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Is your team psychologically safe? - Liz + Mollie Feel Things

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The Psychological Safety Playbook Summary

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The Psychological Safety Playbook Summary

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HBR: How Leaders Fake Psychological Safety

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HBR: How Leaders Fake Psychological Safety

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When it comes to psychological safety, leaders want the best of both worlds: all voices heard and considered, failure acknowledged and learned from, and feedback offered clearly and received graciously. But they also want harmony, comfort, and a sense of equilibrium. While most leaders want to encourage people to speak their minds, their underlying (often unconscious) ambivalence about actually getting the truth can unwittingly lead them to a performative version of psychological safety. And data suggests that only about a quarter of leaders develop the skills needed to create psychological safety for their teams. The author recounts three well-intentioned but misguided ways leaders try to "fake" psychological safety on their teams and presents strategies for creating an environment that welcomes dissenting voices.

"Hmm, I'm not sure of the best way for us to proceed. What do you all think we should do?"

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When it comes to psychological safety, leaders want the best of both worlds: all voices heard and considered, failure acknowledged and learned from, and feedback offered clearly and received graciously. But they also want harmony, comfort, and a sense of equilibrium.

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What exactly is psychological safety? It's a term that's used a lot but is often misunderstood. In this piece, the author answers the following questions with input from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase "team psychological safety": 1) What is psychological safety? 2) Why is psychological safety important? 3) How has the idea evolved? 4) How do you know if your team has it? 5) How do you create psychological safety? 6) What are common misconceptions?

No one likes to deliver bad news to their boss. But that's exactly what I had to do when a project I'd been working on wasn't delivering the results we expected. I'd been a big advocate for our team taking on the initiative and, personally, I'd invested a lot of time into it - and convinced others to do the same.

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What exactly is psychological safety? It's a term that's used a lot but is often misunderstood. In this piece, the author answers the following questions with input from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase "team psychological safety": 1) What is psychological safety? 2) Why is psychological safety important?

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TED: How to Turn a Group of Strangers Into a Team

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TED: How to Turn a Group of Strangers Into a Team

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How to turn a group of strangers into a team

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Business school professor Amy Edmondson studies “teaming,” where people come together quickly (and often temporarily) to solve new, urgent or unusual problems. Recalling stories of teamwork on the fly, such as the incredible rescue of 33 miners trapped half a mile underground in Chile in 2010, Edmondson shares the elements needed to turn a group of strangers into a quick-thinking team that can nimbly respond to challenges.

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HBR Idea Cast: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace

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HBR Idea Cast: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace

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Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace

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Listen to this episode from HBR IdeaCast on Spotify. Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999. Since then, she has observed how companies with a trusting workplace perform better. Psychological safety isn't about being nice, she says.

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Culture by Design: Psych Safety - From Theory to Practice

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Culture by Design: Psych Safety - From Theory to Practice

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Psychological Safety: From Theory to Practice

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Listen to this episode from Culture by Design on Spotify. Here at LeaderFactor, we're all about helping our clients take the theories behind psychological safety and culture and turn them into actual practice inside their organizations. Our goal is to make our content and frameworks as actual as possible, and that's what this episode is all about.

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Forbes: The Growing Psychological Safety Disconnect Between Leaders & Employees

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Forbes: The Growing Psychological Safety Disconnect Between Leaders & Employees

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People providing support to someone in need. Holding umbrella. Painting. My own work.
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Psychological safety, defined simply, is the ability to say or do hard things without the fear of retaliation at work. In a competitive labor market, it is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. As Google found in their Project Aristotle study, psychological safety was the top attribute of high-performing teams.

New Research Supports the Need for More Psychological Safety

New research from Wiley found that leaders tend to overestimate psychological safety on their teams compared to their team members. According to an interview with Mark Scullard, senior director of product innovation at Wiley, "at its core, psychological safety is about feeling valued."

Wiley's research also found that 89% of executives agree that their unique skills and talents are valued on their teams. Comparatively, 82% of team members agree they are valued. Yet, when you dig deeper into the behaviors that are associated with psychological safety, there is a disconnect between perceptions and reality. Individual contributors rated psychological-safety factors eight to twelve percentage points lower than their leaders, indicating discomfort around bringing up tough issues at work. Specifically, when you unpack the attributes of psychological safety:

42% of managers feel psychologically safe compared to 57% of executives

40% of leaders agreed that if they made a mistake, it would be held against them

53% of employees feel safe to take a risk versus 76% of executives

68% of employees agreed that no one on their teams would deliberately undermine them

Scullard recommends that leaders proactively look for symptoms of the lack of psychological safety rather than assuming it exists. These symptoms could be people not speaking up, lack of connection on a team, people being unable to bring their authentic selves to work or covering (minimizing or maximizing traits to fit in with the team).

Closing the Psychological Gap Requires Culture Change

To close these gaps, Scullard suggests setting aside time for candid conversations led by a skilled facilitator or leader. It is the leader's responsibility to set the conditions for psychological safety to develop. There are proven tools and resources such as The Five Dysfunctions of a Team or The Psychological Safety Playbook.

One exercise that helps build psychological safety is from the Cultural Intelligence Center. Their Cultural Identities Exercise helps guide teams through their individual identities, how important they are to them and how psychologically safe they are expressing their identity in the workplace. The discussion centers on disconnects between importance and safety. If humans don't feel safe expressing the identities most important to them, they will not stay at the organization.

The beauty of psychological safety is that once it is unlocked and protected, team performance noticeably improves. Teams are more productive and turnover is lower. Yet, this data shows us that while leaders believe there is psychological safety, their teams may not feel the same. Often our own lived experiences are assumed to be true of others. Leaders have access to power and can be shielded from the lack of psychological safety that their teams experience.

I remember having a project debrief during my consulting days in corporate America. Our client had shared some negative feedback from a program I had facilitated. While I felt safe sharing the feedback candidly with the team in an open forum for discussion, the team quickly signaled to me that it was not safe. They avoided eye contact, got quiet and glossed over the feedback rather than embracing it as an opportunity to improve. I soon left the organization due to the cumulative effect of the lack of psychological safety.

Turnover is costly and actions speak louder than words. Leaders can say things are psychologically safe and inadvertently create conditions that are not conducive to safety by way of their actions. As a social species, humans are wired to fit in. People take subconscious notes of how leaders behave and model those same behaviors. For leaders who want real psychological safety, pay attention to the cues: how often does your team speak up about hard issues, admit to making mistakes, take risks and validate versus undermine others?

Brave leaders know psychological safety is a competitive advantage in a tight labor market. Start by assuming your team does not have psychological safety and work to build it with them.

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The Growing Psychological Safety Disconnect Between Leaders And Employees

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New research from Wiley found that leaders tend to overestimate psychological safety on their teams compared to their team members.