The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (62)

Psychological Safety

It's hard for us to do our work properly when we're frightened.

It's hard for us to do our jobs well when we are anxious and concerned that something bad is going to happen at any minute.

The concept of the provision of psychological safety for your team (and especially for your family) is one that is often overlooked and underrated.

In the past, we never paid any attention to psychological safety because we were really concerned with our physical safety and our physical well-being.

But as we manage to get to a situation (at least for many of us) where the day-to-day risk of physical damage disappears, so emerges the problem associated with the lack of psychological safety that we now feel.

This results, in part, from the avalanche of information that we receive on a daily basis.

Even today, I was travelling to work and I had the radio on in the car and news came on the radio about a possible new test for early Alzheimer's disease and whether adults over 50 should get it so that they could start to be medicated for the risk of Alzheimer's.

That makes me anxious.

Because first of all, I'll have to consider whether I should have the test and then secondly, I'll have to be concerned about the results of the test and then if the results of the test tell me that I'm at risk or have early Alzheimer's, then I will have to deal with the fact that I understand that.

This type of scenario is now enacted out for all of us, time and time again, day after day after day, because news created like this grabs attention and attention pays the bills.

Understanding that almost everyone you meet is struggling more with their psychological safety than they ever were before is probably a good place to start, to be kind and try to make things better.