The Elephant Returns: When Psychological Safety Prevents Learning
- Client Talk
- 5 hours ago
- 7 min read
We have written about the Client Listening Elephant before. We showed how it is often psychological safety that gets in the way of partners truly buying into client listening. However, the partner’s office isn’t the only room that the elephant sits in. In this article, we will show you that a lack of psychological safety is one of the biggest factors which can get in the way of learning. The elephant, it turns out, is just as powerful when sitting in the classroom.
What you would hope to see in place for learning
When you teach soft skills or try to affect behaviour change, certain conditions need to be in place (Michie et al, 2011). On the one hand, there are conditions which need to exist within the individual participant. They need to have the psychological and physical capacity to engage in the activity concerned. Then there is motivation; participants need to be energised to make the change. Finally, there is the environment. This is often overlooked, but the work environment needs to provide the conditions for learning to take place.
This is where things get interesting. Firms spend eye-watering sums on learning, but often learning doesn’t stick. For the behavioural change needed for soft skills to stick (and within this, we include the skill of listening) there are two elements which are critical, but which are all too often missing. The first of these is time, and the second of these is ‘the elephant’ that is psychological safety
Time and learning
Soft skills don’t come easily. They require practice, reflection, and in order to do those things, time. You are in effect building a new muscle, a new habit. One-and-done training rarely works, which is why we rarely recommend a full day of learning. It sends a message to participants that all that is needed is attendance over the course of that day. Why? Well, they are busy people, and they have committed to a day; surely that is enough!
If you have 7 hours, we suggest that it is much better to provide a half-day training, followed by 3 and a half hours of reflective learning, spread over a period of time. Time that is protected so it is seen as of equal value to the in-person event itself. In other words, part of the main event, not an afterthought.
In the famous words of Maya Angelou, “Nothing will work unless you do”. This is one of the main reasons why training fails to stick. Participants are not engaging in the learning that happens outside of the classroom. There just isn’t the time.
There are ways to protect this reflective time. Part of it comes from communication around how important this part of the journey is. Part of it comes from protecting boundaries and putting in place checks, such as accountability partners. All of this can help participants see that they are on a journey, one which they will only benefit from if they put the time in.
Many firms just don’t provide the right conditions for learning. People are running on adrenaline, reacting rather than reflecting, and they barely have time to have lunch, let alone pause to reflect on whether tweaks to their behaviour have made a difference to how they show up. Learning requires slowing down before speeding up. That can be a scary concept for high-pressure, high-delivery organisations.
Psychological Safety: the elephant in the classroom
Psychological safety is defined as a shared belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk‑taking, meaning people feel able to ask questions, admit mistakes, challenge ideas, and try new behaviours without fear of ridicule or repercussions. This risk‑taking is foundational for learning new skills, especially soft‑skills and behaviour change.
The trouble with psychological safety is that the people who are responsible for bringing in a training provider are rarely the ones who have a handle on whether or not psychological safety exists. They might themselves feel safe. Much like we are unaware of our own biases, we are unaware of how others are feeling. Where we have been in an environment for a long time, we cannot see how our environment compares to others. We have no sense of whether we exist in a place of safety or not.
There is another complication here, too. The nature of a matrix structure is such that, even if it is true that in their immediate team an individual feels safe, it might not be universally true. Let’s take the example of a typical large law firm. The marketing and business development (‘MBD’) team will be large too, and within it, there will be sub-teams with an array of managers. MBD team members will report to those managers. However, many MBD people will also be working directly with a practice or sector group, or perhaps a specific client team. For these members, psychological safety is likely less dependent on their MBD manager and much more linked to the partners they are working with. This can vary widely. Even if there are pockets of the firm that are safe, there will likely be pockets that aren’t. We have seen this vary widely, even across one practice group, given how partner-dependent it is.
