What is Psychological Safety?
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In this article the author attempts to answer the following questions: 1.?What is Psychological Safety?? 2. Why is it important?? 3.?How has the idea evolved?? 4.?How do you know if your team has it?? 5.?How do you create Psychological Safety?? 6. What are common misconceptions?
I am a chicken….?
If I had learned and earned the phrase “psychological safety” I might have navigated some situations with my bosses and managers in a very different way.? I might not have been so afraid to be honest, focusing on what they might do to me rather than the truth of the experience I was having.
Psychological safety is meant to engender a feeling of okay-ness in order to get team members more engaged, to feel that their opinion counts.?They are okay expressing it, and there will be no retribution if they do.?Second, it can lead to better decision-making, as a wider and more diverse range or perspectives are heard and considered.
Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, coined the term Psychological Safety.?Her original research and a study done at Google, called Project Aristotle, aimed to understand the factors that impacted team effectiveness across Google. Using over 30 statistical models and hundreds of variables, that project concluded that who was on a team mattered less than how the team worked together.?And the most important factor was psychological safety.
Obviously, the idea has had to evolve due to hybrid work, which requires that managers expand how they think about psychological safety.?The question arose due to many factors:?how do you know if your team has it?
A series of questions was issued to teams as a survey.? It speaks for itself.
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Edmondson is quick to point out that psychological safety is created more by magic than science.?I began thinking about childhood issues of trying to get away with things, ducking and covering mistakes.
I have found that admitting my own vulnerability around certain issues as well as my own fallibility in areas I just don’t fully understand, has helped enormously.? People respond with an almost audible sigh of relief.
If I can boo-boo, so can they.?If I can be honest about what is going on, so can they.
I had an issue with trying to control things and not being willing to listen to others when they offered input.? This was a bit mistake, and as a manger, it is important to learn how to facilitate group input and discussions in a meaningful way.
The author points out that a common misconception about psychological safety is that it’s “all about being nice.”?Enforced politeness is a dishonesty in itself, and I would imagine very off-putting to anyone wanting to participate in a real way.
Another misconception would be that it is important to feel comfortable to be safe.?Wow, I couldn’t agree more that it isn’t important to always feel comfortable.?New behavior often entails discomfort as our brain rewires and we let the old way atrophy and the new behaviors create new pathways.
I am learning constantly.?What about you?
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