What is a Check-In routine and how does it build psychological safety?

A psychological safety study released this year, spanning 47 countries, reached a conclusion that will surprise no-one who has ever sat through a badly run meeting: psychological safety is the bedrock of high-performing teams. The figures attached to that study are worth pausing on — meaningful lifts in productivity and innovation, and retention rates several times higher for the people who have historically had the least room to speak. And yet, by most measures, only about a quarter of leaders are actually creating it. That gap interests me far more than the statistics do. Because almost every leader I work with already believes in psychological safety. They can define it. They've read the research. What they don't have is a practice — something that happens on an ordinary day, in a real meeting, under real time pressure, which actually builds the thing rather than merely endorsing it.