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high performance teams

Creating and Sustaining Psychological Safety in High Performing Teams

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Creating and Sustaining Psychological Safety in High Performing Teams

High performing teams need psychological safety. This means that team members believe it is safe to take interpersonal risks without fear of negative consequences such as criticism, punishments, being ignored or laughed at. When people feel accepted and respected, they bring their best selves to work. They are more likely to take risks, share new ideas, and give constructive feedback.

Creating psychological safety starts with the team leader. Leaders need to set the tone and make it clear that everyone is valued and respected. They should encourage open communication and discourage blamed-based thinking.

Sustaining psychological safety requires ongoing effort from everyone on the team. It takes time and patience to build trust and create an environment where people feel comfortable taking risks. But it is worth the effort, because high performing teams are able to achieve amazing things.

The Difference Between Psychological Safety and Trust

There is a key difference between psychological safety and trust. Psychological safety means that team members feel safe to take risks without fear of negative consequences. Trust means that team members are willing to cooperate and work together towards a common goal.

Trust is essential for any team to function effectively. Team members need to be able to rely on each other, and they need to trust that everyone is working towards the same goal. It is about how individuals treat and interact with one another.

Psychological safety is a shared belief and team norm that all team members adhere to. It allows team members to take risks and share new ideas, which can lead to innovation and creativity. Everyone in the group feels secure enough to participate.

Creating Psychological Safety In High Performance Teams

Creating psychological safety in high performance teams can be a challenge. However, there are a few things that team leaders can do to set the tone and encourage open communication.

1. Leaders need to set the example and be role models for healthy behavior. They should create a safe environment where taking calculated risks and voicing new ideas is encouraged.

2. Leaders should avoid blame-based thinking and engage in difficult conversations. When team members are able to communicate openly, they are able to resolve conflicts quickly and efficiently.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             It is essential for team members to feel safe to take risks and share new ideas. Understanding the importance of cultivating a psychologically safe environment is an important factor in ongoing leadership development. When team members feel valued and respected, they are more likely to bring their best selves to work and contribute to the success of the team.

“Understanding the importance of cultivating a psychologically safe environment is an important factor in ongoing leadership development.”

Sustaining Psychological Safety In High Performance Teams

Encourage Risk-Taking

Allowing teams to make calculated risks is essential for their success. Risks can lead to innovation and creativity, which are essential for high performance teams. When team members feel safe to take risks, they are more likely to share new ideas and contribute to the team’s success. However, risks need to be calculated in order to avoid unnecessary mistakes.

Team leaders should encourage their team members to take risks, but also remind them that mistakes are part of the learning process. By taking risks and learning from their mistakes, team members can continue to improve their performance.

Tolerating Mistakes

When someone makes a mistake, it can be easy to get angry or criticize them. However, this can actually discourage people from taking risks and sharing new ideas. It can also damage relationships and hinder team progress.

A better approach is to focus on the mistake itself, not the person who made it. Ask what can be learned from the mistake and how you can prevent it from happening again. This is an integral part of high performance team programs. When mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, you create stronger teams and help them in developing leadership capabilities that will make them successful both now and in the future.

For high performing team development to be successful, participants need to feel safe in order to cooperate and work together effectively. Creating psychological safety is essential for building an effective high performance culture.  Leaders should set the tone and example for healthy behavior, avoid blame-based thinking, and encourage open communication. When team members are able to communicate openly, they can resolve conflicts quickly and efficiently. Sustaining a psychologically safe environment is important for high performance teams so that they can continue to take risks, learn from their mistakes, and improve their overall performance.

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About the Author: The Leadership Sphere

The Leadership Sphere helps small and medium businesses and larger organisations in Australia, in creating value through leadership. The Leadership Sphere provides a humanistic approach to the way it delivers leadership, performance and coaching services. We work with leaders and senior teams who need to gain increased clarity, build capability and ensure contribution at every level in the organisation, and enable a safe, inclusive and  high trust organisation.

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Creating and Sustaining Psychological Safety in High Performing Teams

vulnerability in leadership

Leading Through Trust Series: Relationships

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Leading Through Trust Series: Relationships

How do we build a strong, positive relationships? Did you know that having good friends in the workplace can boost your job satisfaction? How good are the relationships that you have with your colleagues?

