Psychological Safety in Agile
If Google’s data scientists say this is the top key to building the perfect team, I’m going to pay attention! In case if you haven’t heard, the concept of psychological safety (PS) is a must-have. Agreed that it’s not simple to cultivate, however I believe the consequences of PS being absent compel everyone to enhance our leadership toolkits. Unpleasant symptoms of deficient PS include turnover, quiet quitting, incivility, poor morale, low productivity, performative compliance, toxic competition, diminished well-being, and on and on. If you’re striving to uplift PS in an agile environment, let’s unpack this (the post applies in non-agile environments too, though some of the terminology may be unfamiliar).
Psychological safety is the sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up. It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves
~Hallelujah to Amy Edmondson in 1999
I once witnessed an administrator send out a team-wide message intended to motivate the labor force by saying that the organization was in the business of selling psychological safety. As if selling PS is like selling traffic cones and hard hats, but for the mind. This misstep stayed with me for a long time. I look back on it as a horrible record scratch moment.
[Sidebar for context about this organization: Please know that the mission of this organization was not established to champion diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), certainly not on a systematic, explicit level. Please know that this organization sells a static product/service that is experienced specifically for the benefit of individuals, whereas PS operates within the dynamics of organizations, teams, and dyads. Also please know that even though the organization articulated a culture of support and care among its employees, I witnessed the day-to-day experience for multiple colleagues across departments that the rhetoric was clearly an aspiration than a reality. So even if the business was successful in somehow selling PS to its customers, the sentiment was not well reflected in its internal operations.]
Back to this unwise administrator! The message betrayed a complete lack of understanding that PS is not a commodity you can merely package, let alone sell for a profit. Granted if this organization comprised of DEI professionals who were cogs in the DEI-Industrial Complex, I can understand the context for this message, however I can assure you this organization does not sell one-shot, implicit bias trainings or nonscientific employee climate surveys. I found it all the more damaging that the leader was entrusted with significant responsibility to promote employee support and engagement, yet betrayed their disinvestment in fostering PS for the organization.
You might say my assessment is unkind because surely the administrator did not intend to demoralize anyone by using the wrong words. My short response to this sentiment is that language has impact and the damage was done. Multiple offended colleagues were shaking their heads seeing this as an indicator that the broader organizational leadership had a long way to go in terms of doing their homework to upskill and then role modeling the behavior that cultivates a psychologically safe climate.
So even if the business was successful in somehow selling PS to its customers, the sentiment was not well reflected in its internal operations
I’ve worked long enough in a remote, agile environment to have observed inflection points where challenges with PS could be assessed in order to help agile practitioners decide whether PS really is flourishing on your team. And if not, what nudges or solutions are within our purview to implement that can point to holistic outcomes indicating positive momentum. As you read this, if you can come up with more reflection questions to unpack PS, I’d love to see them in the comments. Putting on my “social psychology researcher” hat, I propose a list of questions every agile team member could use to get started with better understanding your team’s climate.
[Sidebar on context about me: Social science research at the intersection of confronting bias, bystander intervention, communication styles, psychophysiological nerdiness, and well-being have been my jam for awhile. I think we can absolutely leverage evidence-based methods for uplifting DEI within an agile environment — I believe DEI work is feel good work! I wrote this post to encourage folks to be critical observers of your agile team’s culture. We can all be novice ethnographers taking notes on our team’s culture by noticing how we all work together. I see the level of a team’s PS highly informed by the safety felt by the team members most at-risk for marginalization whether due to some demographic, personality trait, appearance, seniority, etc. It’s easy enough to get a high power person feeling bold enough to speak their mind, so that individual’s behavior is not a reliable gauge of the group’s PS. You have to gather the clues and sleuth it out.]
Agile practitioners are well aware that a successful implementation of the agile framework requires the team to collaborate and communicate in a self-organized, empowered, and transparent manner. Good news —agile is like Prego: it’s in there. In other words, when you look at the elements that the agile framework endorses, it aligns with efforts to advance PS for the team. For your consideration:
Role of the Product Owner (PO) and Scrum Master (SM):
- Can team members facilitate their own agile ceremonies?
