Psychological Safety

“The Psychological Safety Playbook” #

The following post is about the “The Psychological Safety Playbook” by Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman¹. The quotes are my key take aways and favorite quotes from the book, to which I add comments or anecdotes. The quotes are not necessarily in the correct order and I might jump between quotes, while keeping roughly the book chapters.

Psychological Safety #

Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

I was curious why this definition was chosen. The term psychological safety was coined in a book called “Personal and organizational change through group methods: the laboratory approach” by Schein, he defined it as “a climate […] which encourages provisional tries and which tolerates failure without retaliation, renunciation, or guilt.”²

The change that the cited paper “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams” by Amy Edmondson introduced was defining it as “Team psychological safety is defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”³ emphasizing the shared aspect of it. I find this point quite important, as it is not the perception of a single team member, but a shared, tacit belief.

(Smaller deep dive into the paper)

In her paper Amy Edmondson explicitly showed that the feeling of psychological safety depends on the team, while properties like intrinsic motivation depend much more on the individual as a control. She achieved that by measuring psychological safety on an individual level and then accumulating a team score based on that. The seven statements she used for this were (mind some are stated reversed):

• If members of this team make a mistake on this team, it is often held against them.
• Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
• People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
• It is safe to take a risk on this team.
• It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
• No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
• Working with members of this team, everyone’s unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

These questions are still used today, although there seems to be different approaches on how to accumulate the team score (Amy Edmondson used the mean of all team members). On first thought (with not enough statistical understanding to make claims), I would have argued the person in a team that feels the unsafest should contribute the most to the score, or the different scores could be used to identify silos of safety.

Communicating Courageously #

One of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is to ask, “What am I missing?” When you ask this simple question, you signal that you are open to looking at things from different angles and even to being challenged.

I appreciate the books emphasize on this, and the proposal to encourage different ideas by asking again if no other ideas are coming like ‘Can you play devils advocate for me?’ or ‘Please roast me on this idea’. The culture of discussing ideas through in a team is definitely something I value a lot in a team. Asking for other ideas has multiple functions: It is ones reflection of being human and not knowing the perfect answer, it is an request for help and collaboration, it is an invitation to join decision making and sharing the knowledge about how the new decision will work, last but not least it is including the team in decision making for solutions that most likely will influence their work in future.

I would emphasize that asking these questions and inviting other ideas is not the hard part, but opening the solution space to really allow other ideas, that contradict or question the base assumptions I did, or diverge a lot from the solution that I already found as the best, or use solution paths that I excluded because of values that I did maybe not even communicate when introducing the problem. Spending enough time with a problem to adequately describe it to the team, while not protecting the path that brain already found suitable is a skill that needs regular exercise.

(Pulling a later chapter up early) The first step in opening this space is to thank the person who has just tackled your opinion.

It is important for leaders to be in control of their emotions and not have outbursts that can destroy psychological safety. At the same time, leaders can help build trust with their colleagues and employees by sharing that they, like all human beings, have emotional reactions.

People prefer having a human as colleague than a robot. A statement that might read weird in todays world of Chat Agents, after all they just mimic the positive perceived emotions of a human. Excitement, Empathy, Humor are all emotional concepts without which a team would struggle to function.

While this was my expectation of this chapter, it is actually about the negative emotions, about regulating and displaying these emotions even if that makes one feel vulnerable. First up, the book’s recommendations are really nice:

• Notice what you are feeling (can be a named emotion or your body’s reaction to what just happened)
• Appreciate. Separate the content of the challenge from the person challenging your idea or assumption.
• Share what you are feeling and take a break if needed “This hit me harder than expected, give me a moment please”
• Breath - calm your nervous system.
• Connect with the person again. You are team mates not enemies.

What I find a bit confusing in this chapter, or more precise with the third recommendation, is that this has a different price depending on your gender. Being a woman in a male dominated field feels like walking a thin line between fitting in the warm and empathic stereotype, while limiting emotions as those make one “unprofessional”. This is not just my experience, but a field of research that inspired multiple experiments and papers (just one example “Whereas women’s emotional reactions were attributed to internal characteristics (e.g., “she is an angry person,” “she is out of control”), men’s emotional reactions were attributed to external circumstance)”⁴. I am not saying that this is something the authors were not aware of - two women with specialties in research on inclusive leadership will for sure know. I think they did by choice not make a gender difference, in a psychological safe space it should not matter, and the target audience of this books feels like team members who are in power to make such changes.

