Psychological Safety Training For Managers

Psychological safety training for managers carries more weight than any other audience, because a team calibrates against its manager rather than against the policy.

The moment that sets the ceiling is the first time someone brings the manager an inconvenient truth. If the response is defensiveness, a search for who is at fault, or a visible cost to the person who raised it, everyone watching updates their behaviour accordingly. If the response is curiosity and thanks, the same thing happens in the other direction.

So manager training should be concrete. How to receive bad news, including what to say in the first ten seconds. How to ask questions that do not signal the answer you want. How to hold back your own view until others have spoken. How to run a mistake review that looks at the system rather than the person. And how to handle the case where the concern is about the manager.

Safe Work Australia sets out the psychosocial risk duty that sits alongside this. This is general information rather than legal advice.

See Sentrient’s psychological safety course for managers and psychological safety training course.