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Yesterday’s article was speaking about the fact that we need to graduate from the talk-about-Psychological-Safety to doing something.
Don’t get us wrong, the awareness phase is more than necessary and the concept definitely needs us to do the due diligence of connecting to people and ensuring they genuinely comprehend what this dynamics means for themselves and those around them in earnest, no question about the needs.
That said, awareness-building is only useful when it remains a step in the process – when it has been done well enough that it lowers the human resistance to the work and it makes all of us more able to do the work because we understand the science behind it and the need for it but as soon as it becomes the totality of the exercise and the enterprise gets to pat themselves on the back for having held another webinar or bought everyone a book, that’s when it’s actually detrimental.
In this video, we clarify that we know the importance of awareness building but that companies must start thinking of Psychological Safety as a daily to-do and of integrating human work in general.
Some of the things we describe as being the characteristics of an efficient awareness-building exercise are:
- General campaign to democratise the concept – aiming to clarify and popularise the definition, history and existence of the Psychological Safety topic;
- Team-by-team connection work – once the theoretical topic has been clarified, working in smaller groups to genuinely achieve moments of significant connection that are individually important is key;
- Using the behavioural changes we need and can accomplish with our Psychological Safety work to reiterate the agency of teams and the need and encouragement for human work
These are just the parts it must feature and not a prescriptive way in which they ought to be delivered but the one crucial element here is intentionality. In its absence, even if you were to have these done they wouldn’t have amounted to awareness-building having been just a stepping stone in lieu of a goal in itself.
Of equal importance: the tone, the modelling, the comms, the sense of trust, engagement and partnership already had with one’s people before any of this awareness work makes sense but above all: keep it focused and useful and see it as the stepping stone to the main act which is doing the actual human work on a daily basis.
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At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams, come see a DEMO.
To order the “People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age” book go to this Amazon link