Psychological safety in teams - why we need it and how to build it.
Teams play a crucial role in solving complex problems and driving innovation.
Recognising this, Google conducted research to understand how to consistently build high-performing teams.
They studied 180 teams and found the most important factor for an effective team is not who’s on it but how the team is cooperating.
Google found the most important factor for an effective team was psychological safety.
“Psychological safety is about risk taking and being comfortable with vulnerability. People who don’t feel psychologically safe worry that taking risks will mean they’re seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. Psychological safety means feeling confident about admitting mistakes, asking questions, or offering new ideas.
One of the key contributors to a lack of psychological safety, according to Harvard professor Amy Edmonson in this TEDx talk, is that we have been conditioned to avoid speaking up from when we are very young. We seem to feel unsafe and need to be shown it is safe to be vulnerable.
We become focused on what she calls “impression management” — what impression are we creating on our peers and managers? We perceive it’s important not to be seen as ignorant, intrusive, or incompetent because we believe it could harm our career progress or worst case, lead us to be fired.
This perception can prevent you from asking important questions, offering ideas, or admitting mistakes. When you don’t ask questions, you rob yourself and others of moments of learning and stop contributing to creating something better.
For teams navigating a highly uncertain situation and requiring strong collaboration to solve it, psychological safety is essential to become high performing.
To increase the psychological safety of a team, take these four actions:
Let go of obsessive perfectionism - Research shows that perfectionist leaders tend to overreact to mistakes, micromanage more often, and mistrust anyone who doesn’t meet their personal standard of excellence. If you’re working within a team, a perfectionism bias can prevent you from making valuable contributions. Instead, reframe perfection as giving your full contribution and allowing space for others to do the same and suspending judgement for anything else.
Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem – Talk about the problem you’re working on as having high uncertainty and requiring strong collaboration to succeed and as a result no one can be expected to know the answer right away. Therefore, the team needs everyone’s mind and voice in the game to work it out. No question or idea will be judged for being right or wrong.
Acknowledge your own fallibility and admit when you are wrong – If you’re leading a team say: “I may miss something, so I need to hear from all of you”. This invites everyone’s contributions and makes it safer to speak up.
Model curiosity and ask questions – This invites people to voice their thoughts and normalise providing responses, conditioning them to speak up more freely. Asking questions is especially important if you’re the leader of a team. Offering opinions and not asking enough question if you’re the leader, shuts down the motivation to contribute and instead wait for direction.