According to the Gallup Organization, people who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs. And it doesn’t have to be a best friend: Gallup found that people who simply had a good friend in the workplace are more likely to be satisfied. In this article, we’re looking at how you can build strong, positive relationships at work. We’ll see why it’s important to have good working relationships, and we’ll look at how to strengthen your relationships with people that you don’t naturally get on with.

Human beings are naturally social creatures – we crave friendship and positive interactions, just as we do food and water. So, it makes sense that the better our relationships are at work, the happier and more productive we’re going to be. Good working relationships give us several other benefits: our work is more enjoyable when we have good relationships with those around us. Also, people are more likely to go along with changes that we want to implement, and we’re more innovative and creative. What’s more, good relationships give us freedom: instead of spending time and energy overcoming the problems associated with negative relationships, we can, instead, focus on opportunities.

This is the third article in a six part series on trust. You can read about how to be more transparent here.

Defining a Good Relationship

There are several characteristics that make up good, healthy working relationships:

Trust – This is the foundation of every good relationship. When you trust your team and colleagues, you form a powerful bond that helps you to work and communicate more effectively. If you trust the people you work with, you can be open and honest in your thoughts and actions, and you don’t have to waste time and energy “watching your back.”

Mutual Respect – When you respect the people who you work with, you value their input and ideas, and they value yours. Working together, you can develop solutions based on your collective insight, wisdom and creativity.

Mindfulness – This means taking responsibility for your words and actions. Those who are mindful are careful and attend to what they say, and they don’t let their own negative emotions impact the people around them.

Diversity – People with good relationships not only accept diverse people and opinions, but they welcome them. For instance, when your friends and colleagues offer different opinions from yours, you take the time to consider what they have to say and factor their insights into your decision-making.

Open Communication – We communicate all day, whether we’re sending emails or meeting face to face. The better and more effectively you communicate with those around you, the richer your relationships will be. All good relationships depend on open, honest communication.

How to Build Good Relationships

Although we should try to build and maintain good working relationships with everyone, there are certain relationships that deserve extra attention. For instance, you’ll likely benefit from developing good relationships with not only your team members but also key stakeholders in your organisation. These are the people who have a stake in your success or failure. Forming a bond with these people will help you to ensure that your projects and career, stay on track.

#1: Develop Your People Skills

Good relationships start with good people skills. But first, we each need to identify our own relationship needs. Do you know what you need from others? And do you know what they need from you? Understanding these needs can be instrumental in building better relationships.

#2: Schedule Time to Build Relationships 

I sometimes hear team leaders – or members of the team themselves – say that they haven’t caught up 1-on-1 for several weeks. In order to build trust, team leaders must devote sufficient time towards relationship building. So, how frequently you should catch up with team members? I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules, but what I recommend is weekly 15-minute conversations, with one of those per month being a longer meeting which is not about their to-do lists, tasks or projects.

Instead, it’s about them. Ask them how they’re doing, ask them what support they need, ask them about relationships in the team, and finally, ask them about their role and their level of engagement. This can also move to a broader career discussion. Ask ‘what else can I do to support you having a stimulating and enjoyable place in the team?’ It goes a long way, believe me.

Don’t forget the little moments that matter – for example by saying good morning to people, checking in regularly even just for 30 seconds. These little interactions help build the foundation of a good relationship, especially if they’re face-to-face.

#3: Focus on Your EI

Also, spend time developing your emotional intelligence (EI). Among other things, this is your ability to recognise your own emotions, and clearly understand what they’re telling you. High EI also helps you to understand the emotions and needs of others which is the focus of the next level – Understanding.

#4: Appreciate Others

Show your appreciation whenever someone helps you. Everyone, from your boss to the office cleaner, wants to feel that their work is appreciated. So, genuinely compliment the people around you when they do something well. This will open the door to great work relationships.

#5: Be Positive

Focus on being positive. Positivity is attractive and contagious, and it will help strengthen your relationships with your colleagues. No one wants to be around someone who’s negative all the time.

#6: Manage Your Boundaries

Make sure that you set and manage boundaries properly – all of us want to have friends at work, but, occasionally, a friendship can start to impact our jobs, especially when a friend or colleague begins to monopolize our time. If this happens, it’s important that you’re assertive about your boundaries, and that you know how much time you can devote during the workday for social interactions.

