Building a High-Performing Team with Psychological Safety

I am sitting in a room with the leadership team here at Gusto. We’re discussing future product strategy. After absorbing the presenter’s briefing, I have a few questions. Not just any questions. Questions that challenge our current strategy. Questions that could be seen as contentious and divisive. Questions that I’m afraid to ask.

I know that talking about the “tough stuff” can drive the business forward, but still, I am paralyzed. I am unsure if I should bring these issues up. Did I already “disagree and commit” to this strategy in a previous meeting? Will people perceive my questions to be of malicious intent? Will I be ostracized for bringing up these issues? I’m afraid to share my thoughts for fear of being punished or embarrassed. But if everyone in the room is afraid to share their thoughts, then collaboration breaks down, issues aren’t raised, and the business suffers. Fear and silence could be our downfall.

Our Insights & Operations team at Gusto has incubated and built 10+ teams over the past four years. Through these experiences, we have discovered what many scholars have put forth in recent years: the key to high-performing teams is having both high performance standards and high psychological safety.

The concept of high standards is generally well understood, but psychological safety is not. Per Amy Edmundson, psychological safety can be broadly defined as “a climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves.” It is not about being nice. It is not another word for trust. Psychological safety exists when people feel they can speak up, offer ideas, and ask questions anytime without fear of being punished or embarrassed.

In May 2018, our team started a quarterly survey to measure standards and safety. Specifically, we posed two questions on a 5-point Likert scale (i.e., asking for responses that range from strongly agree to strongly disagree):

1. “We set high performance standards on our team.”
2. “I feel safe to take risks without fear of judgment or negative consequences.”

An overwhelming 94% of survey respondents agreed/strongly agreed that our team set high standards. However, only 68% responded agree/strongly agree to question two. I was shocked. I had been expecting the exact opposite results. Based on this survey, we started on a journey of learning and experimentation to cultivate more psychological safety on the team. Here are some of the things we did that worked:

• Talk about psychological safety. We started by sharing our survey results with our teams in both department-wide meetings and smaller groups. In department-wide meetings, we introduced terminology and research. In smaller groups, we used the data as a backdrop to invite feedback. For example, Riley Bingham, our Product Operations lead, brainstormed with his team to generate ideas on what might create a safer environment in their 1:1 meetings, then implemented those ideas to find what worked for individuals.
• Model psychological safety via vulnerability. We started an optional gathering for people in our department to share something about their lives. Modeling off of Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability, we then asked for volunteers in our team to take a risk and disclose something about themselves with vulnerability. We’ve had over fifteen of these optional gatherings now, in which we’ve learned about our team member’s experiences as immigrants, through depression, with spirituality, and much more. This has helped us know one another more deeply and create mutual empathy in meetings and beyond.
• Positive reinforcement. We began recognizing and celebrating the small, often under-appreciated actions that individuals took to model psychological safety. For example, when someone broke the silence in a meeting, or when someone sought to understand a contentious point instead of immediately disagreeing, or when someone asked a tough question that they were hesitant to bring up, I would strive to provide timely positive feedback on that specific action.
• Confront my mistakes. I also had to come to terms with tough truths in how I was making our climate less safe. Sometimes I messaged people in a meeting while someone else was speaking. Sometimes I entered a conversation with judgment, not curiosity. Sometimes I didn’t share the intent of my words, and people felt confused or afraid. In the past I would rationalize why this behavior was okay. But to grow I had to let that go, apologize when I was making the climate unsafe, and change my behavior. For example, when I have a spurious idea in the middle of a meeting now, I write it in my notes to share that with the right people afterwards. This way, I can keep my focus on the presenter’s material and let them know with my actions that I respect their time.

Ready to build psychological safety with your team? Here’s what I recommend:

1. Educate yourself, starting with The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson and Google Project Aristotle.
2. Send a simple survey to your team to ask how they feel about the team’s standards and safety.
3. Bring the team together to share what you found. Consider having this conversation outside of the typical work environment, such as at an offsite.
4. Tell the team that you are working on psychological safety, model the behavior of asking for feedback, and take risks within meetings to speak up yourself.
5. Get ready for a journey. For us, there was no “a-ha moment.” Rather, there were moment-to-moment choices we made to promote a safe environment, such as welcoming and asking for feedback consistently, not punishing smart failures, and asking generative questions.

After making the changes, we took another survey three months later in which we landed with 83% agreeing that this was a safe environment. More importantly, our meetings became more lively, conflict-rich, and generative. We have a long way to go. For example, our surveys today are still anonymous, which seems inconsistent with a psychologically safe environment. But, we are privileged to have an opportunity to try to get better every day.

And how did that meeting go where I was afraid to speak up? In the spirit of modeling safety, I asked my questions. While I did not get specific answers in the meeting, folks came up to me afterwards to share their perspectives with candor. It was a step in the right direction and another example that when it comes to building safety, the only wrong answer is staying silent.