The Key Factor to Team Success: Psychological Safety

Google’s first attempt to figure out what differentiated their high-performing teams from other teams failed. Google is a data company, and in 2012 they did a research study to find out if some combination of factors such as experience, skill, personality, education level, in person meetings, etc. resulted in certain teams performing better than others. They looked at 180 teams and could not find any meaningful correlation to these individual factors.

Obviously, something was missing. They went back to the drawing board and started looking at group norms instead. That is when they discovered that the most important factor to high-performing teams was psychological safety.
·        Psychological safety accounted for 43% of the variance in team performance.
·        Psychological safety impacted not only performance, resulting in 19% higher productivity, but also 31% more innovation.

I still remember the moment that I first heard about psychological safety. I was listening to Charles Duhigg’s book, Smarter, Better, Faster when he talked about Project Aristotle, which is the name of Google’s research study on high-performing teams. It was a lightbulb moment for me because up until that point, I didn’t know what I had been doing right. I remember one of my bosses asking me, “Your teams are so motivated, what is it that you are doing?” I couldn’t really give him a satisfactory answer. I told him that I explained to the team why what they were working on mattered but that didn’t seem like it was enough. It turns out that I had been practicing psychological safety, not perfectly, but consistently enough that it resulted in high-performing teams.

What is Psychological Safety

Although the concept of psychological safety might be quite familiar to some, there are still many people I talk to that haven’t heard of psychological safety, which is why I continue to bring up the topic because language matters and having shared language, especially among leadership teams, is important.

The term psychological safety was coined back in the 1950s but it wasn’t until the 1990s that the concept became more mainstream through the research of Dr. Amy Edmundson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and world renown expert on teaming and psychological safety. Some of her early work was studying hospital teams and she found that on teams where nurses felt safe to speak up, there were less errors during medical procedures.

Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. – Amy Edmundson

Here are a few examples of what psychological safety might look like:

• No “shooting the messenger” when someone delivers bad news.

• A leader or someone else on the team asks other group members to speak up or voice their opinions when they notice certain people haven’t spoken yet.

• Acknowledging when you don’t know something

Keep in mind that psychological safety is not the absence of conflict. Healthy conflict is necessary and good for the team. Dr. Timothy Clark is another leading expert on psychological safety. He has expanded our understanding of psychological safety into 4 stages:

1.     Inclusion Safety: This is the first stage where people feel they are accepted and belong on the team.

2.    Learner Safety: In this stage people feel safe to ask questions and learn.

3.    Contributor Safety: Team members are actively contributing their ideas and suggestions.

4.    Challenger Safety: This is where people will challenge the status quo which is crucial to innovation.

How to Build Psychological Safety on Your Teams

From my observations, how a leader reacts when there is an issue or someone brings up a problem is often the most crucial factor to either building up or dismantling psychological safety on the team.

This is what makes psychological safety challenging because the most crucial moments are often when the leader is under stress. Maintaining psychological safety during these times requires self-awareness and self-regulation, both components of emotional intelligence, as well as stress management and mental resilience.

No leader can always react in a positive way to bad news, especially under stress. However, if he or she does “flip out,” it is important to acknowledge the behavior in a timely manner and make amends. The act of apologizing may actually have a positive impact on the psychological safety of the team provided that it does not become routine behavior.

Here are some other ways to build psychological safety on your teams:

-           Have your team go through a DISC assessment to understand each other’s preferred communication styles and triggers.

-           Build trust between team members by being dependable and showing that you care. Psychological safety is a group norm. Trust is between two individuals; however, higher trust will contribute to increasing psychological safety. To learn more about trust, read my earlier blog on the formula for trust.

-           Have regular 1-on-1 meetings with direct reports to provide them with a safe space to raise concerns.

-           For project teams, create not only a project charter but also a team charter.

For more on emotional intelligence, the key factor to personal success, read The Progressive EQ Model by Gloriana Teh, founder of Claritas Consulting & Coaching. Click this link to book a discovery call with Claritas or use the link below to sign-up for our monthly newsletter for more useful leadership resources and frameworks.

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