Psychological Safety by Iterum

Trust is not the same as psychological safety. When building psychological safety in a team, or in any group context, it’s necessary to foster and maintain trust. Trust and psychological safety are sometimes confused with each other, and whilst they are related, trust is simply a component of psychological safety. Trust can be defined as: The extent to which we hold expectations of others in the face of uncertainty about their motives, and yet are willing to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. So yes, trust is indeed essential to building and maintaining psychological safety in a team: if you break another team member’s trust, it will certainly damage the psychological safety of the team. But whilst trust is necessary for psychological safety to exist, it is not sufficient. Psychological safety doesn’t simply comprise of high trust in a team. The primary difference between psychological safety and trust is that psychological safety consists of beliefs concerning the group norms – what it means to be a member of that group – whilst trust focuses on the beliefs that one person has about another. We may trust someone, and yet still not feel psychologically safe with them. To make that clear:  Psychological safety is defined by how group members believe they are viewed by others in the group whilst trust regards how one individual views another. So, just as building deep trust takes time, building psychological safety also takes time. It is not enough to say “this team is psychologically safe”, as in order to properly showcase this, team members and leaders need to consistently demonstrate to each other that they can be trusted. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

Avoid “The Average Trap”. Averages and metrics can obscure the experiences of individuals who feel unsafe, particularly those who are marginalised or underrepresented. If we measure group psychological safety without considering the experiences and perception of the least safe people in the group, and the reasons why they’re feeling that way, we risk only improving it for those who are already somewhat privileged within the group. Fostering psychological safety is a collective effort, and we’re all responsible for doing so. If you have time, and are inclined to do so, try the below: - If measuring psychological safety, look for outliers as well as averages. - Reflect on your own privileges and how others may not possess them to the same degree. - Recognise and actively address power imbalances within your teams. - Commit to practices that promote inclusion and open dialogue for everyone. There are plenty of practical ideas in our big list of psychologically safe behaviours** and our top ten ways to foster psychological safety*** which can help improve inclusion by fostering psychological safety for everyone on the team. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

“If nine people walked across a bridge safely, and one fell over the side, we wouldn’t say that was safe.” This quote from Eleanor Groat got us thinking about measuring psychological safety. When measuring it in a team, we often are asked which measurement should be considered the “group measurement,” given that different individuals will likely experience rather different degrees of psychological safety. Our stance at Psych Safety is that we consider teams to only be as safe as the least safe person. What we often see, and challenge, is a team’s psychological safety being represented as the average (usually the mean) level of psychological safety among its members. This is particularly common when survey tools are used to measure, which use likert statements and present us with a set of metrics. It’s easy to take that data set and look at averages, but this is problematic. As an example, if we have a team of ten people, and nine of them feel very psychologically safe whilst one feels very unsafe, that average score will completely mask the outlier. The score will suggest the team is doing great, when in fact we have someone on the team who is suffering and feeling excluded. Not only does this suck for that person, but it’s a real risk to the integrity and performance of the team. It’s fundamentally inaccurate to describe a team as psychologically safe if there are people on the team who do not feel safe. “If nine people walked across a bridge safely, and one fell over the side, we wouldn’t say that was safe.” Only looking at the average stops us from investigating why one person may be feeling significantly less psychologically safe than others. Our work shows that steep power gradients are the primary contributor to low psychological safety in groups. That power may be formal or positional (as in a hierarchy), informal or social (as in social status in a group), intersectional (as in race or gender), or expert (as in degree of expertise and experience). And these types of power are not necessarily independent of each other. Speaking up always involves some level of risk, but the stakes are higher for some than others. We’ll dive into fostering psychological safety for all & avoiding “the average trap” in tomorrow’s post. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

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It’s important that we learn from our own mistakes and failures, and self-reflect in order to improve. However, there’s also a lot we can learn from things others get wrong. That, after all, is partly why psychological safety is such a powerful foundation for high-performing teams. When we share our mistakes and what we’ve learned from them, the potential for learning extends beyond ourselves to everyone around us. In one of our newsletter editions last year, we highlighted some bad management horror stories from some of our 10,000 subscribers. The stories delved into themes such as:  - How good leadership involves being a competent manager too.  - The negative impact delaying feedback can have.  - How doing “everything in public” is not always the right thing to do.  - How holding different expectations for women and men can have toxic impacts. - Using emotional blackmail and “friendship” to get what the boss wants.  - Sometimes, people just need some time to adapt and improve.  - The gap between an organisations values and how their managers behave.  - And much, much more. We want to caveat this list by pointing out that “bad” management doesn’t mean a “bad” person. As we’ll see, a lot of these examples come from people who are trying to do the “right thing” – they might just not know how to yet, they’re not sure what the “right thing” is, or they simply made a mistake. And that’s ok, as long as we learn from it! Many thanks to Roberto Ferraro for turning our newsletter edition into this awesome graphic, we love it! Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

