Psychological safety, dialogue & teams

team is a verb, not a noun

Rethinking teams

Over the decades I’ve worked with teams across the world in a wide-variety of environments and operating contexts, whilst at the same time researching and exploring fundamentals of connectivity, relatedness, communication and belonging.

This has been an eclectic journey that’s dived into systems thinking, dialogue, positive psychology, organisations and team systems, complexity, family therapy models, innovation, creativity, trust, psychological safety and mindsets. It’s been fascinating, and a privilege to learn from some exceptional people who have been generous with their wisdom.

What has surfaced through all of this, are some fundamentals of interpersonal connection that enable intra-group and inter-group performance. I have been looking for some connecting method or approach that integrates these. Unfortunately, as far as I can see there isn’t one – but there are discrete approaches which can be applied by skilled practitioners.

The most surprising element of this journey, is that the primary elements of team performance are a blend of unconditional positive regard and personal safety. Amy Edmondson refers to this as ‘psychological safety’ and has spent many years researching this topic, with her start point being trying to understand medication errors in hospitals.

Understanding Psychological Safety

To understand psychological safety, one way is to think of a healthy family environment. Think of the discussion around dinner (for those who still eat together) – the flow would be open, respectful, able to tackle tough stuff but would do this in a caring and compassionate manner. Showing unconditional positive regard can still address tough issues, but how you do this is critical. The analogy between healthy family units and psychologically safe organisational teams is highly aligned – in the best teams, members can take risks and know colleagues will support them, they can afford to be vulnerable without fear of ridicule or subtle attack.

Psychological safety is the single most important predictor of team performance. As Edmondson recalls in her wonderful new book, diversity in teams can actually result in reduced performance unless you have psychological safety. Trying to create teams with high skill-levels can also result in reduced performance, unless you also have psychological safety.

This finding completely debunks the idea that promoted by many psychologists and leadership experts, that you just need to hire for “team fit” or “ensure you have diverse thinkers”. It shows they are relying on flawed theories and perhaps have no real-world experience in the areas they’re talking about. Merely hiring for team-fit, or hiring for diversity can really backfire unless you first have an environment of psychological safety – hiring in this way is following very poor advice. 

Think of being in a team where you know your boss will squash ideas, or colleagues are always picking faults and being overly critical – I suspect we all have experienced this at some stage in our careers.

In teams like this, you learn to stay quiet. In meetings, people avoid speaking up because they know what the consequences are. Everybody “plays the game” – but everyone is fearful, anxious and continually on the lookout for evidence of danger. This is an “unsafe tribe” - and being in an unsafe environment like this can seriously affect your wellbeing – your immune system can be impacted, blood pressure raised, ability to heal damaged, levels of hormones in your body change, ability to think is diminished, you process food differently (and you put on weight) and you can enter a chronic state of stress. If you want to learn more about the physiological reactions to stress, get any of the excellent books by Professor Robert Sapolski.

Creating psychological safety

If the most important aspect of team performance is psychological safety, how do you develop this?

I often ask people “given that psychological safety is so important, how would you go about building this?” Unfortunately, many of the responses I get illustrate a lack of understanding of team-dynamics. Here’s some suggestions I offer.

What not to do.

• Do not assume that all you need is a training course. This is a simplistic response to what is a complex issue. If you think about the meaning of “to train” – the Latin roots refer to “a line of travelling people or vehicles”. This is what training does, creates following behaviour. You cannot be ‘trained’ to develop complex social behaviours and interactions, regardless of what your trainers think they can do. Training is a waste of time. Dave Snowden’s framework for sensemaking, Cynefin, is a superb way to think about psychological safety (his HBR paper is here). Psychological safety is a complex issue – it changes over time, is socially constructed, and one team may show this whilst another does not. To influence a complex issue (or system), you start with small, safe probes (experiments) to see how this affects the system. You do the same with psychological safety, start small and observe the feedback.
• Do not delegate the issue to HR. Your HR department may be able to do a lot, but the development of psychological safety is a team-specific construct. The team members and team leader are the only ones to make this work. Some help from skilled OD practitioners can get you up and running, but the rest is up to the team. It’s a bit like getting fit – a coach can help motivate and point out some good things to do, but you have to do the actual work - the coach can’t get fit for you.
• Do not create process and behaviour rules – this is a simplistic and pointless exercise.
• The last point, and perhaps the most important: don’t assume that what worked for Team A will work for Team B. Each team has its own team ‘system’ – you need to work with the uniqueness of that system. In the same way that every family is different, so is every team. You must work with the characteristics and strengths of the team, and not believe in the fallacy of rolling-out a “sheep-dip” programme.

So, what can you do?

To start, you need to unpack what psychological safety is, and what it isn’t.

• It is a group-level construct, not an organisational one. So, start with the group.
• It is an experienced state, not an observed state. Work with how people feel.
• It is dependent on social connection, trust, reciprocation, honesty, dialogue and whole raft of other interpersonal psychological factors. Develop the ability to communicate openly within the team – this is in-depth skill in dialogue, not just ‘being polite’. Look at the dialogue model from Otto Scharmer and Adam Kahane.
• It is an almost indefinable quality that allows your team to excel, thrive and achieve things that other teams aspire to.
• It is highly dependent on local leaders and how they support, encourage, listen and interact to their team.
• It is not about reducing performance, being nice, or personality, and it is not the same as trust.
• And lastly – treat psychological safety with great care: it is easily broken and hard to repair.

What can I do to start building an environment that allows psychological safety to emerge?

Now this is the right question!

1. Start like a Systems Thinker – in a systems thinking perspective, the best place to intervene in a system is with mental models and worldviews. What does the team believe is the right way to work, interact and communicate – and why? Investigate and explore this aspect of with the team. There are a number of dialogue-based approaches which can assist here.
2. Invest time in understanding the team “as a system” – and how this fits into your wider organisational system. Every system has properties and behaviours, what are these for your system? What happens when 2 of your organisational-systems ‘bump into’ each other? How do you talk about this? The approach from Dr David Kantor (structural dynamics) addresses this specific area and is an extremely powerful approach.
3. Understand the current level of psychological safety. There are existing surveys which offer one way to unpack this, or use the tool from Dave Snowden (SenseMaker) which uses a narrative enquiry approach. This will let you gather stories from your people about what’s working and what’s not – and this is more valuable (and actionable) than points on a scale.
4. Build the capacity to talk openly, honestly and learn how to “see” patterns of behaviour and your team-system in action. Again, the approach from Dr David Kantor (structural dynamics) specifically addresses this.
5. Start shifting the team system from the inside. Do not assume that “others” need to change – this is something unique and personal to each team, and group. If you start internally, the team members will start to show up differently with each other – and from there it ripples to other teams, clients, customers.

To finish with, a quote from Amy Edmondson says it all ….

“ making the environment safe for open communication about challenges, concerns, and opportunities is one of the most important leadership responsibilities of the 21st century”.

For more information on building psychological safety, team dynamics, structural dynamics, systems thinking, Cynefin, SenseMaker or anything else I may have touched on - drop me a note or go to www.stravaig.co.nz