The 3 Steps of DIY Psychological Safety
Duena Blomstrom
Podcaster | Speaker | Founder | Media Personality | Influencer | Author | Loud &Frank AuADHD Authentic Tech Leader | People Not Tech and “Zero Human & Tech Debt” Creator | “NeuroSpicy+” Social Activist and Entrepreneur
In yesterday’s article, we gave you a few ideas of what you need to have so you try and increase Psychological Safety at the team level without the support of a “woke” enough organisation that knows how important it is. They even apply to the case where the organisation is smart enough to know this and is looking for the right piece of software to assist with increasing Psychological Safety. Irrespective of how you do it, there are minimal conditions that need to be in place to get a real picture of what the dynamic is like in the team and what you can do to better it.
In today’s video
https://youtu.be/gtu4yeLY53U we further discuss the three sine qua non elements of those:
- Measure - for the good, with the team, demonstrating safety. Bring each team member on the journey of defining what behaviours are positive and increasing Psychological Safety and which ones, on the contrary, are hurting it. Once you identify them together and give them names make sure the bubble level is clearly defined, established and safe at all times to heal from years of potentially punitive measurements. While having a smart mechanism to measure behaviour and an algorithm to give you the best possible insights into the data, that’s not doable in the absence of software (and no software is worth investing in if it misses these elements in our opinion) but you can come close to that by replacing it with a lot of team level work;
- Focus on the Bubble Level. As a team - resist the temptation to give in to any organisational pressure when you do work on your dynamic, you don’t owe the results of your measurements to some board-level report. If you’re the organisation - stop asking for an overview. The team doesn’t need to give you any visibility, they are interrogating their behaviour and they base their vulnerability on the assumption they can be in a protected space. Leave them to it.
- Re-define “Engagement” - the emperor is naked, we’re measuring the wrong thing when we say “engagement” - in lieu of emotional bond, morale, empathy and EQ, we measure some arbitrary indication of employer branding and NPS score. It needs urgent change and while we’re at it, it’s time to re-examine every other notion we work with at a people level or we will never be able to use insights to inform our next bubble level human intervention that will better our Psychological Safety and therefore performance.
If you do nothing else, do those, and you’ll start seeing the blessed effects of a team that engages (truly), measures (gleefully and for the good) and gets better (at the bubble, safe, team level).
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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are: Understand, Measure and Improve.
Read more about our Team Dashboard that measures and improves Psychological Safety at www.peoplenottech.com or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your teams become Psychologically Safe, healthy, happy and highly performant.
High School at Gateshead high school
3 年Hi there can you offer any advice on how to stop my pay dept manager to stop under paying me it has gone on for 3.5 years and every pay fortnight i have to email them with hours and days i have had the pay manager ask me why i email them weekly to which i replied that the pay arrangement was wrong and had been for 3.5 years , he then hung up on me , i have since explained to him that my pay is the way i put food on the table pay bills car rego etc , (which i feel i do not have to explain) there needs be more thought as to the staff and not a dictator ship where by i am expected to suffer this persons bad work practices this seems to be a trend which i have seen through various companys since i started work at 1i years of age please help thx bryce
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3 年This is a very insightful article. Thank you very much for sending this.
Sociological Safety? | The Sociological Workplace | Trivalent Safety Ecosystem
3 年You raise some good points. Many are of the opinion that algorithms require software. I consulted for a global 200 client for whom I developed a human performance algorithm for team-oriented software, and they took it to market without really even fully understanding what an algorithm was or how to use it. It seemed a magical idea to them, but they completely missed the point of the exercise. As you've implied, "Understand,?Measure?and?Improve" actually is an algorithm, and you don't need software to do it or to do it well. But we've become so enamored with the idea of I.S. algorithms and bewitched by tools from the IT world that we now imagine that hand tools won't cut it anymore. Yet, pyramids were built with hand tools. Teams are one part of a sociological structure, and they are not and most often cannot operate physically or psychologically as if they were independent of the larger sociological entity.
Degree in Psychology, interested in Behavioral Investing and Neuromarketing (Consumer Behavior and Marketing). Lately interested in Cybersecurity and screenwriting (speculative writing)
3 年Thanks for the video (and the article, of course)!To sum up (but I'm omitting some concepts) psychological safety is focused on a careful dissection of dynamics of the team at work, targeting ( and coping with) those processes than can become disfunctional for its whole growth.
WE Alcoholic/Addicts. Recovery Coaching. Interventions. *First Responders First*. EAP Advisor. HR Mental Health Mentor.
3 年As someone who was in long term addiction and has been substance free for almost a decade, "creating trust" absolutely resonated with me. During my journey, I needed to "deconstruct" my past - with the help of therapists, counsellors, coaches and others who share some of the negative lived experiences and events that have haunted me. The pandemic has created such a huge increase in anxiety, depression and so many other mental illnesses. The teams who will be tasked with measuring the data must have both empathy and soft skills built into their own lives first. And then the systems will have a chance to create wellness. Thank you for this article, and the wonderful work that you and your organizations are doing. ??