You’ll rarely have the perfect mix of people on your team. But keep in mind that the very best teams focus on their interactions with each other and with stakeholders. So, keep recruiting the best people possible for your team, and use this secret for building a better team: show up as team leader in a few proven ways that create greater psychological safety.
The Importance of Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is defined as a team member’s belief that they won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with questions, concerns, ideas, or mistakes – by you or by other colleagues. In short, it means that team members believe that others on the team will give them grace when they take the risk to look silly, uninformed, or just plain wrong.
Psychological Safety is critical to have, especially with work that is complex, uncertain, cutting-edge or creative. It also entails working interdependently with other parties or groups. Moreover, research shows that psychological safety is the “gateway” condition for creating a high-performing team. This means that without adequate psychological safety in place, your team members won’t give you their best.
Without psychological safety, your team or organization will fall behind when trying to create high-quality products or services that meet or exceed your stakeholders’ expectations. You’ll know you need to build greater psychological safety when you see low or even mediocre employee engagement, innovation, growth, customer satisfaction, and by extension, profitability.
It’s time to stop waiting for a magic bullet or for something or someone else to improve the psychological safety on your team for you. But here’s the secret: building more psychological safety starts with you as team leader.
How to Show Up for Your Team to Build Psychological Safety and Improved Team Performance
Whether you’re a team leader, middle manager over a department, or executive, work on these aspects of your own self-development to create the conditions conducive to better psychological safety and a high-performing team.
Be Authentic
Showing up more authentically is about being your genuine self with others. To be more authentic, embrace your uniqueness or “weirdness” instead of trying to fit a cookie cutter idea of who you need to be at work or a one-size-fits-all leadership mold. The concept of being “weird”, a word that comes from a Norse word (wyrd), refers to one’s individual experience and expression. So, express your own “wyrd-ness”. (Watch a video I made on this topic.)
Also, to show up more authentically, consider doing work on your self-awareness and self-development to get a handle on “your stuff” and increase your EQ. A good place to start is to look at the things or people that “set you off” and how you react when you are “triggered” into your threat response (fight or flight). You might not realize that your reactivity impacts those around you that your status as a leader magnifies that impact. These triggers indicate beliefs and behaviors that aren’t working for you anymore and that you might want to let go of.
Adopt a Learner Mentality
As you work on showing up more authentically, you’ll become more secure and centered, which means you can admit mistakes and be open to ideas from others, a key to adopting a learner mentality. The qualities to tap into for a learner mentality to include:
humility – knowing that you aren’t better than others, which allows you to admit when you don’t know something;
fallibility – knowing you’re not perfect or all-knowing and will readily admit when you’re wrong and will share your mistakes and what you learned from them;
curiosity – having a desire to learn, which you can demonstrate by asking thoughtful, open-ended questions of your team that are both broad and deep; and
focusing on learning as part of implementation – helping team members discover what they need to learn to be successful as they pursue the tasks required to reach a team objective or goal
Respond Effectively
You can respond effectively and encourage more team member participation, thoughtful discussion, and better questions from your team when you:
Assume good intentions – suspend judgment of something a team member does or says until you more fully understand where they are coming from. (Watch a video I made on this topic.)
Express appreciation for sharing bad news or failures – thank team members for their contributions, questions, and broaching difficult-to-bring-up topics. That means you’ll listen thoughtfully, indicate the information they shared matters, and acknowledge or thank them for bringing up the topic, idea, mistake, or question at all.
Put mistakes or failure in perspective – based on the nature of the work, talk about mistakes and failures with the team in terms of the number of unknowns they’re faced with and how complex, difficult or unpredictable the work is.
Celebrate failures that helped the team learn something new – avoid “shooting the messenger” when a team member delivers bad news to you and instead offer help or support when team members experience failure or mistakes.
Address clear violations of policy and procedure – Clarify boundaries from the start to let team members know what is blameworthy. Then, respond appropriately to clear or obvious breaches of policy or procedure in a timely and appropriately serious manner to influence future behavior
The secret to building more psychological safety starts with how you show up. No matter how good or discombobulated your team is currently, realize that you probably have some of your own work to do on yourself. After all, you are a powerful role model for the rest of your team.
So, become more authentic, adopt a learner mentality, and work on responding more effectively to encourage team members to take the risk of divulging mistakes and failures. When you become the type of person who routinely creates the conditions for psychological safety, team performance and relationships will improve.
See more videos on psychological safety on my YouTube channel here
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🚀Want to work on your ability to create psychological safety as a team leader, middle manager, or executive? Or maybe you want to explore team coaching for your whole team to collectively do so. Let’s discuss how I can help you.💡Book a free strategy session.👉Find out more about how I work with team leaders here.