Enabling the creation and thriving of a high-performing team that works well together and collaborates openly in the best interest of the project, the company, or the client/customer is one of the many things that a great leader strives for. After all, highly effective teams produce great outputs, create better client experiences, and increase engagement for the individuals. But as we know from our own lives, the high levels of cohesion that are required to reach this state do not naturally happen and it is therefore our role to help shape the behaviors that are conducive to these results.
As expected, when dealing with complex people relationships there are many contributing elements at play in our teams’ interactions. You may be familiar with Google’s findings in Project Aristotle, a two-year research project that tried to uncover the secret sauce for high-performing teams.
Reading through their findings, it becomes clear that each team will be as unique as the combination of its individual members, which originally resulted in inconclusive results and a lot of frustration. For a data company, this data did not make much sense.
It all changed when they started to assess the results through the lens of ‘group norms’ and other behavioural filters. Luckily for them (and us), the study did uncover a couple of key behaviours at the core of highly effective teams: communication and empathy.
Why do we fail to communicate in the first place?
While there are exceptions and some people do naturally try to approach challenges from a learning lens, most of us tend to follow our own evolutionary roots a bit closer. As a rule of thumb, most people don’t want to look incompetent in front of their colleagues, teams, and bosses.
This comes hard-wired in our brains as a method of self-preservation. Back when our survival depended on our ability to be part of a group, there was a strong sociological desire to fit in to avoid being rejected. In an environment where dissent feels like an attack to the status quo, we learned to adapt to survive. It also means we have learned to second-guess ourselves and let the inner-critic come out at the drop of a hat with questions such as ‘what if I’m wrong’, its companion ‘what does that say of my abilities’, and the conclusion ‘what does that mean for my standing in the group and how I am perceived by them’.
From a physiological perspective, this is when the safety mechanism within our brain kicks in, activating the amygdala by assessing these challenges to our sense of self as a real threat to survival and engaging the fight or flight response.
That punch in the stomach when someone openly says ‘you are wrong’ in front of everyone (or when you read it in that email where the CC box clearly has more names than it should have), together with the immediate heat in the back of the neck, the tunnel vision, the shallow breath… all of these are the responses of a life-threatening situation that was not life-threatening at all – but it sure felt like it for a few moments.
So we actively seek to avoid it by conforming, which in turn decreases engagement and collaboration, reduces the number of ideas being explored and the associated innovation that may spur from them, and ultimately hurts our business results.
How to foster psychological safety in our teams
By now it is clear that psychological safety is a crucial element of creating high-performing and effective teams, so how do we go about fostering an environment in which our teams feel safe to share and speak their minds? For that we turn to Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School.
Through her initial research in finding out if better hospital patient care teams make fewer mistakes in relation to medication errors, she uncovered that the best teams were the ones with the highest reported errors. While counterintuitive at first, the key there is in the word reported.
Better teams were more willing to openly admit to, discuss, and learn from mistakes. The other teams were not making less mistakes, they were simply not talking about them. Based on her findings, she offers the following three key ingredients to psychologically safe teams:
1) Frame the work as a learning problem (not an execution problem).
In today’s highly interconnected and interdependent world, challenges increasingly fall in the realm of complexity over complication. Explaining that as a team or company we have not been here before and highlighting that the problem needs everyone’s brains and voices to solve it, creates the rationale for speaking up. Giving people a logical reason as to why they need to speak up helps to calm the self-preservation voices and the amygdala by providing the explanation that speaking up is a requirement of success, so it is not just encouraged but expected.
This gives people permission to offer their ideas under the banner of compliance with the framework. Having someone share “because you’ve asked me to” is better than not having them share at all. With time, the framework will go into the background and the behaviours will remain at the forefront. It is important to note this will only work if you really mean it and do not shut people down as they voice their opinions, because no matter how much you talk about the expectation, people will react to what they see is actually happening when they do so.
2) Acknowledge your own fallibility
Following from the previous point, the best place to start to model a behaviour is within yourself. Actively demonstrate that you are interested in hearing all options because you don’t have all the answers. Lead by example by acknowledging your own potential for mistakes or misjudgments. Ask about the things you may be missing, both individually and as a team.
I have found a great way to elicit deeper insights is by asking questions in an open-negative form. What I mean by this is that rather than asking ‘what are we missing?’, try asking ‘is there anything we may have not considered?’. The first one is about finding a thing, the second one is about exploring the landscape.
3) Model curiosity by asking a lot of questions.
As simple as this may sound, asking questions requires others to answer them, which encourages speaking and in turn leads to discussion. Demonstrate curiosity by approaching challenges as a collaborator rather than an interrogator. Ask to learn, not to look smart – or even worse, to look smarter than the other person. It is better to focus on the process than on the people by asking open-ended, exploratory questions about the situation, the options, or the results.
Reaping the rewards
If done well, by creating an environment in which psychological safety can flourish you also help create a learning organisation, where the goal is about improving the outcomes through testing and iteration. This in turn improves the creation and transferring of knowledge across business functions and teams. Further to this, you also create an environment in which people can bring their authentic self to work and engage in constructive debates with people that respect each other’s opinions and points of view.
Ultimately, having a psychologically safe environment does not mean you need to ease up on performance; it is about making the workplace feel challenging but not threatening, so people can find their own motivation to fulfil their potential. It’s good for people, and it’s good for business.
What has or has not worked for you in the past when trying to create a trusting and safe environment? What did you learn in the process?
What is one action you can implement this week as a result of reading this article? Give it a go and let me know how you go!
