Understanding The Basics of Psychological Safety: A Session with Gana Diagne 

What does it take to create a culture where people feel safe to speak up, take risks, and fully engage in their work?  

This was the focus of Day 4 of the Center for Organizational Effectiveness’ four-day virtual summit, Thriving in Uncertainty: Leadership and Wellbeing in Turbulent Times, during Gana Diagne’s session, “Practical Strategies to Foster a Culture of Safety and Openness.” 

As Chief Knowledge Officer at Workplace Options, Diagne brought deep insight and practical wisdom to one of the most pressing topics in the workplace today: psychological safety. Over the course of the session, he unpacked what psychological safety really means, why it’s essential in today’s workplaces, and how leaders can actively nurture it within their teams. 

Drawing on real-world case studies, Diagne showed what can happen when organizations neglect psychological safety—and what becomes possible when they prioritize it. Backed by worldwide expertise, he encouraged leaders to take a closer look at their environments and ask themselves: 

• How do my actions—what I say and do—promote or erode psychological safety? 

• Are my managers making it safe to challenge, question, and learn? 

• Do our systems enable people to innovate and grow? 

Read an excerpt from the session below: 

Gana: So how is psychological safety defined? 

Psychological safety means that an employee is not penalized or humiliated for expressing ideas, questions, or concerns. This is the foundation of psychological safety. That’s why openness is so important—encouraging openness, encouraging communication, encouraging the expression of ideas. It’s also about trust—the trust between colleagues. As soon as trust is lost, psychological safety is, too.  

Psychological safety is also about respecting each other. Respect, in this case, means being able to have a debate with opposing views without fear of ridicule or disparaging remarks that hold people back.  

It’s also about learning—because making mistakes is an opportunity to learn. There are very few processes in the world that have succeeded on the first try. In general, we move forward through the world through trial and error. And so, psychological safety is the very concept that makes the process of trial, error, and improvement optimal.  

In the world in which we live today—where everything is moving, speeding up, constantly changing—it’s important to be able to grasp these changes and respond effectively. Roughly 80 percent of the economy in developed countries is service-based, so it’s important to renew ideas and to renew approaches. Psychological safety is what allows people to share their thoughts, and to allow that innovation to take place. 

That’s basically the concept of psychological safety. 

So how does psychological safety improve engagement? 

What we’ve discovered in our research here at WPO, is that in companies where employees are respected—in companies where employees can express themselves, where they’re allowed to make mistakes—productivity is higher.  

Why? 

In short, because employees are more motivated.  

When employees aren’t seen as just pawns on a chess board—when they’re regarded as stakeholders, encouraged to make suggestions, and as a result, take ownership of their ideas—employees become more motivated to perform because they feel included, believe they are valued, and feel a stronger sense of purpose and connection to their work.  

What also helps [verb] this increased productivity is enhanced problem-solving. When we establish a culture of psychological safety, resolving issues becomes much simpler because we can more easily talk to one another. We can communicate. We can have different points of view and discuss them respectfully and nonjudgmentally.  

How do you promote psychological safety? 

To start, it’s about encouraging tam participation. As a leader, you need to think about how you encourage team participation. Avoid the top-down approach. Make sure that there is a process within your organization that allows for the sharing of ideas, that encourages a culture of curiosity and experimentation, and that enables dialogue. 

There are different ways to do this. For example, management might meet every month or every quarter and allow employees to come and present their ideas. That doesn’t mean every idea will come to fruition—but it still creates the opportunity to be heard, and more importantly, the opportunity for leaders to broaden their perspective. To see things from a different point of view. 

For example, WPO has developed products that have come directly from employees. These were for untapped demand we hadn’t noticed ourselves, but that the employees who are in daily contact with the people we support clearly saw the need for. They came forward with the idea, and what began as a simple insight evolved into a service that filled a real need and became a success. 

So again, this service didn’t come from the product management or marketing department. It came from an employee who was on the phone and had no management position, but who saw an opportunity to support the people he was helping every day and thought this is something we should offer systematically.  

So as a leader, how do you encourage that expression of ideas? How do you ensure that ideas can be shared and circulated at every level of the company? 

This is extremely important in a company that promotes psychological safety. 

How do you do this?  

It starts with a change in mindset. This means moving away from a preoccupation with giving orders or controlling outcomes. Instead, it requires normalizing the reality that mistakes happen. That doesn’t mean celebrating mistakes as inherently “good,” but recognizing them as a natural and necessary part of the learning—and improvement—process. 

Mistakes offer valuable opportunities to improve a product, a process, or even the organization as a whole. The goal isn’t to dramatize errors or to encourage them, but to create a space where they can happen—and where people are enabled to learn from them. 

“Once a mistake is made, how can we learn from it? How can we make sure not to repeat that mistake? Can we change the process that led to that mistake, or study the system that led to that mistake?” 

These are the questions that need to be acceptable to ask—and that openness starts at the top. 

How does management speak to its employees? How does management receive an idea from its employees? How does management handle it when someone in their team makes a mistake?  

These are critical considerations, because leaders set the tone for the entire organization. As a leader, it is important to set an example, to encourage the expression of ideas, to encourage people to make mistakes, to encourage people who have made mistakes to improve on those mistakes or to improve on the conditions that led to those mistakes so that they do not happen again, and to support learning and growth—both for the individual and the systems they operate in.  

So what happens when organizations fail to foster psychological safety? 

I’ve selected three concrete examples that have recently been in the news of how not fostering psychological safety for employees can lead an organization to destroy value and perhaps even put itself at risk of collapse… 

Curious to see how low psychological safety plays out in practice? 

Click here to view the full library of session recordings from #2025COEWeek for more insights from the session.