Psychological Safety - where do we go wrong?
This piece is a little longer than usual. Why? Because every now again an issue raises its head above the parapet. Sticks out as something more than the norm. Becomes an issue that I find myself discussing in a high proportion of my coaching conversations. And psychological safety is the one that’s doing this at the moment. Too many people, teams and organisations seem to be struggling with exactly what it is, why it is important, and how to create it.
Psychological safety, like growth mindset, is a concept that gets misunderstood and misapplied. And that is a shame. Because, just like growth mindset, psychological safety is a concept that instinctively makes sense. One where research has backed up what we all sort of knew anyway. And both concepts, and applications, are about driving and improving performance.
I have examined the continued relevance of growth mindset in a previous blog, https://www.sportandbeyond.co.uk/blog/2020/1/16/growth-mindset-useful-or-not
In this piece, we shall examine the continued relevance of psychological safety, highlight where we tend to go wrong with it, and how to give ourselves the best chance of getting it right. First, let’s remind ourselves of the background to this concept.
Where did it come from and what is it?
The term psychological safety was first coined by Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson back in 1999. She has defined it over the years as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’ “A sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’
It rose in prominence largely off the back of a study run by Google, in an attempt to try and build the perfect team. Google launched Project Aristotle back in 2012, bringing together a crack team of statisticians, organisational psychologists, sociologists, engineers and researchers. The group was tasked with studying hundreds of Google’s teams and working out why some stumbled whilst others soared. To cut a very long story (and project) short, the team studied decades worth of academic research, and tried to map what they learnt from this onto team performance at Google. But for a company whose comfort zone was data and patterns, they were in for a shock: no matter how they arranged the data, they couldn’t find any strong patterns. As they struggled to figure out what made a group successful, they kept on coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘group norms.’ Norms are the traditions, behavioural standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather.
Suddenly the Project Aristotle team had a potential ‘key’. Group norms. And they needed to discover which norms mattered the most. Helped by some research in 2008 by a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Union College, the key group norms that all good teams generally shared started to become clear. And when the Project Aristotle team encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space to take risks. That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his team leader had poor emotional control, and added that he panicked over small issues and kept trying to grab control. This engineer noted that he would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car. That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well.
For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviours that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.
How is it misinterpreted?
The concept has become popular across industries. From the GB Women’s Hockey team, who cite their focus on psychological safety as being key to winning Gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics, through to the aviation and healthcare sectors.
But not everyone has understood it properly. It is not about being soft. About being easy. About being able to say whatever you want at work, and citing a culture of psychological safety as a reason why you should not be challenged. Or as a reason not to focus on performance.
It’s also not something that you create, and then just leave to exist.
How does it drive performance then?
Why then has the concept of psychological safety been taken up so readily by sectors such as health care and aviation? Because it helps to reduce risk and poor performance. In one of the early studies on psychological safety in healthcare, the teams who were assessed as having good psychological safety were reporting more mistakes. This initially concerned the researchers, until they realised that the culture of psychological safety was enabling team members to speak up and share when things had gone wrong. Unlike other teams, whose cultures did not encourage or permit this. And of course by speaking up and sharing mistakes, those teams were able to discuss the issues and seek to solve them, giving them a much better chance of ensuring the same mistakes were not repeated.
As Adam Grant, Professor of Organizational Psychology at Wharton, best selling author and one of the best thinkers in this space, points out in his latest book Think Again, in ‘performance’ cultures, the emphasis on results often undermines psychological safety. When we see people get punished for failures and mistakes, we become worried about proving our competence and protecting our careers. We learn to engage in self-limiting behaviour, biting our tongues rather than voicing questions and concerns.
Of course performance IS relevant though. Ultimately we are all aiming to perform well at work, in order to achieve our, our team, and our organisation’s goals. And this is where it’s important to debunk the myth that psychological safety is about being soft and easy. It’s about ensuring an environment, which, combined with high standards and accountability, is where you get constant learning, and so improved performance over time. Amy Edmondson herself has pointed out that where you get psychological safety without accountability, people tend to stay within their comfort zones. Where however you combine the two, that’s where you create the ultimate learning zone; where people feel free to try, to experiment, and to poke holes in one another’s experiments and ideas in service of making them better, and so ensuring a better outcome.
How do you go about creating it?
Whilst a relatively simple concept, it takes a huge amount of hard work and effort to instil; however, the results overwhelmingly make it worthwhile. And of course once instilled, it takes constant tendering and cultivation to keep it going.
In her book the Fearless Organisation, Amy Edmondson breaks it down into the following three areas.
Setting the Stage
Provide clarity on purpose and direction.
Identify what’s at stake, why it matters, for whom.
Motivate your team to work hard to achieve it.
Build trust between the team, by getting to know each other better.
Ensure clarity on role and contribution to the wider goal.
Inviting Participation
Have you got the right structures in place?
Do you follow through on ideas and suggestions?
Do you make it easy for people to share concerns and experiences?
Does the leader make it clear they haven’t got all the answers?
Do you ask good questions?
Responding Productively
Listen, acknowledge and thank.
Destigmatise failure: look forward, offer help, discuss, consider, brainstorm next steps.
Fight then unite.
Highlight clear violations of psychological safety.
From my own reading and practice in this area, I have found that whilst there are a range of interventions and recommendations for building psychological safety within teams, these are some of the key levers:
understanding each other better as individuals;
making candour real;
making it safe to not know – early – and making it safe to fail – early;
seeing conflict as collaborators not adversaries;
replacing blame with curiosity; and
re-booting the way the team communicates.
Psychological safety is a brilliant culture to be aiming for within your teams. Just make sure you understand it first, and that you build a clear and long-term plan to introduce and embed it, realising that it won’t be without a certain level of pain and setback along the way.
For more on this or any aspect of leadership, with a healthy dose of mindset, sport, and I hope usefulness thrown in, do feel free to browse through all the articles in the Huddle, or get in touch with me directly on catherine@sportandbeyond.co.uk. I would also recommend a read of the New Yorker article that delves in much more detail into Project Aristotle which can be found here and of course a read of Amy Edmondson’s book the Fearless Organization.