5 Signs You Need to Improve Your Team's Psychological Safety
Does your team feel safe enough to voice their opinions and be innovative at work?
In the workplace, psychological safety is the understanding that you won’t be embarrassed or reprimanded for speaking your mind, challenging the norm, or making a mistake. Teams with strong psychological safety can challenge the status quo, take risks, be vulnerable, contribute to innovative solutions, and bring their authentic selves to work.
Research suggests that only a minority of employees feel completely psychologically safe. Leaders play a significant role in driving psychological safety at work, and every people leader should recognize and embrace this as part of their role. Doing so will nurture creative, confident and collaborative teams who will feel empowered to work towards strategic organizational goals. This article highlights five key signs that leaders should look out for which might suggest a psychologically unsafe environment for your team.
1. Leaders contribute more in meetings
Disparate contributions in meetings can be a large indicator of hesitation, discomfort, and fear of voicing opinions. If managers find themselves having to take the lead in meetings a little too often, then this is a sign that employees do not feel comfortable doing the same. Sometimes, the behaviour of the leader will create a barrier to a collaborative atmosphere, and a third party will need to be brought in to facilitate team involvement.
2. Employees don’t reach out for help or guidance
One of the core ways a team or individual might feel psychologically unsafe is through the fear of asking a question which everyone else might know the answer to, as this creates the impression that they are out of the loop.
In their research, Google identified that one of the most effective ways to improve psychological safety was to encourage a culture of reaching out for assistance, and that no question is a silly question. This breaks down excessive vulnerability and builds trust and cohesiveness.
3. Employees find it challenging to discuss mistakes
Connected to the idea of managing workplace vulnerability is the notion that employees need to be comfortable in admitting mistakes or owning up when something goes wrong. The CIPD emphasizes the importance of leaders providing tangible and intangible resources to drive this mindset. Intangible resources could include support, training or simply a quick word of encouragement, whereas tangible resources could be data, materials, or physical support with reworking a task.
4. Employees avoid problems and difficult conversations
It is often said that a little conflict is healthy, as it promotes debate, facilitates the resolution of issues, and contributes to solving problems. Employees who avoid problems and dissenting views, or don’t take accountability for mistakes often feel untrusted by their managers. To address this, leaders must communicate goals in such a way that achieving them is understood to be a team accomplishment, akin to “we win as a team, we lose as a team”. A disconnect in goal setting will only cause employees to avoid ownership of problems, contributing to feelings of alienation in the workplace.
5. Employees engage in unhealthy competition
Competing for recognition is fueled by the need to seek positive affirmation. Positive affirmation is – like avoiding problems – caused by focusing on individual goals, not team goals, and is also a by-product of seeking validation from leaders. Leaders who foster a culture of tolerating mistakes and having an open-door policy will be able to manage such behaviour more effectively. Also keep an eye out for the ways that team members speak about each other. Teams with strong psychological safety will tend to trust each other and hold mutual respect.
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Psychological safety is an emergent area of leadership and human resources management theory, but it has been lauded as one of the best areas to focus on to drive inclusion, results, and engagement at work. Leaders should look out for warning signs suggesting that renewed focus on psychological safety is needed, and put into place cultural changes and behaviours that will encourage the organization to work openly as one.