Greetings Bloggies. I hope all is well for y’all. The summer is coming to an end, so we only have 2 blogs remaining after this one! As a preface, this week’s blog will be relatively short compared to previous weeks. I’ve been rebuilding and conserving my energy after all of my adventures these last 3 months. That’s my socially acceptable way of saying I didn’t really do a whole lot this week. LOL. Anyways, my song for this week is one of my favorites! I haven’t particularly listened to any music a whole lot this week, but that’s just because I lost my airpod case AND my wired earbuds broke. 🙁 So I’ve been persevering with minimal audio-stimulation the last couple of weeks, which has been HARD. However, I’m choosing to receive this happenstance as an impromptu gift from the universe as a form of stimulation detox! Perseverance and optimism!! (I’m extremely distraught about my lack of music intake.) Anyways here’s my song:
Since I didn’t really have a day off this week to do any interesting activities, I’ll just teach you about one of my favorite concepts. This is something I go over and apply to my Wellesley experience in every single tour I give, so some of my coworkers have grown quite accustomed to hearing my usual elevator pitch. I will now introduce you to the concept of:
“Psychological Safety!”
Psychological safety happens in group settings of all kinds. It’s a shared expectation between the group that everyone will feel comfortable sharing concerns, new ideas, questions, or mistakes without fear of punishment, social ostracization, or humiliation from the group. This idea of feeling safe to take interpersonal “risks” is integral to the advancement of the individual and the group. Hence why this is a widely attempted practice, typically performed in the workplace. Fostering psychological safety in a professional setting encourages innovation, prevents long term mistakes, boosts team morale and confidence, and emphasizes overall transparency between a team or group. Seems like a pretty sweet deal right? Why isn’t everyone doing this psychological safety thing everywhere?
Well while this concept is simple on paper, it can be extremely tricky in practice. Let’s take a psychological perspective on this: to make an environment psychologically safe, we are literally attempting to influence an individual’s future behaviors by making a promise, as a team, to all verbally and internally agree to one set of moral codes. And this commitment is set with the goal of influencing the future behaviors of everybody on the team, including yourself! And companies tend to be made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of team members, which significantly increases the chance of at least one person tainting the integrity of the polyphonic nature of psychological safety.
The overall goal of PS is to have employees bringing their fullest, most authentic selves to take calculated risks for the betterment of themselves and their team members in the workplace. But if we add a sociological perspective to this discussion, we’ll be able to really see why actually implementing such a practice is so challenging.
Put simply, society, and the individuals that make it up have a lot of unlearning to do. Psychological danger oftentimes isn’t executed purely based on one’s own lack of morals or dislike for another person. Many times the tainting of a psychologically safe environment is woven with the thread of systemic racism and harmful assumptions of many marginalized identities. As modern-day companies attempt to “diversify” their workplaces while simultaneously promoting psychological safety, they find themselves running into social roadblocks.
I’m sure “John” has ample socialization to know when to apologize when he’s wrong, listen to his peers when it’s their turn to speak, or communicate his concerns directly without sugarcoating his words. But is John, a white man, going to subconsciously act in the same way when his coworker is no longer another white man, but a woman of color? What if she’s also an immigrant? With an accent? Will John, who was socialized in 21st century America feel inclined to encourage his new coworker, whom he shares minimal identities with, to take interpersonal risks, to speak first in the meeting room, to disagree openly and objectively, to share a brand new idea? What do we think?
Chew on that,
Avery the Admissions Intern