#7: Avoid Gossiping

Don’t gossip – office politics and “gossip” are major relationship killers at work. If you’re experiencing conflict with someone in your group, talk to them directly about the problem. Gossiping about the situation with other colleagues will only exacerbate the situation and will cause mistrust and animosity between you. You may have heard the terms ‘above the line’ and ‘below the line’. Above the line is about taking ownership, accountability and responsibility for things that happen, whereas below the line is when our behaviour can be damaging. It’s about blame, excuses and denial. It’s toxic. Gossiping or talking badly about people behind their back is below the line. As a leader, we must try really hard not to do this.

#8: Listen Actively

Practice active listening when you talk to your customers and colleagues. People respond to those who truly listen to what they have to say. Focus on listening more than you talk, and you’ll quickly become known as someone who can be trusted.

Difficult Relationships

Occasionally, you’ll have to work with someone you don’t like, or someone that you simply can’t relate to. But, for the sake of your work, it’s essential that you maintain a professional relationship with him. When this happens, make an effort to get to know the person. It’s likely that she knows full well that the two of you aren’t on the best terms, so make the first move to improve the relationship by engaging him in a genuine conversation, or by inviting him out to lunch. While you’re talking, try not to be too guarded. Ask him about his background, interests and past successes. Instead of putting energy into your differences, focus on finding things that you have in common. Just remember – not all relationships will be great; but you can make sure that they are, at least, workable!

Next time, we will talk about Understanding.

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Leading Through Trust Series: Relationships

Vulnerability in Leadership

Vulnerability in Leadership: More than just a Buzzword? (Part 2)

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Vulnerability in Leadership: More than just a Buzzword? (Part 2)

In part 1 of this two-part article, “Vulnerability in Leadership: More than Just a Buzzword“, I discussed vulnerability as a key leadership strength.  It’s an idea and principle that is increasingly referenced in leadership literature and in organisations. Despite this growing awareness, vulnerability is still usually associated with weakness. That’s unfortunate – because vulnerability is such a critical leadership quality that it deserves serious attention.

I also mentioned in part 1 that I, like many others, stand on the shoulders of giants like Dr Brown. I’m very excited to be heading to the US in November to complete the Dare to Lead accreditation program.  In it we will further explore concepts such as courage, vulnerability, shame, the gifts of imperfection, rising strong and brave, and deeper hearts and minds work. I look forward to sharing the learnings with clients here in Australia and abroad to develop effective leadership skills.

In part 1, we look at ‘what’ (what is vulnerability?) and ‘why’ (why we should care about vulnerability in leadership). In this article, we will focus on the ‘how’ – how to be a more effective leader by being more open, authentic and vulnerable.

Top Five Reasons We Should Care About Vulnerability

In summary, the business case for vulnerability is around five key benefits:

  1. Connection – In a technology-centric world, vulnerability allows us to connect with others, build stronger relationships and enhance job performance.
  2. Trust – Trust is an essential component of business effectiveness. High trust organisations experience 32x greater risk-taking, 11x more innovation, and 6x higher performance. (Edelman Trust Barometer)
  3. Innovation – You can’t have innovation without vulnerability. Most leaders know that innovation is good for business, but many still struggle to create nimble, agile and innovative cultures.
  4. To Partner is to Lead – If you want to create change in your organisation then you need to be more ‘leader’ than ‘manager’, and more ‘partner’ than leader. Learning to share power and leadership at the right times can release dormant potential within teams and organisations.
  5. Building Learning, Growth and Resilience – One of our primary tasks as leaders is to grow and develop confident, capable and resilient people into high-performance teams. Learning inherently requires vulnerability – taking ourselves outside our comfort zone.  If you’re not open and vulnerable, then you’re probably not learning.

The Being-Doing Paradox

Before we discuss how to be a more effective leader by being more open, authentic and vulnerable, it might be useful to explore being versus doing.

The Being-Doing Paradox is that to get more done (e.g. task accomplishment at work), we can often be trapped into believing that we must do more things. In our minds at least, we often seem to correlate doing with productivity. It’s what Michael Bungay Stainer calls ‘busy work’ rather than ‘good’ or ‘great work’. When we’re honest with ourselves though, we know that sometimes we are busy being busy with nothing much to show for it. Sound familiar?

The busy-ness epidemic has grown over the top of us like mould. It has kind of just crept up on us. The problem is that the ‘mould’ is now starting to block some of the sunlight. I have written about this before, but I continue to see people working harder and longer. I’m often left wondering when something will give. What will be the wake-up call for you and your organisation?

