It’s one of the leadership buzz terms of our age, but what is psychological safety actually? It was a phrase popularised as result of a large-scale piece of analysis conducted by Google in 2012 – codenamed Project Aristotle. The aim of the project was to determine what made high-performing teams from across Google’s business so great. What were the factors, unique to successful teams, that set them apart from other parts of the business. It was a wide-ranging piece of research and involved 180 teams from across the business. The research team was made up of data engineers, psychologists and statisticians and they looked at every aspect of team dynamics they could find. They studied personality types and motivators, history and experience, age and gender. They looked at how often the teams socialised together and even whether they made one another coffee. The result was a series of findings that the Aristotle researchers claimed made for high-performance in a team setting, no matter what the setting. Whether the team was set up to drive sales, or design software, the key factors identified by Project Aristotle would be apparent in high performance teams and missing in those which were faltering. Most significant of these factors was something called ‘psychological safety’. And it’s a hard one to pin down and indeed, for leaders to get right it seems. In its most basic sense, psychological safety refers to a climate or environment in which there is an absence of fear . This is not physical fear (of violence) or material fear (of losing one’s job or similar). It’s a much more subtle fear that is absent in teams which have a climate of psychological safety. It’s the absence of fear of messing up, saying something foolish, or failing or of trying new things and not getting it right. The absence of power play, one-upmanship and political backstabbing. It’s the absence of the sense that anything I say and do can and will be held against me. Instead, it’s a culture of anything I say/do will at best be validated, heard and taken on board and at worst will be overlooked with kindness if it’s way off the mark. The Aristotle team noticed that this cultural phenomenon manifested itself in a number of ways. There were the bumbling, introspective, technical leaders who had created a ‘talk to me – I get you’ climate. There were the dynamic, dominant leaders who had cultivated a culture of ‘we are all in this together and we all have off-days’ climate. There were team cultures in which banter and back-chat was understood to be absolutely fine and safe and others in which talking about serious health issues in a team meeting was welcomed and indeed invited. The key thing in each case where this condition existed was that the leader had a very earthy understanding of his / her own humanity. He or she treated themselves with kindness (it’s ok to mess up – messing up is part of the journey) and they extended that open, non-judgemental approach to those who worked for them.