Question 1

What is psychological safety, and does it matter?

Accepted Answer

The shared belief that you can **speak up, admit a mistake or ask a question without being humiliated or punished** — and it is one of the better-evidenced findings in organisational research, though it is also one of the most widely misunderstood.

**What the research found.** Amy Edmondson's work originated in a study of hospital teams, where — counter-intuitively — the **better** teams appeared to make **more** errors. The explanation was that they were **reporting** more, because it was safe to do so. Google's internal research into team effectiveness subsequently identified psychological safety as the strongest differentiator between high- and low-performing teams, ahead of who was on the team.

**Why it matters practically:** problems surface early, when they are cheap; people admit what they do not know, so gaps get filled; unusual ideas get voiced rather than self-censored; and near-misses are reported, which is the basis of safety improvement in aviation, healthcare and engineering.

**What it is not.** It is **not niceness, comfort, or an absence of criticism**. Edmondson is explicit that psychological safety combined with low standards produces complacency; the valuable combination is **high safety and high standards**. A team where nobody challenges anything is not psychologically safe — it is conflict-avoidant, which is a different failure.

**What creates it**, and almost all of it is leader behaviour:

**Admitting your own mistakes and uncertainty**, publicly and specifically. This does more than any policy.

**Responding well the first time someone raises something inconvenient** — the whole team is watching that moment, and it sets the norm.

**Asking questions rather than issuing conclusions**, which signals that you do not already know.

**Framing work as a learning problem** rather than an execution problem.

**Thanking people for bad news**, visibly.

**What destroys it instantly:** blaming individuals for systemic failures; reacting badly to a question; punishing the messenger; and public criticism.

**How to tell whether you have it:** how long it takes for someone to tell you something has gone wrong.

Question 2

What is a performance calibration meeting?

Accepted Answer

A meeting in which managers compare and adjust their proposed ratings for their teams before those ratings are finalised — and it explains a great deal about why a review outcome can differ from what

Question 3

What is a competency framework?

Accepted Answer

A structured description of the behaviours, skills and knowledge an organisation expects at each level — used for recruitment, promotion, development and performance management, so that the same

Question 4

How do you give difficult feedback?

Accepted Answer

Promptly, privately, and about observable behaviour and its effect — because the two things that make feedback fail are delay and vagueness, and both come from the giver's discomfort rather than from

Question 5

How do you manage upwards?

Accepted Answer

By making your manager's job easier and by taking responsibility for the information flow between you — which is not politics or flattery, but recognition that they cannot read your mind and are

Question 6

What is a competency interview, and what is the STAR method?

Accepted Answer

A competency — or behavioural — interview asks about things you have actually done, on the premise that past behaviour predicts future behaviour better than hypothetical answers do. STAR is the

Question 7

What is a 360 review and does it work?

Accepted Answer

A 360-degree review collects feedback on someone from multiple perspectives — manager, peers, direct reports and sometimes clients — rather than from a line manager alone. The name describes the full

Related Questions