Taking the Lead for Your Advantage

By Marina Maydanov and Robert Holmes

In the previous articles…

This is the third in a three-part series on psychological safety and its role in our society, organisation and for us as individuals. In the first article Trust, commitment and the emergence of psychological safety we discussed why psychological safety has emerged as a trend now and how it relates to trust. We looked at the decline of trust in leadership in Ukraine, and in government in Australia and how trust is the basis for psychological safety.

In the second article Psychological safety for Organisational leaders we discussed the ways in which society is dividing along fault lines, disintegrating, atomising as people distrust and move away from one another. To combat this, we seek to create social cohesion by building the experience of psychological safety, taking people from inclusion, through safe learning to contributing and finally challenging.

There’s no team without trust

Do you remember the first team you have ever joined? Did you feel welcomed or spend the first week sitting quietly in the corner being ignored by your new teammates and with excitement quickly evaporating? We have all been there, as part of a great team where you feel safe and confident to contribute and still remember everyone’s name with memories that put a smile on your face. The majority of us have lived through some painful ‘team’ experiences, when you are afraid to ask a question, speak up with an idea, terrified to make a mistake, often departing with your confidence being shattered. Both experiences have a lasting impact on us as individuals and professionals.

So, what is this secret ingredient of a [great] team? According to Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google: “There’s no team without trust.” Trust in the team is needed like the oxygen we breathe. Trust is a belief that the person (or system or process) you are dealing with is safe, reliable and will not harm you. Psychological safety simply does not exist without trust. As trust goes up, the opportunity to develop psychological safety goes up, and vice versa. This formula works for all kinds of people at different levels across the world: from kindergarten to a board of directors.

On the latter, according to the Australian Boardroom Psychological Safety and Performance Benchmark 2020-21, 45% of board members feel unsafe in the boardroom the majority of the time and only 4 out of 10 board members feel psychologically safe. As a result, only 25% of strategic decisions made in the boardroom are highly effective.[1]

High-performing teams

Psychological safety is central to the development of interpersonal and professional trust. Harvard researcher Amy Edmonson found that higher psychological safety, linked with higher motivation and accountability leads to higher team performance. She represented this finding in the following diagram where the vertical axis represents increasing psychological safety (based on trust) and the horizontal axis represents increasing accountability and motivation:

Organisations with low psychological safety will be stuck in the bottom two quadrants: the apathy zone – where motivation and accountability are low, or in the anxiety zone as they turn up accountability or make drives to externally motivate people (with lunches, gym memberships and so forth). This apathy is undergirded by other cultural artefacts such as:

• blind spots (cognitive bias)
• functional silos
• overlooking opportunities to work together.

If we turn the dial up on making people feel safe, we will achieve a more trusting workforce, but they will rest in that safety and become comfortable without further progression toward high performance (the comfort zone). This requires a conjoint effort and focus on developing better debate, agreeing on shared outcomes and moving toward accountability (the top right quadrant).

[1] Whitepaper Psychological Safety Benchmark 2020-2021 (Aust) – 6peas

Courageous leadership

When you build resilience, you get additional benefits for the company. Three cultural dimensions that are critical for resilience:

• Integrity: Ethical leadership and courageous honesty.
• Innovation: Fearless collaborative creativity.
• Inclusion: Authentic respect and belonging.

Leaders need to be courageous in developing a resilient, high-performing culture. It always starts with ‘eating at our own restaurant’ – demonstrating the principles we wish to see in others. Management consultant and organisational researcher Patrick Lencioni notes that the basis of high performing cultures is a foundation of trust.[1] His suggestion for developing trust is to start by being vulnerable.

In The Culture Code, Dan Coyle argues that leader vulnerability is never a weakness. On the contrary, leaders need to be the first to show vulnerability and admit to flaws. Being vulnerable with your team about the issues you are dealing with, the struggles you are having and asking for help to solve issues that are beyond you. Good leaders are available to staff who may be struggling on the journey toward full contribution and challenging. We therefore need to be accessible to staff to discuss issues, demonstrate humility in accepting feedback and empathy toward their concerns.

High-performing teams are transparent, because teammates feel safe enough to talk openly about their shortcomings, mistakes, and weaknesses. When teams lack transparency, and operate within a competitive cut-throat atmosphere, the consequences are far-reaching. Teammates conceal imperfections, hesitate to ask for help, and avoid touchy topics. Members ultimately become disengaged, put their interests above the team, or become non-committal about team goals.

The journey starts

How can you contribute to psychological safety and build trust within the team? Some might have a perception that building up psychological safety is someone else’s responsibility: organisation, leadership, your manager. In reality, each and every one of us can play a role in rebuilding trust and psychological safety in our teams. You can start with allowing and trusting yourself to be you.

Here are five further suggestions to evolve in your journey:

1. Ask questions about the culture: periodically conduct assessment of engagement, integrity and other aspects of culture. Pay attention to the results and how they change over time. Take the time to map out existing and desired cultures and design a roadmap for necessary transformation.
2. Be clear about expectations for ethical decision-making and integrity: ensure employees always have a safe channel for raising concerns and that they understand how to access it.
3. Encourage outside-the-box thinking: support creative performance and innovation, reframe and celebrate mistakes as organisational learning opportunities.
4. Invest in, and personally support, your DEI initiatives: foster diversity and inclusion as explicit business strategies.
5. Build accountability for psychological safety into performance metrics: set relevant objectives and provide the necessary training for managers so that psychological safety rises to the level of the strategic objective. Emphasise leadership skills around emotional, cultural and social intelligence in career development and promotions. Take the metrics seriously and hold people accountable.

To conclude with the wisdom of J.K. Rowling that will be familiar to all Harry Potter fans: “We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”

[1] Lenioni, P. (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, ch 2.