3 steps toward psychological safety
Have you been thinking about how to help your team perform better next year?
The research strongly suggests that psychological safety is the most important factor to the performance of a team and we’ve shared our own explanation for WHY it’s so impactful. It plays out at every level: teams with psychological safety have incredibly high-impact collaboration, fewer blind spots, and less stress overall.
Given all that, you’d think it’d be the primary focus of coaching and leadership development. But most leaders have never gotten any development on the specific craft of creating psychological safety. Let alone effective development. And there is a core truth about psychological safety that is often misunderstood.
Safety is something we FEEL. It’s not a mental process. We don’t deduce whether we’re safe or not. Rather, we feel safe when we’re stimulating our vagus nerve, our cortisol levels are low, and our oxytocin levels are high. There are specific things a leader must do in order to create a safe environment - but the safety (or lack thereof) will be the direct result of what environmental and behavioral cues people are receiving at any given moment.
Leaders who treat "psychological safety” as an intellectual process will over-invest in creating norms documents, building team commitments, or trying to define a “narrative” on their teams. And, unfortunately, those efforts will mean little to nothing as soon as the team is in a meeting and getting cues that people aren’t being really honest, some dynamics among the team are unspoken, or the leader is quick to respond to some views or feelings with judgment or correction. When we sense those things, our nervous system will be activated, defenses will be engaged, and no norms document in the world is going to override those basic functions of our evolution.
So what can a leader do instead? Creating psychological safety is an active skill that requires incredible presence, emotional attunement, and the right kind of intuitive risk-taking. We support leaders on a simple 3 step process: tuning in to their own / others’ emotional state, acknowledging what seems to be really happening (without judgment or correction), and being really honest about their own feelings and opinions (stripped away of jargon, “framing,” and other performative flourishes).
In our experience, these are muscles leaders need to actively build and that’s why we leverage an actor-based simulation to honor the ways psychological safety is largely a physical skill. But for any leader looking to make an immediate impact on the safety within a given meeting, I would recommend the following three things:
Start every meeting with an opportunity for each person to share what energy / feelings they are bringing into the space - without doing anything to respond, correct, or fix whatever people are bringing in. Just a chance to build awareness and set the tone for honesty.
Always put someone else in charge of meeting the technical objectives of the meeting, so that at least one leader can stay focused on noticing what’s really happening within the team and asking questions if they sense people aren’t being totally honest.
Be truly honest. The more vulnerable and plain-spoken the leader is in sharing what they are sensing and feeling, the more automatically other people will lower their guards. And conversely, when they’re overly framing or speaking in a polished or performative way, other people will intuitively do the same.
And be kind and patient with yourself. Psychological safety is not a binary. It’s not something teams either “have” or “don’t have.” The question for leaders is: how safe is it for this team at this moment? And, can we make it safer? It’s hard to do, but when we can tune-in and be honest, it’s also just one moment away from getting better.
