Psychological Safety & High-Performing Teams

High Performing Teams & Psychological Safety at Work:

Psychological safety is the foundation for team performance, whether we’re oriented towards consistent quality, innovation, adaptation, safety or a combination of all outcomes. When people feel psychologically safe, they feel more able to speak up with idea, questions, concerns or mistakes. Let’s just take a quick dive into each of those and examine the relationship with performance:

Ideas: when we feel safe to suggest ideas, including “half baked” or unfinished ideas, we’re more likely to surface the really good ones. Through this, we’re better placed to innovate, experiment, and find better ways to do things. It doesn’t mean we’re going to innovate or experiment in unsuitable contexts, but we’ll feel safe in discussing how we can improve and do things differently in safe and appropriate ways.

Questions: It’s only through asking questions that we can address the gaps in our knowledge. Asking questions allows us to find out how to do something more effectively, quicker, safer, and understand the reason for doing it in the first place. It’s also how we can ask for help with a task, reducing risk, burnout, and sharing learning.

Concerns: This is where psychological safety reduces the risk of disaster. Myriad disasters, from Chernobyl and Challenger to the VW emissions scandal and the Global Financial Crisis, have in their causal factors, an inability or ineffectiveness in speaking up with concerns. From a nurse speaking up about a surgeon making a potential mistake, to a software developer speaking up about the lack of accessibility in their software, raising concerns is essential to avoid things going wrong.

Mistakes: A lack of psychological safety means that mistakes are hidden until they become too big to hide. In teams with high psychological safety, we admit our mistakes and enable everyone else in the group to learn from it – meaning that we don’t keep the learning to ourselves, and enabling everyone else to avoid making the same mistake. Plus, admitting the mistake as soon as it happens means we can mitigate the impact of it – we can take action to ensure the mistake doesn’t cause a disaster, and the impact of it is reduced.

We can see, therefore, that psychological safety is essential to team performance. But that’s not the whole story.

Trust and psychological safety safety are pivotal in team effectiveness, especially in remote and distributed work contexts, where often, the real issue lies in ineffective management rather than the nature of remote work itself.

Psychological safety is aligned with the empowerment of teams and people over strict rules, including “return to office” mandates, and is also fundamental to addressing the challenges faced by marginalised and under-represented groups in traditional office environments, underscoring the need for leaders to be mindful of historical and social dynamics in fostering psychological safety.

In respect to speaking up, the stakes are simply higher for some than others.

There are various factors that may inhibit people from voicing concerns in apparently psychologically safe environments, ranging from past personal experience to systemic and cultural issues: we must not ignore the psychological safety “backpack” that we bring with us to our teams and the workplace. Team diversity relies on people feeling psychologically safe: we cannot feel included if we don’t feel psychologically safe, and inclusion is fundamental to diversity. Diversity also improves team performance, but only when people feel psychologically safe.

Just because we might feel safe in a team, doesn’t mean everyone does.

A team is only as safe as the least safe member.

There are so many things that we can do to foster greater psychological safety and team performance, and the two are usually intertwined in a virtuous cycle: the greater psychological safety we foster, the greater the potential for team performance. And the greater the team performance and the more we build good habits, the greater our psychological safety becomes. We should be careful not to conflate psychological safety with simply being “nice” – that road leads to toxic positivity and potential for the weaponisation of psychological safety. Being “nice” doesn’t lead to candour, but we should make an effort to be kind – which can sometimes involve telling difficult truths, asking awkward questions, or challenging people.

Psychological safety is not enough to foster team performance on its own.

A psychologically safe group isn’t necessarily high performing. In order to reach a high performing state, teams also need:

• Well defined, ambitious goals.
• Structure, clear roles, responsibilities, processes and priorities.
• Care, ambition, and meaning: we need to be invested in our success.
• Shared norms, expectations, and behaviour standards.
• Domain expertise, knowledge and experience.
• Information sharing capability, including practices to learn from work.
• Manageable workloads and non-utilised time.
• A higher ratio of planned vs unplanned work.
• Definitions of “done” and “finished”.
• Opportunities to reflect, both practically and emotionally.
• Permission to rest & to take a break.
• And many other characteristics and capabilities too.

See Google’s Project Aristotle for the essential industry research on psychological safety and team performance.

A team cannot be “too” psychologically safe.

There are multiple articles and studies that purport to show that a team can be “too” psychologically safe, and that some teams with very high psychological safety actually perform less well. These studies fundamentally misunderstand or misrepresent what psychological safety is, and neglect the crucial point above, that psychological safety is not enough on its own. For example, a highly psychologically safe team who become lax are not lax due to high psychological safety, they’re lax because they lack high standards, clear goals, or ambition. It is never useful for someone to feel unable to speak up with an idea, question concern, or mistake.

For example, in Cockpit Resource Management (CRM) training in aviation, people are taught how to create environments where people can candidly and confidently speak up to power and hierarchy. At no point over decades of successful CRM training does the literature state that we should help people feel safe to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes, “but not too much!”. CRM has been the most successful safety programme in human history, with proven success over decades and millions of flights each year.

If a team begins to exhibit non-constructive or negative behaviour when psychologically safe, it’s not the psychological safety that caused it. It’s simply that once you remove the constraint of interpersonal risk, other constraints become evident.

Team performance isn’t the only reason we foster psychological safety.

Psychological safety isn’t just about group performance – it’s part of our right to present our true identity at work. Psychological safety, as Amy Edmondson states, is about being able to bring your full self to work. Bringing your full self to work means people can exhibit their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, background, family status, and any other part of their identity without judgment.

Even if psychological safety had no effect on team performance, it would still be the right thing to do.