Master the Art of Listening #

Listening is an art, and it’s probably the most underdeveloped leadership skill. […] We focus more on presenting our own opinion, and when we are not talking, we are listening with the intent not to understand but to respond. […] It is a fundamental shift in our attitude: becoming curious about others’ perspectives even if we disagree and being willing to explore their story before we put forth our own.

I love this 🩷 Listen with the intent to understand, not to respond! We can listen to somebody with empathy and without agreeing to them.

If we listen for what’s not being said, we can understand what is really driving other people’s actions, and we will be better positioned to address the root cause of conflicts and concerns. […] Have a friendly suspicion of first statements. When you hear something, don’t assume you understand what the other person truly means.

Again this is much easier written down as acted upon. Taking some time (even if that requires verbalization like “Give me a moment to understand what you are saying”) to truly understand the persons motivation, what they wish for, and what is concerning them. I am not a big fan of the “repeat in you own words what they said”, nor the “I feel you are frustrated about this”, for me this feels a bit too much like learned behavior out of a psychology book. Plain and honest curiosity about what the person is trying to communicate can change the value of a conversation. One major factor of this is not judging what the other person is communicating.

Resist the urge to judge and kill new ideas […]. Commit to finding what’s valuable about the idea. A useful hypothesis for this is that 10 percent of each idea can be built upon

Being non-judgemental opens the space for a safe communication. This is always possible, although this (again) is easier recommended than acted upon. My recent learning in this point that even if the proposed idea is contradicting my values or goals, the underlying need still can be discussed openly.

Embrace Risk and Failure #

Understand and communicate that failure is a source of valuable data.

There is almost no human error. This requires the assumption that every person involved in an incident always acted with best intentions and made the best choices given their knowledge in this situation. With this assumption, the question of “who?” becomes secondary behind questions like “Why appeared the system to the user like X?”, “Why knowledge was missing at this point in time?”, “What actions were possible in that scenario?”.

Practice distancing. Notice what’s going on inside you. Label your emotions. Zoom out and see the big picture.

Reacting to incidents will not help to understand how a system of events and software caused a situation in which people did not find themselves able to avoid an upcoming incident. In hindsight the decisions of people might look idiotic, but their past selves did not know about the result.

There is no benefit in judging people, but there is a great benefit in identifying how the system could have avoided such an incident. This could be a user interface that informs about critical information (mind that user can always be a dev - the user of a Grafana dashboard that monitors errors or queue time is user interface as well); this could be updated handbooks on how the system can be handled in case of an error; this could be a more transparent system.

Blameless postmortems: regular discussions about what happened and why something didn’t work […]. Premortem: a meeting in which a team starts with the premise that their decision or project will turn out to be a disaster and discusses why it will fail.

Postmortems (if facilitated blameless) can identifying intransparencies, restrictions, assumptions, or dependencies. I never had a Premortem, but I find the idea quite intriguing! I can imagine the meeting to be quite fun - imagine some incident scenarios and identifying how a dev or user can identify, monitor, and resolve that.

Design Inclusive Rituals #

Help clarify anything that might be unclear. […] Be aware of people who look as if they want to contribute but are having trouble figuring out how to jump in, and invite them to speak. […] Intentionally ask for an alternative point of view if the group is quickly converging on one person’s idea.

Knowing your audience here helps a lot. Talking about the meeting afterwards with people can be a great help to identify what was missing or who actually had more things to contribute. The book recommends some tools and techniques like having an actual feedback form or ensuring nobody speaks twice until everybody spoke once. I find both a bit hard in practice, forms will get annoying and I don’t see a benefit in forcing people who currently don’t see a value in contributing. But talking to people after a meeting is often giving some insights about the additional thoughts people have on the meeting, maybe they perceived something, they had talking points but not enough opportunities to speak. Even if it is just their perceived safety or value of the meeting, this is important feedback.

Conclusion #

Psychological Safety is a great concept! It includes feeling safe to ask the stupid questions, to propose alternative solutions, to make decisions, to explain what happened in an incident, to be yourself knowing that the team is accepting that. To reach that feeling within a team is not achieved by declaring it as a state, but by practicing it in every meeting and conversation. This book is a great collections of behaviors that help achieving an awesome team culture, and I can only recommend it.

Happy Reading :)