Psychological Safety
Story time
My team was in a rough situation and my manager gathered all of us team members to brainstorm ideas, and he asked everyone to speak up and “share any idea”.
I was in similar situation in the past, so I explained what we did to resolve it.
My manager’s reaction was “I asked for any idea, not a stupid idea!”
Can you guess how many ideas were shared afterwards?
What is Psychological Safety?
The belief that one will not be punished, rejected, embarrassed or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, mistakes and interpersonal risk taking
An environment where even difficult ideas can be freely exchanged
Why is it important?
Google conducted a research, trying to answer “what make an effective team”. This Project Aristotle concluded that “Psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work”.
It totally makes sense — how motivated, innovative and productive would you be in a workplace where you are afraid?
Another experiment was conducted in hospitals, where safe and unsafe teams were the subject of research. Initially, and to the surprise of the researchers, unsafe teams did better — they had less fatal and serious mistakes. After digging deeper, it turned out that mistakes were simply not reported due to fear, thus promoting lack of learning and even more mistakes.
To summarize, the benefits are:
- Less mistakes, more learnings
- Brain cycles used for productivity, not for self preservation
- Innovation, experimentation, more ideas and points of view
- Doing much more than the bare minimum
- Concerns are brought up on time to do something about them
- Help is asked when needed, lower waste
- Seeing reality as it is, not as we want it to be, making decisions based on reality
You wouldn’t be surprised that safety is a basic need according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
How to set psychological safety?
In private with a direct report
- 1:1s
- Weekly, rarely rescheduled or skipped
- Direct report always starts with their topics
- Any topic they want
- Listen and ask questions
- Timely follow up on questions and action items
- Build relationship and rapport
- Curiously show you care, not just pleasantries, know their spouse and children names, hobbies, etc. - Feedback: give five positive feedbacks for every negative one
- Coaching: you are here, supporting their mastery
- Delegation: give them more, acknowledging the quality will be lower than yours
- Receiving feedback: don’t ignore — show you act on it, or explain why you will not
- Educate about importance of psychological safety, stop offenses by team members immediately
- Don’t surprise with changes, give time to process and adapt
- Share information as much as possible
Publicly
- Speak last, so others don’t comply with your opinion
- Don’t shoot down ideas
- Don’t give negative feedback
- Give positive feedback only if report is ok with it (e.g. reserved personality)
- Show vulnerability — admit mistakes (not in a confidence ruining way), ask for help
- When bad news are brought — don’t shoot the messenger, proactively look into the future, “now what?”
- Never use the “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” adage
- Gossip — don’t take part, stop it, so people know you also don’t talk about behind their backs
- Remove “Us and them” and people uniting over “common enemies”, as structure might change and would need to cooperate
- Learn from mistakes, don’t punish
- Retrospectives and post-mortems — stop blame-game, focus on future
- Don’t surprisingly redo work of your direct reports to improve it
- No exceptions for specific individuals “because they are just like that” or other excuses
What it doesn’t mean
- We “must be happy”, singing kumbaya, etc.
- We can demonstrate bad behavior (a.k.a “being a jerk”)
- We can continuously repeat our mistakes
- We have low standard
- We don’t give negative feedback
- We don’t engage in conflict, when done in a healthy way (opposing ideas, not people) is an evolution and we have more options to act
- Manager doesn’t make hard decisions — the aim is to be trusted, not liked
