What happens when people on your team have ideas, questions or concerns - but don’t feel safe saying them?
Learn how to build a workplace where people speak up with:
Respect.
Curiosity.
Voice.
Psychological safety isn’t about being nice or lowering expectations. Building Psychological Safety at Work explores how everyday leadership behaviours, assumptions, tone and reactions can strengthen or quietly damage the sense that it’s safe to contribute. It gives you practical ways to create space for questions, feedback and healthy challenge, while still holding clear performance expectations.
What You'll Explore
- What psychological safety is - and what it is not.
- How your reactions, tone, assumptions and communication patterns affect how safe people feel.
- The behaviours that encourage participation and idea-sharing, and the ones that shut them down.
- How unconscious bias, micro-behaviours and the gap between intent and impact affect trust.
- How to build trust, curiosity and respectful dialogue during difficult or uncomfortable conversations.
- How to support psychological safety in hybrid, remote and high-pressure environments.
- How to create space for learning, disagreement and healthy challenge, and recognize the signs that safety is breaking down.
What You'll Gain
- You’ll leave with greater awareness of how your behaviours affect the people around you, practical strategies to encourage feedback and respectful challenge, and ways to spot and respond to the early signs that people are holding back.
- The goal isn’t to avoid tension or difficult conversations. It’s to build a team where people feel safe to ask, challenge and contribute, so ideas and problems surface early.
Define Psychological Safety → Notice Your Impact → Recognize What Shuts People Down → Create Space for Voice → Sustain a Safe Culture.
The learning journey moves from understanding what psychological safety is and isn’t, to noticing how your own reactions and communication affect others, recognizing the behaviours and biases that shut people down, creating space for feedback and healthy challenge, and ultimately sustaining a culture where people feel safe to contribute, wherever and however they work
The MCE Learning Experience
This is a highly interactive, reflection-based course. You’ll move between reflection activities, self-assessments, workplace scenarios, group discussions and practical leadership exercises, and practice responding with curiosity and empathy in situations where people might otherwise hold back.
Your workbook is an important part of the experience. It brings together the key concepts, models, tools, and reflection activities from the course, giving you a place to capture your own insights and examples. Use it throughout training and reflect on it afterwards to apply the tools in your day-to-day leadership.
ELECTIVE courses are responsive by design and developed to stay current with industry trends and client needs. Add them to any pathway, whether DEVELOP, BUILD or BLENDED, or take them on their own.
Ready to Build a Team Where People Speak Up?
Building Psychological Safety at Work is an ELECTIVE. Add it to any pathway as an EXTENDED option: in DEVELOP it builds awareness of your own impact on others, in BUILD it helps you create a team culture where people contribute openly, and it fits just as well in a BLENDED cohort. It also stands on its own. Cohorts are available for this course. Or ask us how it fits into a pathway.
Cohorts are available for this course. Or ask us how it fits into a pathway.
Pairs well with Leading with Emotional Intelligence in the BUILD pathway.