Psychological safety has received considerable attention for some time. As with all ideas, there are supporters and critics. In this blog post, you’ll learn about the ORSC approach to building psychological safety in your team.
So, What is Psychological Safety?
The Harvard Business Review’s ‘What is Psychological Safety?’ provides a succinct and helpful definition of psychological safety. “Team psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that it’s okay to take risks, to express their ideas and concerns, to speak up with questions, and to admit mistakes — all without fear of negative consequences. Edmondson says, “it’s a felt permission for candor.”
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Here’s Why Team Coaching Can Enhance Psychological Safety
Understanding why psychological safety is important helps organisations foster open communication, innovation, and stronger team dynamics. How can you build psychological safety in your team? The presence of a sense of ‘enough’ psychological safety in teams has many benefits for both the team members and the business, highlighting the importance of psychological safety in the workplace. The word ‘enough’ in the above sentence is intentionally placed because 100% safety is impossible. Psychological safety is not static in the sense that it is either there or not. It is dynamic and influenced by various factors.
What are the Strategies and Benefits for Leaders to Build Psychologically Safety in a Team?
(1) A higher degree of employee engagement lowers turnover and improves performance
(2) More creative and collaborative thinking together
(3) Engaged problem solving, which brings more sustainable solutions quicker
(4) A sense of ‘We’ that supports self-organising
(5) Increased ownership towards change that needs to happen and solutions generated through the team
(6) It is OK to say, ‘I do not know!’ and learn from that
How to Maintain Psychological Safety Through a Relationship-Centred Systems Approach?
Leaders and coaches who work with teams enhance their effectiveness through tools and skills that support them in intentionally and skilfully creating the conditions for psychological safety to thrive.
Relationship Systems Intelligence (RSI™), which leaders and coaches develop through the Organisation and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC™) training, offers various practical and effective principles, tools and skills that enhance and sustainably strengthen psychological safety. It offers critical strategies for leaders to build psychological safety.
Here, We Want to Explore One of the Five Principles of RSI: “Every member of the Relationship System (team or partnership) is a voice of the System.”
Intact teams that share a common objective or identity make up a Relationship System. The context under which they come together makes them a system, and the interdependent, interpersonal connections in the system make it a relationship system. RSI focuses on the quality of that interdependent, interpersonal web of connections. It invites leaders and coaches to consciously, intentionally, and skilfully influence this space, enabling the system’s ability and capacity to achieve its desired outcome.
Relationship Systems Intelligence focuses on the system and, to a lesser degree, on the individuals in the system. It invites everyone to be primarily intentional about working with a systems lens while simultaneously honouring and leveraging the diversity of the system’s individuals.
In RSI, the individual’s experience, opinion, and contribution are true at a personal level and represent something true at the system level. This powerful shift in perspective of interpreting the individual’s voice at a systems level is important and radical in its impact.
As a leader or team member, I focus on the system as a whole. I appreciate my voice as a voice of the system, which means that my contributions serve the system. From a systems lens, I appreciate that the more information the system has available regarding any relevant topic, the more generative, intelligent, and creative its approaches to peaking and sustaining performance will be. With this shift, I am no longer focused on how my contributions compare to or compete with those of others in the team but on how we serve the system in achieving its desired outcome.
The psychological safety created through this subtle but powerful shift in focus invites me to speak up, bring in new and even unusual ideas, and build on others’ thinking, not in a competitive way but as part of an innovative, interconnected flow of thinking and feeling at a systems level. The ORSC approach to building psychological safety in your team is radical, practical, and simple. How can you develop Relationship Systems Intelligence and strengthen psychological safety?
ORSC Training with CRR Afrika
CRR Afrika provides a comprehensive ORSC training curriculum designed for leaders and coaches across the African continent. While our programs are primarily delivered online for accessibility and flexibility, we also provide in-person training for intact teams when deeper, hands-on engagement is needed.
The five modules that comprise the full ORSC Training curriculum provide leaders and coaches with over 30 powerful tools and 20+ key skills to establish Relationship Systems Intelligence and enhance psychological safety wherever people come together to achieve something.
How to Stay Connected?
Register today or explore our 2025 schedule to join one of our introductory modules. If you'd like to learn more about how ORSC and RSI can help you as a leader or coach, contact our team. We are always happy to connect.
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