Coaching & Psychological Safety

According to Inc's Great Leaders Do These 3 Things to Foster Psychological Safety (Burke, 2021), "At its core, psychological safety is about trust. Employees are more likely to share creative ideas and take risks when they trust it won't jeopardize their performance or reputation. It's one thing to tell our teams to "fail fast, fail often", but how leaders actually react to mistakes is what matters. That's why it's not a coincidence that psychological safety and high performance are correlated; teams with a foundation of trust are more empowered to be autonomous and challenge the status quo than those without one." Google has found psychological safety to be one of the top drivers of effective teams. 

Psychological safety is also important when discussing the relationship between coaches and the teachers they work with. While we want to believe that we are perceived as a professional support system that has no bearing on someone's performance review and we would never discuss someone's challenges in the classroom outside of the privacy of their meetings, the bigger question is are we perceived that way as coaches? How do we react to failure in the classroom or when teachers try new, innovative things? What happens when we witness a teacher fail and someone else doesn't react well to that failure? 

An important way to create psychological safety is by understanding that taking a risk isn't a one-time event but instead there is a cycle to the process. When someone feels psychologically safe throughout the entire cycle, they are more likely to try again and learn from their experience. View the "Leadership Support for the Risk-Taking Cycle" graphic below and then reflect on these questions:

• What stages of the cycle do you see when you are coaching a teacher?

• What stage of the cycle do you think is the most difficult to get through as a risk-taker?

• Is there one stage that is more important than the others for the coach to support the risk-taker? If so, which one and why?