DOMAIN 4: SECONDARY TRAUMATIC STRESS–INFORMED LEADERSHIP

Item 8

To what extent do staff feel safe expressing their concerns with leadership without fear of retribution?

Strategies for Leaders:

  • Create organizational psychological safety in the workplace that allows staff to feel comfortable talking about their concerns, the impacts of the work, and expressing their opinions without fear of judgment.
    • Encourage staff to provide feedback and that a diversity of viewpoints is welcome. Strategies for enhancing psychological safety among staff:
      • Ensure physical safety.
      • Be aware of potential threats to psychological safety for staff.
      • Pay attention to group dynamics and safety in staff meetings.
      • Provide consistency and predictability.
    • Attend to staff: Be present, minimize distractions.
    • Be accepting of staff, take a non-judgmental approach.
    • Encourage and model reflective listening/reflective practice.
    • Promote power-sharing and shared decision-making.
    • Frame the work as a learning process.
    • Acknowledge your own fallibility.
    • Model curiosity.

Implementation Resources:

Podcast and Videos

  • “Building a Psychologically Safe Workplace” (12 minutes), a TED Talk by Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson in which she discusses what it means for an organization to provide psychological safety to staff, enabling them to speak up to express concerns, bring forward new ideas, and to be innovative. Alternatively, organizations that don’t provide this type of safety risk staff turnover, poor service delivery, and stagnant growth and innovation.

Publications

“Trauma-Informed Leadership,” by Dayna Lee-Baggley, Ph.D. outlines ways that leaders can be trauma-informed enabling them to create psychological safety within their organizations

Websites/Apps/Posts

  • “Psychological Safety,” Amy C. Edmondson’s website on psychological safety that contains articles and podcasts on defining and learning to create psychological safety in the workplace.
    • On Edmondson’s website, see the “Recommended Resources & Inspiration” page that lists podcasts, newsletters, and blog posts to gain a further understanding of psychological safety.

Select Action Plan to begin to organize and implement next steps.

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