Psychological Safety 101 — Part 1
A 5-part series to build trust and safety in your teams
TLDR;
The point you need to remember is this: If you don’t take time to know your employee, you cannot create a safe environment for them. Ask questions, or risk having your ignorance come back to bite you later. If you don’t follow the letter of your new law, it all falls apart.
Why I wrote this
I’ve been working in tech the past 20 years, and I’ve integrated enough teams as an individual contributor, and as a leader to know it’s no easy task. The thing about technology is that it creates deep bonds, or deep divides. You’re in the trenches! That hotfix has to go out or ELSE! It’s an exhilarating feeling and this depth has an impact on teams. Existing teams have history and, usually, emotional baggage. New teams need to feel each other out and find their place in the pecking order of expertise. In both cases, they are wary of you, their new “leader” because everyone has had a bad boss at some point.
As a manager working with transversal technology teams that span product, engineering, and all other areas of the business, I can tell you the task is even harder. These are the teams who are most often poorly positioned, with overlapping scope, weak missions, lack of staff, etc. I’ve found something magical that empowered us to “fix” all these things to become high performing teams.
The magic ingredient is feeling SAFE. This is not the same thing as trust. Here’s the difference from my point of view: Trust is when you can rely on someone, and believe what they say. If you have trust with your manager, you know that if they say they will try to get you that raise, they will do it.
Safety hits a little different. It’s trust + speaking up + mutual respect + the right to learn from mistakes. In a nutshell, it’s a lack of judgement coupled with an abundance of support. When a team feels safe, they will tell you what you need to hear, clear the toxic from the team, and start to take bigger swings knowing that they can learn from them and still have a job the next day.
In the context of mass layoffs, I think safety is the capital all employees are looking for. It’s the reason our teams’ shared ENPS went from -60 to +90 in less than 6 months. It’s the reason my retention rate was 80% for years, and my manager NPS was 100. It’s the reason my team members cried when I told them I was leaving my last job.
Safety is so much harder to build because it requires a different set of expectations to be clarified. I doubled down on the relationships with the questions in this article, and soon after, it created a level of performance and loyalty that got noticed.
I started getting pings from other managers asking me how I did it. I’ve been asked how to help people build safety in teams so many times, I decided it was time to write the manual. Note that I’m skipping a lot of things I think are “normal know-how”, but I might follow up in a series with some of those or ones with an angle specifically for women or minorities in tech.
Below is my script, and why I ask those questions. I hope it helps you to be an ally, a good manager, and generally, a decent person. Most of all I hope it helps you to set up safety in your team(s). I would love to hear your trust building techniques as well, feel free to find me on LinkedIn or share your thoughts in comments.
When I take on a new people in my team, or join a new team, I start a profile on each person. It covers 5 parts:
- Their goals in the role now, and in the future.
- How to motivate them.
- How to give feedback.
- How they like to have fun.
- Sensitive points.
Later I’ll add other sections:
- Achievements aligned to their next role’s technical skills.
- List of soft skills they demonstrate in the next role they want.
- Skill gaps I’ve noted and want to help them with.
- Trainings we should set up for them to close skill gaps.
Below are the questions and discussions I use to kick off the first part of the profile in 5 main steps: Making them feel secure, getting to know them, preparing the work environment for them, and walking the walk.
1. State your intentions: they are welcome, trusted, supported, and safe.
“First, I want to welcome you, and solidify the trust between us. Here’s why you’re important to us…”
- Tell your new joiner in 1 or 2 specific ways how important they are to the organization and to the team.
“I trust you in this role because…”
- Tell them why you chose them by naming experience, skill, or other things that earned your trust. This will immediately reassure your new joiner that they are legitimate.
- This is especially important for minorities in a team — it dispels the “token hire” feelings.
- It’s not 100% on you to resolve impostor syndrome in your team members. You can however, make them feel like they belong. I think this point alone deserves a *whole* post, so I won’t go into it here.
“Next, I should clarify my role. As a manager, I want to be more than someone who reviews your work twice a year. I will help you grow as much as I can, and see it as an important part of our work together. Can you tell me about something you’d like to work on that I can help with?”
- Let them know that in addition to clarifying the direction and priority of the team’s work, your role is to be a career coach, reputation and skills developer, and guide to internal politics.
- You are someone to help them build confidence in their abilities, set clear expectations, and empower them to grow to their full potential.
“I’d also like to help you feel secure in this space. I’m not perfect, and neither are you. I expect us to help each other grow in transparent, honest, and respectful ways. Here’s how you can talk to me constructively when something’s not working for you….”
- Growth mindset is created by explaining that you tolerate imperfection. It’s on you to create the spirit of continuous learning.
- You’re not malicious, right? Help your new joiner know that you will always accept constructive advice to make the workplace more inclusive, supportive, constructive, and equitable. This might be the most important step in the entire process.
- If your new joiner doesn’t feel like they can bring up issues to you, they will suffer in silence and your team’s behaviors will never improve. Multiply this across an entire organization, and it’s a recipe for toxicity to thrive.
- Tell them one or two ways you like to be approached so they have a safe way to bring up concerns to you. Give them the exact words. It can serve as a code to prepare you both for the conversation before it even starts. I like to use something like:
“Remember when you said I could come to you if something wasn’t working for me? Well, we should talk about ____”.
