#1 - Establish Psychological Safety

Establishing Psychological Safety is #1 on Google's list of their research about how high performing teams succeed. Are you creating a safe space for your team?

Here's an excerpt from our book Move Fast. Break Shit. Burn Out. about particular importance of psychological safety to empower those wicked problem solvers in your organization.

The concept of psychological safety was first explored in the 1960s by organizational scholars and regained popularity in the 1990s. According to organizational behavior scientist Amy Edmondson it’s “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” In Google’s more recent exploration about the characteristics of high performance teams, psychological safety is #1 on their list. Google defines it as “team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.” One of the world’s top innovative and most valuable companies stresses the importance of psychological safety. If we had to bet, there’s a fair few Catalysts at Google - we work with some of them. And while psychological safety is important for all teams, it’s particularly important when you’re actual job responsibilities include taking risks to creating change. It’s crucial for their wicked future-focused problem solvers - Catalysts.

For Catalyst Leaders:

As a Catalytic leader, creating a culture of psychological safety may be one of the most important skills you can develop. If we expect our team to step out on a limb to provide divergent thinking, we need to let them know they’re safe. If a difficult conversation arises when considering different options, people need to know that there won’t be retaliation later. People need to be able to ask for help when they need it without fear of being perceived as weak or incompetent. And as we’ve already discussed with failure, if you’re asking a team to iterate all the time, and we’ve pivoted from “failure” to recognizing the new data as a learning – the team needs to feel confident that it will be perceived that way by leadership.

We all know what it feels like when a team doesn’t have this trait as a core value (we’ve all experienced bullying, which is the antithesis to psychological safety). For Catalysts this is even more pronounced because of the roles we find ourselves in.

You’ve been asked to come up with new ways of doing things. You’ve done your homework. You’ve aligned with your stakeholders. You think you’ve got it all buttoned up. Only to have people shut you down when you present your vision, tell you what a bad idea it is, and by the end of the meeting, everyone has jumped on the bandwagon and your ideas (and yourself) are torn to shreds.

Not very motivating for the next time you’re asked to present a few new solutions.

To evaluate your team’s readiness you can work with the questions posed by Edmondson:

• When someone makes a mistake in this team, it is often held against him or her.
• In this team, it is easy to discuss difficult issues and problems.
• In this team, people are sometimes rejected for being different.
• It is completely safe to take a risk on this team.
• It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
• Members of this team value and respect each others' contributions.
• 
  

Psychological safety requires a leader to practice active listening and curiosity, authenticity, non-reactivity, a willingness to let go of our perfectionism, patience, an ability to admit when we’ve made mistakes, encouraging collaboration, and a strong practice of celebrating wins. It means letting people stretch beyond their comfort zones and balancing motivational and constructive feedback. It sounds like a long list, and it is! But this is where mindfulness becomes a great tool. It helps us develop the self-awareness to develop and strengthen all of these skills.

Imagine how this empowers your team! They know they can bring almost any new crazy idea to the team for consideration…because well…that’s how new ideas are born. The team asks appreciative questions, you build on each other’s ideas, people even lean in to help you with the next iteration or pivot. The team co-creates incredibly well and there is high trust. And maybe your idea this time doesn’t get wings, everyone on this team knows that you’re undeterred and will be back with your next amazing idea soon. The team celebrates the person who brings the most new ideas in addition to the person who brought the most ideas that made it through the process.

For Non-Leaders:

If you’re not in a leadership position, you can certainly model these behaviors for your peers, colleagues and even boss. But since you don’t have direct control of the team culture, you have to evaluate for yourself how psychologically safe/unsafe you are. It’s a scale, not binary. No manager is ever perfect in gracefully receiving all ideas and not all teams collaborate perfectly. But if you’re feeling like it’s unsafe, if people on the team are constantly berated, if it’s starting to cause you trauma, it’s time to pause and reflect. If you feel like it’s better to just keep your head down then speak up, then it’s time to evaluate your next move.

Almost every tool that we outline about in our book is something for you to cultivate and leverage personally. Psychological safety has to be established by the leader. And when it’s not there, it’s almost impossible to change as it requires a willingness to do deep personal work. A leader needs to feel confident and secure in themselves (admitting failure) while being comfortable with ambiguity (allowing the team to explore new ideas and admit when they need help). Sadly, these aren’t traits that have been historically celebrated as essential in leadership development. Though one silver lining to our tough new VUCA reality, that’s starting to change.

Now that you know how crucial this can be, if you’re thinking to myself, how do I find a team with this cultural foundation? The answer is, right now, it’s not easy. Few teams advertise this. There’s no “World’s Most Psychologically Safe Companies” list...yet. So many Catalysts do the next best thing, once they find a manager that embodies this, they end up following them from team to team or company to company.

What if you haven’t found that amazingly self-aware leader or forward-thinking company? If you’re going through the interview process looking for a new job, you could use some version of Edmondson’s questions.

• How does the team handle divergent thinking and difficult conversations?
• How does the team handle risk taking or failing?
• How does leadership model receiving feedback?
• What’s your team’s purpose?
• How does the team evaluate its team-wide performance and how do you iterate to improve?

Of course, if you’re brave, you can ask, what happens when someone disagrees with the boss? Or you can ask the same question through back channels.

If you find yourself in a psychologically unsafe environment, first, know that it’s not your fault. Trust your intuition – it’s probably not your imagination. You can start to tally how new ideas are perceived (even when they’re not yours), examine how divergent thinking is received, and how much people collaborate across silos. If it’s unsafe and you can’t leave that environment, self-compassion and distance can be a great antidote from letting the environment erode your confidence.

And know that we are here for you. We've experienced the highs on teams that have provided psychological safety, and the the trauma when it's not there. Our global network of Catalysts know what it's like to be tasked with bringing in divergent thinking only to have the organization's immune response attack both our ideas and us personally.

We also work with leaders and organizations to help create a psychologically safe environment to be able to activate and empower their creative problem solvers. And the world needs empowered change needs now more than ever.