The Importance of Psychological Safety on Teams

If you are a manager or team leader or if you have ever been surprised by new information and pondered the thought "I wish they had told me that sooner?" Did you reflect on why that happened? Psychological safety plays an important role in letting others feel free to share their thoughts and feelings, no matter how hard it may be to say. Individual contributors on teams may feel shy, be new to the company, a new report to you, or have any number of reasons that may make them feel like they don't want to speak up. Sometimes it can be helpful to glean this information from body language. But better yet would be to create a safe environment where active participation doesn't need encouragement because everyone is participating.

Providing that safety means that team members can feel free to share their thoughts. It allows others to make mistakes, learn from them, and then share that learning so others don't fall down the same path. As a leader in a team or organization, it is your responsibility to make sure it is safe for others to freely share. Consider the following ways in which you can set up an environment that is psychologically safe. You can consider the following categories to build on each other. Inclusion is the first step.

Inclusion safety, to put it simply, is the idea that everyone is an equal contributor and has the best intention to improve and contribute to your project and organization. People should be treated fairly, with respect, and felt like they are heard, and their contributions appreciated. No one should be punished or marginalized. It's the idea that everyone in a company is on the same train, working to get to the same destination.

Learner safety is how comfortable people feel experimenting and trying something new. Giving room for experimentation will lead to increases in innovation. Not everything will be a success and allowing room for failure can only increase the general knowledge of things that work well and what does not.

Collaborator safety is roughly equivalent to having an open-door policy. It means that anyone has permission to collaborate with anyone else, no matter where they are in the organization. This leads to open dialogue and a culture of feedback across boundaries. It enables your organization to be in a constant state of dialogue and discussion, leading to higher collaboration and buy-in.

Challenger safety is how open others feel to offer a differing opinion. This gives others an opportunity to challenge the current process. Good behavior looks like recognizing when others think differently and allowing them space to explore. The opposite effect leads to a lack of commitment to the work being done. If someone cannot contribute thoughts on how work is done, they will not feel invested in the process.

Each aspect of safety has a different level of importance depending on the type of work you are doing. Maybe you are a senior developer pairing with a junior where collaborator safety should be considered. Or perhaps you are in the middle of a retrospective where the team is hypothesizing a different approach to working that is out of the norm (hello learner safety). Or perhaps you've been the team lead in an ongoing project where the individual contributors are new to the project and are challenging you on why things are done a certain way.

There is a relationship between trust and psychological safety. Trust is a cornerstone business need. A base level of trust in your teammates allows you to share openly and believe they will do what they say. Trust is what you extend outwards towards one individual. Once a group has been able to create trust throughout, that is psychological safety.

Google's Project Aristotle looked at identifying what makes a team effective. It took inspiration from Aristotle's quote, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Not ironically, safety was identified as the cornerstone of those teams. Likewise, Patrick Lencioni's book 5 Dysfunctions of a Team marks trust as the cornerstone. This is the interconnected nature between trust and safety. Can you spot some similarities in the diagrams once you have established trust & safety? 

Google's 5 Keys to a Successful Team:

Similarly examining Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Psychological safety falls somewhere between safety needs (a basic necessity) and social belongingness (a psychological need). 

You can help drive an individual's esteem and self-actualization within an organization by achieving the highest level, challenger safety. The peak of Maslow's pyramid shows that creativity is unlocked at the top. This is the principle that drives innovation and unlocks your next breakthrough. Someone can only reach the top after the psychological safety step has been reached.

As a leader, you can start to build the foundation of safety. Shape your work as a learning problem rather than by execution. Make sure to get everyone's opinion around a problem in order to solve it. Admit your own fallibility. Make sure to model curiosity by posing questions to the team.

BlueEQ defines psychological safety as "a shared belief that it's safe to discuss ideas, experiment, take risks, give feedback, and learn from mistakes" (Psychological Safety – Why We Need It Now More Than Ever). High safety allows you to have no surprises and creates a culture of high feedback, collaboration, accountability and innovation.