Psychological Safety — Deep Dive : An Eye Opener

Danish S
Danish S
Nov 8 · 4 min read

Hello Folks,

I would like to share some work which i did on Psychological Safety in my recent engagement. I conducted a survey assessment randomly with some of the Agile teams. The assessment was set of simple questionnaires divided into 4 parameters as MISTAKES, OPENNESS, CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS and TEAM BONDING.

The whole idea to do this survey is to find out whether Psychological Safety is MORE or LESS in a team.

I collated the result of 5 teams and myself along with SM’s did a good Data mining around the result that we got from the team members. We were able to spot the 5 teams under the following zone as shown below :

So according to the above graph everything looks good and most of the teams are placed in the zones where they have to be :-) But it was not true.

Myself along with the Scrum Masters of these teams did a deep dive analysis and came up with some logical conclusion. Those are as follows:

1) We observed a pattern here from the 5 teams that all these team’s answers looks similar where people have agreed on many of the things which make these teams to fall under COMFORT / LEARNING ZONE.

2) Based on the SM’s observation for their teams, it was seen that none of their teams could be in the Learning / Comfort Zone and so we felt that none of the teams have given the survey correctly. It seems like people have played safe here and we did not find any teams falling under problematic/challenging zone (APATHY and FEAR ZONE)

3) One analogy we made together is that all people giving the answers to make themselves safe which is strongly disagreed by the their SM’s determines that all these teams does not feel Psychologically Safe OR they should have been in FEAR/APATHY ZONE if they have given it openly.

4) As we have to come to some conclusion, we did more data mining around it rather than continuing with the survey of other teams. We actually divided the 4 scenarios and did some analysis around the answers, like for which scenarios people find Psychological safety issue. When we did this exercise together and we found the below result

In the above analysis, Thumbs Up means more Psychological Safety and Thumbs Down is Less. It is seen that the Team results for MISTAKES is high that means they are more Psychologically Safe to make mistakes in their teams or to pursue others mistake. However after discussion with SM’s of these teams, it is found that none of the teams had answered this parameter correctly. So according to them people are not feeling safe to make mistakes.

So basically what i mean is there is no Psychological Safety for any of these teams in 3 of the parameters which are a) MISTAKES b) OPENNESS AND c) CHANGES AND IMPROVEMENTS.

And that’s how we concluded our deep dive on Psychological Safety.

Now few conclusions from my side on this exercise that we performed :

1) We did not do any solution’s regarding the problematic area because this workshop was more of an eye opener to everyone where the actionable items heavily comes from Management or Leadership Team.

2) Psychological Safety is all about culture building and people need safe environment to work so its not one person responsibility.

3) The teams which took the survey were not open as they might have felt that its just another survey without any ACTION so the reality has not come up.

4) Some of the bigger challenge or questions to be addressed are :

Does these kind of survey happened in the past where they have opened up and no action was made ?

Are they still influence by the management to make give any response because at the end of it they will be questioned for it ?

Are they Safe in the parameters which i mentioned above? What are your thoughts?

Until the Psychological Safety is more in the Organization you will never see the impact of change in people mindset.

DO you agree or not ??

Thanks,

Danish

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