Psychological safety is not immunity from consequences, nor is it a state of high self-regard. In psychologically safe workplaces, people know they might fail, they might receive performance feedback that says they're not meeting expectations, and they might lose their jobs due to changes in the industry environment or even to a lack of competence in their role. These attributes of the modern workplace are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. But in a psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They feel willing and able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor. They fear holding back their full participation more than they fear sharing a potentially sensitive, threatening, or wrong idea. The fearless organization is one in which interpersonal fear is minimized so that team and organizational performance can be maximized in a knowledge intensive world. It is not one devoid of anxiety about the future!

The data are consistent in this simple but interesting finding: psychological safety seems to “live” at the level of the group. In other words, in the organization where you work, it’s likely that different groups have different interpersonal experiences; in some, it may be easy to speak up and bring your full self to work. In others, speaking up might be experienced as a last resort - as it did in some of the patient-care teams I studied. That’s because psychological safety is very much shaped by local leaders.

Working in a psychologically safe environment does not mean that people always agree with one another for the sake of being nice. It also does not mean that people offer unequivocal praise or unconditional support for everything you have to say. In fact, you could say it’s the opposite. Psychological safety is about candor, about making it possible for productive disagreement and free exchange of ideas. It goes without saying that these are vital to learning and innovation. Conflict inevitably arises in any workplace. Psychological safety enables people on different sides of a conflict to speak candidly about what’s bothering them.

Today, over a thousand research papers in fields ranging from education to business to medicine, have shown that teams and organizations with higher psychological safety have better performance, lower burnout, and, in medicine even lower patient mortality. Why might this be the case? Because physiological safety helps people take the interpersonal risks that are necessary for achieving excellence in a fast-changing, interdependent world. When people work in psychologically safe contexts, they know that questions are appreciated, ideas are welcome, and errors and failure are discussable. In these environments, people can focus on the work without being tied up in knots about what others might think of them. They know that being wrong won’t be a fatal blow to their reputation. Psychological safety plays a powerful role in the science of failing well. It allows people to ask for help when they're in over their heads, which helps eliminate preventable failures. It helps them report -and hence catch and correct- errors to avoid worse outcomes, and it makes it possible to experiment in thoughtful ways to generate new discoveries. Think about the teams that you’ve been a part of at work, or at school, in sports, or in your community.

Owning our errors becomes easier when we accept human fallibility as a fact and put that acceptance to use in learning and improving. In the most successful teams in my research, people, especially team leaders, talk about the ever-present chance that things will go wrong. They are honest and good-humored about mistakes, which nurtures the psychological safety you need for people to speak up quickly about them. This is a best practice—in families, too, not just work teams—if you want to reduce basic failures.