In 2012, Google began Project Aristotle to understand why some teams are more successful than others. The project—which analyzed 250+ attributes from 180 teams over the course of two years—pointed to a surprising result.
Contrary to popular belief, extroversion, seniority, and funding didn’t play a fundamental role in team success.
What did was psychological safety.
But what is psychological safety, and why is it so critical to a team’s success? In this article, we’ll dive into both questions and give you a curated list of tips for how to cultivate psychological safety at work.
What Is Psychological Safety?
Psychological safety describes an environment in which team members feel it’s safe to speak up, share ideas, and admit mistakes. When we feel this special sense of safety, we’re more open to taking interpersonal risks as we don’t fear that we’ll be embarrassed or punished.
The term was popularized by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who studied the impact of psychological safety in hospitals. Like Google’s Project Aristotle, her findings were counterintuitive. Hospital staff at psychologically safe hospitals reported more errors than those at psychologically unsafe hospitals, yet their patient had better outcomes.
Although surprising at first, it’s easy to see why. The psychologically safe staff felt comfortable reporting their errors and speaking up, which allowed the team to fix things promptly and improve patient outcomes. The psychologically unsafe staff felt uncomfortable reporting their errors, so they didn’t. Mistakes piled up as patient outcomes declined.
How do you create a psychologically safe workplace?
Now that we know what psychological safety is, let’s turn to the challenge of how to develop it in your team. Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman’s The Psychological Safety Handbook provides an excellent guide on how to do it.
If you don’t have time to devour a book in the next five minutes, here’s a curated list of the 11 most powerful tips:
- Encourage diverse perspectives: Healthy dissent is a quick way to gain better results. Say, “That’s one viewpoint. Now let’s hear some dissent” or assign a devil’s advocate to keep the focus on challenging ideas with critical thinking not criticizing people with harsh judgements. In addition, thank those who share their thoughts, and provide multiple ways to give feedback. Surveys, emails, informal chats, and other channels can give people the comfort they need to express controversial ideas.
- Be imperfect: Show vulnerability by admitting when you don’t know something—especially if you’re a leader. Then, commit to finding out more, and ask for help when needed. This encourages team members to follow suit, admitting when they don’t know something, asking questions, and seeking answers.
- Be curious and clarify: Be curious about others and aim to understand their viewpoint. Say “tell me more” and “what makes you think that way?” Then, paraphrase the other person’s point of view, confirm your understanding with clarifying questions, and share your own ideas. Finally, discuss the best way forward.
- Tune into emotions: Emotions drive decision-making but are often left unspoken. So, pay attention to micro-expressions, gestures, and body language, and describe what you see. Confirm with the other person whether you’re accurately describing the reasons behind their emotions, and show empathy without judgment.
- Look for blind spots: The brain likes fast thinking, but that all too often leads to blind spots and the risks that follow. So, instead of jumping to conclusions, treat your first thoughts as tentative, consider other perspectives, and look for evidence that challenges your view.
- Build up other ideas: To foster motivation and creativity, avoid being negative or judgmental about new ideas. Instead, do as improv comedy groups do—say “Yes, and…” Find the valuable part of the new idea and treat it as an experiment in a larger learning process.
- Make failure normal: Treat failure as a natural step toward success. In fact, if your team never fails, it might be a sign that they’re not innovating enough. To help normalize it, share stories of famous failures to show how even the best have stumbled and come back stronger.
- Be a learner: Admit mistake and share what you learned from them. This builds psychological safety and encourages others to do the same. Reflect on your mistakes, extract key insights, and share them appropriately.
- Celebrate learning: In addition to normalizing failure, regularly analyze failures without blame. Ask non-judgmental questions to understand what happened and how to improve. Use “premortems” to predict and prevent potential failures, and reward those who identify possible issues.
- Assign someone as the “inclusion booster:” Make it someone’s role to ensures everyone gets a chance to speak during a meeting. This “inclusion booster” monitors speaking time, interrupts when someone dominates, invites quieter folks to contribute, and asks for alternative ideas. Rotate this role so everyone gets a chance.
- Establish rules: Follow a “No One Speaks Twice Until Everyone Speaks Once” rule to promote innovation and prevent groupthink. Move from speaker to speaker using a visual timer for brevity, and circle back to those not ready to speak. Use online tools to compile ideas in one convenient spot.
Why psychological safety matters
Whether you’re a group of remote freelancers or an in-house team at a Fortune 500 company, cultivating psychological safety makes your teams more trusting, innovative, and ultimately, successful. It worked for Google, and it can surely work for you.
Interested in growing ethically? While psychological safety allows any team to be successful, it can be particularly helpful when practiced by businesses that aim to benefit the public while making a profit. For more on those organizations, check out our guide to Public Benefit Corporations.