Psychological Safety Is Never About You

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

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Here’s another reason we have to get serious about understanding and measuring Psychological Safety: we will often get it wrong if we go by our own feeling when we evaluate it.?

If we ask people how much Psychological Safety there is in the team they will often report extremely different results from the reality the data reveals once it is checked. ?

Most of our client teams show a serious discrepancy between the initial perceived level of Psychological Safety as estimated by team members before measuring, and what our software uncovers to be the true levels of PS in that team. People are often dismayed and crestfallen to see that their estimation was incorrect.?

This is partly due to an optimism bias but it is mainly because people extrapolate their opinion to the group dynamic. Obviously, they have little to no reason to believe what they feel is coinciding with what the rest of the team feels, but it’s natural they would presume the intersection.?

One of the main barriers in realistically appraising the level of Psychological Safety our teams have from an intuitive, empiric point of view, is that Psychological Safety is not individual but a “shared belief”. A personal sense of feeling completely open and even an individual sense of lack of risk at a team level is nice, but it isn’t in any way synonymous with the team dynamic we are after when we work to enhance PS.

In a sense, this is why we measure both Courage and Openness in our Dashboard when we come to dissecting Psychological Safety into the behaviours that enable it because teams can have members who feel utterly brave and yet the team can still lack a consistent habit of being open and speaking up as a team.?

Team members may be disappointed to notice that their belief is not correlated by data, and we must prepare them for said disappointment in advance and acknowledge its cause to mitigate a demoralising effect.?

Needless to say that superimposing a sense of personal responsibility towards the success of the team as experienced by the team’s management -whether that’s a team leader, a CEO or a scrum master- only exacerbates this generalisation lens and therefore leaders are the most prone to overestimate a sense of Psychological Safety at a team level in particular as they are the least likely to experience a fear of speaking up themselves by virtue of their privileged position.?

This is why, when we meet clients, I am openly dismissive of the leader’s opinion of how much Psychological Safety there is in their team at the risk of making myself unpopular. They simply have no way to appraise it even remotely accurately from their vantage point and no right to deprive the team of the opportunity of improving the team’s dynamic based on their respective skewed perspective.?

Above all, we must remember that Psychological Safety doesn’t have phases, it isn’t an immutable thing we build and it stays as such -which is why training alone, no matter how great, doesn’t have any long-lasting effects on Psychological Safety-?but that it is an ever-changing, ever-in-need-of-human-work state that enables us to have the team dynamics we are after for high performance.?

The beauty of remembering that Psychological Safety only exists at a team level and means nothing individually is that it reminds us of the fact there IS a team to consider and keep focusing on.?

Without that realisation and focus, a team is just a group of independently brave individuals with no common goal and therefore little in the way of sustainable common achievements when that bravery is at a joint level and translates into the freedom to act fearlessly. And therefore, if we recall this, if we measure for Psychological Safety as a team dynamic with an open mind and seek to increase it at that level setting our individual selves aside, we are already increasing our chances of being that team that’s courageous and open together and therefore moves mountains.?

So whatever you think you know about your team’s levels of Psychological Safety - toss that aside and replace it with genuine open-minded curiosity to find out what the data really shows about how the entire team really feels -then do something about your findings- to begin to get more of it.?

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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.