Psychological Safety at Work

I love this Twitter thread from James Heathers, who dives head-first into some of the terrible takes on remote work that have been going around the business press. James gets right into the misleading journalism, bad science, and the hidden (or not so hidden?) agendas around trying to get people back into the office. He points out that many very successful organisations have been fully remote and/or online for years. James says: if your organisation is finding that remote working is impacting productivity, it’s not being remote that’s the problem, it’s that “…a lot of people who manage people suck out loud at it, and they threw their hands up at the complication of not having social control to maintain, and wanted to Go Back To How It Was without having to learn anything or be decent to their people.“

And in that same vein, this is a lovely read from Dan Rust, laying into the organisations that are demanding a return to the Old Ways. “If you want breakthrough moneymaker product ideas, corporate streamlining, communication innovations, simple productivity from smart people who are easily bored, you best set them free.” High-performing teams don’t need to be forced into the office, they need to be empowered and emancipated.

We recently covered giving feedback in order to improve performance whilst minimising harm and fostering greater psychological safety, leading to high performance teams, and the awesome Designer & Sketchnoter Chris Spalton, has created this sketchnote summarising how to give great feedback!

This is a great piece by Agatha Agbanobi and T. Viva Asmelash about creating psychological safety for black women in the workplace. Given the historical marginalisation and discrimination that black people, particularly women, have experienced, plus the fact that offices have traditionally been designed by, and for, white men, leaders need to consider the relevant historical and social context and take appropriate action. This article highlights some of those actions, including the discussions that need to happen, pay audits, and levelling up on coaching, feedback, and leveraging your privilege.

John Cutler does a great job here of diving into some of the reasons why people might not speak up with concerns – even in a psychologically safe environment. They include:

• They lack confidence. 
• They’ve tried unsuccessfully to bring up the issue in the past. 
• They assume the situation is normal. 
• They know there is a problem but misattribute the cause of the problem. 
• They fear their job is at risk. 
• They haven’t heard from other people with the same challenge. 
• They assume there must be a reason why things remain unfixed. 
• They don’t want to throw someone under the bus. 
• They “aren’t paid to worry about it”.
• They don’t know how to bring up the issue. 
• They believe the issue is too big to be addressed. 
• They fear isolation or exclusion. 
• They benefit from the problem. 

Here’s a fab deep dive into micro-management and psychological safety by John Schrag, the mechanisms, the reasons, and how it’s bad for team members, managers, and the organisation.

Roberto Ferraro does some fantastic illustrations, and here’s another one illustrating the balance of listening vs talking in psychologically safe environments. Inspired by an article by Shani Harmon in Forbes.

And here’s an example of how to create a psychologically unsafe environment! Thanks, Work Chronicles.

Here’s an in-depth academic evidence review of the literature on high-performing teams, by Eric Barends, Denise Rousseau and Iulia Cioca, at the Center for Evidence-Based Management (CEBMa). The research was funded by Novartis and focussed solely on quantitative academic studies. It’s a review of evidence, so there’s nothing necessarily “new” in these findings, but the paper reinforces some well-known key elements of high-performing teams, which include:

• Team dynamics: requires that colleagues trust each other and feel psychologically safe  
• Team cohesion: stems from familiarity and shared norms and behaviours.
• Shared thinking: looks at how team members interpret issues and communicate.
• Information sharing: ensures the best use of each members’ expertise
• Team reflection: means working on shared goals, collaboration and communication.  
• Well-planned interventions: includes teambuilding, teamwork training, debriefing sessions and goal setting.

As previously shown by Google’s Project Aristotle, the State of DevOps Reports, and many academic papers, psychological safety is essential for high performing teams.

Psychological Safety Practice Playbooks

In addition to our well-established “Teams and People” Practice Playbook, we now have Technology and Education Playbooks available to download. 

The “Teams and People” playbook is designed for managers and leaders and contains:

• Personal User Manual Template
• Manager Manual Template
• Team charter Canvas
• Social Contract Canvas

The Education playbook is designed for teachers, facilitators and educators, and contains:

• Classroom Contract
• Introductory Letter Scaffold
• Monitoring Learning Guide
• Know-Want-Learnt Grid
• Feedback Template

And the Technology playbook is designed for software development, engineering, and other technology teams, and contains:

• The Agile Prime Directive and Local Rationality Principle
• Blameless Post-Mortem Guide
• Technology Team Charter
• “Safe-to-fail” Canvas
• Team API template
• Positive Psychological Safety Behaviours for tech teams

There are more on the way too!

Psychological Safety Workshops

Open enrolment online workshops are available to book now! See our training page for more information; there are 3 online workshops and 1 in-person workshop available:

Online Workshops:

• Advanced: June 15th, for the psychological safety, sociotechnicality and complexity geeks.
• Practice: June 20th (sold out!) for people who want to learn and take away practices such as TRIZ, Empathy Mapping and various Retrospective methods.
• Measurement: June 27th: how to measure psychological safety in your organisation, including sociological research methods, designing research questions, quantitative/qualitative approaches, longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, research ethics and more!

NEW! In-Person Workshop, Barcelona, 13 July:

We’re so excited to be offering our first in-person workshop in Barcelona on 13 July!

This is an open-enrolment version of our “Putting it into Practice” corporate workshop, and we can’t wait to share it with you! Find out more and book here. The first 3 newsletter readers to book can use the code GAUDI20 to get 20% off. As always, prices are based on affordability.

This week’s poem:

If You Have Time, by Nanao Sakaki

If you have time to chatter,
Read books.
If you have time to read,
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean.
If you have time to walk,
Sing songs and dance.
If you have time to dance,
Sit quietly, you happy, lucky idiot.