Continuing with the example of the legal sector, you only have to Google ‘psychological safety and legal sector’ to bring up a multitude of articles showing how this particular condition is often lacking in firms. In many marketing and business development teams, those who have succeeded have done so because they have heeded the unspoken narrative: “Be tough. Don’t take it personally. You are getting paid a lot to be here, not for me to be nice to you”.
We see this play out in coaching time and time again. Not just from marketing and business development professionals, but from lawyers and other advisors too. People are ‘running on survival mode’ when they are inside, and when they finally break and come out the other side, their confidence is at rock bottom, they question their own judgement, and many contemplate a step backwards to rebuild.
This is a big problem for professional services, but the problem is not just with mental health. It also means that learning just won’t happen. It isn’t safe to try, and it certainly isn’t safe to fail.
What do you see when there isn’t psychological safety?
If you are curious, here are a few examples of why you might want to measure the psychological safety of your learning cohort, by showing what might happen if you don’t, and you embark on a learning journey where this is an issue.
1. Grabbing for certainty rather than engaging with discomfort. This is a big one. Learning happens when we move outside of our comfort zones. That means discomfort. Where the cohort doesn’t feel safe, they will look for answers and examples, rather than spending time to build the foundations needed for behaviour change. They will seek certainty (a reflection of where their nervous system is at) rather than discomfort. It is a key indicator of low safety.
2. Withdrawing and disengagement. Where a cohort does not feel safe, they will fail to truly ‘lean in’. They might withhold their contributions to discussions or avoid making the mistakes needed to learn. If boundaries are not set around reflective learning, they will simply choose not to engage at all, but this can spill into the classroom, too. Signs here are only hearing from a few dominant voices, or having people ‘leaning out’ in the classroom.
3. ‘Performing’ instead of learning. In environments where psychological safety is low, learners optimise looking competent and so look for scripts or best practice examples. Trial and error, indeed experimentation, the very things needed to learn soft skills, are dismissed. Psychological safety is the ability to fail; its absence means that failure is not an option.
4. Fear of being vulnerable. Participants will hold back sharing honest perspectives where doing so leads to vulnerability. They might overplay what they know at the start of the journey, or not fully articulate what they need. If the environment is not used to seeing and feeling vulnerable, the cohort might push back against a facilitator who invites it.
5. Blaming the environment. There are, of course, examples where the environment does have real barriers; we have already discussed the main one, time. However, where there is a lack of safety, participants will often look to apportion blame to something external: time pressure, the facilitator, or competing demands. This is an example of the self-serving bias, where failure is blamed on external factors. In an unsafe environment, this gives learners another reason to ‘lean out’.
Environmental recommendations for learning soft skills
If you want to make sure that soft skills stick, being aware of the conditions needed for that to happen is not a ‘nice-to-have’, it is key. With regards to psychological safety:
High Psychological Safety | Low Psychological Safety |
✔ People explore ✔ People reflect ✔ People speak up ✔ People take risks ✔ People practise new skills ✔ Learning embedded
| ✘ People withdraw ✘ People avoid stretch ✘ People stick to what’s safe ✘ Learning is superficial ✘ Behaviour change doesn’t stick
|
Below are three recommendations to bring some of this article to life.
1. Know your reality – Don’t assume that you are operating in a psychologically safe environment. If you are embarking on a high-stakes, high-value learning journey, take the time to measure how safe the cohort feels first. If they don’t feel safe, then question whether the conditions are right for the journey you intend to take them on. If they aren’t, you might need to scale back expectations or start with building safety rather than skills.
2. Set and model boundaries – What are the expectations for the cohort, and how will the time that is needed to build the skill be protected? There are different ways this can be achieved. We encourage learners to have accountability buddies, who provide a check-in at key points. You can also schedule time for further learning, much as you would for the in-person sessions. Make it easy for the cohort to succeed.
3. Ensure all voices are heard – Low psychological safety often shows up as silence, or dominance by a few. Use techniques which enable everyone’s voice to be heard in the room. This builds belonging and reduces fear of judgment.
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