Psychological Safety

Psychological Safety #

¹

Psychological safety is “a belief 3that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.”

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

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” emphesizing the shared aspect of it. I find this point quite important, as it is not the perseption of a single team member, but a shared, tacit believe.

(Smaller deep dive into he paper)

In her paper Amy Edmondson explicitly shown 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 acheived that by measuring psychological safety on an indivdual level and then accumulating a team score based on that. The seven statements she used for this where (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, everyones unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

These questions are still used today, although there seems to be different approaches on how to accumilate the team score (Amy Edmondson used the mean of all team members). On first thought (wih not enough statistical undertanding 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 apreciate 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 defently 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 contractict 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 adequatly describe it to the team, while not protecting the path that already found suitable is a skill that needs regular exercise.

(Pulling a later chaper 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 colegue 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 emptional 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 emptions even if that makes one feel vulurable. First up, the books recommondations are really nice:

• Notice what you are feeling (can be a named emption or your bodys reaction to what just happend)
• 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 recommondation, 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)”². I am not saying that this is something the authors where not aware of - two woman with specilties 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 verbalidation 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.