By sheer coincidence, three conversations I had last week all pointed to the same topic, that I could only name after the third conversation: psychological safety. One of those typical leadership topics I like to explore and wanted to share.
“The highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.”
-Source: High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It, Harvard Business Review
When you create psychological safety, you enable a work environment that is challenging but not threatening. You make your team feel safe and supported on their path to success. Failing to create that type of environment infallibly results in one thing: fear. And fear paralyzes. A paralyzed team will quickly stop progressing, they will overload you with requests for approval, they’ll stop innovating, they’ll stop trying and this… is not good. Not for them, not for you, not for the company.
Before I could name it, I would express psychological safety by saying “as a leader, my job is to create certainty in an uncertain world”. This is particularly true in a startup environment where you have to make decisions based on assumptions and with limited data available. There’s always a hint of doubt in your mind, but for your team to perform, you need to create that true north that allows them to progress in the set direction with confidence.
Nevertheless “certainty in uncertainty” misses an important element of psychological safety, it creates the frame but it lacks a component: how you interact with your team and colleagues, which is actually an even bigger lever.
Of the six steps mentioned in the Harvard Business Review article to create psychological safety, there is one that I find particularly powerful, yet very easy to put in practice: replace the blame-game by curiosity. You should start now and here is how you can do that:
- Use factual & neutral language to state the problem: “I’ve noticed that you’re not progressing as fast as it was expected toward your goals”
- Explore together (because what you see is never the full picture): “Can you walk me through the actions you took and we can try to find out together why it didn’t produce the expected outcome”
- Let them come up with a solution & show support: “What has to be done differently to succeed?”, “What support do you need to make it work?”.
By using discovery instead of blame, you do not reduce accountability. On the contrary, you increase ownership, moderate risk-taking and foster a problem-solving attitude. All of which are characteristics of high performing teams.
