TSLH #060: 5 Actions To Create Psychological Safety In Your Team

Psychological safety belongs to these words that every leader has heard or keeps hearing about. Most leaders understand that in order to have a high performing team, they must create psychological safety in their team.

Psychological safety is defined as “the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” This is the definition of Amy C. Edmonson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School.

The key question is often not what is needed to have a high performing team. But rather, it is how to create psychological safety in a team, especially if you are the new leader of that team. Frankly though, what I am telling you below can apply in any situation.

There are tons of things and steps you can implement to create psychological safety on your team. I’ll offer you 5 actions that I have seen consistenly done by the very best leaders I have learned from. Each of these 5 actions alone can already put you on the right path to high performance. If you excel at all 5, then, you will be close to leadership greatness!

Listen and ask for different perspectives. One of the most effective actions you can use to create psychological safety on your team is to show that you don’t have all the answers and you value the opinions of others, and for that matter of everyone on the team. When listening and asking for other perspectives, you show your team that although you are the leader and you will make the final decision, you need input from other people (the team) in order to nurture your thought process and make the right decision.

When you want to do that, just make it clear to your team that you want their feedback and make it also very clear that you don’t expect everyone to agree with you and that it’s OK to disagree. Explain that this is what you need.

Then, ask questions like:

Don’t forget to thank the team for their feedback. It does take courage to speak up in front of you, the leader. Don’t underestimate the effort needed.

The biggest challenge you will have when you want feedback from your team is that some people will speak up and pretty much steal the show from anyone else. That means there is a risk that you do not hear the dissent voices or all the different opinions. This could be because of several reasons: People are introverts and don’t speak up in meetings, they are afraid to voice their concern, they are from an underrepresented group, etc. As the leader, it is your responsibility to hear all the voices, not only the loudest.

Here are a couple of questions to ask to ensure you give a chance to everone to speak up in a safe space:

Be vulnerable and express your own emotions. The best leaders I have worked with are able to be vulnerable, show emotions. By doing so, they show their human nature and invite the team members to do the same. This helps create psychological safety in the group.

Key here is to understand that as the leader, you need to control your emotions and you certainly want to make sure that the team members control their emotions too. You don’t want to have outbursts that will destroy psychological safety. Having emotions means that you recognize them and are able to express them in a way that is calm and feels safe for the team members.

Here are a few things you can say to show vulnerability:

Have fun and laugh. You work 8 hours a day (at least), 5 days a week. That’s an awful lot of time spent with other people who are not family nor friends. You’d better make sure that you do have some fun and can laugh at times. Otherwise, things will feel miserable at work, for you the leader, and also for your team members.

Having fun and laughing at work can help create psychological safety because you show your team members that even dramatic situations can be turned into something we can laugh at – at least temporarily – and then find the energy from that laugh to address the problem.

Setting a humorous tone at the beginning of a meeting can help make the meeting more efficient. Laughing about unintended consequences of a small mistake with the rest of the group can diffuse the feeling of failure or disappointment or shame that someone on the team may feel because of a mistake they made.

Here are 2 examples that I used with my team, to give you an idea of what you can do here:

Be very aware though that humor in one culture may sound inappropriate or insulting in another. When you’re unsure, ask! You can even ask in a fun way, just to lighten the atmosphere.

Be curious and listen for what is not said. I have said it several times in this newsletter: You will be a very efficient if you can listen not only with your ears, but also with your eyes and your own feelings, intuition, curiosity.

Putting these skills into use will create a lot of psychological safety. This is because you will recognize that what is not said is as important (if not more important sometimes) than what is said.

When someone in your team or in a meeting says something, look for clues for what is unsaid: Is someone having a body language that suggests resistance or refusal? Does someone raise their eyes thinking maybe “what a stupid idea” but not saying it? Are there emotions that you feel in the room that are not expressed? This is what you are looking for and want to see expressed, because when this happens, this gives all the voices of the team a chance to speak up and this helps create the sense that this is safe to speak.

A few things you can say or ask:

Use failure for learnings. Failure or making a mistake is usually a traumatic event for anyone in a company. There is immediate fear of being judged, labeled incompetent, of the mistake being cascaded up to senior leadership. People may fear consequences for their jobs.

Your role as the leader of the team is to protect your team from these feelings and be clear about the fact that you will support people learning about mistakes and failure instead of judging and blaming. This is a key behavior you must demonstrate to create the needed trust in the team that will eventually lead to psychological safety. If people cannot trust that they can fail or make a mistake without adverse consequences, they will not be engaged and will refrain from collaborating.

The best model you can use to create psychological safety around failure and mistakes is to use that three-step template:

To do their best, your team members must feel safe, listened to, and supported by you – the leader – as well as the rest of the team. If you can get to that point, you will have created psychological safety. When that happens, take a step back and observe all the great things that you team is delivering because they feel safe and they are fully engaged.