5 Tips To Build Psychologically Safe Leadership Teams

We wrote about Psychological Safety at the Top many times:

“Leadership Teams Are Not Psychologically Safe Because They Don’t Exist”

“Leaders Need An Impression Management Detox”

“You Are Not Alone: Teams Are The New Leaders”

“FitForVUCA: The Leaders With a Chance To Change”

“Emotionally Intelligent Team Leaders Not Mindless Execs And Middle Managers”

It’s such an important topic that we have created workshops for PS in the leadership team, as it’s not reasonable to expect every other part of an enterprise to be a team except for the leaders, and we have learned a lot while delivering these. 

First and foremost, you have to start at the concept of “team”. As we were discussing yesterday, teaming is difficult at all levels of the organisation because of a lack of practice and a lack of true permission, but when it comes to leaders, this is even worse as they often tend to regard the times they come together not as opportunities to roll sleeves, problem solve and row in the same direction together, but as a time to talk “at each other”, communicate results, be defensive or boast.

Vulnerability is harder at the top. Risk aversion, impostor syndrome and above all impression management all play a role in making Psychological Safety really difficult to attain in exec teams. 

While the industry in itself seems not to be a factor, there are differences depending on the size of the organisations we work with (the tightly knit founders’ team only lasts so long, unfortunately) and yet we find some things to be universally true. Leadership teams score worse on Courage and Openness than most other teams we encounter. Their Morale is consistently low despite the eternal cheery disposition of some and, unsurprisingly, they aren’t open to Learning as much at the top as a developers’ team. All of these can be worked on. 

We also see low levels of Empathy and we find that in the executive team not only is compassion hard to come by but it doesn’t extend to their own selves either, so leaders tend to use the excuse of the pursuit of perfection to avoid having to gain and apply EQ.

Since we’re big on practical advice here are some of the things we found from the teams we’ve worked with:

• Practice vulnerability - overshare, relate, be wide open, raw and authentic to each other- it’s learned behaviour;
• Make “servant leadership” a habit and let it permeate the organisation;
• Re-discover the power of inspiring - show true leadership through humanity by focusing on increasing your EQ and demonstrating empathy;
• Reward relentless continuous learning;
• Be Agile at the top - reinstate the leadership meeting as a design sprint - a blank canvas discussion with a blue sky exercise or a sprint kick-off preferably complete with a Kanban board.

Above all, obsess with the “bubble” - “Are we tight yet?” is the new equivalent of “are we there yet?” where “there” is “where we are meant to be to remain competitive in this VUCA world”.

In this week's video, we talk about these topics and we ask you to think of them - watch it and let us know what you have done to have a leadership bubble if you have one or what you want to try to reclaim it.