How do you get a workplace, or a department, or a team, where people make suggestions, toss around a bunch of solutions, deconstruct and rebuild ideas, come up with brilliant answers, and get tons done?
Short answer: Trust.
Some of you are probably thinking, “Great. Bonnie talks about trust a lot, and how important it is to creating a great team, but what do I do when I’m in an environment where people are so guarded and wary that it’s impossible to build trust?”
Fair enough. This can be a tough situation. But impossible? Nope.
I’ve got another trick up my sleeve, but first, let’s talk about the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
Nobody Wanted to Be Blamed for Delays. Instead, People Died
For those of you who are too young to remember, in 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated shortly after launch, killing all aboard – six astronauts and a school teacher – on live TV.
The Rogers Commission, created to investigate the disaster, found NASA’s organizational culture and decision-making processes had been key contributing factors to the accident, with the agency violating its own safety rules. Physicist Richard Feynman implied that NASA was more concerned with public relations than reality. It turned out that management was resistant to bad news and didn’t want to hear that there were potential problems with this launch, even though engineers at both partner companies tried to alert them.
The tragedy is that a delay would only have made NASA look bad, and might have cost additional dollars. Going ahead with the launch cost lives, and made NASA look a whole lot worse.
If the culture at NASA had been “safe” and open to negative feedback, the Challenger launch would have been postponed and the disaster would have been averted.
Safe to Work
When we talk about safety at work it’s not physical safety, but the understanding that you are “safe” to disagree, or offer negative feedback, or tell management that there are serious flaws in the new design and the current deadline for launch will have to be pushed back.
This is “psychological safety”.
Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, coined the term while studying healthcare workers in the late 1990s to answer a basic question – do better teams make fewer medication errors? What she found was that the most effective hospital teams reported making more mistakes, not fewer. Digging deeper, she realized that it wasn’t that better teams were making more mistakes. It was that they were more willing to own up to and openly discuss their mistakes.
She defines psychological safety as “the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes”.
When there is psychological safety your employees are willing to say “I screwed up” or “I have a stupid question, but I’m going to ask it anyway”.
An internal study conducted by Google found that teams with high rates of psychological safety were better than other teams at implementing diverse ideas and driving high performance. They were also more likely to stay with the company.
Gallup also weighs in on the benefits of psychological safety, noting that, “employees that engage in strategies to fit into dominant organizational norms report: 16% less committed to the organization, 14% lower sense of belonging to the organization, 15% less likely to perceive having opportunities to advance, and 27% more likely to have considered leaving the organization in the past twelve months. Not surprisingly, given its positive emotional effects, psychological safety is linked to greater employee engagement.”
A common misconception is that psychological safety is about being “nice”, and it can easily be dismissed as something fluffy or touchy-feely in our data-driven age. This could not be further from the truth. Psychological safety is more about creating an environment where candid feedback is given, mistakes admitted to, and learning is the foundation of how people work. It’s also the sense that our coworkers care and have our back.
How Do We Create a Psychologically Safe Workplace?
There are different elements to psychological safety, and some may be easier to implement than others. The good news is, if you don’t know where to start, our tips will help!
Share personal stories. Personal story-telling creates authentic connections with employees and normalizes the sharing of personal experiences. Sharing personal information develops empathy and intimacy and enhances perceptions of psychological safety.
Provide room to experiment and fail. Provide protection and support when employees encounter difficulty or challenges in their efforts to innovate and deliver results. Failure should be a learning experience, not an opportunity for blame and shame.
Model reasonable risk-taking and failure. In addition to the above, show your employees that it is okay to take reasonable risks even if they do not always succeed by sharing your own failures.
Avoid blame. Fear of blame plays a big role in unsafe workplaces, like at NASA during the Challenger era. Blame and criticism lead to conflict and defensiveness. Discuss personal performance issues using factual and neutral language. When there is a problem with a project, seek the employee’s explanation and ask for their thoughts on how to solve it. Ask how you can support your employee and praise their courage in raising the issue in the first place. Depending on the problem, bring it to the team to help solve it. Blame won’t get any problem fixed.
Recognize effort as well as achievement. Recognition goes a long way in motivating employees. When employees feel appreciated, they put in extra effort to deliver exemplary performance on a consistent basis.
Be curious. Curiosity is the antidote to blame. Ask a lot of questions to encourage employees to voice their ideas and to demonstrate willingness to hear diverse perspectives and thoughts. Actively seek dissenting views and do not shut down any ideas, no matter how crazy. When people feel that their managers want to hear from them and value their perspectives they are more likely to offer their input.
Listen. It’s not enough to ask the questions. You have to actively listen to the responses you get. Does it make you a little uncomfortable? Then you’re doing it right!
Delegate authority/ allow autonomy. Allow employees the room to make decisions on their own that are well within their area of expertise and scope. A sense of agency helps team members feel more accountable towards their responsibilities and perform accordingly.
Be open to feedback. Managers need to be accessible and open to receiving and giving feedback. Eliminate all the bureaucratic procedures that discourage employees from reaching out to their managers and ask for or give feedback.
Go first! Perhaps most importantly, you need to be the first one to open up, acknowledge a failure, share a personal moment, ask questions, encourage discussion, and maybe even dig deeper.
Exercises to Build Psychological Safety with Your Team
In addition to the tips above, you might want to try this exercise. Gather your team and pose the following questions, in this order:
- What can we count on each other for?
- What is our team’s purpose?
- What is the reputation we aspire to have?
- What do we need to do differently to achieve that reputation and fulfill our purpose?
It is usually most effective to ask one person, perhaps the person sitting on your right or left, the first question, “What can the team count on you for?” and then have the rest of the team share how that affects them. Follow this method around until everyone has answered, then move on to the next question, which can be asked to the group as long as everyone has a chance to be heard.
Another suggestion is for all team members to take a personality/behavior assessment. This can remove interpersonal roadblocks among teammates, helping them understand each other better.
Finally, consider taking the team off-site to do something just for fun, even if it’s just lunch. Make a point of sharing personal stories during this time. If that is something your team has never done before, as the leader you get to be brave and go first!
Psychological Safety = Team Success
If you make a conscious effort to create this sense of psychological safety on your own team starting now, you can expect to see higher levels of engagement, increased motivation to tackle difficult problems, more learning and development opportunities, and better performance.