Psychological Safety: The Lynchpin Of Learning
This article is the first of a series exploring the key ideas behind the CultivateMe methodology for learning at work. To start, I’m going to explore the Three Pillars of a growth culture: Home, Edge, and Groove which come from the excellent book An Everyone Culture. Home, Edge, and Groove are, respectively, psychological safety, self-awareness, and regular practice. This article focuses on Home, and how it’s the lynchpin for everything from innovation to efficiency to development and growth.
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety is the ability to be vulnerable without fear of being harshly judged.
- Alice shares a risky idea at the team meeting.
- Bob admits the latest marketing campaign was a dud and explains why it failed and what he learned.
- Cristina isn’t quite sure she can pull off this new project but she volunteers anyway.
- Dakota proposes a clever approach to the new implementation, one that’s radically different from what the boss just suggested.
As Google discovered with Project Aristotle, it’s the most reliable predictor of outstanding team performance.
Psychological safety is a belief about a group norm. It’s a belief about how people feel they are viewed by others. Alice believes she won’t have her idea laughed at, so she shares it. Bob believes he won’t be punished harshly for the campaign failure, so he admits it and learns.
When a team (or an organization) has a high degree of psychological safety, people bring new ideas forward. They extend themselves to help others, whether or not it’s advantageous to their career. Psychological safety fosters healthy debate. People give feedback to one another to help them grow. They admit their weaknesses so they might develop them into strengths.
How to kill psychological safety
A strong sense of Home has to be maintained. It takes work. It’s the sum of all sorts of little actions by lots of people. And it doesn’t take much to squash this sense of team safety:
- Alice’s risky idea gets laughed at.
- Bob’s campaign failure gets him demoted.
- Cristina is publicly told she has no business volunteering for that project.
- The boss tells Dakota, “that’s not the way we do things around here,” and shuts her down.
When psychological safety is lacking in a culture, things get ugly. Politics and posturing prevail. People spend enormous energy managing their image and thinking defensively rather than giving colleagues the benefit of the doubt. Useful advice goes unshared. Great ideas are kept secret for fear of ridicule. You get a lot of “yes men” and “yes women” and not a lot of original thinking.
If that sort of behavior persists, guess what you’re NOT going to see a lot of… new ideas, professional growth, enthusiasm, healthy risk-taking, or novel solutions. People are going to keep their mouths shut and look out for themselves rather than take a risk that could benefit the client or the company.
Common misconceptions of psychological safety
Let’s go a bit further. Let’s define psychological safety by what it isn’t. Psychological safety is not…
- Trust. While it feels similar, trust is a phenomenon between two people about how they will act in the future. Bob trusts Alice to send that important email tomorrow… just like she said she would. That’s Bob’s perception of Alice. Whereas psychological safety is about how Bob thinks Alice perceives him. Bob feels psychologically safe around Alice. I suppose you could say that Bob trusts Alice will give him the benefit of the doubt, but now we’re just debating semantics.
- Being nice. Psychological safety is not lying to people in order to protect their egos. In fact, at its essence it’s about candor. You might say it’s candor with kindness. It’s about giving people the benefit of the doubt so that you can address the truth of the matter and make something useful of a potentially uncomfortable topic.
- Lowering standards. It’s also not saying that failure is okay or that poor performance is no big deal. Psychological safety paves the way to have more rigorous standards because it enables you to talk about performance in honest terms. In fact, the combination of psychological safety and high standards is what super-charges learning and growth in an organization.
How to build psychological safety
Okay, this sounds great, but how does one develop psychological safety in their team or their organization?
Amy Edmonson, who introduced the concept back in 1999, offers these techniques for team leaders (or any individual, really):
- Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. This is a central idea to the CultivateMe model. In every endeavor there is an opportunity for growth, to discover new knowledge or understanding of yourself, your colleagues, or the work itself. Focus on that.
- Acknowledge your own fallibility. This can be especially hard for inexperienced managers who feel they need to have all the answers, but a simple “I’m not really sure, what do you think?” can dramatically change the dynamic of a conversation and open the floodgate of ideas and feedback.
- Model curiosity and ask lots of questions. Psychological safety breeds curiosity and questions. So jump start it by showing what that looks like. Signal that “this is what we do here.”
Here is Amy Edmonson’s TEDx talk about psychological safety from 2014. Google’s toolkit for managers offers 28 ways to improve psychological safety on your teams.
Finally, try this set of questions from Jake Herway to guide a team discussion that will build a foundation of psychological safety.
- What can we count on each other for?
- What is our team’s purpose?
- What is the reputation we aspire to have?
- What do we need to do differently to achieve that reputation and fulfill our purpose?
Part two of this series will focus on Edge, or self-awareness, and how it contributes to a growth culture at an agency.
CultivateMe is a talent development agency for agencies. We help agencies establish a repeatable, scalable, and sustainable system for growing their people and winning the talent war. To get fresh ideas on how to improve learning at work, sign up for our newsletter.
