According to Amy C. Edmondson, the professor at Harvard Business School who coined the phrase, psychological safety (paywall) is “a shared belief by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”

Psychologically safe teams can take moderate risks, voice their opinions, be creative and experiment without the fear of judgement or being labeled a failure. In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected and can be themselves without fear of negative consequences for their career, self-image or status.

Google conducted research into psychological safety and its role in high-performance teams starting in 2012. It spent two years carrying out research, dubbed Project Aristotle, across 180 of its teams to find out what made its most effective teams better than the rest.

Initially, the researchers thought the most effective teams were built on the perfect blend of complementary hard skills. However, the study revealed that who is in a team is less important than how the team members interact and make contributions. The researchers identified five key dynamics in the most effective teams, with psychological safety—whether the team could take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed—at the top of the list.

Studies show that psychological safety has a positive impact on employee engagement and retention. With many organizations currently struggling with high turnover rates, that’s a valuable benefit in its own right.

As a leader, there are a few questions you can ask to help you gauge how psychologically safe your teams are and where you can make improvements.

How do you react when a member of your team makes a mistake? Do you accept it and use it as an opportunity to learn, or do you hold it against team members and even punish them?

If employees are open about the mistakes they make, rather than avoiding them or trying to cover them up, it suggests they feel some degree of psychological safety.

Leaders who don’t encourage suggestions from their employees soon find they’re surrounded by people with nothing to say. Employees should be given the space to experiment, share ideas, voice their concerns and always ask why.

Encouraging employees to take these types of risks can boost levels of participation, ownership and engagement.

The best-performing teams have no strict power structure when it comes to ideas and initiatives. Regardless of their role or seniority, all employees should have an equally valid opinion. It also helps if those opinions come from a place of diversity, with different backgrounds, genders, ages and experiences across the team.

You can’t build a safe, inclusive and trusting culture overnight, but you can start to make improvements. And given the proven benefits of a psychologically safe environment, it’s well worth the effort. These are the steps you can take:

You can’t learn if you don’t try new things. By prioritizing learning—not executing—and supporting the exploration of new ideas, you can promote an innovative mentality that makes it easier to share and discuss ideas.

There’s no point encouraging experimentation if you criticize people as soon as they make a mistake. Mistakes are inevitable; it’s your job to make sure your employees know it’s okay.

Rather than rushing to find a solution, take the time to explore why the mistake was made as a team. That will help you evolve and prevent you from making the same mistakes again.

As a leader, you must demonstrate the behavior you want from your team. By being curious, asking questions and making it clear you don’t know everything, you can show that the workplace is a safe environment where employees can be vulnerable and learn.

Creating knowledge silos and not sharing mistakes with your teams prevents them from understanding and learning from each other. Making knowledge easily accessible across the company can help your teams learn, innovate and grow within a psychologically safe space.

In my experience, regardless of the seniority of the team, these simple steps done well can have a significant and lasting impact on a team's performance. A team that boosts psychological safety can be both more productive and conducive to the high-performing, positive culture businesses aspire to. Look at these steps as the basic building blocks to success.