Whether you are a team member or a team leader, you’ll no doubt have had experiences where you’ve been talking with a number of other people and had something you wanted to say on the tip of your tongue but thought better of it. If what you wanted to say was coming from a positive place of wanting to support the team or an outcome then that’s a waste. What happened and what can you, or your team leader, do about it?
While sometimes what holds us back is ourselves and our own confidence (see my previous blog, the confidence conundrum), often it is about how safe we feel to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes without fear of recrimination. It’s all about the degree of psychological safety that’s felt within a team. Research shows that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out. When we feel safe we become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent.
Psychological safety at risk?
So what are some of the clues that psychological safety in your team may not be where it could be?
Team members…
- are holding back on giving each other honest developmental feedback
- are not admitting mistakes that others may have learned from
- don’t feel that their ideas are valued
- feel pressured into supporting something that doesn’t feel right to them
- are being made to feel isolated or disloyal when questioning something outside of their area
What are the effects of a lack of psychological safety?
They vary from papering over the cracks so that the team doesn’t benefit as much as it could from diverse thinking and approaches to team dysfunction and a potentially a high level of stress.
What steps can you take to improve levels of psychological safety in a team?
- Measure Psychological Safety
Starting with an indication of the team members’ views on psychological safety via an anonymous assessment can provide you with insights on where any trouble spots might be enabling you to focus on improving the team climate through targeted solutions. A team coach can administrate the assessment for you and collate the responses, feeding them back in a safe and productive way with a view to having the team decide how to move forwards. The assessment that I use from the Global Team Coaching Institute provides a good level of understanding of any issues. - Rules of engagement
It can be helpful as a team to have an open and honest conversation about how each person expects to be treated within the team and what they can commit to in terms of behaviours towards others, with a focus particularly on any areas highlighted by the psychological safety assessment. Using the idea of green card and red card behaviours can be a way to bring this to life where green card behaviours are ones that ones that the team will encourage and recognise in others and red card behaviours are ones to avoid. - Role modelling
It is one thing to have rules of engagement and another to ensure that they are followed. A team leader can help to underline that the green and red card behaviours are important by firstly ensuring that they focus on demonstrating the green card behaviours consistently, secondly by recognising when others do, and thirdly by sensitively drawing attention to any red card behaviours and ensuring that they are not ignored. From there, getting agreement from all team members to do the same and to hold each other mutually accountable emphasizes and further embeds the rules of engagement. - Just like me
When we feel that there might be some underlying issues between us and others on a team this can be visibly marked by a fight (confrontation) or flight (avoid) response. Either way, we are not feeling safe. It can help for us to recognise the similarities that we share with the other person rather than assuming difference. The ‘Just Like Me’ exercise is a way to help team members reflect on how much we are like our fellow team members which can support our feelings of safety.
These four steps are a start. From there, continuous team reflection and learning with team members playing their part can see safety grow over time.
If this is an area that you’ve successfully addressed with your team, I’d love to hear your own thoughts on what has worked for you.
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