It’s not the team that makes the least mistakes or includes the biggest brains that is most successful – it’s the team with the highest level of psychological safety.
Psychological safety is the secret sauce to high-performing teams. It empowers people to ask questions, take risks, learn from mistakes, let their creativity shine and bring their authentic selves to work. These are the ingredients of high engagement and productivity.
“In Google’s fast-paced, highly demanding environment, our success hinges on the ability to take risks and be vulnerable in front of peers”, says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. You can take his word for it – no other company has researched psychological safety as thoroughly as the tech giant Google. In 2012, the company embarked on a research journey called Project Aristotle. Over two years, the project team conducted more than 200 interviews with Google employees and looked at roughly 250 attributes of more than 180 active Google teams. The declared goal was to find out what makes a great team – the underlying attributes that explain why some teams keep failing miserably despite owning the finest intellectual, technological or financial resources, while others thrive even in challenging circumstances.
As the patterns started to emerge, it became clear that who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, or view their contributions. Turns out that a group dynamic called psychological safety, defined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson as the “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking”, is what differentiates truly amazing teams from the rest. It is a sense of confidence and understanding shared by each member that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up. This shared agreement creates a team climate characterised by interpersonal trust and mutual respect, and leads to an environment in which everyone feels comfortable and safe.
And what happens when we feel safe? We become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent – which leads to better outcomes on all levels, from the individual’s wellbeing to the team’s track record and the organisation’s bottom line.
So, what can you do to foster and support psychological safety in your team? Here are some ideas on how to help your team shift gears and adopt a positive mindset to increase team cohesion and performance:
From judgement to curiosity. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that we can be quick to judge others and jump to conclusions. Psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error: if a colleague is late for a meeting, it is because they have no time management skills, or because they are disrespectful. If they make a mistake, it’s because they don’t have the required skills or the right attitude. If we ourselves happen to be late, however, there is always a specific reason that kept us from being on time, and our own mistakes tend to be temporary and excusable slip-ups due to particular circumstances. As Stephen Covey put it, “We judge others by their actions, and ourselves by our intentions”. To overcome this tendency which diminishes psychological safety in relationships, don’t assume what the other person is thinking or the motivation behind their actions. Instead, ask genuine, open and non-threatening questions, and listen non-judgmentally to what they have to say. If there is a problem to be solved, try to switch perspectives and really understand what the situations looks like from the other person’s position – what they can see and what’s hidden to them, what they may worry about, what really matters to them. This is a good starting point to explore solutions together.
From false harmony to constructive disagreement. The opposite of hostility and suspicion is not keeping a smiling face or avoiding open conflict at the cost of personal discomfort, it is respectful and constructive disagreement. Groups that fall prey to a sense of false harmony tend to pressure their members to submit to outward agreement, suppress doubts and questions, and value conformity above critical thinking. The pressure on the individual to “fall in line” with everyone else can be subtle or overt. This gives rise to groupthink, a dangerous and dysfunctional dynamic that stifles creativity and innovation, leads to poor decision-making and causes a drop in standards, for example, in relation to performance or ethics. To avoid this, encourage respectful, productive dissent and divergent thinking. Remind your team that sharing different perspectives and politely challenging each other’s opinions (always with the right intent and never as a personal attack) is what enables continuous improvement and innovative solutions.
From pointing the finger to learning together. Making mistakes is what makes us human. People make the wrong decision sometimes, choose the wrong words in a conversation or an email, or interpret data or patterns in the environment incorrectly. We can only work with the information we have in a given moment, we don’t always have the same mental and physical energy levels available to us, and priorities can change over time. Nobody wants to look bad in the eyes of others, and if mistakes are used as an opportunity to point the finger and lay blame instead of identifying their instructional value for everyone, people will be compelled to hide errors or even lie about them to avoid scrutiny and repercussions. Teams with high psychological safety openly share their mistakes with each other to create opportunities to learn, develop new insights and increase both individual and team capability over time.
From adversarial to collaborative. Conflicts and misunderstandings will inevitably occur when a group of diverse people work together. Suppressing them or pretending that you didn’t notice won’t make them go away, but will deteriorate relationships over time. Instead, use these situations as teachable moments where you shift the focus from an adversarial (win-lose) to a collaborative (win-win) mindset. Instead of entering discussions with a narrow and combative approach, psychological safety is built around demonstrated behaviours that value the other person’s views and are focused on creating mutually beneficial outcomes. Sometimes this is a compromise, other times it can lead to the development of novel solutions and ideas. Questions to ask include “how can we achieve an outcome that is agreeable to everyone?” or “what needs to happen to move forward together on this?”
From perfection to vulnerability. It doesn’t matter if you are in a officially assigned management position or have assumed an informal leadership role: Use your influence to role-model pro-social and altruistic virtues such as vulnerability, humility and compassion. Perfection does not exist in the real world, and if this is what you are trying to project, other swill struggle to connect with you and build a relationship based on honesty and trust. If all they see from you is steely resolve and a notion of infallibility, they will conclude that this is what they need to do in order to protect themselves from unfair criticism, blame and personal attacks. Showing vulnerability by asking others for help, admitting that you don’t have the answer to a question or sharing personal struggles to a level that is appropriate invites cooperation and trust from others as well as reciprocity. Others will feel safe to show vulnerability in return leading to an increase of mutual trust.