In her book, Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (Wiley, 2019), recounts her research that explains outstanding and poor team performance depends on psychological safety. Psychological safety is when team members feel safe to speak up about an untested new idea, share mistakes, and admit to failure without criticism from others. As team leaders, you can influence and shape the culture of your teams where everyone can speak their truth and not get blamed, judged, or criticized. How to do this? Here are Edmonson’s suggestions to make it safe for others to fail.
- At every discussion, emphasize that failure is a learning event. Ask: What did you learn? What will be different next time? Look for what was uncovered from the mistake or what new data or novel insights emerged from the failure, mistake, or error.
- Take time to recognize and reward those who talk about their failures. And of course, still take time to celebrate successes.
- Always share lessons learned within your team. Codify and update as your team reaches each project milestone. Share lessons learned with other teams. This is an simple way to expand psychological safety throughout your organization
Edmundson mentions other tips to create a safe place to share team observations. Beware of staying silent. You could endanger a project misstep by thinking: it’s not my job, I’ve got enough on my plate. As a team leader, it’s up to you to encourage colleagues to speak up about what they notice even if these observations are about errors. For example: a new hire is not following the equipment maintenance SOP. You notice this new employee using a shortcut that the new employee used at their former job. If they continue to use this shortcut, it could affect quality and safety. In a culture where it’s not psychologically safe, you could ignore the issue. In a psychologically safe culture, you speak up and say: “Let me show you our way of doing this equipment maintenance. Here’s the SOP. And I’ll demonstrate if you would like.”
The third tip from The Fearless Organization is the power of candor. Psychologically safe teams demonstrate honesty and authenticity. Team members don’t have hidden agendas. Speaking the truth must be a prized ground rule of team engagement. As a team leader, invite others to give you candid feedback. By taking the initiative, you are a role model by asking others to tell you what you are doing well and what could stand improvement.
And finally, the three most powerful words in a psychologically safe environment, are I Don’t Know. By admitting that you don’t have the brain capacity to know everything is eye-opening and heartwarming to those who are teaming with you. But don’t stop there. I don’t know needs follow-up: “And I will find out the answer and get back to you.”
