How to model the behaviours required to build a psychologically safe team
As an Agile team coach one of the aspects of my role is to create a safe environment for the teams I am working with so they can, without fear, experiment, learn, and grow. In doing so, I create the conditions for my team to make better products.
Psychological safety is a term first introduced by Amy Edmonson, a Harvard Researcher and defined as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes”. Her research along with others such as Google’s on Team Effectiveness demonstrated that Psychological Safety was the most important component in building high performing teams. This makes sense: when teams don’t feel safe, they don’t take risks, they don’t challenge status-quo, they don’t experiment and therefore they, and consequently the organisations they belong to, don’t learn and grow.
The teams recognised as highly effective share this common belief that they’re safe to risk taking, they don’t fear to appear ignorant, inexperienced or troublesome, they’re confident admitting a mistake, asking for help or offering a different view.
Creating a safe environment requires each team member to contribute to it and can therefore take time. There are however steps you can take on your own in order to model the behaviours, here are a few I do my best to take:
1.Share your vulnerabilities
In her book ‘The Gifts of Imperfection’ Brene Brown says ‘Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.’ By sharing your own fears, doubts and uncertainties you make it ok to not be perfect and not have all the answers, you are demonstrating that we are all in this together.
During my first project as an Agile coach I frequently chickened away from difficult situations, feeling too inexperienced or unqualified to ask questions to the team; I didn’t dare challenge them much and often held back observations. During our end of project retrospective I took a few minutes to share this with the team. I told them that at times I was so scared that I wasn’t a good enough coach that it made me hide away rather than seize the project as an opportunity to learn. Sharing how vulnerable I felt at the time felt liberating and helped me connect further with the team.
2.Call out blame (and don’t blame)
Blaming is unconstructive and a lot of the time it has the result of suppressing any will to take risks and seeds hard feelings. Unfortunately this idea of blaming instead of learning and moving forward constructively is deeply anchored in our culture.
Recently I read the following description of ‘accountability’ in an internal document: “The person you blame when things go wrong”. The author of the description was fast to edit the copy and didn’t need an explanation about what was not ok with it, but this example just shows how anchored the idea of blame is in everyone’s mind and why it’s important to call it out whenever possible.
3.Be open to hearing both sides of the story
When you give feedback to someone, be open to hearing the other person’s experience of the situation. What was going on for them at the time? How did they find the same experience? Hearing out their story will contribute to building a trusted and safe relationship.
(I elaborate about this point and about sharing feedback in a previous article.)
4.Go outside your comfort zone
Get involved in initiatives or projects involving topics and technologies you know nothing about. The aim is not to add to your workload but to give you a new challenge that will make you learn new things and challenge your way of thinking.
I was recently offered the opportunity to become a Business Mentor for a group of Bristol University students. I initially declined the invitation as I felt I didn’t have much to offer to them. I reconsidered my answer when I heard they didn’t have many women mentors, and thought I could give it a try. I am so pleased I went beyond my initial fears and doubts as so far the experience has been very rewarding for me and I received positive feedback from the students I am mentoring. This made me challenge the stories I tell myself about who I am and what I am capable of. Every time I push myself outside my comfort zone I strengthen my empathy for those who also do as I understand better what it takes. I also hope that modelling this behaviour can encourage others to do the same.
5.Be aware of your own bias
It doesn’t take much for a positive or negative opinion to be formed in our brain: how someone talks, how an idea is presented to you, the state of mind you are in when you come across something for the first time, etc. In fact it sometimes only takes a few seconds!
Some of your bias will be unconscious but some of it won’t and you should therefore regularly step back and wonder what bias towards people, ideas, tools you may have. Simply raising this bias to your awareness on a regular basis will help you counter-balance it.
I am fully aware that I can be very quick at coming up with opinions and judgements, but rather than labelling people and things with super-glued stickers I like to think that my initial opinions are written on sticky-notes and I make a conscious effort to regularly revisit them.
What do you think of these steps? And have you got others you would want to add to the list? If so I would love to hear about them in comments here, or on twitter @cecfrombelgium.
