Psychological Safety In Agile Team

As a Scrum Master / Agile Enabler how do you create psychological safety for your teams?

Thanks to Agility who gave me the opportunity to drag my thoughts on a few points, and 'Psychological Safety' one of them...

“Don’t worry, we are here for you” - Sajid Y. Sidi.

Yes this was said by me to the customers as a QA Lead (and still it is in the background of my LinkedIn Profile pic.) This was a small part of psychological safety towards customers that we will not give you buggy products. We are here to provide you with a clean product… But this quote is very suitable in terms of Team psychological safety so I thought to mention it here.

It is very important to maintain psychological safety in the workplace, this gives Ideas where we will need to focus on to improve our organization or team.

We may be wrong in thinking we have a good idea of the levels of psychological safety in our team, but it can be surprising what we learn when we measure it.

We can get a baseline for the feelings of each member, by implementing some questionnaires with teams, this should give us a true interpretation of areas we may need to work on in order to create a psychologically safe workplace. It will certainly give us a starting point for what to focus on.

Such questions we can ask like…

·     How individual is feeling in Team and how we are doing as a team?

·        Do they trust other team members?

·        How confident do they feel while working in a team?

·        How much confidence do they have, especially while they make some mistake?

These all questions should get answered to my each team member and then as a Scrum Master we should demonstrate that the communication channels are open within our team. This means sharing information as a group or in private one-to-ones.

We should encourage our team to share feedback on whether they feel included, whether they trust their colleagues, being honest about mistakes and not any blame game, allowing them to be themselves and providing the basis for comfort around sharing ideas and asking questions.

What should be an action plan with innovation?

The process of measuring psychological safety can become the start of implementing it within our team. The very process of asking good questions and listening to your team will show that we are keen to understand their needs and what’s and this will help encourage honest and open communication channels, it is very necessary for individuals to feel secure which would be helpful to change their behavior.

Sometimes Admissions of errors, lack of knowledge or skill set is not met at that time Scrum Master need to support and appreciate whatever they have and can moralize what team can do in best way.

Always appreciate members in front of all teams and while pointing such mistakes use one-o-one meeting approaches, these can increase safety level mentally, while pointing out mistakes always use soft words and make them understood with drawbacks of repetition of mistakes with some examples works always in any conditions.

Make sure Each Member's view, contributions, inputs is valued and appreciated irrespective of rank, status or job title.

Include team in discussion and decision making

Sometimes ask opinion to junior level members as well like “What do you think? What should we do here?” listen everyone, ask why and why not questions make them to discuss openly without any fear, be open for feedback.

These kinds of conversations really make a difference in a team, always letting them feel that we are here to support them as a true coach.

Team bonding should be strong, and to make it strong a coach has to work continuously by using different ways of communication, activity, outing, team lunch etc. and should apply some care protocols. If we welcome only goody goody news that means we create fears that means people will stop telling you the truth.

Throw Negativity in dustbin

Always encourage team with positive thinking, talk happily with positive news, even if there is negative news, use positive and soft words while discussing, because when leaders allow negativity to stand, it can become contagious and spread to others

Avoid blame game

It is always easy to blame persons, instead represent your thinking like a problem is for everyone and we can solve it, no problem.

Always use selective words while communicating such like….

Use “How did that happen?” instead of “Why did you do it?”

ask “Are you upset?” instead of “why are you not responding?”

ask “How will we make this possible?” instead “How will you complete this?”

Note that the word “We” turns the responsibility into a group effort, rather than singling out an individual for a mistake.

Let the team feel you are there for them.

Be present among the team for any problem, any discussion and meetings, let them feel you are always there with them, If they are stuck, help them to come out from that problem, if they are confused, help them to understand.

Here the art of listening is very important especially while problem solving with a team.

Lake of Psychological Safety is very dangerous for organization, It breeds Risk-aversion, Low Engagement, Group-think and fear and ultimately leads to low performance and terrible results.

Note that Team with psychological safety is always performing higher than Teams with low psychological safety. Always make them believe in you by saying..

“Don’t worry, I am here for you”