Developing Team Culture Through Psychological Safety

What Psychological Safety Means on an ABA Team

Psychological safety (feeling safe to speak up) is a shared belief. The belief is that the team is safe for interpersonal risk. That risk is small and daily. You ask a question. You admit an error. You float an idea that might flop. Amy Edmondson named the concept. She was a Harvard Business School professor at the time. She brought the term forward in the late 1990s.

Her work points to a clear pattern. Teams with high safety learn from mistakes. They share ideas openly. They try new things. The reason is simple. People speak up without fear of shame or punishment. Fear is the tax on a team. Safety takes it off.

Osos makes the case that ABA is prime ground for this. A BCBA (a board certified behavior analyst) writes the plan. An RBT (a registered behavior technician) runs it for hours each day. Neither one sees the whole picture alone. Safety is the link between those two views. Without it, the link breaks quietly.

psychological safety is a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.

From the talk — Dr. Jessica Osos

The Four Stages, From Exclusion to Challenger Safety

Edmondson defined the term. Timothy R. Clark built a stage model on top of it. The stages run from least safe to most safe. With no safety at all, a person sits in exclusion. From there, the climb starts.

Inclusion safety comes first. People feel accepted and respected. They belong, and they join in. Learner safety comes next. Growth feels safe, and mistakes turn into lessons. Contributor safety follows. People share ideas and take ownership of the work. Motivation and output both rise. Challenger safety sits at the top. People question assumptions, pitch new ideas, and push back without fear.

Build the stages in order. Also treat them as personal, not global. One team does not share one level. A new hire may start near exclusion. After a solid first week, inclusion should land. The rest gets built by how the team handles mistakes along the way.

this is the highest level of psychological safety at this level team members can question assumptions they could propose innovations and really push boundaries without fear

From the talk — Dr. Jessica Osos

What Silence Costs Your Clients

Safety is not a perk. It is the base for team results. When people feel safe, they speak up. They share ideas. They admit errors early. Teams with high safety outperform teams without it. They pull in more points of view. They adapt fast when a case shifts. Job satisfaction rises, burnout drops, and skilled staff stay.

Flip it and fear takes over. People hold back input. They stop asking questions. They hesitate to report errors. Work stalls, and in ABA the client can pay that bill.

Picture a technician who took data the wrong way. They notice it during a team meeting and say nothing. You then read that data set and make a clinical call. The call rests on a number that is wrong. The plan moves in the wrong direction, and nobody in the room knows why.

This openness really fosters collaboration and continuous learning, which are so critical in our ABA settings where client needs are so complex and evolving day to day.

From the talk — Dr. Jessica Osos

The Learning Zone: Safety Plus Accountability

Osos shared a simple grid. One axis is psychological safety. The other is motivation and accountability. Together they make four zones, and most teams sit in one by accident.

Low safety with low drive makes the apathy zone. People feel neither safe nor moved to engage. Output sinks. Burnout and turnover follow. High safety with low drive makes the comfort zone. That one sounds pleasant. It is not. People coast through the same routine and stop questioning things. Growth stalls.

High drive with low safety makes the anxiety zone. Standards are high and fear runs the room. People worry about mistakes. Errors go unreported. Stress climbs and ideas dry up. High drive with high safety makes the learning zone. That is the target. People take risks, ask questions, and learn out loud.

Name your zone first. Then ask which axis is short. A team with high standards and no safety needs a different fix than a warm team with no challenge.

team members may feel safe, but they really lack that motivation or challenge.

From the talk — Dr. Jessica Osos

Five Core Elements You Can Actually Build

Trust and respect come first. People need to feel valued for who they are. Leaders model fairness. Colleagues treat each other with dignity. Open communication is second. Ideas, questions, and concerns need a clear path up. Think about a care team meeting. The technicians in that room log the most hours with the child. Their read on the day is data you cannot get anywhere else.

Constructive feedback is third. Frame it as a route to growth, not a verdict. Watch the wording too. Osos swaps negative feedback for praise and supportive feedback on purpose. Aim every comment at observable behavior. Use operational definitions (clear, observable descriptions of behavior), not personality traits.