Experiments don’t mean thoughtlessly or recklessly trying anything out to see what happens. In an experiment, we try to define what, in our context, is ‘safe to fail’ and what we might learn from trying it. In other words, what can we try that has minimal risk if it doesn’t turn out as hoped, and how can we maximise the learning from it regardless of the outcome? This is also the basis for Amy Edmondson's concept of “Intelligent Failures”: “undesired results in new territory”.* So, what are the characteristics of well designed experiments (and intelligent failures): They’re carried out in new, potentially complex and unknown contexts.  Although there can be value in repeating past experiments, to confirm the results or bolster the evidence, the real value lies in uncharted territory. They’re quick. Or at least, they don’t take any longer than necessary. A large experiment, like a big project, might not tell you anything useful until it concludes, which could take a while. As such, the cost of failure in long-term experiments is high, so make experiments as fast and as iterative as possible whilst maintaining the utility of the potential learning from them. They’re designed with a small ‘blast radius’ of failure.  If they fail, how can we limit the undesired effects of failure? This might be financial cost, reputational damage, or even increased staff turnover if we’re experimenting with new ways of working. They’re based upon a hypothesis.  Using past experience and knowledge, we should have reason to believe that what we’re doing will result in a desired outcome. Whilst there is occasionally value in the FAFO* approach, it’s fairly risky. They’re strategic.  Our experiments should be aligned with our greater objectives, mission, and values. With experimental approaches to work, we learn and build confidence as we go. We want to design work so that it maximises learning and minimises the impact of failure. We want to learn fast, rather than waiting a long time for a result. After we’ve carried out some smaller experiments and increased our confidence in our approach, we can carry out larger experiments and utilise that earlier learning to better design them. Everything is an experiment, even designing the experiment itself (for considerations on this, go to the article!). Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

That’s right, the top ten ways to foster psychological safety in the workplace - on video! We’ve been reflecting on our last few years of experience delivering psychological safety workshops, training and consultancy in organisations around the world. Based on all those wonderful experiences, working with industries from healthcare to aviation, education and technology, these are the top ten activities that we’ve found most effective in fostering psychological safety and enabling people to speak up. In our experience, these strategies have proven to be effective in the vast majority of contexts and environments; they look slightly different in different situations, but they consistently work. Whatever the organisation and whatever the work, if these top ten activities are adopted across and between teams, we see a dramatic improvement in psychological safety and performance: 1. Levelling power gradients = Share the power of the most powerful, increase the power of the least powerful. 2. Establishing shared norms = Being able to predict how the team will react is crucial. 3. Effective listening and giving space = People won’t continue to speak up if they aren’t listened to when they do. 4. Intelligent and compassionate communication = Being intentionally clear, kind, empathetic and reasonable. 5. Rewarding speaking up = We get more of the behaviour that we encourage. 6. Framing work as experiments = Delivery is important, but learning is even more important. 7. Practising retrospectives and futurespectives = Intentionally learning from work. Intentionally looking ahead. 8. Addressing persistent problematic behaviour = Not tolerating behaviour that undermines psychological safety 9. Embracing differences = Recognising that culture, experience and neurodiversity influence how we work. 10. Accepting human error as normal = Quite literally - we are all human. We will make mistakes: what’s important is that we learn from them. In our article*, we dive into each one of these ten. We’ve identified these as some of the most powerful and effective ways to foster psychological safety and performance in teams and organisations. That doesn’t mean these are the only ways, but they are a great place to start. We’ve also linked 150 behaviours that foster psychological safety**, which grows all the time based on feedback and insights from the people we work with. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your team. ---------------------- 💥 We're PsychSafety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety, leadership and innovation. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for our weekly newsletter. 🔝 Follow us www.psychsafety.co.uk https://lnkd.in/dTZa9FVZ

