Last week, after a keynote, someone asked me “How can we break the cycle of eternal awareness-raising and no doing when it comes to Psychological Safety in our enterprise? How do we take the next step?”.
When the conversation with the person who asked deepened, I came to find out they were at that level I both command and bemoan where they are avidly collecting facts about Psychological Safety as an organisation. The top of their awareness curve. A few years ago, someone read something that resonated and the topic had made its way in the organisation’s internal lexicon.
As the storyteller remembers it, the initial focus was a cheerful and optimistic call to arms “Let’s just find out how much Psychological Safety we have in our teams and then make sure they get more of it where needed”. He then recalls a brief exploration of what there is to do in order to measure it and that nothing was found and that for a while, an email with Prof Dr Amy Edmondson’s initial 7 questions was passed around and people answered it individually by sending the responses to their manager.
He can’t recall what effect that had, how often it was done, any overall feedback from it or indeed when that practice stopped, but it certainly wasn’t there today. His presumption was that it likely met with the same fate as any survey results do in their enterprise and melted in the big ocean of topics-never-to-be-touched-again. As we know, each of these instances where people feel they have offered feedback and like it was ignored or squandered, gravely add to the overall HumanDebt and erode trust in the organisation.
Beyond this point, he remembers that sometime during the first lockdown, the little conversations they were still having on PS and its behaviours at the team level with their scrum masters or agile coaches and even some HR advocate has all but stopped with the sudden move to remote working and all he could see returning were links to cheat-sheets, books being recommended (mine included to be fair) and links to articles being passed around so he believes the interest is still clearly around and that once people had had exposure to the common-sense idea of the need to speak up and trust at team level if we want better results it’s hard to make them “un-see it” but the execution is non-existent.
He was concerned it had now become a general topic mired in confusion and unclarity and that if anything, the overall PS level that their teams were experiencing were even lower than before any of this was explored.
He wondered if maybe going back to basics and definitions wouldn’t help and as he seemed rightfully concerned with muddying and how each of these separate articles or cheat-sheets or certifications and proprietary frameworks seem to be using their own fancy language. I answered that absolutely, yes, a session to clarify and go back to fundamentals can’t hurt, on the contrary.
He asked whom did I think could organise that. They could!
As ever, external help – coaches, pieces of training, resources – they are all only truly useful if the facilitation brings more clarity or speed but when it comes to the people topics they are never exclusive guardians of knowledge that the team couldn’t easily access themselves.
Understanding emotions and the dynamic of the team is accessible and possible, it is within every professional team’s reach no matter what industry or culture they function in.
Let’s be very clear: there is no team that lacks the ability to better their EQ or start a people practice and team health practice based on Psychological Safety by themselves. None. All teams are “able” that is never in question, it’s the “willing” that’s debatable.
So I advised, as usual, that they leaf through all the resources out there -all of Amy’s books, PeopleNotTech’s hundreds of articles and videos, Tom Gerarghty’s website, our Fundamentals of Psychological Safety series, etc) and extract from there the following parts in their own 8-10 slides:
- Definition – What is Psychological Safety and why does it matter to us as an organisation and as a team?
- Examples of safe orgs and of unsafe orgs;
- Why is PS needed? What are the business benefits? Increased retention, innovation, engagement, satisfaction, reduced errors, burnout and disengagement and the clear link to overall team performance, etc;
- Good behaviours that make up healthy, high performing and PS teams – Speaking up AKA Courage, Openness and Vulnerability; Flexibility; Continuous Learning and Improvement, Resilience; Emotional Closeness; People Work Habits; etc
- Bad behaviours that harm the team’s healthy dynamic such as impression management and unhealthy conflict/communication patterns;
- Actions! – Clarify the idea that team behaviours can easily be affected through habitual human work when they are highlighted and discussed at the team level. Provide examples of work that teams do habitually to increase the positive behaviours mentioned above and to decrease the ones that are harming the team’s ability to perform;
- Ways of doing the people work – What can and should the team do to achieve an efficient feedback loop and put in place measurements that will show them progress? What habits? What commitments?
- Highlight organisational permission to minimise the team-level-human-work-resistance. Companies that went beyond the mere awareness work show the importance of the human work by having included it in compensation and job descriptions while keeping the distributed continuous improvement human work as a declarative KPI/OKR goal but those that haven’t need to clearly state why they find it important with more active communication work.
That’s all the deck needs. That’s all that teams need to feel it’s the kick-off for real work. That’s all that anyone needs as a precursor to real action that will foster true change. And after this deck, once they are done with this back-to-basics-clarification-awareness-building-vicious-circle-circuit-breaker, they need to roll their sleeves and focus on the ways in which they can start a sustained practice of doing the work.
How to consistently measure, regularly discuss and periodically do something to affect their own behaviours as a team.
It’s all about trusting themselves – concluding that they know enough and that now they need to do the doing.
So for anyone reading this stuck on the same “let’s read all about it but not yet do anything” carousel – you can get off the ride – build your own presentation with the above, stop postponing, temporising and procrastinating by bringing yet another consultancy in to create that handful of slides for you, or by perpetuating an academic cycle of curious exploration that results into no actual change to people’s lives and use the time you save to start doing the human work itself.
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve
At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us about a demo at contact@peoplenottech.com
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link