The Psychological Safety Audit

Psychological safety has entered corporate vocabulary faster than almost any idea in organisational psychology, and in the process it has come to mean roughly being nice. It does not mean that, and teams that believe it does get worse rather than better. It is about the cost of speaking: whether you can admit an error, ask an obvious question or disagree with the most senior person in the room without it changing how you are seen.

The audit gives you a 20-item team assessment across five dimensions, the four things safety is commonly confused with and why each confusion is expensive, the seven behaviours that destroy it fastest in rough order of damage, a 90-minute facilitated session plan with the failure mode that ruins most of them, and four observable signals that let you measure change without running another survey three months later.

For team leads, engineering managers, HR business partners and coaches.

What it is not: Edmondson’s seven-item measure. The items here were written independently from the construct as the literature defines it, and carry no published norms. They are built for diagnosing your own teams and structuring an honest conversation, which is what most organisations actually need.

9 pages, A4, formatted for printing. Delivered as a PDF immediately after payment.