At first glance, healthcare teams that work well together seem to have higher rates of error.

But when we dig just a bit deeper, we can see more accurately. 

In fact, teams in which there is a high degree of psychological safety are more willing to acknowledge error, paving the way for a continuous learning process that improves performance and reduces mistakes.

Psychological safety is a perception that it is okay to express yourself, acknowledge mistakes, ask questions, and voice concerns without worrying about suffering negative consequences. It doesn’t mean that everyone will agree with you, but that it is safe to have disagreements and to be wrong. 

Along those lines, psychological safety is not feeling comfortable all the time. It is painful to acknowledge error and that pain is not necessarily indicative of a toxic or unsupportive environment. But in psychologically safe workplaces, the error can be acknowledged without inviting a pile-on of criticism and denigration.

While psychological safety is something we feel or perceive individually, it is really a team or group phenomenon. Research suggests that members of a team tend to have similar perceptions of the psychological safety of their team.

Harvard Business School professor and psychological safety pioneer Amy Edmondson has a 7-item questionnaire for use by leaders wishing to assess their team’s perception of psychological safety. If you are on a team but not leading a team, there is also a questionnaire for personal use (https://amycedmondson.com/resources/). The questions prompt you to consider whether making a mistake is held against you and whether you are able to ask other members of the team for help. Are there people on the team who would undermine you on purpose? Can you take risks? Are your unique talents valued?

Even if you find yourself in the unfortunate position of being in a psychologically unsafe environment, there are things you can do to help manage the distress associated with error.

There is nothing about self-compassion that is detrimental to performance. So if you’ve made a mistake, try giving yourself grace.

You can work on acknowledging and accepting that people are not perfect and that life isn’t perfect either. Everybody fails. Everybody suffers. When we keep these facts in mind, our own failures, missteps, and suffering don’t make us feel isolated the way we might when we lose sight of these realities. This recognition of our common humanity is one of the three main components of self-compassion.

In addition, it can be helpful to attend to your self-talk. Self-talk is the messages we give ourselves throughout our daily lives, our internal monologue. The first step in changing self-talk is noticing it. Once you’ve identified unhelpful self-talk, you can take steps to substitute more helpful statements (e.g., “I’m such an idiot” becomes “I’m still learning this”).

And consider this. When facing error, we tend to believe that if we had acted differently, the outcome would have been better. Rarely do we consider that acting differently might have led to something even worse. If we examine this, we can see the fallacy. We only know what happened. We don’t know, and will never know, what might have happened under other circumstances. This doesn’t mean that a mistake did not occur. This is a way of addressing any catastrophizing thoughts we have in relation to the mistake.

Finally, think about times when people close to you have made mistakes. How have you responded to them? Think about what you said, what you did, and the tone of voice you used in your interactions. 

Next, think about your response to yourself. Think again about what you say, what you do, and the tone you use in speaking to yourself. It can be very helpful to write this down instead of just thinking about it so I encourage you to do that if possible.

And remember that offering yourself this sort of compassion will not make mistakes more likely to occur; it will actually serve to decrease their occurrence.