18 Sep Psychological Safety
How do you build psychological safety for your team?
As a leader you want to have a team who is performing, able to develop relations with the stakeholders, anticipating the future, agile, full of energy and able to lead by itself.
To reach there you need to start with the basics. It is like building a house; you cannot put the bricks unless you have already made the foundation.
The foundation is psychological safety.
The term psychological safety was coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson.
She defines it as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”
Establishing a climate of psychological safety allows space for people to speak up and share their ideas; pushing yourself into new challenges, assured that should you fall short of the goal, your team will not point fingers and call out your ‘mistakes’. Instead, they will help you get where you need to be.
High psychological safety brings a performance response with innovation as the goal, whereas low psychological safety brings a fear response with survival as the goal.
Agile does not work without psychological safety!
When a team feels safe, it will be more empowered to face challenges.
In today’s world where we faced pandemic years, followed by war and economic crisis, to build strong performing teams, became a priority.
And it is not enough just to talk about it. It is about working on that step by step, day by day, walking the talk, assuming and sharing the progress as well as the failures. To transform new behaviors into habits it takes hundreds of repetitions. You need patience as well as perseverance.
Looking back to my experience as a leader, working with teams I acknowledged that high pressure of delivering results, lack of alignment and prioritization, capability of saying “no,” lack of powerful assertiveness can affect a lot the construction of psychological safety and high performing teams.
To move forward there is a critical need for systemic awareness and support coming from some important stakeholders: board, direct superior, peers (individuals/teams).
You can have it if you invest time for building it!