What makes a great team? That’s what Google tried to discover through a 2-years long study called Project Aristotle. The result was surprising – the common denominator for the highest-performing teams is psychological safety.
Layer 2 of PX calls for ‘Balanced’ Psychological Safety. In this post, I will introduce the concept of psychological safety. I will address the ‘balanced’ part in a later post.
Dr. Amy C. Edmondson, professor of Leadership at Harvard, first introduced the concept of team psychological safety. She defined it as “a shared belief held by team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”
When an employee feels psychologically safe, she will be comfortable and secure in sharing ideas or concerns because she is not worried about being judged or receiving criticism. This emotional safety clears the way for quicker decisions, a creative approach to problem-solving, and calculated risks.
What is Psychological Safety?
A work environment where people are:
- Comfortable expressing themselves and asking questions without fear of being humiliated or ignored,
- Comfortable sharing concerns and reporting mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution.
- Confident, honest, and trustworthy
- Respectful of colleagues
- Leaders gain strength through sharing vulnerability
Psychological Safety is not:
- About being nice or saying what you think the other person wants to hear
- Guaranteed applause for everything people have to say at work and praising without any reason or purpose.
- A personality factor
- Lack of accountability and tolerance to toxic behaviors
- Just another word for trust (the key difference between trust and psychological safety, as Edmondson says, “trust is about giving others the benefit of the doubt, and psychological safety relates to whether others will give you the benefit of the doubt when, for instance, you have asked for help or admitted a mistake.”)
- About lowering performance standards: psychological safety is not about being “comfortable” at work or about creating an “anything goes” environment
- Becoming friends with your direct reports or colleagues
Benefits of Psychological Safety
- Enhanced employee engagement
- Improved employee well-being
- Greater team cohesion and performance
- Reduced employee turnover
- A psychologically safe environment encourages creativity and new ideas
- Employees become avid brand ambassadors
- Rapid value creation
- People express their opinions honestly on different sides of a conflict
Symptoms of an environment without psychological safety:
- Teammates are reluctant or slow to share ideas, opinions, or concerns
- Leadership may listen to concerns, and requests for help or ideas but rarely take appropriate action.
- Hesitate to take ownership of the assignment
- People are rarely inspired. They are not motivated to be proactive or take the initiative
- Team morale is persistently low
- Turnover is persistently high
- The team’s spirit is dictated by compliance over commitment.
- Unhealthy competition within the team trumps cooperation.
- Team members rarely challenge the status quo.
- Leaders or employees rarely admit weaknesses or mistakes.
References
Why psychological safety at work matters and how to create it By Dr. Jacinta Jiménez, PsyD
How to Create Psychological Safety at Work and Why It Makes a Difference
Psychological safety: The secret to Google’s top teams’ success – and 5 lessons for workplaces
GUIDE: Understand Team Effectiveness
Improving Psychological Safety at Work: A Five-Point Plan
Tool: Foster psychological safety
Credit: Photo by Alex Shutin on Unsplash
