understand why our service users, team members, or organisation is operating in a certain way, we can think about what and where something might need to shift or change to improve things. 

Psychological safety and the role of leaders

When we are talking about leadership it is important to think about the culture of a team as often the two are interlinked. Leaders in a psychologically safe culture are more open to listening and understanding, which fosters more psychological safety within the team, and the opposite can also be true.  

Dr Amy Edmondson (1999) defined psychological safety as “the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”. In 1999 Amy Edmondson was researching clinical teams and the number of mistakes different teams made. A surprising finding from her research was that the teams with the best outcomes made more mistakes than the teams with lower outcomes. When she dug into this further, it became clear that the teams with good outcomes were more likely to admit to making mistakes, whereas those with bad outcomes were more likely to try and hide their mistakes. 

Research into psychological safety in teams is developing all the time but is widely acknowledged to exist on a continuum. It is not an attribute that a team either has or doesn’t have, but instead is something that we can all be working towards. 

In 2022, Ito et. al developed a concept analysis of the antecedents, attributes and consequences of psychological safety in a healthcare setting. The model is worth looking into further by following the link above, but the core attributes were considered to be:

1. The perceptions of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks – how we believe taking a risk will be received by our team and organisation.

2. Strong interpersonal relationships – mutual trust and respect were highlighted as particularly important factors. 

3. Group-level phenomenon – the idea that psychological safety relies on a shared belief, rather than an individual belief. 

4. A safe work environment for taking interpersonal risks – this includes the organisational environment, such as policies, procedures, and values. 

5. A non-punitive culture – this refers to not punishing people for taking risks, rather than never punishing people, for example in the case of a clear and intentional violation. 

Developing psychologically informed leaders

Good leadership comes from a place of understanding. This might be achieved through active listening, providing non-judgemental spaces such as reflective practice, a willingness to check your understanding, and to action change as a result. 

It could look like working towards creating a culture of psychological safety at work. Timothy R. Clarke (2020) describes four stages of psychological safety that teams can progress through. 

1. Inclusion safety – where team members feel safe to belong to the team. 

2. Learner safety – team members feel able to ask questions and learn. 

3. Contributor safety – the team feels safe to contribute their own ideas.

4. Challenger safety – team members can question others’ ideas and suggest significant changes without fear. 

As with most models, teams would not expect to move through these stages in a linear fashion, but there might be progress in some areas, whilst other areas feel stagnant. The important element is that the team is willing to work together to progress within a flexible framework. 

At Matter South Yorkshire CIC we offer a package of training and reflective spaces to support leaders in your organisation to move towards psychological safety and a better understanding of their team. If this might be helpful for you, please get in touch to discuss further.