Psychological Safety

What does it take to build (or weaken) an enthusiastic, motivated and high-performing workforce?

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Don’t let the silence in your business be the only noise you can hear in a team meeting…

Foster success in your business when you build a psychologically safe environment

Make your team feel safe by taking away the fear in your business

Create a safe environment in your business and get the best out of your team

Why risk the future of your business by not building a safe culture for them to thrive

What happens in meetings when your team feels safe to speak the truth?

Take the fear away from team meetings and allow your team to cooperate and collaborate

How do you build an effective team in your business?

Have you ever wondered what you need to do to increase the performance of your team?

When your team feels safe they are more effective…

What happens to the performance of your team when you follow Google’s example?

How can you increase the performance of your team?

Create the right environment for your team to perform at its best.

Google listened to Aristotle when it came to team effectiveness, can you do the same?

If Google can make the time to invest in the safety of their team, then so can you…

How can a Greek philosopher help you build the success of your team?

Don’t risk the future of your team and the future of your business by dismissing psychological safety

Encourage an environment for collaboration and innovation when you make your team feel safe

When you allow your team to take interpersonal risks you will build the success of your business

What happens when you encourage and expect ideas, creativity and candour from your team?

Don’t allow silence to be the loudest sound in a team meeting

Should psychological safety matter to the overall performance of your team?

Create a psychologically safe environment in your business and your future proof its success

What happens when your team feels safe to speak openly with candour?

Create an atmosphere in your business where trust, respect and candour are expected

Find the right source of success for your business when you create a safe environment for your team

Your business wins when you create a safe environment for your team

Encourage honesty and openness from your team for business success

What does a psychologically safe environment look like when you get it right?

Take the time to ensure your team feels supported, valued and respected…

Ensure psychological safety is a business success, not a failure…

How can listening, empathy and conflict resolution help you foster the right environment in your business?

What happens when you encourage your team to have a growth mindset?

Really listening to your team can create a culture of safety in your business

Create the time to work on your business, not in your business to ensure your team feels safe

When you focus ON your team and your business you foster a sense of safety for your people

Allow your team to collaborate and innovate when you create the right culture in your business

Your business wins when you build a psychologically safe environment

4 steps to build an effective, engaged and motivated team in your business

4 steps to build the safety and enthusiasm of your team

Your team want to feel safe, here are 4 steps to make this happen

Create an atmosphere of respect, value and honesty in your business with these 4 steps

What are the 4 steps to creating a psychologically safe environment in your business?

4 helping hands to help you generate the perfect team in your business

Apply the right skills in your business to build the safety of your team

Make the right changes in your business to provide an environment for psychological safety to be embraced

Embrace the diversity of your team and you create the right environment for success

Should you be cultivating the right environment for success in your business?

If you create safety for your team, you naturally create safety for your business

LinkedIn Updates

1. You know that the engagement, enthusiasm and overall happiness of your team as regards the work they do is down to you and that a happy and enthusiastic team will help ensure your business is more successful and a nicer place to work for everyone. Click here to discover how creating a safe environment in your business will make this easier to achieve.

2. How happy, engaged and enthusiastic do you think your team is with the work they are doing? When you create a psychologically safe environment in your business you build the engagement and enthusiasm of your team and also create a happier place to work. Click here to discover more.

3. What difference to your business would a high-performing and effective team make? This was the question that Google asked themselves and to answer the question, they turned to a Greek philosopher and you can do the same to ensure that you create the right environment for your team to perform at their best. Click here for more.

4. Getting your team to work together at their best can be tricky, you take a chance and hope that they will all work well together, but the larger the team the more difficult this becomes. Click here to discover how Google got it right and why shared interests are the lifeblood of your team success.

5. How does the rest of your team react when someone else takes an interpersonal risk and shares an idea, concern, mistake or issue? Is it received well and therefore prompts an open judgment-free team conversation or it is met with ridicule and criticism? Click here to discover how to embrace risk-taking in your team meetings and the importance of psychological safety in these conversations.

6. Psychological safety is critical to a healthy and high-functioning work environment. When your team feel psychologically safe, they will feel comfortable expressing their opinions, ideas and concerns without the fear of being judged, ridiculed or punished. Click here to discover more.

7. Psychological safety is key to the future success of your business. Get it right and you have a highly motivated, high-performing, collaborative team. Get it wrong, and you create a cut-throat work environment of mistrust, judgment, poor communication and unhealthy competition. Click here to discover more.

8. Click here to discover what happens when psychological safety is missing from a business and what happened to the Deepwater horizon oil rig as a result. This preventable disaster will demonstrate the importance to your business of creating an honest, open, candid environment for your team.

9. When you are busy every day working IN your business, it’s hard to find the time to work ON your business and ON your team, but it’s vital to your future success that you make time for this. Click here to discover the importance of making time to create a psychologically safe culture in your business.

