Psychological safety in teams: what can you achieve when you stand on solid ground?

This week, it snowed in the town where I live. I know that all my friends and colleagues in much colder parts of the world will tell me that it didn’t really snow: we just had a couple of inches. But even that small scattering changed the way the world looked, changed the way I interact with the world, and also prompted some thoughts about psychological safety, confidence and my own response to challenges in the workplace.

For the first couple of days, the world was transformed. The streets had that special quality they have after the first snowfall, when everything seems soft, quiet and pristine. I couldn’t wait to get out and walk in the snow (to the extent allowed by current lockdown restrictions). It was cold, but the snow was powdery and I felt completely safe to explore the changed environment.

Yesterday and today, things have changed. Some of the snow is still here, but the ground is now covered in ice. I still want to get out and enjoy it, as we only get snow here a few times a year, if at all. But the experience is different: the ground is treacherous and I do not feel safe. The road that leads away from my house slopes sharply, and it is easy to fall. I proceed cautiously, checking my footing with every step. I am conscious that now is not the time to take risks and clog up the health system with unnecessary injuries, and I turn back early.

I think that this experience is mirrored in the workplace. Google has famously conducted research to figure out what makes high performing teams successful, and found that the number one determinant of performance was psychological safety, expressed in the ability to give a positive answer to the question: can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed? 

I think that most of us find this conclusion intuitively recognisable and appealing: I certainly do. When I reflect on my own experience of psychological safety, or the lack of it, I naturally think of my ability to feel confident of my place in a team, and the difference that confidence makes to my response to challenge and opportunity.

In those teams (and I am thinking of teams quite broadly, to include my manager, my team-mates and other people on whom we depend) where I have felt psychologically safe, I have felt like I felt after the first snowfall: the world was full of opportunities which were fresh and exciting. If I fell, there were plenty of people to lift me. Challenges were interesting problems to be solved and drew me forward.

In those teams where I have not felt psychologically safe (and there have been plenty of those), I have felt like I felt after the snow had frozen into ice. The ground was uncertain and treacherous. Mistakes would bring me crashing down hard, and I could expect nothing but blame for falling. Unsurprisingly, challenges were unwelcome, it was personally risky to seek them out, and each new setback weighed heavily.

I think that my (unscientific, with a sample size of one) experience illustrates that to achieve psychological safety, we do not have to live in a world without risk or challenge. Indeed, I think that teams with high levels of psychological safety are able to take on some of the most risky and challenging tasks in the world - because they can be confident of support if they fail or stumble.

I also think, based on my experience - and my own admitted mistakes in management and leadership over the years - many teams whose managers think that they are fitted to take on big challenges (because they are tough teams who don’t accept failure) are actually more fragile than they realise.

The value of the research conducted by Google is that, unlike my experiences above, it is based on data rather than anecdote, and it presents managers and leaders with findings that they should not ignore. But what we choose to do with those findings is personal. What type of environment do we want to create for ourselves and our teams?