5 Ways to Help Your Team Thrive by Increasing Psychological Safety

KAROLIN HELBIG 

MINETTE NORMAN

Karolin Helbig, who spent more than 15 years with McKinsey as a top management consultant and has a deep expertise in science, helps leaders increase their effectiveness, optimize team performance, and transform their organizations through mindset, emotional intelligence, and psychological safety. Building on her three decades leading global, technical teams in the software industry, Minette Norman focuses on developing transformational leaders who create inclusive working environments with a foundation of psychological safety. Together, Karolin and Minette developed The Psychological Safety Playbook.

Teams thrive and innovate when every team member feels heard, seen, and valued. Leaders can cultivate the conditions for thriving teams by deliberately building a strong foundation of psychological safety—an environment where employees can share ideas, offer dissenting viewpoints, and ask questions without fear of embarrassment or exclusion.

Think of psychological safety as the essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals needed to develop healthy teams. As a leader, you play a critical role in this dynamic. Your team members are watching your behavior, noticing your reactions, as well as observing what you reward, punish, and tolerate. You set the tone for the team, and it’s important for you to deliberately focus on bolstering the level of psychological safety.

Building a psychologically safe environment does not mean that you can protect the team from challenging events or shield them from the larger context in which we all operate—whether a global pandemic, an economic downturn, or senior leadership decisions. However, by creating a healthy team environment, you can better equip your team members to face challenges in a productive way.

Here are five effective ways to increase psychological safety in your team.

Communicate courageously

Courageous communication requires leaders to get out of their comfort zones, invite other perspectives, and let go of their need to be right and have all the answers. One of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is to make it a habit to ask, “What am I missing?” When you ask this simple question, you signal that you are open to looking at things from different angles and even to being challenged.

Another way you can communicate courageously is to admit that you don’t have all the answers, ask your team members to help you identify what you may be missing and then support them to get comfortable asking for help themselves and learning from one another. The goal is not to be perfect—the goal is to be able to learn together, tapping into the collective knowledge and creativity of the group.

Master the art of listening

Artful listening may be the most underdeveloped leadership skill. Often, when we think we’re listening to someone, we are not really listening. We are distracted by mental clutter—all those apps running in the background. Commit to monotasking by fully engaging in conversation and listening. Try to catch yourself when another train of thought creeps in and come back to the current conversation.

As a leader, get more curious about other people’s perspectives and explore them before putting forth your own ideas. Develop the discipline of not preparing your response when someone else is speaking. Instead, focus on truly understanding the other person, checking with them to make sure you’ve understood. 

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Think of psychological safety as the essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals needed to develop healthy teams.

KAROLIN HELBIG & MINETTE NORMAN

Manage your reactions

Often, leaders think they must always be unflappable and strong. However, like everyone else in the world, leaders are human. They get triggered and react automatically, which can detract from a team’s psychological safety. To avoid those harmful reactions, leaders need to become highly self-aware and learn how to manage their reactions and respond deliberately. One of the best ways to do that is to hit the Pause button: Before reacting, pause, take a breath, and only when you have taken that pause, intentionally choose your response.

If you want to create an environment in which people are willing to challenge you and others by offering dissenting viewpoints, make it a practice to thank people for their courage in speaking up, even if you do not agree with them.

Embrace risk and failure

How leaders deal with risk and failure has a huge impact on the psychological safety of their teams. Do you encourage taking intelligent risks, or do you punish failure? Do you focus on learning, or do you play the blame game?

There is no innovation without failure along the way. Start to reframe failure as a learning opportunity. Make it clear to your team members that you expect failures along the way when you try new things: “This is new to us, so we will experience failure.” Start to include open discussions of both failures and successes in your team meetings so your whole team can embrace a growth mindset and learn together. The more you model this growth mindset and learning behavior, the more you help your team members let go of their natural fear of failure.

Design inclusive rituals

The need for inclusion and belonging is fundamental to us as human beings. Leaders must deliberately build inclusive cultures where diverse ideas and talents can flourish. Changing a culture means changing how team colleagues behave and interact. By building inclusive rituals into your everyday interactions and by being consistent with these rituals, you can build a culture in which everyone feels heard, seen, and respected.

A perfect place to start establishing inclusive rituals is the way you run your meetings. Have your team members take turns facilitating team meetings by ensuring equal speaking time, a no-interruption policy, and inviting dissenting viewpoints. Make sure no one is dominating the conversation and find ways to engage the quieter team members. Gather feedback regularly after meetings to check if everyone feels included and continue to refine your meeting practices.

We know that building and sustaining a psychologically safe working environment is a continuous journey, with twists and turns and ups and downs along the way. We also know there is no perfect end state. We encourage you to start by trying out one new behavior from this article. You don’t have to do everything at once. You may be surprised by the positive impact of small changes done consistently.

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