10. The importance of creating a psychologically safe environment in your business cannot be underestimated. Click here to discover that when you focus ON your team and your business you foster a sense of safety for your people.

11. It’s important to understand, when deciding to focus on building psychological safety in your business, that this is not just about everyone agreeing with everyone else just to be nice, nor does it mean offering support and praise for everything. Click here to discover how to build the safety in your business using 4 steps.

12. Psychological safety is actually about candour, candour which is based on trust and respect. It must allow for, and encourage, productive disagreement or conflict, where ideas can be shared and discussed without fear of rejection. This exchange allows growth within your team. Click here to discover the 4 steps to help your create a safe environment for your team.

13. When you create and nurture a culture of psychological safety in your business, you ensure that your team feel free to exchange ideas, concerns and questions without fear of reprisal or negative consequences. Click here for 4 helping hands to get you started.

14. You play a crucial role in creating and maintaining psychological safety within your team. You can foster psychological safety by actively listening, providing clear expectations, encouraging open dialogue, rewarding collaboration and addressing conflicts or disrespectful behaviour promptly. Click here to discover how to cultivate the right environment in your business.

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Blog Posts

Blog 1 – Time to build a culture of psychological safety in your business…

As a business owner, leader or manager, you know that the engagement, enthusiasm and overall happiness of your team as regards the work they do is down to you.

You also know that a happy and enthusiastic team will help ensure your business is more successful and a nicer place to work for everyone.

When you look around at your team, how happy do you think they are? How engaged in their work are they and how enthusiastic are they about the work they are doing?

You might think that you have all of these things sorted and that everything is fine.

Now let me ask you another question – how safe do you think your team feel?

This might be a strange question and you might not fully understand what I mean…

Here is a scenario – if you and your team are sitting in a meeting or gathered together, and someone shares an idea, asks a question or raises a concern, how do the rest of the team respond?

Do they take the idea on board and share additional ideas? Do they answer the question, openly and honestly? Do they respond to a concern with solutions and ideas? Does the environment within which your team operate promote a free-flowing, honest, open, judgment-free conversation?

Or is this idea, question or concern met with criticism, judgment, negativity, mocking or even blatant ridicule? And if this is the case, what is the likelihood of this person, or anyone else at the meeting who might have thought of sharing something, speaking up in future?

How many times in your team meetings have questions, ideas or concerns been greeted with silence?

When you create a psychologically safe environment in your business, you allow your team to share, free from fear and judgment. You create a positive and thriving work environment that promotes open communication, collaboration, innovation and employee well-being, all of which contribute to the long-term success of your team and your business. For you, creating and nurturing this environment is a win–win.

Click here to discover exactly what psychological safety is and the importance of investing in it in your business, so that you can unlock the full potential of your team and cultivate a culture of honesty, openness, engagement and collaboration.

Blog 2 – Learn from Google (and Aristotle!) how to increase the performance of your team…

Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, is generally regarded as one of the greatest intellectual figures of Western history, but what has he got to do with your business?

Well, he is famously quoted as saying ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’

Now think about this quote with your team in mind – when your team or a group of team members are working together, does the Aristotle quote ring true, or is there friction, mind games and internal discord?

How well do your team perform? How effective are they?

And do you even know what a high-performing, effective team looks like?

If you want your team to be more effective and to perform at a higher level than they do currently, how do you go about achieving this?

When you put 6, 8, 12 or more people in a room, you take a chance and hope that they will all work well together. However, the larger the team, the more difficult this becomes as you increase the number of personalities, opinions and temperaments.

It’s like sitting down with a group of your friends and trying to decide on the movie you’ll watch together – some like comedy, or horror, and others want action or a thriller. To find a movie that can please everyone is challenging…

Shared interests are the lifeblood of your team, but ensuring that is not easy. For your team to truly work, you have to foster the right environment.

And that is exactly what Google aimed to do when they put together a project to help them build the perfect team – they embarked on a multi-year study of 180 teams, called Project Aristotle, to determine the factors involved in how and why some teams are effective and some are not.

The project, led by Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, initially looked at each team’s composition, particularly in regard to educational background, group dynamics, skill sets, personality traits and emotional intelligence.

What they discovered was that none of these factors were decisive in determining the effectiveness of a team. The key finding of Project Aristotle was the importance of psychological safety to all team members.

Google found that psychological safety was THE most important factor in determining team effectiveness. Even for smart, high-powered team members, a psychologically safe environment was critical to the team’s effectiveness and overall success.

For Google, Project Aristotle's findings highlighted the significance of creating a supportive and inclusive team culture. Leaders and managers were encouraged to prioritise psychological safety by actively listening to team members, encouraging diverse perspectives and providing constructive feedback.

