10 Reasons Why We Need Psychological Safety

For those of you who are Psychological Safety veterans and are further along the path with superheroes and advocates having made inroads and companies who now prioritise it thanks to their hard battles, this article may be too much of a return to clarity and you can skip it and instead, come back next week when we are talking about the intricacies of learning how to predicate your strategy on the people-work and have that reflect into translating OKRs/KPIs or objectives into rewarded and recognised, compensated efforts so that we see big wins.?

For everyone else - we said this over and again and we’re not afraid of repeating it in particular since there’s an influx of new subscribers to this newsletter who have just joined us on this big journey: Psychological Safety is essential, it needs intentional building and it needs constant people-work investment from all of us, it isn’t a nice-to-have but a business imperative and simply chatting about it is insufficient.

What do we need Psychological Safety for?

1. Innovation - there is no innovation in the absence of Psychological Safety. When team mates don’t engage and don’t take risks, communicate openly, admit mistakes, learn and grow, they can never think out of the box and experiment so innovation is simply impossible in psychologically unsafe environments.?
2. Productivity or better yet, high performance - Both of these are largely taboo topics in most enterprises. In an ill-understood effort to not put pressure on people we largely dropped them both from the business vernacular, but their absence is not making employees’ lives better, on the contrary. Every organisation that finds they’ve all but banished productivity metrics needs to open a real dialogue with their people and redefine them openly before they can hope to have the high performance Netflix or Google have. Once done, the next step is to put a number on the increase in performance and see the same 20-40% gains others enjoy one they invest in PS.
3. Sustainability and success- All of the enterprises that put their people and their psychological safety first, will ultimately stand the test of time and accomplish great things whereas all the ones who pay it no mind will not. Don't believe us? Simply look at corporate history so far for examples of the grave Boeing-level failures.
4. Retention - Maybe the most underrated effect of having Psychologically safe teams is that they stay. We’ve all heard the adagio of how people don’t leave leaders they love, they are even less likely to leave teams where they feel understood, free, heard and like their are the best version of themselves. Before the pandemic, there were studies to suggest team members that had high PS were 30% less likely to leave we estimate that number to be a lot higher now even in the midst of the GreatResignation from the data we gathered.?
5. Engagement/ Belonging/ Satisfaction/ Happiness - None of these terms is right. “Engagement” ought to refer to how connected and invested people are with each other emotionally not to NPS scores. “Belonging” is a much better term but not one that has yet grown into its own and surpassed the jaded execs eye-rolls “Satisfaction” sounds antiquated and insufficient whereas “happiness” can seem plain our patronising but irrespective what we call it, we know what we mean - employees who have their heart into it and are satisfied and joyful. We need that, we owe that, we have to strive for that.
6. Better D&I - a little studied but ever so obvious side effect of focusing on Psychological Safety is its effect on D&I. This is not only for the obvious reasons that we need to build a “speak up” culture to have anyone feel included and in its absence our efforts to be diverse will always trail behind but, interestingly, as the teams working with us have learned, to increase psychologically safe behaviours and reduce the unsafe ones, there’s a need to bring it all back to basic human concepts such as “learning”; “courage”; “being open” etc and those are blissfully universal. Working on increasing PS has an equalising effect that reflects in higher D&I indicators.?
7. For building servant leadership and empowered teams - No one can argue agains the importance of building servant leaders in our new reality that makes command and control impossible moving forward. At PeopleNotTech often advocate for a concerted, large scale L&D push to make the monumental shift in thinking possible but the flip side of that is how, servant leaders will not be reigning over meek, dependent teams but ones that are strong, daring and autonomous because they feel they have the freedom to employ their best self which hinges on their sense of Psychological Safety.?
8. For Higher EQ - We talk a lot about soft skills, how important it is that we recognise the presence and effect of emotions on ourselves and our teams, how crucial it is that we become more empathic or even compassionate and more attuned to each other’s emotional needs and resulting dynamic but it is only when we focus on increasing the Psychological Safety of our teams in a methodical fashion such as through tools like our Dashboard that we get an accompanying continuous education in those emotions and can acquire a higher EQ in the process.
9. To lower the HumanDebt? - it’s long overdue. We have to make the continuous improvement human work central and be smart enough to distribute it to the team level to make a dent in the extraordinary amount of HumanDebt most of us have amassed.?
10. Because it’s fundamental. Not only is it cornerstone to everything to do for our employees' lives, but the work is so comprehensive and so basal is could easily replace any other HR efforts as it bares fruit on all other topics - from L&D to leaders’ development to D&I and retention. It all starts with a culture of Psychological Safety and investing in anything else, is basically putting many carts before this big horse and not the smartest of strategies.?

When does Psychological Safety drop??

• When there are major external and minor internal events - both affect our teams;
• When there is a disdain for doing the human work;
• When there’s rife impression management in particular at the top;
• When we don’t close the feedback loop with action and then measure again;?
• When the culture of blame becomes institutionalised;
• When we get stuck in a cycle of awareness-building on the people-topics which has no practical application;
• When there is no focus on people’s emotions;
• When we don’t care enough to make it a priority.

Who can do something about it?

We get asked a lot why can’t leaders just read more about it and then go off and make it happen in their team? Is the avalanche of demands for leaders to model courage and therefore vulnerability and to foster open communication wrong? No it isn’t. It’s just sorely insufficient and a little misguided.

Let’s be very clear: leaders on their own can not and will not increase the Psychological Safety of the team. The only ones who can make that happen are the teams themselves once there is enough organisational support.

What should we do about it?

Raising awareness is obviously super important, if you work in an enterprise that hasn’t even heard of Psychological Safety and isn’t discussing any of this as a true priority there’s a clear and urgent job to be done: quickly get them up to speed. Use our Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series to see the people that matter understand it quick and realise they can should do something about it.?

But here’s the trick: every enterprise we have seen succeed in doing something about improving the lives of their teams through PS and therefore see performance, has kept the awareness raising period short - a fact finding mission that was focused and followed by swift “Now what shall we concretely do? How do we measure how much we have and get more of it?” and dived straight into action. The ones who haven’t often ended up in an analysis-paralysis and academic lull that sees them set the topic back on the “nice-to-have/fluffy” shelf and carry on with even more HumanDebt than before.?

What is there to do then??

At a team level: start doing some of the work on your own. Learn about the value of each behaviour in the team together then try and uphold the desirable ones.

At an enterprise level: decide how many of these 10 reasons are key to our organisation, then construct true permission and support the mindset change with the tools and time needed to measure and improve it.?

Above all - make it priority. Psychological Safety and the human work that the team needs to do have to come first now. We need it because it makes absolute business sense and makes us sustainable and competitive. And last but not least it’s high time and we all deserve it. ?

————————————————————————

This Thursday on the Fundamentals of Psychological Safety Series : “The People Work – what does it take?” so make sure to subscribe so you have it in your inbox.?

—————————————————————————

The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are:?Understand,?Measure?and?Improve

At PeopleNotTech we make software that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us about a demo at [email protected] ?

To order the "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age" book go to this Amazon link