I’m particularly interested applying “psychological safety” to teams and facilitation. I’ve been working with a client on the group dynamics of facilitation and how facilitators can enable full participation. I’ve identified four types of prerequisites for participation, including psychological safety. This means that participants in a facilitated session feel safe to express their opinions and are free from undue influence.
I asked my OHSU colleague Dr. Niki Steckler for insight. She suggested a Tedx talk by Dr. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the influential book, “Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy.” Here is the Cliff Notes version of Dr. Edmonson’s talk. If you can carve out 12 minutes, watch the video at https://youtu.be/LhoLuui9gX8.
Three simple ways leaders can help teams build psychological safety in a work environment:
- Frame the team’s work as a learning process full of uncertainty – emphasize that we need each other.
- Make it a point to acknowledge your own fallibility.
- Model curiosity. Ask questions.
Dr. Edmondson emphasizes that increasing psychological safety is not going soft on holding people accountable for high performance.
- High accountability with low safety leads to a dangerous environment where people won’t speak up.
- High safety with low accountability leads to excessive comfort with the status quo.
- A team is in the high-performance Learning Zone when both accountability and safety are high.
I think creating psychological safety is especially relevant in these pandemic times, when change is overwhelming, and peoples’ resilience has been drained.