Patrick McKendry

Psychological Safety is the most important thing, according to Google. As a massive organization of teams, researchers at Google took it upon themselves to identify the characteristics of high performing teams so they could bring the insights to all of their managers. The top valued trait they found was psychological safety.¹ It seems like such a simple concept. Team members should feel comfortable to speak up and share ideas without fear of repercussion. Innovation will flourish as ideas are shared openly, development will happen rapidly as all members feel empowered to give feedback, and knowledge will grow as ideas are tested without the paralysis of overanalyzing risk.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Psychological safety can be difficult to evaluate because managers are inherently biased away from truly critiquing whether they have established a psychologically safe atmosphere. Confirmation bias will highlight examples that confirm a safe set-up and ignore examples that do not. After all, each manager does not see themselves as intimidating, so they imagine no one else will either. There are also a multitude of reasons that a team member may decide to not share an idea up and out. Fear of repercussions from a mistake, holding off on a potentially unpopular proposal during the annual review season, or even just not wanting to create more concerns in a stressful environment can all be contributing factors.

Psychological safety can also be difficult to maintain because it must be a constant. Imagine if you were on a team and were comfortable sharing ideas before, one day, your manager completely ripped apart a new proposal. Even at only 1 in 100 times, you would likely be less forthcoming in the future. It is even a well-studied phenomenon that the randomness of the negative reaction would make its effect more influential.² The inverse application of this idea is what makes the slot machine so addictive. All this to say, if you are not actively promoting a psychologically safe team environment, it is probably not as healthy as you think.

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Three traits of psychologically safe teams

Given the important yet delicate nature of psychological safety, managers should be mindful of how to nurture it. There are a few things we must do to establish a team environment that supports psychological safety, per Amy Edmondson who introduced the concept³.

Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem
Acknowledge your own fallibility
Model curiosity and ask lots of questions

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Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem

The world is unfathomably complicated. Countless variables occur around any event and the simple multiplication of those variable factors against each other create a multitude of potential outcomes. As a very basic example, if you have 2 colors of socks and 2 colors of shoes there are 4 potential pairings you could choose between. But with only 4 of each, you get 16 potential outcomes. If we apply this thought to something actually useful, think about how many inputs go into any business decision the team makes. The current margin, the specific stakeholders, recent performance trends, and many many more considerations are at play. Mathematically, you only see any given situation once. Maybe twice. Further, our constantly evolving digital world, modern consumer behavior, and evolving competitive strategies are regularly shifting. Realistically, everything that you see you are seeing for the first time. Think about that. Seriously. Stop reading and think about that for one minute.

Ok, welcome back. Amy Edmondson’s first callout should now be self-evident. Everything has to be a learning problem. Some input will always be changing, which makes it impossible for anything to be a purely executional problem. If we define “execution” as the “carrying out or putting into effect of a plan, order, or course of action” then we must recognize that execution is thoughtless.⁴ For us then, nothing is purely execution because some aspect is always new.

If you are hoping to build psychological safety in your team, the first change is to instill this culture of learning. Talk about this framing with the entire team and in our 1:1s. However, leaders must also demonstrate this belief through their actions. Pre-mortems and post-mortems, coaching the team to include lessons learned as part of any presentation or report, and asking questions about lessons learned at the start of the feedback process are a useful way to highlight the importance of learning as a part of the process. Additionally, shaping overall team behaviors to reinforce this framework can be helpful. Encourage highly frequent communication amongst the team - in a team slack channel or between those nearby as someone works through an analysis. This can be a self-reinforcing mechanism for knowledge sharing as the team learns from others and are reminded to share their own lessons learned.

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Acknowledge your own fallibility

It would be disingenuous to preach everything as a learning situation but to never admit your own mistakes or lessons learned. People tend to reciprocate in relationships. If you are guarded about mistakes and what you don’t know, the team will be similarly guarded. If you are open about where your knowledge falls short or how you were wrong, the team will be similarly transparent. I generally like to use self-deprecating humor too, not only for its hilarity but because it helps demonstrate comfort with being a work in progress.

It is critical to note that if you - as the leader - have not fully reconciled the fact that you may be wrong, this framework will unravel quickly. If you’ve built a good team there are things that they will know better than you. And if you have psychological safety, they should tell you when you have things wrong. If you are not prepared, your response will be defensive, the team will notice, and their sense of safety will drop. It is hard to coach others on fighting their demons if you still need to overcome them yourself.

