Psychological safety in teams

What are the ingredients that go into making high performance teams?

Over the years I've been lucky to be part of numerous different teams, some high performing and some not. One of the common threads that weaves through these successful high-performance teams is psychological safety. Just like the strong foundation for a skyscraper, it is essential to an effective team.

Psychological safety allows the members of the team to fail without fear. Charlene Li wrote a great article recently around this topic, specifically around the shame from failure. The fact is that no-one wakes up in the morning setting out to fail. We all want to succeed and do our best, at least those that are not actively disengaged at work. And when failure happens we feel ashamed and we are afraid of looking bad and being ridiculed.

This fear of failure is counterproductive because, let's be honest, failure is an essential element of success. We all know the cliche about the iceberg, but the message that it conveys still holds true. While we might only see the peak above the water, representing success, a much larger part of it is invisible underneath. And it is this submerged part, the countless failures, that holds up the visible peak of success.

Our society exacerbates this further by creating unrealistic expectations that success happens on your first attempt. Are we ourselves sometimes guilty of jumping on this bandwagon and shaming failure, forever locking away that unrealized potential, at times from a very young age?

So how do we harness this essential precursor to success & innovation? The answer is through psychological safety, by creating a safe and controlled environment for the team to experiment and learn. A safe environment where the team members offer support and guidance to each other, spotting errors in their primacy and collectively learning from them. An environment where learning and self-development is constantly encouraged and prioritized.

We have all come across a colleague, at one time or another, that does not take responsibility and ownership, always externalizing and blaming others whenever things go wrong. While sometimes these traits are inherent to the individual in question, at times they are also the result of a non-conducive team dynamic. Where fear of failure persists and psychological safety is scarce, decisions are avoided and innovation comes to a screeching halt.

One of our philosophies at FCTG that resonates the most with me is "Taking Responsibility". By taking responsibility of our work and the resulting successes or failures, we are able to learn, grow and innovate, with team longevity and staff retention a direct benefit that stems from this.