practice · all tools
Psychological Safety Micro-Behaviours
An individual practice run inside real teamwork: deliberately doing the small things research links to team psychological safety — asking genuine questions, speaking up about your own mistakes first, inviting quiet colleagues into conversations and decisions, asking for others' opinions, showing interest and respect across personality differences, trying new behaviour visibly. Safety is a group property, but it is built one modelled behaviour at a time.
- Leaders going first matters most and costs most — a leader admitting a mistake builds safety; pressuring others to disclose destroys it
Practical
- Time
- 0-5 min
- Group
- 1–1 · individual
- Settings
- self-guided
- Materials
- None — the team's ordinary meetings are the practice field
- Mechanisms
- life-embedding, behavioral-rehearsal
- Change scope
- skill · recurring-practice (every meeting, small doses)
Origin & where it lives
Codified in the Phase 2 Toolkit (Kristofer Vernmark); research base Amy Edmondson — Psychological safety research (Edmondson; Google's Project Aristotle)
Instructions: open online
In this directory via IDG Phase 2 Research Report & Toolkit (2022)
Related: fearless organization scan (pairs-with)
2021 mapping "Communication skills + Trust" crosswalks Trust to Relationship-Building Skills (C1). Pairs naturally with a team-level measurement (see fearless-organization-scan) and with Jordan's ongoing team scaffolds, which are structural versions of the same behaviours.
status: checked · added 2026-08-25