How To Create and Foster Psychological Safety
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When working with teams, there are two main challenges: airtime and how decisions are made.
Airtime means the amount of time each person on the team gets to voice their ideas, points of views, and/or questions. As you may imagine, people who are outgoing and social will, to no fault of their own, get most of the airtime. In hierarchical organizations, the most senior person may have more airtime.
Decisions could be made by consensus, a single decision maker (usually the person who is most senior and/or has more power or expertise), or by majority. All these options are neither good nor bad in themselves. The challenge is when we use one by default (because that is how we do things around here) or at the incorrect moment in the project – for example, using a single decision maker when exploring ideas.
There is a third, hidden challenge when working with teams, which is how safe or not the team is for each member to take interpersonal risks. Enter psychological safety.
One of the most essential elements for innovation, productivity, and true collaboration is psychological safety in the workplace.
Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that others on the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish you for speaking up.
We can all think about at least one time when we had psychological safety and another when we did not. Our human nature seeks belonging. It is a key element for survival; we need to be part of a tribe.
To have exceptional results at work and in our lives, we want to create and foster psychological safety with the people around us.
Here are three ways we can do that.
1) Use unexpected results as learning
When we set a goal and achieve it immediately, with apparently low effort, usually we do not stop to reflect on what we did well to get these results. We celebrate and move on to the next objective.
What happens, on the other hand, when the results we obtain are not what we expected? Or when there is no progress towards our goal? We either give up or make changes. We stop to reflect on what we have been doing, on what did not work, on what we could do differently. We ask other experts for their advice, close our knowledge gap with classes, podcasts, etc.
If we use this approach in groups when people bring ‘unwelcome news’ of unexpected results we will start to foster psychological safety in our team. Our tacit message would be ‘it is okay to bring every topic to this group even those that make us uncomfortable, and we will use it for everyone to learn.’
2) Be vulnerable
This is especially important if you are the leader of the group. Vulnerability has two main objectives: to connect with someone else or to teach.
When we let our team members know that we do not have everything figured out, we give them permission to do the same thus creating psychological safety.
3) Encourage risk-taking
This action is a little trickier. Each of us has a different risk-taking tolerance that is a combination of our disposition and life experience and perspective.
I am a big proponent of ‘pilots’ and experimenting. This is the equivalent of first running a 5K, then a 10K, then a half-marathon, and then the actual marathon.
When I notice hesitation in others, I try to look for something we can do as an experiment to see how the proposed solution would work in practice, learn new considerations, and iron out any unexpected results. This creates space and relief because we do not have to make a final decision at that moment.
You may be on the other side of the spectrum, and you want to go big from the start (run the marathon before the shorter races). That is perfectly fine as well. Keep in mind that others on your team may not have the same tolerance as you so you will have to find ways to make them feel comfortable going big.
“Psychological safety is not at odds with having tough conversations – it is what allows us to have tough conversations.” Amy Edmondson
Psychological safety is extremely important. It helps us get the best out of teams: novel ideas, collaboration, and prompt execution with lofty standards of excellence.
As the leader of high performing teams, we want to create and cultivate psychological safety. This is especially important when we have diverse teams – which perform much better than homogeneous ones – since we want to foster inclusivity and belonging.
How do you create psychological safety at work, in your family, with your friends? Please, let us know in the comments. You can write in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.
Source: eCornell course, Designing an Effective Team Structure
As a leadership coach, I enable talent to achieve bold goals with high standards. My mission is to help women transition from mid to senior level leadership positions by creating awareness, increasing emotional intelligence, and unveiling the tools and choices available to them, so they can confidently realize and fulfill their potential.