FOR INVESTORS AND ENTREPRENEURS
Psychological Safety is the Bedrock of High-Performing Teams
What is it, and how can you build it?
For venture capitalists and entrepreneurs alike, startups represent a world of opportunity, innovation, and potential. But building a successful startup requires a team to execute the innovative vision. That team, however, is typically interdisciplinary, diverse (hopefully), and composed of a myriad of personalities. One of the biggest challenges founders face is transforming that team into a high-performance unit. So what does it take to make that happen?
There are a multitude of factors that facilitate high performance on teams. Psychological safety is one of those factors, and it is foundational.
“Psychological safety was by far the most important of the five key dynamics we found. It’s the underpinning of the other four.”
~ Julia Rozovsky, The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team
In this blog, I will define psychological safety and give tips for fostering it on your team.
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety is a state or belief in which the team members feel comfortable being vulnerable around one another, are willing to take risks, ask each other for help, and do not fear judgment or punitive consequences when they admit to a mistake.
Psychological safety is about the willingness to engage in productive conflict. When people feel psychologically safe among their team members, they feel comfortable being candid and open to different perspectives and points of view.
Sometimes, psychological safety is confused with trust, but they are not the same thing. One core difference between trust is that psychological safety is experienced at the team level, whereas trust is about an interaction between two parties. Trust is about a specific target. Psychological safety is about an experience within a team.
Why is psychological safety vital?
Research has consistently demonstrated the importance of psychological safety since 1965, when MIT professors argued that it helped team members feel secure and capable of changing their behavior alongside organizational challenges and adaptations. Since then, evidence from hundreds of studies on psychological safety shows that it improves learning, innovation, and performance at the individual, team, and organizational levels.
Psychological safety is the foundation from which your team can begin to grow together and reach apex performance. When your team members feel like they can be open and forthcoming with each other, it will pave the way for more collaborative work. They are more likely to share information, contribute to ideas, speak up if they disagree, and learn from failure.
Tips to Build Psychological Safety
Below are five tips to help you build psychological safety on your team.
1. Set the Stage
Ensure all members have a shared mental model of what needs to be done. Emphasize the purpose, explain what is at stake, and clarify expectations. Help your team understand why it is essential to accomplish your goal.
2. Invite Engagement
Explain to your team that you welcome all perspectives and opinions, not just positive comments or agreement. Let the team know that conflict can be positive as long as it is focused on the task and is not interpersonal conflict.
Set up guidelines and processes for discussion so everyone knows you value their opinions, and they should feel safe and comfortable speaking their mind. Encourage open and candid dialogue.
3. Ask Questions, Humbly Listen
Solicit comments and concerns from all members. Below are some questions that can facilitate discussion and signal to your team that you welcome all points of view.
- What do other people think?
- Are we missing anything?
- What other options could we consider?
- Who has a different perspective?
Encourage careful thought and probe deeper into comments by asking follow-up questions.
- What leads you to think so?
- Can you give us an example?
- Can you expand on that?
- Can you explain that further?
4. Respond Appreciatively
Listen to each member carefully and acknowledge their contributions to the discussion. Express gratitude for being open and honest. These small gestures help to reinforce behaviors that foster a psychologically safe environment.
5. Destigmatize Failure
The fear of failure has become an epidemic in the U.S. I see it in the college students I teach. Popular culture and the academic system have painted failure as a negative experience. That is just not true, however.
No one, and I mean no one, succeeds 100% of the time when they attempt to learn and grow. Growth means you are stepping outside of your comfort zone and trying something new. What are the chances you do something perfect the first time you try? In reality, failure is part of the learning process and necessary for success. It’s not fair or realistic to expect your team to be failure free.
There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure. — Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Help your team be comfortable being uncomfortable. Do not punish team members for mistakes. Instead, set expectations for how to manage and deal with a mistake after it happens (because mistakes are inevitable). And even more importantly, work together to figure out how to prevent mistakes from happening in the future.
Conclusion
If your team is out to win, you need to create conditions that facilitate success. Start with building psychological safety because it is the foundation of high performance. Psychological safety makes room to build trust and collaborate effectively.
Do you have experiences being on a team that lacked psychological safety or one that successfully built psychological safety? Share your experiences in the comment section so we can learn from them.
Acknowledgments and Resources
The research and work of Harvard Professor Amy C. Edmonson substantially informed this blog. I highly recommend reading her book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, if you want to take a deeper dive into this topic.
Need Advice or Have Questions?
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