The Cost of Ignoring Psychological Safety

In this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, Patricia Kong talks with Professional Scrum Trainer Joanna Plaskonka about why psychological safety is critical for effective Scrum Teams. Joanna explains how it fuels openness, innovation, and accountability—while its absence leads to poor collaboration, low morale, and missed opportunities. Through real-world examples, she dispels common myths and shares how leaders can foster a culture where teams feel safe to take risks, challenge ideas, and grow. This conversation highlights that psychological safety isn’t a “nice-to-have”—it’s essential for delivering real value.

Transcript

Lindsay Velecina  0:00  
Music. Welcome to the scrum.org community podcast, a podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast, we feature professional scrum trainers and other scrum practitioners sharing their stories and experiences to help learn from the experience of others. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Patricia Kong  0:20  
Hello and welcome to the scrum.org community Podcast. I'm Patricia Kong with scrum.org and today we have a PST from Poland. I'm going to try to do this right? Johanna PUAs Conca,

Joanna Plaskonka  0:33  
Oh, wow. Trish, that was amazing. Thank

Patricia Kong  0:37  
you. Wow. Okay, the toughest part was over. How are you? Joanna,

Joanna Plaskonka  0:44  
I'm good. Thank you so much. Thank you for invitation, and I'm super excited to have this conversation today with you. Good.

Patricia Kong  0:50  
I am too, especially because of the topics that we might hit. But this is interesting. So in terms of psychological safety, you had done a webinar or webcast already with with scrum.org there's been a lot of questions around it and some interest, and that was called the importance of importance of psychological safety in Scrum teams. And you may have mentioned it there, but, but I am curious just why is this topic important to you? I know you said you were getting you got training on it, and you you've gotten some certification around it, but, but what, what led you to it as a topic, and what made you think about this for Scrum teams?

Joanna Plaskonka  1:40  
That's a very good question. So I think that what convinced me that I should study the topic was the realization that this is something that significantly influences teams effectiveness, right? So if this is something that can contribute to value creation. Wow, for me, sounds like something that I should definitely know a lot about.

Patricia Kong  2:08  
Has it, has it, has it helped you and how you work with teams and your clients and maybe even your personal life. It's always interesting when you gain more knowledge, like what it does for me, at least, and how I interact with the world,

Joanna Plaskonka  2:23  
definitely. So I started introducing this topic to my clients and customers to show them that this is the area that, in my experience, is quite often forgotten, neglected, right? And a lot of people are surprised why certain things do not work right. And sometimes I call psychological safety like a secret ingredient in your kitchen, or this little, small thing that can change, change everything. So what I absolutely love is that psychological safety, or achieving high level of psychological safety. It's not your ultimate goal, but this is the enabler, enabler of some great things to happen.

Patricia Kong  3:13  
So today I know we want to talk about, because you were talking about the value bit of how this is something that teams and organizations and people in general can focus on, because it's really going to drive some effectiveness on what we can achieve. And so I know that we want to get into kind of the cost, like, if you don't, if you don't do this, what are you kind of leaving on the table? What? What's the cost of ignoring it? But I'm wondering, if you can help me understand what what psychological safety looks like in the scrum team. Have you, have you even seen that? Have you even seen that exist?

Joanna Plaskonka  3:55  
Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I can give you some examples during a lot of those experiences, I wasn't aware that we are speaking about psychological safety, but I knew something good is happening, right? So what I saw maybe to connect it with Scrum vocabulary, that psychological safety is actually hidden between scrum values. So when the company is struggling to see to experience tough but open, respectful, valuable conversations between, for instance, team members, yes, we have connections with Scrum values, and what we can do is actually increase the level of psychological safety in such situations to make those conversations happen. Let me show you two examples with low psychological safety and high psychological safety in a very similar context. So low psychological safety people are sitting in the room, you can feel, Oh, something is wrong here, right? There is an elephant in the room. Nobody wants to talk about that. And we are like kind, but it resembles more like talking to a kind walls. Okay, so the actual important topic is omitted. We talk about a lot of stuff, but this is not the what is the most important? Imagine a retro sprint retrospective that ends up with some conclusions, but we were dancing around the subject and not pointing out the biggest problem, and thus we were not focused on finding the best solutions how to solve that. Another example, the real life example that happens to me. I was so proud and so amazed to see that between two engineers, one of them was courageous to say to the other one, listen, I think that the problem is that we are forgetting that we are the team. And if we are unable to work as a team, then we have a huge problem and we should address it. What about talking to our managers? This is not an easy to speak out like that, but this was definitely a sign that this person feels psychologically safe to point out the problem and be ready to take accountability of the actions. So for me, this is what I want to see. And by the way, some changes happened, and they were good for those individuals, for that team, right? But it required this tough conversation to to happen.

