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What is psychological safety – The textbook definition of psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. In teams, it refers to team members believing that they can take risks, and may fail without being shamed by others. In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected.
So why is psychological safety important? Or what would happen if a team doesn’t feel psychologically safe?
Psychological safety leads to team members feeling more engaged, motivated, and upbeat, because they feel safe to voice their opinions, without it a team feels demoralized, low on energy and demotivated at work.
Which also means that psychologically safe organizations have lesser attrition, high employee retention as compared to organizations having low psychological safety in them.
In psychologically safe teams, decision making is easy and better as people provide their opinions freely, in an unsafe environment decision making suffers as people fear to speak up.
There is higher turnover & profit in organizations which have psychologically safe environment. On the contrary the organizations which do not have a safe environment have lower turnover, negative performance as employees feel burnt-out, stressed, and mentally not in a happy place.
A psychologically safe team continuously improves itself, as new ideas and opinions are welcome, people own up their mistakes without any fear and others learn from those failures, on the other hand a team with low psychological safety has a hard time improving itself as people keep their ideas to themselves, cover their mistakes.
How can psychological safety be built inside teams?
Let me give an example of how it can’t be built first.
During one of my previous jobs, when I was working as an Agile Coach, a Technology Director ran a survey to gauge the psychological safety inside his department. Not the mention the survey results were extremely distressing, especially the psychological safety of women associates in the department, which was at an alarmingly low level. He then reached out to our Agile team and requested one of us to organize a meeting with each team in his department and facilitate the creation of a team charter/ manual, as he thought this would address the issue.
Do you think an Agile coach taking an hour’s meeting with a team and making a team manual with them would result in the team have psychological safety. No, it simply can’t.
Psychological safety is a cultural attribute and culture is something that is driven and set top-down, not bottom-up. As our team coached him, in the above case the Director could have helped improve the psychological safety by speaking to his team directly, encouraging them to speak their minds out without anyone judging them, telling them that it’s ok to make mistakes, to fail as long as we learn and improve from our mistakes. Telling them what diversity and gender equality means to him, making them heard, promising them to be there when they need him or feel unheard. And off course later, walking the talk. In short – Psychological safety can’t be established by a piece of paper or on a whim, it requires leaders to set it by their actions.
So, if you are a people leader and wish to improve your team’s psychological safety then do the below:
1) Consult and involve your team in the decisions, solicit their inputs on matters that affect them.
2) Support and be empathetical towards your team members, not only as employees, but as individuals. If a leader shows empathy, it encourages the team to support each other as well.
3) Accept and be open about your vulnerabilities, this tells others that it’s okay to be vulnerable at times.
4) Learn the art of giving and receiving feedback in the right way.
5) Help establish a culture wherein no one gets put on spot for speaking their minds, where people feel safe to say ‘No’ to things or say ‘I don’t know’ when they don’t know about it.
6) Increase transparency by having a clear and honest communication with them.
7) Appreciate others, when they genuinely have done something good and foster a culture wherein people celebrate each other’s success together.
Remember, only if you set the right and psychologically safe culture from top down and lead the way by embodying the right leadership attributes, then only you can expect the teams to live by the same principles. And maybe then a team charter or manual could help in giving a common understanding of how they choose to operate together.
