Building Team Psychological Safety With Motivational Interviewing Spirit And Skills
Psychological safety sets the foundation for high-performing teams. When your team is free to collaborate and innovate without fear of judgment, individuals are more likely to express themselves, take risks, and engage in meaningful dialogue. As leaders in human-serving fields, this is an opportunity to apply motivational interviewing (MI) skills and strategies often used in client settings in the office among colleagues.

Motivational interviewing provides a way to engage with individuals and strengthen their motivation and commitment to change. Its essence lies in the MI spirit, which is characterized by four interlocking elements:
1. Partnership
To collaborate as equals and to value each person’s expertise balances power dynamics and avoids any sense of belittlement, while helping to foster mutual respect and a sense of shared purpose.
2. Acceptance
To offer non-judgmental recognition of others’ worth and potential. Acceptance involves affirming a person’s strengths, showing empathy for their experiences, and respecting their autonomy.
3. Compassion
To prioritize the well-being of those you serve. Compassion is demonstrated by genuine intent to support others, focusing on their growth instead of mere outcomes or efficiency.
4. Empowerment
To help others recognize and harness their own strengths. Empowerment means encouraging autonomy and highlighting individuals’ existing capabilities, fostering an optimistic view of their potential.
These four principles align seamlessly with practices that promote psychological safety. When leaders embody the MI spirit, they create spaces where team members feel seen, heard, and respected.
When leaders embody MI spirit, they create spaces where team members feel seen, heard, and respected.

Psychological Safety And Project Aristotle
In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle, a study that looked at hundreds of organizational teams to uncover what distinguished successful groups. Two key behaviors emerged.
- Equality in Conversational Turn-Taking: Effective teams ensured that all members had a voice, which allowed them to feel valued and included. Teams with unequal contributions experienced diminished collective intelligence.
- High Social Sensitivity: Members of high-performing teams remained attentive to one another’s emotions, and picked up on subtle cues like tone of voice and nonverbal expressions. Social sensitivity fostered trust and deeper understanding among team members.
These findings define psychological safety as a shared belief that interpersonal risk-taking is safe. Teams with high psychological safety described environments where they could share openly without fear of judgment, enhancing their collective intelligence and problem-solving abilities.
Amy Edmondson, an organizational behavioral scientist and Harvard Business School professor is one of the first to describe psychological safety as “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.” It is a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect, enabling people to be their authentic selves.
Learn more about Ms. Edmondson and the project in this Google article and in the below Tedx Talk.
How The MI Spirit Creates Psychological Safety
The MI Spirit—rooted in empathy and collaboration—offers practical tools for creating psychological safety.
- Partnership Fosters Equality: Leaders ensure that every team member’s voice is valued, by balancing power dynamics and encouraging equal participation, which mirrors the conversational turn-taking identified in Project Aristotle.
- Acceptance Builds Trust: Demonstrating non-judgmental acceptance helps individuals feel secure in expressing their thoughts and emotions.
- Compassion Enhances Sensitivity: Prioritizing others’ well-being deepens connections and encourages honest communication, which increases social sensitivity within the team.
- Empowerment Nurtures Autonomy: Encouraging individuals to recognize and use their strengths fosters confidence and collaboration, which builds an optimistic and supportive team culture.
7 Practical MI Tips For Leaders
Leaders play a pivotal role in setting norms that support psychological safety. Here are actionable steps to integrate the MI Spirit into team dynamics:
- Encourage Balanced Participation: Implement practices like round-robin discussions or structured meetings to ensure everyone’s voice is heard
- Model Empathic Listening: Demonstrate active listening by reflecting back on what you hear, validating team members’ experiences, and asking clarifying questions.
- Promote Open Dialogue: Create opportunities for team members to share their thoughts and feelings without fear of repercussions. For example, designate a “safe space” for honest conversations.
- Recognize and Celebrate Strengths: Highlight individuals’ contributions and unique abilities to build confidence and mutual respect. Regularly affirm the value of diverse perspectives.
- Foster Curiosity and Collaboration: Ask open-ended questions that invite diverse perspectives and solutions, which creates a culture of inquiry and shared problem-solving.
- Provide Constructive Feedback: Frame feedback in a way that supports growth and learning, not judgment or blame. Use feedback as a tool for empowerment rather than criticism. (Learn more about creating a culture of feedback in this blog post from ACJI.)
- Enhance Social Sensitivity: Encourage team members to develop awareness of nonverbal cues and emotions. This can be achieved through team-building exercises or training in emotional intelligence.
By applying the principles of motivational interviewing, leaders can foster open communication and trust. MI helps individuals navigate behavior change, especially in the corrections field. For example, a probation officer might empathize with a person’s challenges, ask open-ended questions to explore motivations, and affirm their strengths to build confidence. MI empowers individuals to take ownership of their change, fostering trust and lasting progress.

Conclusion
By integrating the MI Spirit and skills into team leadership, leaders can cultivate an atmosphere of psychological safety where individuals feel empowered to share, collaborate, and innovate. The insights from Project Aristotle underscore the importance of equality in communication and social sensitivity, both of which naturally support the principles of motivational interviewing. Together, these approaches create a roadmap for building resilient, high-performing teams that thrive on trust and mutual respect.
Interested In Learning How To Implement Motivational Interviewing Techniques?
Learn practical MI tools, skills, and strategies to support behavior change with ACJI’s Motivational Interviewing (MI) online course. Whether you are new to MI or looking to refine your skills, this video offering is ideal for those in community-led reentry and criminal legal system organizations.