Building Psychological Safety

Understanding what safety really means, the specific leader behaviours that build and destroy it, formalising team agreements, and maintaining trust under pressure.

What's inside

This collection starts where psychological safety actually lives — in the daily micro-behaviours of leaders, not in team-building exercises. Each topic includes a micro lesson, blind spots, journal prompts, and a five-day habit builder.

The programme moves through four stages:

Understanding Psychological Safety — What it is and isn't, how to honestly assess your team's level of safety, and why leader behaviour has a disproportionate impact on whether people speak up.

The Behaviours That Build Safety — How you respond to mistakes, whether you model vulnerability, and how you create genuine space for dissent — the three leader behaviours with the most direct impact.

Team Norms and Agreements — Making unwritten rules explicit, creating shared agreements about how to disagree, and clarifying how decisions get made.

Safety Under Pressure — Holding both standards and safety when performance falls short, maintaining trust through change and disruption, and repairing safety after it's been broken.

How to use this collection

As a structured programme, deliver sequentially over eight to ten weeks. The arc builds from understanding to action to sustainability.

For leader coaching, each section works powerfully in one-to-one coaching. Use the Behaviours That Build Safety for leaders who need to shift specific patterns.

For team coaching, several exercises invite the leader to involve their team directly — sharing norms, seeking feedback, and co-creating agreements. These translate naturally into facilitated team sessions.

Available to registered Coaching Workspace members. You'll be asked to sign in if you're not already.