My belief is that if we want to be more productive, then we need to be less busy. We need to re-connect with being human rather than being busy.

There is a great article I often reference from James Galvin and Peter O’Donnell (Authentic Leadership: Balancing Doing and Being), that uses the metaphor of a tree. Unless we attend to the roots of the tree (i.e. Self, Framing, Character, and Alignment), then we will be weakened and severely buffeted by the strong winds of change (i.e. the branches and leaves). Ultimately, this will impact on our ability to effectively deploy our Self, our Skills, Practices, and Behaviours in a meaningful way (see diagram below).

Source: James Galvin and Peter O’Donnell (Authentic Leadership: Balancing Doing and Being), Systems Thinker, April 2005.

How Do We Nurture and Develop Vulnerability

An essential part of being able to benefit from vulnerability-based leadership is to be authentically vulnerable. While this may sound obvious, it’s worth re-stating.

To show genuine vulnerability, we have to be comfortable to be genuinely vulnerable – not put on a half-hearted show for the crowd. We must work on the roots of the tree for the trunk, branches, and leaves to be at their best.

Five Stages of Vulnerability: A Practical Guide to Brave Leadership

Based on our understanding of current thinking in the literature and our own experience coaching and consulting with leaders for more than two decades, we have formulated the Five Stages of Vulnerability.

The stages should be viewed more as ‘guides’ rather than empirically based development stages. They serve as a useful metaphor none-the-less.

Be Open

The first step in improving our capacity for vulnerability is to Be Open to the idea that we can always learn new things about ourselves (in particular) and about others. When working with leaders in our High-Performance Team Program, the biggest block in making progress is to think we have it all worked out.

Three things to improve openness:

  1. Feedback: Always look for opportunities to get real-time, meaningful feedback from trusted sources (as Brené Brown would say, not from people who like to occupy the ‘cheap seats’!).
  2. Assumptions: Assumptions hurt you and me. The only assumption we can safely make is that we don’t have all the information or data. It continues to amaze me how frequently people make a statement of ‘truth’, and because no-one responds or challenges them, they assume that everyone agrees!
  3. Curiosity: Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. If we want to learn about others, we must put ourselves out there. Be genuinely curious and actively find out about people’s stories. Ask questions and then listen, really listen.
Share More

The principle of Share More is linked to the first stage, Be Open. Sharing is caring. However, this is often one of the most misunderstood aspects of vulnerability. many people think it means lying on a couch and opening up about your childhood or life traumas. Share more of yourself – go beyond pleasantries and the expected. Lower your armour enough so you can show up authentically.

Three things to improve sharing more:

  1. Armour Down: This is the opposite of ‘armour up’. We need to drop the armour just enough for people to be able to see more of who we are. Let them in a bit more than you usually would. Admit you don’t know the answer to a business challenge, or that you too suffer from uncertainty from time to time.
  2. Be Honest: Being honest sounds like it is a given, but is it? When was the last time you withheld information at work (when you didn’t need to)? Or when did you tell a white lie to protect yourself or someone else? Speak the truth with authenticity and courage. As Brown would say, brave the wilderness.
  3. Generosity of Spirit: Being generous is like gift-giving for free – the other person gets the gift, but it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s a win-win. If we can give more and expect less, then we’ll each ultimately receive more anyway (kind of like the ‘circle of life’?).
Trust Others

Trust, by its very definition, means taking a risk. I’m not talking about risks where you put yourself and others in great danger. I’m talking about risks that you might ‘logically’ ordinarily reject. For example, I like the quote from the movie “We Bought a Zoo”, where Benjamin Mee (the Dad played by Matt Damon) says to his 14-year old son Dylan (played by Colin Ford), who was apprehensive about showing his true feelings for a girl says, “Sometimes you just need 20 seconds of insane courage”.