Diverse perspectives are fourth. Seek input by design, not by luck. Osos's organization runs monthly clinical collaboration meetings. One BCBA brings a case with a reassessment coming up. They share background, what the child mastered over six months, and the plan for the next six. Peers give feedback right there. The same format works at the technician level with care team meetings.

Learning from mistakes is fifth. Normalize error as part of the job. Osos tells every new technician that the first weeks will be sloppy and stressful. Nobody is watching for perfection. That one line does a lot of work in week one.

I really like to avoid negative or like bad feedback because I don't like the connotation that's surrounding it.

From the talk — Dr. Jessica Osos

Four Barriers That Quietly Shut Teams Down

Fear of judgment or punishment is the first barrier. It was also the top answer when the room was polled live. People hold back when they expect blame. Creativity and engagement go with it.

Rigid hierarchy is the second. Structure itself is fine and needed. Stiff power lines are not. When calls only flow from the top down, input starts to feel unwelcome. One fix is simple. When a system changes, include a person who works that process every day. If the change hits an RBT's day, ask an RBT first.

Thin communication channels are the third. Staff need set ways and set times to raise things. Cultural and personal differences are the fourth. Mixed backgrounds make a team stronger. They also leave room for misreads. Leaders have to tend that on purpose, not hope it sorts itself out.

Naming the barrier is the first real step. You cannot remove what you have not named.

without those opportunities misunderstandings can grow and trust can erode

From the talk — Dr. Jessica Osos

Strategies That Fit ABA Service Delivery

Model humility out loud. Osos says I do not know when that is the truth, then promises to look it up and come back. Guessing well is a trap. It also teaches the team to bluff instead of check.

Push feedback both ways. Supervisors give plenty of it by design. The return path is the one that goes missing, so build it. That organization runs several lanes at once: direct conversations, a quarterly engagement survey, and an open anonymous form. The form takes anything, from a request for craft supplies to a challenge about a decision.

Set a rhythm people can predict. Monthly treatment integrity checks (doing the plan as written) tell technicians what good looks like. Monthly staff meetings carry the wider news. The clinic also runs a huddle (a short team check-in) twice a week. It happens on Monday and Wednesday, at a set time. Huddles surface safety concerns and general questions. They skip client specifics to protect privacy.

Use supervision as the main stage. That clinic runs 10 to 20 percent of hours. Do not spend it on a laptop in the corner. Coach in the moment, then ask for feedback on your coaching. One prompt from another session stuck: what did I give too much of, and what do you need more of? The same idea carries into caregiver guidance (coaching parents on the plan). Parents often hide a behavior until the clinic sees it, and shame is usually why. After a crisis, stay calm and nonjudgmental in the moment, then debrief with the team later.

I always encourage people within my organization to address the person that you're having an issue with directly first

From the talk — Dr. Jessica Osos

Measure Safety, Then Act on What You Find

Edmondson also built a psychological safety assessment. It uses a Likert scale (a rating scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree). It splits into three parts: individual safety, team respect, and team learning. Many behavior analysts distrust rating scales. Osos grants the point. Then she asks a fair question: what better way is there to get this data from a team? Run it quarterly or yearly, whatever fits.

Read the results with care. A perfect score is not a win. It often means people did not feel safe answering honestly. A low overall score does flag low safety, but the real signal lives in the details. Look at the lowest items. Look harder at items with the widest spread. A team split between ones and fives has a different problem than one split between threes and fours. Newer staff often score lower than staff with longer tenure. A team is only as safe as its least safe member.

Then act, because a survey with no follow up makes things worse. Start with the issues that need attention now. Chase weak items with an open question, anonymous if that fits your setting. Tell the team you noticed a low score on one item and ask what sits behind it. We do not collect data and then ignore it in any other part of our work.

Build the action plan in four steps. Find the deficits from survey results, feedback, and what you observe. Bring the team in to pick the fixes. Set a goal you can measure, such as raising team participation in meetings by 20 percent this quarter. Then schedule the check ins. You can run this in onboarding too, with stage goals at 30, 60, and 90 days.

psychological safety cannot be imposed, right? It has to be co-created.

From the talk — Dr. Jessica Osos