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Model curiosity and ask lots of questions

Questions are good for so many reasons. At a glance, Edmondson’s first two recommendations are more reactive. The actions implicitly rely on a project coming along that can help us learn or requires us to acknowledge we were wrong. Questions are powerful because they can be proactive. It puts learning on our own terms as we seek out information when we want it rather than when problems arise around us. It also teaches the skill of identifying our knowledge gaps and filling them. How many times does a problem highlight something that we had not even been aware of before? Curiosity teaches us how to step back from a problem and, with that distance, see all of its angles. This can help us preempt issues and even find market opportunities before our competitors.

If you are looking for the gold standard in curiosity, there may be no better examples than children. As kids - over the span of only a few years - we go from knowing literally nothing to being able to function in an incredibly intricate social fabric, read books, write stories, calculate with numbers, maybe play an instrument or sport, and engage in thousands of other previously unknown activities. School plays an important role, just like L&D programs should in a professional setting. But a great deal is learned in an unstructured way through questions like “Why is it hot today?”, “Why does the sun make it hot?”, “Why is not hot during the winter?”, “Why is the earth’s axis tilted?”, “Why is the earth spinning on an axis?” - you know, the types of incessant questions that just go further and further until a parent gives up. Years later in our professional lives, this curiosity can be invaluable and drive us towards deeper insights on our business and findings that can lead to new strategic opportunities.

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Being psychologically safe is not being psychologically soft

While psychological safety can be a problem if it is not present in your teams, it can be an even bigger problem when it is misunderstood and misapplied for teams. Commonly, psychological safety gets interpreted as not providing criticisms to a team’s work or accepting sub-par deliverables. In the worst case, psychological safety is just written off as “being soft”. Neither of these approaches unlock the more rigorous environment that a high psychologically safe team can have. Let us review the tactics we discussed to see how their proper application prevents problems.

If we question whether psychological safety means our teams will miss out on critical feedback or scrap by at a lower standard, Edmondson’s first tactic should give us some orientation. Setting a performance standard for work quality is inherently execution focused. And Edmondson tells us that psychological safety is not about execution. Rather it’s about learning. As such, if our team is not delivering at the level we want as managers, then there is something to be learned and it is our obligation to highlight and coach against those opportunities. Tactically, we should have them go back and rework the deliverable in order to fully apply the lessons learned. However, we are doing this for the sake of the person and not for the sake of the work. See, psychological safety meets our requirements of setting a high bar and giving difficult feedback, but only when it is properly applied.

Often I find that leaders who disdain psychological safety tend to instead describe themselves as “hard driving”, “rigorous”, or “demanding excellence”. This is a common and outdated leadership trope, that it's better to be feared to get what you want. In some ways, that approach is not ineffective. The extrinsic value of the stick will lead people to jump. But never forget that people will only jump as high as they need to reach the bar, and as a consequence they will never raise it for themselves. They will never try to hit a higher standard. Why would they? That would be crazy as it only creates the potential for a new stick when they fall short of that new level. With good leadership that is focused on learning, teams will be intrinsically motivated to set the bar high for themselves and will consistently look to raise it as you help them achieve their goals.

But maybe this is where the disconnect between quality and learning comes in. Psychological safety and self-initiated growth behaviors do not form overnight. In a pinch, immediate motivations on fear get immediate results. Establishing a safe culture of learning takes time, as all good things do. And it is likely as you get started that your team will opt to take the easy way out because they have not seen the benefits yet. Psychologists commonly describe humans as “cognitive misers”, i.e. we do as little mental work as is necessary. Mental processing, such as building and executing a development plan, is incredibly expensive biologically speaking. Doing less mental work is an evolutionary adaptation and your team will have to break those habits. Habit development takes time.

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To wrap, I think a flaw of the Google study is that it is often framed to sound like psychological safety comes first or is the only thing that matters in building an effective team. It is the largest differentiating factor that separates effective vs ineffective teams. Yet, the concept touches on other meaty topics like growth mindsets, motivation and career goal and development planning, and developing a coaching habit. Leadership is not a single-faceted, one-size-fits-all type of responsibility. Great leaders have a finely tuned sense for what matters to their people and will motivate them to push for growth. The best leaders enable that growth in a psychologically safe way.

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References

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Psychologically Safe is not Psychologically Soft