Psychological Safety

Why do some teams outperform others while having the same people, resources and structures?
That was something Google decided to explore when they saw big differences in the performance of their teams. In 2012, they embarked on a big study, code-named Project Aristotle, to discover what made for high performing teams. Google’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people.
However, after reviewing the academic evidence and data from almost 200 teams, the researchers concluded that team norms and, in particular, “psychological safety” were the key drivers of strong team performance.
So, what does psychological safety mean? According to Amy Edmondson, a leading researcher on the topic, a team that has psychological safety is, a team “characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect, in which people are comfortable being themselves”. In such teams, team members feel:
- The environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking
- They are able to speak up when needed
- And colleagues are able to be candid with each other
A key fear that many executives have, is that creating a psychologically safe space potentially results in poor team performance: team mates agree with one another for the sake of being nice; they offer unconditional praise and support for everything that is said; and they ultimately excuse themselves from high performance expectations.
Amy Edmondson offers this framework to understand where your team might be based on levels of psychological safety, and accountability to meet demanding goals. The more demanding the goals are, the higher you need the psychological safety to be. Psychological safety is not a goal by itself, it’s a means to get to excellent results.
How do you build up psychologically safe teams that are also high performing? Here are a few suggestions:
- Frame the work as a learning problem not an execution problem by frequently asking your team “what are we learning from this?”
- Acknowledge your own fallibility, encourage your team to tell you what you might be missing
- Model curiosity by asking lots of questions like: “what worked and didn’t work for you in our collaboration?”
So, thinking about your own team, in which quadrant would you place it today? And, if it’s not in the Learning Zone, what could you do to nudge it in that direction?
For more perspectives on growing your leadership, please visit www.thnk.org
Animation by Sarah Nguyen
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Written, Directed and Narrated by Rod Ben Zeev
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Additional Content by Rajiv Ball
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Executive Produced by Mark Vernooij
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