How to Support Students to Cultivate Psychological Safety in their Teams

The importance of psychological safety in teams has been demonstrated in different settings. Team performance improves when team climate allows team members to be their authentic selves, to ask questions and raise concerns comfortably. However, it is less clear how educators can support students to cultivate skills for developing psychological safety in their teams. Informed by the literature, this activity will help students to enhance their communication skills, more specifically skills for inquiry (asking questions) and listening, as the underlying foundation to create a psychologically safe team climate. Students will be introduced to conceptual foundations of conversational skills and will be given experiential opportunities to apply them in several exercises. This chapter provides the outline of an activity designed to teach the learning outcomes listed below, material to assist facilitators in preparing, and the slides and handouts for teaching the activity.