If team members are overly reliant on or deferential to the PO and SM (aka Scrum Mom), it might be an indicator the team does not feel empowered enough to take ownership of the full role they can play in the team’s healthy functioning. It’s important for the PO and SM to help set the tone through their consistency of actions and words. It’s all the more important for an approach that avoids seeking out a “Mission Accomplished” moment. Cultivating PS is not a “set it and forget it” exercise. Everyone has a role to support the continuity of a productive team culture despite inevitable change.
- Is the team protected from external stakeholders micromanaging the team?
If there are external stakeholders exercising the power to dictate the priorities and operations of the team it instills a culture of anxious compliance over a culture of safety to experiment and innovate. Worse if this disruption keeps happening mid-sprint. How well is the PO communicating and managing expectations of stakeholders? How much progress is the team making in keeping the scope of the sprint stable?
Backlog Refinement and Sprint Planning sessions:
- Do team members ask questions that create stories worth investing in?
If team members are not actively co-creating sprint goals and stories in a transparent way, there might be issues with team members’ level of shared investment in the team, maybe scope creep is a recurring anti-pattern, etc. Unsuccessful planning is a symptom in need of a diagnosis of any number of pitfalls diminishing the team.
- Do team members spend time exploring each other’s ideas toward innovating (e.g. creating prototypes) over maintaining the status quo (e.g. playing it safe)?
If team members don’t express their ideas openly and respectfully, there is a chill in the air. It could be the culture suffers from scapegoating, back-stabbing, and incivility. It could be that folks feel the need to hide, cover, or gloss over some aspect of who they are. No one can work creatively when they feel under constant threat. It may seem like we’re all adults, and yet it goes a long way to make explicit ahead of time what team member behaviors are or are not appropriate. Worse if alarming behaviors occur and are not corrected, the entire team is wiping their feet on a toxic rug.
Daily Standups:
- Is team member progress made visible via proper channels (e.g. kanban board, demos, etc)?
If team members are avoiding transparency, there may be a downward productivity spiral happening. Folks need to feel safe to callout both where things are headed and what is blocking them from getting there. If it’s not happening, it might not be specific to team members! Has a sufficient environment with support, guidance, and tools been explicitly provided to make progress easy for every team member to share?
- Do team members acknowledge blockers, capacity limits, and training needs?
If team members are only offering vague descriptions of blockers, they may be uncomfortable leaning on others to get unblocked. Some of the fear of disclosure comes from having to callout there is a something lacking in terms of resources provided, someone’s skillset, or someone’s attitude. How much does the team regularly allow for upskilling, learning, and research activity, maybe in a spike? Or does asking questions to tackle a blocker represent weakness?
- Do team members offer each other instrumental and moral support (especially in times of stress)?
If team members are behaving like a loosely affiliated group of individual contributors, there is a need for team cohesion, purpose, and stability. When the broader environment is unstable, agile offers the appeal of a reliable routine the team can leverage as its shared refuge. But when everything is implemented in a chaotic way, that lack of coordination introduces extra stress that diminishes everyone’s capacity to go above and beyond for each other.
Retrospectives:
- Do team members acknowledge missteps and focus on blameless problem-solving?
If team members are not using the time to learn from mistakes and troubleshoot pain points, the retrospective risks becoming a demotivating anti-pattern. As adults, we know that no team is perfect. But requiring vulnerability of team members requires someone taking a risk of being the first to make their dissent known. When leaders regularly role model seeing challenges as an opportunity to grow by tackling it head-on, it paves the way to show others it’s safe to air out our grievances (our scrum team affectionately called our retros “Festivus”).
- Do team members offer meaningful suggestions and commit to continuous improvement through experimentation?
If team members are not advocating for suggestions to improve, more attention is warranted to understand what motivates this team and these individuals. For example, is the broader impact of the team’s work and the rationale behind operational decisions evident to the team? Are there sufficient rewards and recognition offered to sustain engagement? A lack of suggestions for improvement is less an indicator that the team is functioning perfectly and more a concern that the team is experiencing apathy.
Last question:
- Are team members self-organizing to uphold the kind of positive work environment they want for everyone?
Fleeting perks can delight team members, yet it feels even better for team members to know and feel that they matter to the team. Once a more virtuous cycle of conveying trust and respect gains momentum, team members will be more likely to engage and invest in the team, which yields good outcomes for everyone. If you see team members stepping up to help set the right tone that brings everyone into the fold, count that toward a positive step on the ongoing journey to sustain a psychologically safe work environment.