Patricia Kong  6:59  
That's nice. That's nice how you're, you're, you know, I don't know if you meant to or not, but you're tying that back to the scrum values. And it sounds like these people were courageous, and they're being respectful and open and and they're actively building conflict. They're saying, we have a conflict. Let's go talk about it. So that's nice in terms of, you know, what it can look like, what it what it looks like when there isn't psychological safety. One of the things that I'm wondering is, when you think about the team that doesn't have psychological safety, what, what are they unable to accomplish? Versus a team that we might call a high performing team,

Joanna Plaskonka  7:51  
I absolutely love the vocabulary that you use, because the same the same one was used by both Professor Amy Edmondson, who studied the topic of psychological safety a lot, and she she built all the foundations for all of us. And also it is consistent with the vocabulary used by by Google, they were also interested in that topic. So generally, one of the biggest costs that we will pay when not paying attention to psychological safety is reduced performance and effectiveness. So I believe that's that's a killer, right? That's something that is extremely important. And I've never met a manager not interested in high performance and high high results, outcomes, high effectiveness. So definitely, we have evidence and good stories that show it is one of the biggest cost but it's not the only one. So low psychological safety means that we have problems when it comes to learning innovation and connecting back to our vocabulary. Product discovery, product validation is is difficult, is ineffective. We are lacking opportunities. Opportunities there. There are also aspects related to motivation, to employees turnover. It affects communication in a negative way. Low psychological safety, we have worse collaboration. It affects taking accountability, so low psychological safety means Scrum teams, Scrum team members might avoid taking accountability. And last but not least, in the end, all of that will affect customer, customer satisfaction, because we might have more errors or poorer. Quality of the products, of the solutions delivered. What

Patricia Kong  10:04  
I what I appreciate, is so we're at a point, I think, or we've been at a point in the industry where people go, oh agile, oh Scrum. I know there's, there's been a lot of talk about that in Poland especially, oh, it's dead. Oh, these things. So what would your advice be for teams that are feeling unsafe? So a scrum team right now, who is using Scrum, you know, or maybe they're afraid to even use Scrum or agile or something, because even things like this would affect the the identity of the team, because they're a scrum team or something. So what would what would you do when talking to them? Because I think a lot of people will say, hey, Scrum and Agile failed because it's not working. We overarched, and all we talk about is our feelings, right? We weren't focused. And so what I really appreciate is you were talking about, hey, this is, this is something actually, that can help our performance. It can help us do better. We're still focused on the customer. And so I think that part is nice. What I'm wondering is, for that team right now that says we're a scrum team, it kind of works, but everybody tell us, you know, this isn't the right way. It's old fashioned. What would your advice be for them as they try to develop some more safety around their identity or confidence? Probably that's

Joanna Plaskonka  11:30  
a very good question. So it sounds like a great opportunity to build Foundation, and in my view, psychological safety. So achieving high level of psychological safety is a great foundation, because when we build that as a team, we might find more space for innovation and creativity. And we know that there is no one scrum by the book, because Scrum is a framework, right? So it requires a lot of learning, which sometimes we forget, right? Or people believe we will just read scrum guide and that's it. No, we need to find a lot of complementary practices that will become our practices. Some of them will not right. So maybe it's actually a good idea to build a high level of psychological safety and experiment a lot, also on the process level. So what are the practices that serve us? What are the practices that help us become better in delivering value to our customers, and maybe as a result, over time, we will rediscover Scrum and Agile as our way, but we will do it differently this time. Um, I love

Patricia Kong  12:54  
that, because I almost set you up. So it was, it was, um, right, because it reiterated the fact how you are saying psychological safety isn't a goal, so you're talking about the state of that team and, and, and I think, obviously, I feel like even in this short talk, we've we've said, Hey, here's the benefits, here's what happens if you don't do it. And I really think that one piece, especially in today's conversations, at least in my part of the world, it's a lot about how I feel, how therapy helps us mental health, psychology. So I want to address some of the misunderstandings which you were starting to do. And one of the things that people, I find have been doing, at least from a psychological point of view is they pathologize, or they try to, they try to say, Oh, this bad experience, this challenge is is not good for my psychological safety. And I think there's a misunderstanding that that every struggle or every challenge you hit isn't, isn't traumatic, it's not it's not unsafe. So for a scrum team where you were just talking about like, hey, yes, you're in a challenging time, there's some different conversations. This is, this is something that you can work through, and that's where the psychological safety will help you. What other ways would you say to advise a team to think about their ability to grow and feeling uncomfortable and not mistaking that for, you know, as a threat to the well being of a team, let's say,