Are your team working in an environment of psychological safety?

Click here to discover that by following Google’s example and understanding and nurturing psychological safety in your business, your team can be more effective, and perform at a higher level.

Blog 3 – Time to make the safety of your team a business priority

Imagine you are in a meeting with some or all of your team and someone takes an interpersonal risk and shares an idea, issue, concern or problem. However, instead of receiving support, leading to an open, constructive and healthy debate or conversation, another member of the team is dismissive, sarcastically belittles the idea and ridicules the person who spoke up.

This leaves the team member feeling embarrassed, unsupported and devalued.

At the next meeting, what are the chances of this person (or of anyone else on the team privy to this interaction) contributing anything?

Psychological safety is lost.

You may be unfamiliar with the idea of psychological safety, but it is now recognised as a fundamental element of an engaged, enthusiastic, effective and high-performing team.

But what exactly is it? Psychological safety refers to a shared belief within a group or team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks without the fear of negative consequences or retaliation.

Psychological safety is critical to a healthy and high-functioning work environment. When your team feel psychologically safe, they will feel comfortable expressing their opinions, ideas and concerns without the fear of being judged, ridiculed or punished.

So why does it matter to the success of your team and business?

Psychological safety fosters trust, respect and open communication. Such an environment encourages your team members to be vulnerable, to share their thoughts and feelings, to admit mistakes and to ask for help when needed. It encourages an atmosphere of collaboration, learning and innovation, which ultimately leads to better problem-solving, increased creativity and higher levels of engagement.

All of this is good news, not just for the performance of your team, but for the performance of your business.

When you create a psychologically safe environment, your team will feel valued and listened to. They will feel assured that their opinions not only matter but that they are supported by the rest of the team and are contributing to the overall success of the business.

Can you afford not to take this seriously? Will you devote more time to building a psychologically safe environment and culture in your business?

Click here to discover much more about psychological safety and the benefits to your business of creating an environment where your team can flourish.

Blog 4 – Prevent business disasters by creating the right environment for your team

Psychological safety is a subtle but powerful factor when it comes to whether your business will succeed or fail.

Get it right, and you have a highly motivated, high-performing, collaborative team. Get it wrong, and you create a cut-throat work environment of mistrust, judgment, poor communication and unhealthy competition.

Have you ever wondered why your team isn’t more collaborative?

Do you have jobsworths in your team, those who just do their job and never step out of their box?

Have you ever been concerned by your team’s lack of ideas, creativity and motivation?

Do the members of your team ask questions, challenge mistakes, admit weakness and make suggestions?

Most people seek to avoid these interpersonal risks for fear of being seen as incompetent, ignorant or disruptive, but taking these risks in a psychologically safe environment where there is trust, respect and candour amongst team members can actually result in the opposite.

Challenging mistakes or making suggestions in a cooperative and collaborative culture can result in refined processes, improvements in quality and an increase in performance, both for the team and the business – this is all good news for you, your team and your customers.

In her book The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School states that:

Without psychological safety, people cannot speak up, contribute or learn. They cannot contribute their unique perspective or value… Fear in the workplace is lethal to creativity, innovation and engagement.

And the consequences of an unsafe working environment can be catastrophic.

In 2010 the Deepwater Horizon drilling oil rig exploded, killing 11 and injuring 46. While the incident was primarily a human and environmental disaster, in the investigations that followed it transpired that those workers and contractors who had raised concerns about safety issues prior to the explosion were either ignored or faced negative consequences for speaking up. This lack of psychological safety where people felt they couldn't voice their concerns likely contributed to the escalation of risks and the subsequent tragedy.

Businesses can learn lessons from the Deepwater Horizon incident as well, as it emphasises the importance of creating an environment where your team feel safe and comfortable sharing their perspectives, concerns and ideas.

An absence of psychological safety can also have wide-ranging detrimental effects on your team’s stability and well-being. Creating a psychologically safe culture encourages open dialogue, effective risk assessment and proactive problem-solving. If these had been in place on the oil rig, perhaps the tragedy would not have happened.

Click here to read more about the importance of nurturing and maintaining psychological safety in your business and the value of your team taking interpersonal risks.

Blog 5 – Discover the practical skills to help you build psychological safety in your business

As a business owner, leader or manager, you are responsible for the social and cultural environment of your business, in other words, how your team feel and behave. It’s also up to you to maintain their engagement and enthusiasm for the work they do and create room for them to develop and prosper…

When you are busy every day working IN your business, it’s hard to find the time to work ON your business and ON your team, but it’s vital to your future success that you make time for this.

The importance of creating a psychologically safe environment in your business cannot be underestimated.

Allowing your team the space and safety to take interpersonal risks that are not just encouraged, but expected, by the rest of the team will have a profound effect on the way your business operates.

