Psychological Safety: Unlock your team's inhibitions to drive performance

The advantages of cultivating a psychologically safe workplace for team members, managers, leaders and for the organisation are overwhelming - but it can take time, effort and practice to establish.

Organisations need to succeed in an increasingly competitive, rapidly changing, challenging and disruptive business environment.  Having a skilled, capable and a high-performing workforce is key to maintaining a competitive advantage.

Toxic environments and their impact on team performance

If leaders want to unleash both individual and collective talent, it’s imperative that they foster a psychologically safe climate, where employees feel able to:

• Speak up;
• Contribute ideas;
• Share information;
• Report mistakes.

As we have seen all too often, unwillingness to speak up can lead to reputationally damaging failures for organisations. Recent examples include the Post Office Horizon scandal, the car manufacturer’s emissions scandal, and failures within the NHS.

In high-risk environments, such as hospitals, the consequences of suppressing or hiding bad practice due to fears of reprisal can be devastating. In any organisation it can lead to a toxic workplace, low employee engagement and poor performance.

Some of the signs of a toxic environment that lacks psychological safety include:

• When a team member makes a mistake, it is usually criticised.
• Where team members may reject others because they are different.
• When team members find it difficult to ask other members of the team for help.

By contrast, in a workplace which offers psychological safety:

• No member will intentionally do anything that detracts from the team’s work.
• Team members can point out challenges and difficult problems to each other.
• It’s safe to take risky calculated actions.
• The team’s skills and talents are valued and utilised.

What is ‘psychological safety’?

Professor Amy Edmondson from Harvard University used these criteria in her extensive work to identify psychologically safe or unsafe environments (Edmondson, 2018).  Back in 1999 she described it as:

“The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.”

This was a strong message in 1999, and it didn’t really hit the headlines at the time. It wasn’t until Google published the results of their Aristotle Project in 2016 (Rework, 2016) that people began to take note.  The project was named after Aristotle's quote:

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

This quote emphases the importance of collective efforts in achieving remarkable outcomes. The Aristotle Project was a major global study of Google’s 118 teams to discover what made the super-performers stand out from the rest.

The lessons from this extensive research are particularly relevant in today's dynamic and remote/ virtual work environments, where collaboration and innovation are essential for growth.

The results from the Aristotle Project illustrated that the key to these super-performing stand out teams proved to be psychological safety.

Benefits of psychological safety in a team

So whilst the concept and terminology may be new, the reality of psychological safety has always been there. Over the past 25 years leaders have been acknowledging it and embracing it as a powerful tool to enhance team performance.

Professor Edmondson continues to work on the subject, and in 2020 she defined psychological safety as being a shared belief:

“… that the environment is conducive to taking an interpersonal risk, like asking for help, criticising a project or admitting a mistake. It’s an energising and candid place.”

Meanwhile, in another study at around the same time, Anita Woolley (Woolley, A.W., Aggarwal, I. and Malone, T.W., 2015) was looking into the concept of Collective Intelligence, which she defined as:

“A group’s capability to collaborate and coordinate effectively, and this is often much more important for group performance than individual ability alone.”

The key learning from this study also emphasised the importance of psychological safety.

Google's research highlighted five dynamics unique to highly effective teams, but the results also revealed that psychological safety is by far the most important.  Further research by Google (Rework, 2016) shows that teams with high psychological safety:

• Have lower turnover rates;
• Are better able to capitalise on diverse ideas from other team members;
• Are more profitable;
• Are more effective.

Creating fearless organisations

Research suggests (Edmondson, 2018) that by promoting open communication and valuing every team member's contribution, leaders can build teams that:

• Meet their goals;
• Create a culture of mutual respect and trust;
• Encourage continuous improvement and collaboration.

However, establishing psychological safety is very difficult to implement.

Good managers will encourage their team members to employ courteous and considerate behaviours with the team environment:

• Take turns during a conversation;
• Listen to one another more;
• Be sensitive to how their colleagues feel;
• Notice when someone seems upset.

But true and deep psychological safety can be difficult to implement in the workplace, especially if these aren’t your natural skill sets or if your organisational culture offers a challenging environment in which to implement the changes needed.

Professor Edmondson offers some techniques for leaders to build psychological safety in their teams:

• Set the stage: Aim to get people on the same page, with common goals and a shared appreciation for what they’re up against. The most important skill is framing the work; providing clarity on what’s required of everyone and why.
  
  
• Invite participation in a way that people find compelling and genuine: Self-protection is natural, so it’s important to encourage people to engage rather than to play it safe.
  
  To support this, leaders need to adopt a mindset of humility appropriate to the situation, and engage in proactive inquiry. This enables people to voice ideas, without the fear that the outcome of the discussion is a foregone conclusion ‘because the boss already has their own answer, so why should I bother contributing?’

• Have a learning mindset, which blends humility and curiosity: This approach helps to mitigate the risk of team members feeling fearful to contribute, because there is always more to learn. In today’s complex world no one person has all the answers, so being open to acknowledging your errors and shortcomings helps.
  
  Research shows (Edmondson, 2018) that when leaders express humility, teams engage in learning behaviour more. The opposite is also true; being overly certain or arrogant can increase fear, reduce motivation, and inhibit interpersonal risk taking.

• Respond productively to the risks people take: To reinforce a climate of psychological safety, it’s important that leaders at all levels offer productive responses when team members take risks.
  
  Productive responses are characterised by three elements: expressions of appreciation, destigmatising failure and sanctioning clear violations.
  
  Research on mindsets by Professor Carol Dweck, (2008), Stanford University, supports this when she identified the importance of praising people for efforts, regardless of the outcome.  
  
  When people believe their performance is an indication of their ability or intelligence, they are less likely to take risks. But when people believe that performance reflects effort and good strategy, they are eager to try new things and far more willing to persevere.  
  
  So, praising effort is especially important in uncertain environments, where good outcomes are not always the result of good process, and vice versa.

Conclusion

The techniques above are not easy to master. They take time, effort, practice, and most importantly people need a safe and supportive environment to development techniques and get honest and open feedback.

But the advantages of cultivating a psychologically safe workplace for team members, managers, leaders and for the organisation are overwhelming in terms of productivity, efficiency and engagement.

Talent Development Programme

The Talent Development Programme is one of a suite of programmes here at Cranfield that helps individuals to develop complex interpersonal skills by providing a deeper insight into how they show up and what they need to develop further to become even more affective in their roles.

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