Creating psychological safety

How are teams doing on psych safety? Here’s a visual of Tim Clarke’s stages of psychological safety that answers the question.  

This is the highest level of psychological safety and the one that will deliver innovation in your team. For a different take on it, have a listen to Matthew Bellringer on We Not Me talking about how to disagree.  https://www.squadify.net/wenotme/episode-72?hsLang=en 

The next level of Psychological Safety we will be looking at is Contributor Safety. We all want to belong and we want to contribute and enabling that to happen is a significant job for the leader.  For a thought-provoking listen, here’s Matthew Bellringer on the We Not Me podcast: https://www.squadify.net/wenotme/episode-64?hsLang=en 

Learner safety is the second stage of Clarke’s model on Psychological Safety and is vital in a changing world. Here’s an introduction to the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZN_yFprVi8  When giving feedback, it’s useful to have a structure to make it as fair as possible and maximise learning. For example, here’s the EIC model: Example: start with a specific example of what was observed about what someone said or did or how they said or did it. Be as concrete as possible Impact: what effect did that action have on self, team and results? Change/continue: what would you like the person to do differently or keep doing? 

Google’s Project Aristotle discovered that Psychological Safety is the foundation of high performing teams and this Connect is about the foundation of Psychological Safety so this is important!  For a deeper dive, take a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXiqGTOfb78 

Psychological safety was defined by Prof Amy Edmondson as ‘the shared belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.’  For a deeper dive, you can read her book The Fearless Organization: https://fearlessorganization.com/the-fearless-organization.  You can also see Amy speaking at TED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhoLuui9gX8