Quick Win: What teams get wrong about psychological safety

You could be trying your hardest to build psychological safety - and still be getting it wrong. Here’s why just one person feeling unsafe can quietly unravel your entire team.  

In this Quick Win episode, I’m joined by clinical psychologist Sabina Read to unpack one of the biggest leadership mistakes I made last year: misunderstanding how psychological safety really works. We talk about how uneven safety erodes trust, and I share the exact tool my team now uses to make sure we catch culture issues early - before they snowball. 

Sabina and I discuss: 

• Why psychological safety must be universal, not just widespread 

• The ripple effect of one team member feeling unsafe 

• How safety gaps shift conversations into private whispers 

• The ritual we now use to track team health every 6–8 weeks 

• Why we focus on what’s working - not just what’s broken 

Key Quote 
“If just one person doesn’t feel psychologically safe, that can do a lot of damage to the whole level of trust within the team.” 

Listen to the full episode with Sabina here. 

Connect with Sabina via her website, Instagram, or check out her podcast Human Cogs. 

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: 
https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/ 

Connect with me on the socials: 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amanthai 

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha-imber.ck.page/subscribe 

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. 

Get in touch at [e-mail] 

Credits: 
Host: Amantha Imber 
Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It could be trying your hardest to make your team
feel psychologically safe and actually be getting it wrong. I
know this because last year I realized that's exactly what
was happening for me with my team in twenty twenty four.
I made several leadership mistakes, but my biggest one was
misunderstanding how psychological safety works for a team. My mistake

(00:24):
was also my greatest lesson around culture, and I've broken
it down with the help of my incredible friend and
clinical psychologist, Sabina Reid, so that you can learn from
my mistakes. Working with our clients at Inventium, I've seen
environments where psychological safety existed unevenly, and I used to
think that this wasn't a significant problem, but now my

(00:47):
views have shifted. In this quick win, we reveal the
big mistake you could be making with psych safety for
your team, and the one thing your business probably isn't
doing nearly enough of around workla culture that could be
costing you big time. Welcome to How I Work, a

(01:12):
show about habits, rituals, and strategies.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
For optimizing your day.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
You also talked about in your article, and I think
this is quite connected psychological safety. And psychological safety we
know is a team construct. It's not an individual. You
can't just say I'm psychologically safe as a leader, or
as an employee or as a colleague, because it's got
a contagion effect to it. And you said in your

(01:43):
article my biggest culture lesson from twenty twenty four was
about psychological safety. It must be universal, not just widespread
in smaller teams. Especially when even one person doesn't feel
safe to speak up, the entire system breaks down. So
what do you do with that as a leader? What
did you do with that as a leader? Because I
agree with the sentiment one hundred percent.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
That's funny because we help our clients build psychological safety
and have better conversations. But I think for me it
didn't really land for me until I was living with
the experience where a lot of the team had high
psychological safety, they were very comfortable bringing up all sorts
of things, and then there were one or two members

(02:29):
of the team who really didn't. And often that would
result in either them sharing something with me but asking
me to keep it confidential, or again like diads, sharing
with each other but no one else. And then I mean,
you know, it's the same company, but it's really different.

(02:50):
And it made me realize if just one person doesn't
feel psychologically safe, that can do a lot of damage
to the whole level of trust within the whole team,
even when some people do feel safe.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
I agree. And you said in the article, without complete
psychological safety, genuine concerns move from open forums to private conversations,
which is what you've described there. How do you test?
What are the metrics? You said? We look at this
regularly as a team now, and we didn't used to.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
We've always had metrics in place to do with things
that relate to engagement. But I'll talk you through what
we do now. So every six to eight weeks we
are a remote first team, which means we all work
from wherever we want. But once a month we now
come together in person, and on that in person day,
we'll spend about sixty to ninety minutes going through what

(03:42):
we call our Inventium Team Health Monitor, which is adapted
from what at Lassie and do and adapted from some
of the team performance research that wear across and so
we look at about ten different dimensions that we know
are really important for culture and for a team to
work together really well to be a high performing team.
And one of those dimensions is psychological safety. And so

(04:06):
how we do that as a team. We come together,
We're sitting together in a room, face to face around
a table, and we are each thinking about, Okay, how
are we going at the moment instead of thinking back
over the last six to eight weeks or whenever we've
last done that team health monitor, what's our experience like
as individuals, And what we do is we've got a

(04:27):
four point rating system. So silver is the highest and
that's represented by two thumbs up. Then we've got green,
which is one thumbs up. We've got orange, which is
thumb on the side, and then red, which is thumb down.
And so at the counter three, like we all think
about what is.

Speaker 3 (04:42):
That paper scissors?

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Kind of like rocks paper scissors, but with completely different movements,
And so what we do is we all think individually,
how would I rate it for myself? What's my experience?
And then on the counter three, like in rocks paper scissors,
we do our gesture and then sometimes we're completely aligned.
A lot of the time we are, but other times
we're not. Other times one person might have a two

(05:04):
thumbs up and someone else might have a thumbs down,
and so for us that's an important cueue. Okay, we
need to have a conversation about this. And likewise, you know,
if something is working really well, it's also important that
we know why is it working well? Like what do
we need to double down on? So that ritual that
we have as a team has been so powerful in

(05:26):
going how are we going and how is everyone feeling?
And also I think because we're there face to face,
we're doing it in person. I mean, there's just like
a read that you get on body language that is
generally impossible to get virtually, you know, not least in
the bit because people's camera set up is generally crap
and you can only see them from the neck up
if they have not optimized their virtual setup. But like

(05:50):
you just get something else through that.

Speaker 3 (05:52):
It's doing an energy I think there's an energy exchange.
You know, you walk into a room, whether it's for
business or pleasure, we know immediately what the sense you
feel is when you're with in the presence of others,
and for all of the benefits of working from home,
that energy exchange is really valuable. So you do your

(06:13):
rocks paper scissors well or your thumbs up, thumbsides, thumbs down,
double thumbs whatever it is. And you also raise something
there that made me curious. It's so easy for us
to only want to focus on the two thumbs down
or whichever the lowest rating was that you described, and
we overlook when we've got two thumbs up. And I
think that a lot of organizations and teams think, well,

(06:35):
if it's working well, let's almost not talk about it.
We don't want to curse it, we don't want to
disrupt it. It doesn't need our attention. And of course, from
a strength based model and positive psychology lens, we have
to understand, as you said, double down, what is working well?
Why is that working well? How can we continue and
what can we learn that's transferable from whatever that double

(06:55):
thumbs scenario is. To take that to a thumbs down
scenario because there'll be learning there.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
I hope you enjoyed this quick win with myself and Sabina.
If you'd like to listen to the full episode, you
can find a link to that in the show notes.
If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes
drop how I work was recorded on the traditional land
of the Warrangery people, part of the Cooler Nation