According to Amy Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization:

The leader’s job is not to have all the ideas but to make sure all the ideas are heard… The essence of leadership is to enable others to feel safe in contributing their best.

Experts in the field, including Edmondson, believe there are a number of practical skills necessary for creating a psychologically safe work environment. These include:

Active listening
Empathy
Trust building
Feedback delivery
Conflict resolution
Inclusivity
Growth mindset

Utilising these practical skills can help you create an environment where your team feel safe to speak up, share ideas and collaborate.

Click here to discover more detail about each of the practical skills mentioned above and how these skills can foster trust, respect and candour in your business.

Blog 6 – Focus on the psychological safety of your team with these 4 steps

It’s important to understand, when deciding to focus on building psychological safety in your business, that this is not just about everyone agreeing with everyone else just to be nice, nor does it mean offering support and praise for everything.

Psychological safety is actually about candour, candour which is based on trust and respect. It must allow for, and encourage, productive disagreement or conflict, where ideas can be shared and discussed without fear of rejection. This exchange allows growth within your team.

Below are the 4 stages of Psychological Safety as outlined by author Timothy R. Clark, from his book, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety. According to Clark, these stages represent the journey that your team must follow to truly cultivate psychological safety in your business.

Inclusion Safety – Your team members feel included and accepted, with a sense of belonging. In this first stage, you must create an environment where every member of your team feels valued, respected and recognised for their unique contributions and perspectives.

Learner Safety – This stage helps you capitalise on the foundation you have created in the first stage, where you focus your efforts on further creating an environment where your team members feel safe to learn, grow and express their ideas without fear of judgment or criticism.

Contributor Safety – In this stage, your team feel safe to contribute their unique perspectives, ideas and talents without the fear of negative consequences. You should be empowering them to take risks, share their insights and actively participate in the team's work, secure in the knowledge that the contributions will be valued and appreciated by the team as a whole.

Challenger Safety – This stage is the most important of all. At this point, team members feel safe to challenge the status quo, offer dissenting viewpoints and engage in healthy debate. You must encourage them to question assumptions, voice alternative perspectives and engage in constructive conflict, all the time feeling safe that their viewpoints will be taken on board and considered by the other members of the team.

When you use these four stages in your business, you will have a roadmap of how to build psychological safety, enabling your team to feel safe, empowered, respected, valued and supported in their interactions.

Click here to read more about the high standards you can create when you build a culture of psychological safety in your business. Get more information on Timothy R. Clark’s 4 Stages of Psychological Safety by downloading the tools that accompany this report.

Blog 7 – Use these 4 helping hands to get you started on the road to a psychologically safer business

When you create and nurture a culture of psychological safety in your business, you ensure that your team feel free to exchange ideas, concerns and questions without fear of reprisal or negative consequences.

Your team will feel valued, heard and supported. They are more likely to contribute their own diverse perspectives and engage in constructive debates. This leads to better problem-solving, increased creativity, higher levels of engagement and improved overall team performance.

Psychological safety is particularly important in fields that require teamwork, creativity and continuous learning, such as research, healthcare, education and technology. This environment allows for open feedback, encourages growth and enables individuals to learn from failures and adapt.

You as leaders play a crucial role in creating and maintaining psychological safety within your team.

You can foster psychological safety by actively listening, providing clear expectations, encouraging open dialogue, rewarding collaboration and addressing conflicts or disrespectful behaviour promptly.

But if this is new ground to you and you have no idea where to begin, here are 4 helping hands to get you started:

1. Lead by example – You are the leader of your business, the one who everyone looks to for direction. How can you tell your team how to behave if you are not behaving in the same way yourself? Your team will look to emulate you, so encourage openness, and start viewing mistakes as learning opportunities, not reasons for reproach. Always invite debate and feedback from the rest of the team.

2. Foster teamwork and collaboration – Encourage the team to work together collaboratively at every opportunity and to cooperate on issues or new challenges together. Foster a continuous improvement mentality within the team, so that they are constantly looking for areas for improvement and chances to experiment.

3. Encourage open communication – Ensure your team feel confident speaking up, sharing ideas and asking questions. Actively listen to what the members of your team say and validate their perspectives, even if you do not always agree.

4. Encourage diversity and inclusion – A team member should not leave their identity at the business’s front door; a diverse workforce means a greater chance of different and fresh perspectives and experiences. Ensure that every member of your team has a voice and opinion and feels safe to express it.

The importance of a psychologically safe environment in your business cannot be overstated. It is critical to a positive, healthy working culture where your team feel they can express themselves without risk.

Moreover, psychological safety will have a positive impact on the well-being of your team. When your team feel secure in expressing themselves, they experience lower stress levels, higher job satisfaction and increased productivity in your business.

Click here to make creating and nurturing a psychologically safe environment in your business a priority.

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