How to create Psychological Safety in your work culture

Product development is a team effort. It’s the job of product managers to lead cross-functional teams to deliver high-impact products to market. When the stakes are high, competition is intense, and customer needs are changing — you need your team to be effective in order to build excellent products in this fast-paced environment. What makes an effective team?

I recently came across this research from Google on the dynamics of effective teams. They found that what matters for effective team dynamics is less about who is on a team, but how the team works together. In order of importance, these are the factors that determine the effectiveness of teams:

“Psychological safety: Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.

“Dependability: On dependable teams, members reliably complete quality work on time (vs the opposite — shirking responsibilities).

“Structure and clarity: An individual’s understanding of job expectations, the process for fulfilling these expectations, and the consequences of one’s performance are important for team effectiveness. Goals can be set at the individual or group level, and must be specific, challenging, and attainable. Google often uses Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to help set and communicate short and long term goals.

“Meaning: Finding a sense of purpose in either the work itself or the output is important for team effectiveness. The meaning of work is personal and can vary: financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, or self-expression for each individual, for example.

“Impact: The results of one’s work, the subjective judgement that your work is making a difference, is important for teams. Seeing that one’s work is contributing to the organization’s goals can help reveal impact.”

I noticed that “psychological safety” was found to be the most important component of effective teams. Here is how the Google research team defined “psychological safety”:

Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.

Since it was the most important component, I wanted to dive a little deeper to understand what psychological safety is. I found this TED talk by Amy Edmonson, a professor at Harvard:

Why is psychological safety so important? It’s because the work we do nowadays is complex, and has so many unknowns and interdependencies. We need individuals on the team to be able to:

• Question the status quo in order to surface new approaches and alternatives.
• Communicate the impending risks or failure if we continue on the current course.
• Openly analyze the reasons why we failed, so that we can learn from our mistakes.

The problem, according to Amy Edmonson, is that we have been conditioned to avoid speaking up. We are focused on “impression management” — what impression are we creating on our peers and managers? We don’t want to be seen as ignorant, intrusive, or incompetent. So we don’t ask questions, offer ideas, or admit mistakes.

Unfortunately, our work cultures may reinforce this behavior. When leadership only talks about excellence, results, and accountability without also encouraging individuals to speak up — you end up with a high anxiety workplace. A work culture where employees are afraid to raise warning flags, contribute new ideas, admit and learn from mistakes.

So how can we as PMs and leaders create psychological safety on our teams? Prof Edmonson recommends three things:

1. Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. Acknowledge that there is lot of uncertainty and interdependency ahead. Tell people: “We’ve got to have everyone’s best ideas, instincts, and thinking.” This creates the rationale for speaking up.
2. Acknowledge your own fallibility. “I might miss something — need you to flag things that I miss.” Model the behavior of admitting your own mistakes, and earnestly looking for ways to improve and learn. This creates more safety to speak up.
3. Model curiosity. Ask a lot of questions. Seek to understand. This creates a necessity for people to speak up.

I discussed this video with some of the other PMs on my team, and we identified five other practices that can create psychological safety:

1. Watch for behavior that discourages people to speak up. “That’s a stupid idea.” “We’ve already tried that before.” “That will never work.” “Do you even know what you’re talking about?” “How could you make that mistake?” Comments like these shut down new ideas, questions, concerns, or admissions. Don’t engage in this behavior. If you see others on your team engaging in it, intervene on behalf of the person speaking up.
2. Approach and invite people to speak up. Pay attention to who is speaking, and who is silent. Don’t let any single person dominate the discussion. If engineers or designers are not speaking up, explicitly draw them out and ask them for their thoughts. Do this especially if you know someone has a perspective, but appears to be holding themselves back.
3. Build relationships to build trust. Trust begins with the other people on your team feeling that you care about them as people. It’s not just about the project or launch. You have to care about them as people. It’s always hard for PMs to find time for offsites, lunches, etc — but these are so important. You have to establish some kind of personal connection that translates into trust.
4. Hold retros. Do a sprint retrospective after every iteration (assuming you’re following an agile development process). This creates a model for framing the work as a learning problem, not just an execution problem. Retrospectives get the team comfortable with acknowledging mistakes, sharing lessons learned. They make it a cultural norm to speak up and share mistakes as well as ideas for improvement.
5. Celebrate good work, in addition to wins and results. Celebrate high quality work — meaning that the effort and process was excellent, or the lessons learned were important — even if the immediate results were not great. This is in the spirit of the growth mindset — you want individuals on your team to feel like the work itself and the process of learning and improving is rewarding. By striving for continuous improvement and excellent quality of work, over time you’re likely to achieve great results. (If you’re interested in learning more about this, Bill Walsh of 49ers fame wrote about his philosophy of focusing on continuous improvement, not victory. I captured my notes here.)

In the fast-paced, uncertain, and interdependent world in which we live, we need our teams to be at their best if we want our products to achieve successful results. According to research from Google on the dynamics of effective teams, psychological safety is one of the most important factors for team effectiveness. Without psychological safety, you miss out on great ideas, important concerns, and the wisdom to avoid making (or repeating) mistakes. There are several actions that product managers can take to create psychological safety on our teams, ranging from framing the work as a learning problem to modeling curiosity to holding retros. Next time you’re interacting with your team, try out some of these best practices. Hopefully you’ll bring more psychological safety to your team, and thereby increase your team’s effectiveness.