Return to Work Part 3: Focus on psychological safety
Everything I shared in Part 2 – “Health and wellness before all else” – includes psychological health, which is how your mind works. Here, I’m going to offer further insights. As you transition from working and leading your teams at home back to an office environment, this is a great time to practice psychological safety.
Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash
As I’ve said before, we don’t want to go back to normal. Normal wasn’t optimal. This very strange time of a global pandemic offers an excellent opportunity to rethink and reimagine our future. We can do better with our health and wellness. And we can do better as leaders to take care of our teams, not just because people are stressed and worried at this moment, but because they always deserve the best we can offer. This is a time to reset and upgrade our practices, and here’s another way to do that.
Let me start by sharing research done by Google on healthy high-performance teams.
As business becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of our work is more and more team-based. That means that analyzing and improving the performance of individual workers – a practice known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ — isn’t enough. This is why Google switched its focus to building great teams.
The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. But is that actually true? The company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.
Project Aristotle’s researchers scrutinized the composition of groups inside Google: How often did teammates socialize outside the office? Did they have the same hobbies? Were their educational backgrounds similar? Was it better for all teammates to be outgoing or for all of them to be shy? Did gender balance play a role?
No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. Specific personality types or skill sets or backgrounds didn’t have an impact on performance. The “who” part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.
But researchers did find that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally talented.
Researchers noticed two behaviours that all good teams generally shared. First, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well. But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.
Second, good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. Members knew when someone was feeling upset or left out.
Consider those two behaviours. One, everyone felt equally welcome to talk and share their ideas, and as a result had equal time in meetings. Two, members tuned into each others’ social and emotional state and responded to it so equality and harmony were maintained.
These are two strong elements of psychological safety. All teammates are included, their viewpoints are respected, and they feel safe to take risks around each other. And they keep an eye on each other to ensure everyone feels supported.
To explore psychological safety in more depth, check out the book The Fearless Organization, written by Amy Edmondson of the Harvard Business School. Edmondson offers three basic practices that support learning, innovation and growth in the workplace. I’ve added them to the summary list I provide below (Edmondson’s are numbers three, four and five).
To create high-performing teams – which require psychological safety as a foundation – put the following practices in place.
1. Ensure equal speaking time. You’ll have a mix of personalities, so this will take some practice. But teams are neither healthy nor high-performing when a few individuals dominate every discussion. If you’re not truly inclusive, you’re going to alienate key members and lose out on gathering the best ideas and insights.
2. Pay attention to social-emotional data. Tune into tone of voice, facial expressions, eye contact, body language. Who isn’t happy about how things are going? How can this be addressed?
3. Provide candid feedback. A high-performing team thrives on honest and straightforward feedback. Feedback is not criticism. It’s not being brutal. In fact, teams perform better when they receive more positive than negative feedback. Our brains can get hijacked by negative feedback but love to execute on positive feedback. Focus on what’s working well (which implies what isn’t) and direct everyone’s energy in that direction.
4. Openly admit mistakes. Admitting mistakes allows everyone to learn from failure rather than hide from it. As a leader, this one needs to be strongly modelled by you. And your teams need to learn to appreciate the value of mistakes rather than punish each other for them. And watch for anyone – including you – who says mistakes are valuable learning tools and then criticizes anyone who makes them.
5. Learn from each other. A learning mindset blends curiosity and humility. Humility means you don’t have all the answers – which you don’t, or you wouldn’t need a team – and curiosity shows that you want to hear from everyone so you can expand your perspective and gather the best insights and data.
As Amy Edmondson says in a recent Strategy + Business article, “It’s important to note that working in a psychologically safe environment does not mean that people always agree with one another for the sake of being nice. It also does not mean that people offer unequivocal praise or unconditional support for everything you have to say. Psychological safety is not an ‘anything goes’ environment where people are not expected to adhere to high standards or meet deadlines. It is not about becoming ‘comfortable’ at work. Psychological safety enables candor and openness and, therefore, thrives in an environment of mutual respect.”
Consider all of these practices for every group you lead or belong to: your work teams, your family, your volunteer groups, any at all. At heart, the basic idea is that support always exceeds risk. In all cases, how the team operates is more important than who is on a team.
As life continues to transition, let’s also transition from normal to exceptional. Let's support each other and work better than ever before.
