What Can Leaders and Organisations Do About Psychological Safety? - Nothing. Empower Your Teams!

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

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Pull up a chair and get a cuppa tea, I think it may be time that we talk about something important. Not that the things we usually cover on here are not important, far from it, but because we’ve been getting in depth enough that it may be time to acknowledge something rather uncomfortable: if you care about Psychological Safety there is very little you can do to get more of it. Yourself as an individual. And incidentally the same applies to you “the organisation”.?How’s that? Because there’s nothing that you as an individual or the organisation as a whole can do to better what is a team dynamic.

Before we delve deeper into it let’s backtrack - everyone reading this is aware of both the definitions of Psychological Safety and of the fact that Google and subsequent studies all pointed to how it is essential if we’re after successful, high performing teams, correct??

If you cast your mind back to that time when you first understood what Psychological Safety was did you not have an overwhelming urge to get more of it in your team? Of course you did, everyone has that moment of “Wow! This is the secret people sauce! I know this because I experienced this sorcery once or twice in my working life and we were amazing and accomplished the most when we had it, if our teams now had it we’d be incessantly winning, how do we get more of it?!?”

And you may have then bought and read all 5-6 books about it and tried to amass the actionable advice out there. Truth be told: it’s slim pickings. Not a lot in the way of “The way to get more PS in a team is…” and what little there is seems to be either utterly esoteric and impracticable or classic 21st century leadership advice.?

“Create a better overall company culture” is about as actionable as “Think an army of unicorns into existence”. Whereas “Model vulnerability and openness” is common sense and needed from a leadership perspective but never enough.?

Neither pieces of advice are wrong, just either inactionable or insufficient. For our part at PeopleNotTech we tried to make either of those work and transform into useful reality and we even have a few incarnations of the software to have tried to make better leaders or more inclusive cultures to prove it.?

Our perspective has to be all about actions - when you make a piece of software that has to work for the user in a practical fashion independently as our Dashboard does, you can’t lyricise and use words loosely as one can when their output is an inspirational presentation deck.?

In our journey -a bit more about these wrong turns in the episode of TNT 2.0 Exploding the Status Quo podcast above- we built features for the “company culture” and we built features to aid with those individual displays of courage needed but at the end of the day they were nothing but a distraction from the truth which was then reinforced by other independent studies such as this: that the power to alter the interaction and communication at a team level to ensure they are authentic, brave, open, communicating freely, emotionally engaged and invested in the purpose, that power remains with the team itself and can not either be extrapolated to the hyperbolic organisational level or pushed to the edge towards a team leader.

Psychological Safety is a team level dynamic. Whether they trust each other and are fearlessly working together is made up of delicately balanced collection of behaviours, patterns, triggers, reactivity, empathy and compassion and common good will.?

It isn’t if 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” directive to the leaders of teams is 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.

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?.?

Anyone doing less, even if that less seems to contain efforts towards improving it is really only doing the awareness work. Of which we have much to invest indeed so not a useless exercise but the difference between organisations doing courses, presentations, chats and print-outs of word clouds around “Courage” and “Bravery” in an effort to increase Psychological Safety and those that have realised it’s a measurable set of behaviours that can be improved by the teams autonomously so are working to understand that in the new reality of work is staggering.?

And this is if we don’t further consider the likes of the smart people-focused digitally natives who have always known it to be about the team not the individual and have been investing heavily in empowering them with what they need for the necessary people work.?

So if you’re in an organisation doing nothing about Psychological Safety and better team dynamics you need to correct that asap but correct it by pushing the power to analyse and better to the team not by employing empty rhethorics and vapid leadership advice, help them help themselves - give them organisational permission and resources and let them build the Psychologically Safe winning team they deserve.?

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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.

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