Fearless Workplace and Psychological Safety

 

We live in a world where success is a matter of solving problems and coming up with the next big idea. It’s not enough anymore to be smart and hardworking. Organizations need their employees to collaborate, experiment and respond to their business needs that are constantly changing. But in many workplaces, people lack the confidence to do this silenced by fear and failure, judgmental colleagues, or unapproachable bosses. When leaders use fear to motivate, people can turn to extremes and dangerous methods to get the job done. And when fear gets in the way of people speaking up at work, it’s not only the individuals who miss out.

No one wakes up in the morning saying and thinking that as soon as they arrive at the office, they want to look ignorant, incompetent, intrusive or negative. Well, it’s easy to manage that: if you don’t want to look ignorant, don’t ask questions. If you don’t want to look incompetent, don’t admit your mistakes and failures. If you don’t want to appear incompetent, don’t ever offer ideas. If you don’t want people to think that you are negative, don’t critique the status quo.

This strategy works perfectly… But only for… self-defense. In this portion of the training, we will explain psychological safety and why it should be part of every work environment through summarizing Google’s Aristotle Project and why a culture of openness enables success, and what leaders can do to develop this in their own environments.

In 2012 a  few Google employees set out to investigate what makes some teams successful, while others fail. Sound familiar? Here is what they discovered. Google named their project Aristotle because of his famous quotation: “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” They examined team behaviors on 180 teams with 37000 employees for 2 years. But they did not find the answer for a long time. The researchers eventually concluded that - rather than intelligence - what separated high-performing teams from dysfunctional ones was how members of the team treated one another,

Their research strongly related to another research forty years ago by Dr. Meredith Belbin who found that “The lack of coherent teamwork nullified the gains of individual efforts or brilliance”. Similarly, Google’s research discovered that group norms were significant - in other words, the traditions, standards of behavior, and other unwritten rules which govern how people function when grouped in teams.

Using their findings of group norm as a starting point, they identified five key factors for team success:

1. Dependability

2. Structure and clarity

3. Meaning

4. Impact, and most if all, 

5. Psychological safety

Psychological safety is a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up. Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making teamwork. However, establishing psychological safety is somewhat difficult to implement especially if you are dealing with different personalities who often have to work across distances and cultures. You can’t just instruct people to start trusting and be more sensitive to each other. Taking a risk around your team members might sound easy, but even just asking a simple question, “what’s the goal of this project?” makes you feel out of the loop at least.

That was the point when they discovered that psychological safety and emotional conversations and communications were related. Why? Because it all comes down to communication. When people can share their thoughts with each other, they are much better prepared to tackle challenges. A leader who openly admits that they don’t have all the information invites others to contribute. And when employees know that they always face fair feedback and consequences from their leaders, the feeling of psychological safety is strengthened. Conversational turnover and empathy are two unwritten rules we turn to when establishing bonds. And those human bonds matter in a workplace just as much as anywhere else. In fact, sometimes it matters more. People eventually start sharing ideas and become bold enough to react with full potential.

What Google’s Project Aristotle taught people is that no one wants to put a “work face” when they get to the office. But to be fully present at work, to feel psychologically safe, we need to know that we can share things. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. In the best teams, members listen to each other and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

Resources:

1. Building a psychologically safe workplace | Amy Edmondson | TEDxHGSE

2. The New York Times: How to build a successful team - https://www.nytimes.com/guides/business/manage-a-successful-team

3. Belbin and Project Aristotle – Everything You Need to Know. https://www.belbin.com/resources/blogs/belbin-and-project-aristotle-everything-you-need-to-know. Accessed 22 Oct. 2021.

4. Duhigg, Charles. “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team.” The New York Times, 25 Feb. 2016. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html.

5. Amy C. Edmondson: Summary and analysis of The Fearless Organization, Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth,  Aces Print, 2021