There’s no team without trust.
-Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google
Do you believe that your workplace is safe for interpersonal risk, such as speaking up with ideas, questions, or permission for candor? This type of culture is important for the well-being of your teammates and for the effectiveness of your team to be agile and productive. We are living in times that are uncertain and complex. This requires a team to be using the full talents and ingenuity of all their team members. However, if some people don’t share, you miss out on the reservoir of potential that you already have right there in your team.
For this to happen, your culture needs to have psychological safety. Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. She is a leading expert in this area. She defines psychological safety as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.”
I was in a meeting with other coaches where we were discussing the topic of psychological safety and how there are five safety needs. Each person can have their own continuum from high to low for each need. Let’s look at each of these needs:
Five Psychological Safety Needs
- Predictability: This is the need for consistency, reliability, stability, certainty, and commitment.
- Options: This is the need to have choices and a sense of control. This can be a continuum of autonomy.
- Equity: This is a need for fairness. This is the individual being treated fairly, along with an environment where others are treated fairly too.
- Status: This is how you are being perceived by others. It is a need to be well-regarded and how you compare to others.
- Trust: This is having a sense of belonging in a group. You feel a shared loyalty.
Identifying Psychological Safety Needs in Self and Others
As a leader, it is important to be aware of these psychological safety needs for yourself and for others on your team. If you see a member on your team being reticent, it might be helpful to reflect on these 5 needs. How do their behaviors reflect if they might be high or low on a need? Are your and the teams’ interactions with them impacting those needs?
A tool you could use to help identify individual’s safety needs is the SCARF Assessment. This tool helps you to identify the social motivators of a person. These motivations can be similar to the 5 needs of psychological safety. By having people on your team complete this assessment, it can allow for self-awareness and discussions about each person’s social motivators and how this relates to them feeling safe to speak up and share with others.
Application of Psychological Safety Needs
People also tend to be their best when they are in a learning zone. This is where they are open to discovery and thoughtful discussions that lead the group into novel territory. Amy Edmundson states that groups move into this zone when psychological safety is high, and standards are high.
For standards to be high, there needs to be clear expectations. This is where you make sure that the goals/ outcomes are clear along with the value of the variety of roles each person plays. You also need the rules and norms of the culture to include meeting psychological safety needs. It is the clarity of goals, roles, and rules for a team. Here are some examples that I have witnessed in teams:
A team had a member that rarely spoke up. She was high on the psychological safety need of predictability. So, to help increase her feeling of safety, the team started sharing an agenda for the meeting ahead of time. This allowed her to develop a list of questions or thoughts she had before each meeting. This helped her to know what to expect for the meeting, provided safety through some predictability, and therefore helped her to be more confident to share.
Another person on the team was high on the psychological safety needs of status and options. He identified that he could be triggered to feel low safety (and therefore anxious) when comparing himself to others. By having his role clarified and the value the team saw in him, this helped to fill his status safety need. His team leader also clarified where he had autonomy in his role to make decisions on his own. This empowered him in his role and gave him a greater sense of control over his responsibilities which also increased his options psychological safety need.
Summary
How do you build psychological safety with your team? Being aware of team dynamics is a part of facilitating a team well. As a leader you may have a strength in noticing team dynamics, or it may be an area where you struggle. This is where you add to your toolbox possibilities that can help you in your unique leadership style to lead well. For example, is there another member of your team who has a strength in seeing team dynamics and can help you in facilitating? Or, can using an assessment, like SCARF, be a tool you can use? Or do you have a mentor or coach with whom you can discuss ideas to build psychological safety for yourself and your unique team? What next step will you take today?