Create psychological safety to get your team’s best thinking

I’ve written recently about creating an environment that bring out people’s best thinking – how you can shape this as a leader for your team, and the importance of doing it for yourself as well.

A critical element of this environment is the degree to which people will share the outputs of this thinking – such as their creative yet slightly left-field ideas, potential risks, solutions to tricky problems, ways to improve the status quo, potential impacts on customers. Speaking out in these scenarios requires some vulnerability – if it goes wrong, it can result in embarrassment, shame, feeling incompetent. And nobody wants to feel that at work!

This is psychological safety in action – the degree to which people will feel comfortable speaking out without fear of being negatively perceived by others. It plays a key role in creating a learning culture – is it OK to admit you’re not an expert, make mistakes, ask for help? Psychological safety is a critical enabler for organisations to get the best from their people – it helps create a culture of learning, and promotes discretionary effort which both contribute to higher performance.

Why this meme hits the nail on the head is that we often hear organisations say that psychological safety is important to them, but the supporting actions are not there. One of the key topics on our Adaptive Leadership programme is what leader can do practically to create an environment where people will speak up. Here’s a couple of things to start with:

• Notice how you react when someone comes to you with bad news, a potential risk, a mistake or proposes a left-field idea. Based on your reaction, how likely would they be to speak up again? We say in a light-hearted manner – ‘hug the messenger’. Even if it’s something you don’t want to hear, it’s better than finding out later down the track. Nobody likes unpleasant surprises!

• Be deliberate around framing meetings to make people feel comfortable to fully contribute:

  • “I don’t have all the answers, I need your help…”

  • “We really need the benefit of expertise from across the business…”

  • “We want to get all risks out onto the table…”

  • “Please table your ideas even if they are left field or half-baked – we can build on them…”

  • “It’s really important to capture what we’ve learned from this project…”

  • “There are no silly questions ….”

Doing complex work in changing environments means that leaders can’t have all of the answers, all of the time. The real benefit of creating psychological safety is to help create an environment where your team fully contributes their thinking to give you a bigger pool of data for decision making and to drive action and performance.