Joanna Plaskonka  14:34  
Oh, I love that question very much. So maybe I can also start with sharing some of the myths or misunderstanding related to psychological safety. So I've heard that psychological safety is an excuse, right? So whenever I don't like something or, Oh, it's not easy, okay, it's challenging, I will say it's endangering my psychological safety. Or psychological safety means that we should always be smiling, big smile on our faces, and you know, unicorns, rainbows all over the sky every single day, but we know what is the weather, right? Sometimes we have beautiful sunny days, and sometimes it's raining cats and dogs. And psychological safety means I feel safe to take interpersonal risk, which means, for instance, I'm okay to admit I committed an error. I'm okay to present different perspective. I'm okay to challenge certain idea, still in a kind and respectful way. So in fact, psychological safety is an invitation to face uncomfortable situation and take accountability for for that in psychologically safe environment, our colleagues will not treat this question, idea challenge as a threat, but as an opportunity, right? It will never be easy to hear Hey, Jonah, but what if we look at your idea from different perspective, maybe my first way of thinking would be, oh no. They think I'm stupid, and this is what high psychological safety should help me realize. Oh so they want me to polish my idea, and they want to co create it so that it will be even better. So this is what psychology, psychological safety helps you achieve.

Patricia Kong  16:48  
That's funny. It's actually reminding me. So a couple of years I published a facilitation book, and one of the drivers was that all this kind of bad facilitation, and these icebreakers and all that stuff. And it's really, it's making me think about how you're talking about psychological safety, because somebody with a good intent, they had all these little fun games, all these icebreakers and and they do that sometimes because they say, Oh, we're trying to build team bonding. We're trying to build safety. But when they only think about that, it's almost like they're trying to create an emotional space where people can always just feel maybe entertained or happy, and people will mistake that, that there is an environment where they're catering to a certain emotion they want to feel, and that's not necessarily building the psychological safety. It's very much what you say, I agree about knowing that you can essentially handle yourself, and that you see invitation and opportunity, and that really ties back to an agile mindset and the scrum values, which you pointed out. And I think another thing, if I can just add to what you were saying, is this notion of thinking about psychological safety in a way that helps you be more effective, not as a crutch, not as something that you can be dependent on, and just say, Oh no, we're not feeling safe, because that's that's actually going to, you know, decrease collaboration and communication to to help us be better. And I think that's what's kind of cool. If you think about the accountabilities in Scrum, like, hey, we have purpose, and we can call each other on that when it's not working out. So, so what are you working on next in this topic that you would want to share with our listeners, because this has been quite a topic that is really interesting, I know to you, but like every a lot of a lot of people are talking about this and negotiation and definitely these type of topics, I think, especially in the strange times that we're living in right now. So what should they expect from you next?

Joanna Plaskonka  18:51  
So definitely, I'm willing to share some knowledge in that topic when it comes to leaders, because leaders have enormous impact on psychological safety both ways, actually. So they can help, help to make it high relatively quickly, but sometimes even unconsciously. They can. They can, unfortunately decrease it, and they may not be aware. Why is it happening? What's happening? So I see this topic of psychological safety through leaders perspective, different leaders, so it might be even executive. They can contribute significantly. So I see this topic as something that I'm definitely willing to work on. And I also have a certain model in my head about psychological safety for your own, especially if you are independent consultant, solopreneur. I realized in last month that there is a quite interesting i. Idea in my head, and it's already helped someone. So I'm happy to to go into that direction too. Maybe I will be also able to contribute to to this knowledge about psychological safety. Oh,

Patricia Kong  20:17  
that sounds quite, quite a tease. Very interesting. Okay, so we wanted to keep this a little bit shorter, because there's so much information and it's, it's really, it's really not fair to unpack the topic in in 20 minutes. But Johanna, where else can people get in contact with you if they want to learn more about psychological safety, leadership and psychological safety, that kind of hits on culture. But also I like, I like the extension out to entrepreneurs and and and people like yourself in your space,

Joanna Plaskonka  20:54  
so you can they can reach out to me via LinkedIn. They can just check my name. My profile is public. They can find my profile@scrum.org because I'm a PST and contact me there. They can also visit my website Johanna plus conca.com they can book also on my website, a short free call to just have a have a virtual coffee with me. They can also check my YouTube channel, Scrum with Johanna. So anyway is good when the outcome is achieved. So having a meaningful conversation with

Patricia Kong  21:35  
me, Oh, that's great. Lots of ways. I hope everyone, or some people take advantage of that, and even if they have questions that they want, you know, don't be shy. Throw them over to Johanna and maybe she can even just include it in our next talks. So thank you to you. Have a wonderful day. Thank you to our listeners. That's it for us today. Thank you so much. Scrum on Thank you

Joanna Plaskonka  22:01  
very much. Scrummorg.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai