One of the top priorities for any leader is ensuring that your team feels empowered to succeed. It can be difficult for your team to feel engaged, however, if their workplace is lacking one crucial element: psychological safety. A psychologically safe work environment is one where your employees feel safe sharing ideas, asking questions, raising concerns, and even making mistakes without fear of humiliation or punishment. Creating a psychologically safe workplace is key when it comes to happiness and productivity, of your teams.
So, how do you foster such an environment? In today’s blog, we’ll be breaking down some of the most effective ways to ensure psychological safety in your workplace.
Understand the needs of your team
Psychological safety is all about understanding what your team needs. Asking yourself, “What does my team need from me right now?” will help you, as a leader, to shift your focus and help you to understand the team’s perspective. Were they involved in the decision making process? Were the goals and direction co-created? If not, how do you help them to create ownership over the decision? Before making any decision that will impact the members of your team, wherever possible we should include our team in that process.
If for whatever reason they cannot be involved, being conscious of what they might need to understand the reasoning behind the decision will allow you to communicate in a way that is much more effective because it creates more psychological safety within your organisation. By regularly communicating with your teams, either one to one or in groups, you can provide the certainty and clarity that they need in order to stay engaged and feel valued and respected. This sort of communication will ensure that your team knows that you, as their leader, care what they have to say, are willing to listen and that their feedback and comments are important.
Psychological safety is all about understanding what your team needs. Asking yourself, “What does my team need from me right now?” will help you, as a leader, to shift your focus and help you to understand the team’s perspective. Were they involved in the decision-making process? Were the goals and direction co-created? If not, how do you help them to create ownership over the decision? Before making any decision that will impact the members of your team, wherever possible we should include our team in that process.
Be a transparent leader
Before we can be effective leaders, we must learn to be transparent leaders. Cultivating a psychologically safe workplace where every employee feels safe to share their thoughts and ideas requires transparent leadership. In other words, it begins at the top. If you, as a team leader, are open, transparent, and even vulnerable with your employees, they’ll be far more likely to feel safe, be vulnerable themselves, and follow your lead. Cultivating transparency in your leadership style begins with asking yourself, “Is there anything else I can share in this situation to help others feel comfortable in the direction that we are moving?”.
This leadership shift puts the team first and will help you as a leader to become more transparent. By sharing your own thought process, mistakes you have made, and the learnings you gained as a result of those mistakes you will be creating trust and psychological safety within your team.
Train individuals and teams in psychological safety
While training as a team is crucial to achieving psychological safety, it’s equally important to develop individual skills. An efficient way to put this into practice is by implementing training programmes that include both aspects. Formal, team-centered workshops where every participant is exposed to new skills and techniques, and then following up with individual development pathways with meaningful practical activities that further embed the individual’s learnings. Also, an accompanying coaching programme for individuals can help to ensure that the training is sustained in the long run.
Building a psychologically safe work environment is not an overnight project, but takes time, effort, and careful planning. As a leader, the leadership shift happens when we ask ourselves, “How can I be more effective in building my team’s perceived psychological safety?”.
Build psychological safety through self-awareness
The fourth key step to building psychological safety in your team is helping everyone to develop a keen sense of self-awareness. We all are subject to our own biases and those biases impact the way that we interact with the world at large. By taking some time to reflect on how you, as an individual, make decisions, you can begin to address some of those biases and start to understand the impact that they have on those around you.
You may notice upon reflection that some of your team members don’t feel completely comfortable being open and sharing their thought and opinions in the workplace. There are many things that could contribute to this, and as we develop more self-awareness, we can ensure that we are responding to challenges and situations in such a way that welcomes input from everyone. We are seldom aware of our own biases, so building an environment of psychological safety can create an atmosphere where we can all help each other to build self-awareness and adjust our communication style appropriately, and in that way encourage more open discussion.
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