Full disclosure here: at Psych Safety, we don’t endorse a proprietary tool or software application to measure psychological safety, because we don't believe there's one definitive way to do this Maybe that comes across as odd - after all, we are www.psychsafety.com, right!? Well, we believe every organisation is different and the most appropriate approach depends on the multitude of cultures, org structures, languages, and domains in the organisation, as well as the measurement aims, and of course the budget. Instead of providing a tool, we work with organisations to collaboratively design bespoke research approaches and surveys. Not only does this mean they get the actionable feedback they need, it also has the added benefit of empowering organisations to do the work themselves, rather than forever rely on us. But we understand that there may be situations where people want to use a tool to measure psychological safety. So, if you are going to use a psychometric tool, what should you consider? We should ensure that:  - We understand the methods and algorithms the tool uses. - It’s usable and accessible for everyone.  - It’s secure.  - People retain ownership of their own data. - The questions and statements actually correlate with psychological safety.  - It doesn’t make assumptions based upon majority culture.  - The tool doesn’t create perverse incentives.  - Use of the tool is optional. We go through every one of these in detail in our article*. The complexity of all these considerations is why we tend to advocate for a tailored approach that considers the unique contexts and variables at play in different organisations. Of course, you may disagree with some of the above criteria, or agree with them and decide to use a tool anyway because the benefit outweighs the costs or risks. That’s awesome – the key is ensuring you have the knowledge and criticality to make informed decisions about these important tools. As a final word on the topic, a tool can only ever be as good as the care and integrity with which we use it and learn from it; the emphasis should always be on empowering individuals and teams to foster a culture of psychological safety and openness, rather than narrowing our focus to metrics or scores. After all, psychological safety can’t really be reduced down to a number – ultimately it needs to be seen, felt and experienced Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

Most of us would probably like to think of ourselves as approachable at work. We might have bad moments, or bad days, but we will likely think that on the whole, we are approachable. Approachability takes on a particular significance when it comes to #psychologicalsafety. If we’re not approachable, the very first barrier for people sharing their ideas, concerns, questions or mistakes with us may be too high. One of the challenging things about approachability, and psychological safety more broadly, is that it’s a highly situational phenomenon. In fact very small shifts in the way we talk, behave or act can have a significant impact on the willingness of others to speak up around us. In a great piece of research* which used simulation of team scenarios in #healthcare education, researchers identified a couple of common misconceptions around approachability: - Approachability is a fixed characteristic – the belief that you either are approachable or you aren’t.  - Approachability is mostly about avoiding negative behaviours, such as overt rudeness, chastising people for disturbing you or punishing those who admit mistakes. The research showed that approachability is “a dynamic state that is constantly reconstructed through action” and is “more fragile” than often assumed. So, how can we improve approachability? 1. Be more intentionally present.  Approachability is intrinsically linked to accessibility. If you’re not there (either physically or in an online space), people are less likely to approach you. 2. Think aloud and talk through your decision-making process.  Having the conversation out loud about which course of action you are considering, and where you might be uncertain allows space for others to offer their perspective and lets them learn from your approach too. 3. Admit mistakes and be vulnerably imperfect.  We often talk about the importance of leaders being the ones to share their mistakes first, because it helps others feel safer to speak up with theirs. 4. Use debriefs and retrospectives.  These are the ideal places to be explicitly “approachable”. You can actively invite an exploration of ambiguity and bring in learning from different perspectives in a team. This is how we create learning environments and organisations. Ultimately, approachability is not a static trait. Creating an environment where people feel they can approach us and speak up requires continual effort. By deliberately acting in ways that improve approachability, while being mindful of how quickly even subtle shifts in our behaviour can damage approachability, we can help foster psychological safety for those around us. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

We live by helping people understand and foster psychological safety. So, when we say “psychological safety is not the goal”, you may be a bit surprised. However, it’s true: Psychological safety isn’t the goal; the goal is whatever your organisation, group, or team is trying to achieve, whether that’s saving lives, operating a safe airline, providing a service or launching a successful tech product. So in reality, the “goal” for many of my clients might be something like boosting team & organisational performance, increasing #resilience, improving the flow of work or fostering greater patient & worker #safety.  However, it’s psychological safety, or rather, the behaviours and practices that foster #psychologicalsafety and are encouraged by psychological safety, that enable the realisation of that goal. So whilst our primary engagement focuses on psychological safety, via work on behaviours, workshopping practices, #learning, reframing, addressing #DEI and much more, we usually also end up identifying key areas for improvement in organisational #strategy, structure and execution. To address these issues we help to develop strategy, tactics and delivery practices, improve the flow and visibility of work, and encourage collaboration inside and between teams, and even entire organisations. There is a near-limitless list of practices, skills, tools, and processes we can adopt to support this development, including: - Delivering Feedback. - Developing strategy using the Three Horizons model, Wardley Mapping, OODA and more. - Visualising work and Kanban training.  - Adopting HOP, DevOps, AARs, or even chaos engineering practices.  - Mapping organisational money flows.  - Using Agile and Scrum practices in non-technical teams.  - Measuring and managing team cognitive load. - And much much more. All this means we can be confident that we’re not “just” improving psychological safety, but helping teams and organisations to achieve their most important goals. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com