Three things to improve trusting others:

  1. Trust Others: We often talk about trusting others in our teams or other colleagues, but how much do we demonstrate it?(I write in more detail on this in my book Leadership Without Silver Bullets). Our inability to trust people as much as we could is a hangover from the industrial, mechanistic age where we discovered control as a management tool.Does control work? Yes. Are there better alternatives? Yes. Free people up from traditional organisational constraints to innovate and be their best. If they don’t do their job or don’t do it well, then it’s our job to guide, coach and develop them, so we can genuinely hold them accountable instead of blaming and shaming.
  2. Change Your Relationship to Failure: As much as we protest in organisations that we encourage innovative, agile practices which are more iterative than structured, I call BS on it. All organisations – or human systems – send double messages. Failure is a good example where the messaging is ‘failure is okay’ but when it happens, watch how the system reacts. As a leader, how do you come across when something goes wrong?
  3. Defy Logic: This requires us to over-ride the ‘caution circuit breaker’. What if it doesn’t work out and I’m embarrassed? Within reason, do it anyway. Put yourself out there by having a go. Most of the time, others will feed off your courage and come along for the ride.
Take Risks

Take Risks sounds like Trust Others (above), but it’s more than that. This is personal. It’ what David Maister talks about in his trust formula (Trust = Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy / Self-Orientation).

People trust others with whom they feel comfortable discussing difficult agendas. Business can be intensely personal – and human emotion is an integral part of just about everything we do. Establishing intimacy is about building and accepting mutually increasing levels of risk in a relationship.

Three things to improve taking risks:

  1. Risk a Little-Gain a Lot: Taking risks means that you will fail. You will fall. And you will end up with egg on your face. But isn’t that what ‘risk’ means?Sometimes the risk-reward relationship may not be so clear, not easily plotted on a graph, but do it anyway. Risk doesn’t mean putting others in harm’s way or abandoning them. They must feel like they’re still supported. My father-in-law talks about being ‘taught’ how to swim by being thrown into the deep end of the pool and having to struggle back to the edge – that’s not what we want to do to others.
  2. Set Boundaries: It is important to maintain boundaries when we’re taking more risks by being open, trusting more, and putting ourselves out there. This means setting boundaries for ourselves and others. How much autonomy will you give someone? How much will you share? How much of your personal story will I disclose?
  3. Be the First: Extend trust – first. The primitive part of our brain wants to protect us physically (will this lion eat me?) and psychologically (is it safe for me to….?). It is therefore very easy to wait for others to extend trust or right wrongs in the relationship.However, try going first. Don’t wait for others. Extend trust as often as possible, including in a fractured relationship. Have the conversation. Mend the rift. Move forward.

Stay On Track doesn’t mean stagnate. It means continually investing in understanding the impact we have on others. We need to be continually self-monitoring and seeking feedback from those around us. Like any relationship that we care about, we can’t ‘set and forget’ vulnerability. The moment we do that, the universe is likely to give us a nasty reminder that this stuff requires constant attention.

Importantly, we can only help others grow if we are also growing. We need to be humble enough to understand – and believe – that we can learn from anyone and everyone. I discovered more about myself raising three children than I did from 100 personal development courses!

Three ways to stay on track:

  1. Continue to Invest in Yourself: Do the work. Remain curious. Don’t buy into the BS that you ‘can’t teach a dog new tricks’. This is a convenient story that we tell ourselves to keep us in the cheap seats and out of the arena. It avoids confronting things we may not like about ourselves, and particularly things that others don’t find to be a positive quality or behaviour.
  2. Encourage & Support Others: Good leaders work hard to create the conditions for others to feel they can take ever-increasing risks. People watch your every move as a leader. They are taking their cues from you in terms of how they respond in the moment to someone who is being vulnerable. We must demonstrate that we have their back. If they cross a boundary, then point it out with skill and compassion.
  3. Psychological Safety: Consciously work to build an environment where people feel safe to voice their opinions, to say what they’re thinking and feeling, or to take reasonable risks. Your legacy as a leader shouldn’t be limited to how many projects you delivered or the results you achieved. Your true legacy as a leader is the culture you created and leave behind.

In this article, we briefly recapped the importance of vulnerability (discussed in detail in part 1 of this two-part paper “Vulnerability in Leadership: More than Just a Buzzword“). In particular, its role in building connection, trust, innovation, partnership as leadership and growing and developing people.

We used the Being-Doing Paradox – the paradox that describes how our tendency to work on doing more, taking us away from being more, degrades our productivity.

With the groundwork in place, we introduced the five stages – or more accurately guideposts – to build and develop our capacity and capability to be a more effective vulnerability-based leader.

The five stages of Be Open; Share More; Trust Others; Take Risks and Stay on Track provide a framework to continue the lifelong journey of becoming the best version of ourselves. This builds our capability to make a difference in the lives of those around us – in our teams, organisations, schools, communities, and families.

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Vulnerability in Leadership: More than just a Buzzword? (Part 2)