Psychological Safety: Beyond Awareness Creation Into Actionable Change

I was looking for an article to send to a journalist that asked for a link and I ended up taking a long stroll down what we were saying roughly a year ago and musing how/if things have changed.

A year ago we were writing in this article entitled “Psychological Safety for the team BY the team”?

“Let's be clear, in addition to all the things that Psychological Safety is not such as:?

• A “nice-to-have”;
• About job security;
• A way for employees to be lazy or complacent;
• Lack of conflict;
• Only about mental health; etc.

It is also not:

• A phase in the life of the team;
• A once-and-done topic;
• Something you can measure with an annual survey;
• Something a team leader can “take care of”;
• Something the organisation can demand;
• Something we can increase with leadership modelling vulnerability or by declaring we have an open culture.

Why this matters is because doing the wrong type of work on PS and especially when that is reduced to theoretical awareness building is simply making some shops feel like they are doing something about it but it is unfortunately never good enough to actually change lives and make teams become -or re-become- high performing.

At the risk of making those of us who have been here for the ride roll your eyes at the broken record: Psychological Safety is not a nice-to-have but the one fundamental condition to high performance:

• It drastically reduces turnover;
• It decimates safety incidents;
• And, most importantly, it increases productivity and therefore the bottom line.”

So let’s be clear: Psychological Safety is a team-level dynamic. Whether they trust each other and are fearlessly working together is made up of a delicately balanced collection of behaviours, patterns, triggers, reactivity, empathy and compassion and common goodwill.?

It is not about whether the team leader models vulnerability but if there is space for everyone to display it. Safe space. Soft and caring landings in an environment where your back is firmly had. It isn’t if the lead is flexible and open or learns a lot, it’s that the team manages those behaviours together consistently. That they are resilient and never impression manage. That they are feeling close to each other emotionally and close to their impact and purpose in general. That they care. About each other and the work. Enough to be all always be brave.?

And whether it’s there or not is immensely fragile and ever-changing. One of the worst types of lip-service to bettering Psychological Safety?is learning about it and in addition to pushing some “show you’re courageous” directives to the leaders of teams include some questions on “so how Psychologically Safe do you feel in this team?” in the annual survey of sorts then call it a day. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that, we need the actionable human work and to move past empty rhetoric”

And I wish the above could have been something we re-read today and we thought to ourselves “thankfully the time when saying this was needed has passed and the awareness curve has finally gotten to where it needs to be and we have thankfully since, moved to action. But saying any of that would be a lie. Heaven only knows how we can be so behind collectively on such a clear, common sense and eternally debated topic! How can we think it makes any sense to still be far from doing actual tasks to increase it and we’re still stuck at the “this is what it is’ phase? How on earth do we justify needing this much awareness-building?!??

We also said then and it stands 10x over today:

“Make no mistake about it, nothing other than sustained, habitual, EQed people work at the team level, done BY THE TEAM will improve any organisation’s level of Psychological Safety and therefore drop their levels of HumanDebt?.”

But if your company is still here, in this la la land of just chatting about it, make sure you come back tomorrow because in the video we will outline exactly what a comprehensive awareness-building exercise would be and how it needs to be pointed, efficient in getting everyone truly on board and, above all, swiftly followed by action because the bigger piece of work awaiting us is immensely bigger: normalising emotions and humanity in the workplace enough that the work on our wellbeing and the healthy dynamic of the team becomes mandatory everyday practice aka “the human work”.

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At?PeopleNotTech?we make?software?that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams, come see a DEMO.

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