DAY 3: Create Psychological Safety for a Culture of Growth
This is part of the certificate course, Leading Teams and Change: Advanced Management Development
Overview
The Day 3 module explores how psychological safety supports trust, collaboration, and team performance. Participants examine research showing how it reduces turnover, encourages innovation, and improves adaptability. They reflect on the behaviours, both personal and organizational, that help or hinder a psychologically safe environment.
Through a Sand Trap experiential activity, participants explore how risk-taking and mistakes influence team learning. They analyze the group dynamics during the activity to identify what supports or prevents open participation and honest dialogue.
The session concludes with practical strategies from Amy Edmondson’s book, The Fearless Organization. Participants create action plans and commit to simple, repeatable leadership behaviours that build trust, invite participation, and create a team culture where learning is safe, expected, and shared.
This module includes
Facilitated session (4 hours)
Unit 7 – Psychological Safety - Why it’s needed and how it helps (1 hour)
- Explore the concept of psychological safety and its impact on trust, engagement, and team performance.
- Examine real-world research and statistics to understand how psychological safety reduces turnover, increases collaboration, and enhances innovation.
- Identify personal and organizational behaviors that promote or hinder a psychologically safe work environment.
Unit 8 – Experiential activity “Sand Trap” (90 minutes)
- Engage in the Sand Trap experiential activity to reflect on how mistakes and risk-taking contribute to learning and team adaptability.
- Analyze team behaviors during the activity, discussing how psychological safety influences participation, problem-solving, and decision-making.
- Debrief the experience by identifying strategies to create a work culture where mistakes are seen as learning opportunities rather than failures.
Unit 9 – Skills to build psychological safety (90 minutes)
- Identify leadership behaviours from the Leader’s Toolkit in Amy Edmondson’s book, The Fearless Organization, to set the stage, invite participation, and respond productively to team member input.
- Develop action plans to foster a culture of trust, inclusion, and open communication, ensuring that all team members feel heard and valued.
- Commit to small, repeatable leadership behaviors to reinforce psychological safety in daily interactions and team decision-making.
Virtual facilitated activities (90 minutes each)
- Facilitated discussion on progress with commitments
- Leading Effective meetings - Participants receive a deck of my Lead, Learn, Grow conversation cards