Psychological Safety: Connecting the Dots

Theory applied: Tools for Psychological Safety in Teams

„There is nothing so practical as a good theory” (Kurt Lewin). So let’s look at how the ideas I presented in “What makes a Team great?” and “Team — Together everyone achieves more! …?” can translate to real life agile teams and groups.

In this article I will highlight some considerations and practices every Agile Coach and Scrum Master should have in mind while working with teams. These are far from complete. In order to avoid repeating the many excellent writings on teams, I will focus on the following aspects:

1. What is needed to foster Psychological Safety?

Psychological safety is the key enabler for team performance. It is defined as “absence of interpersonal fear”¹ or social threat within a group. (For a longer definition see here.) The main effect of psychological safety is that everyone in a team can speak up with work related content, trusting that this will be heard and well received. In short: everyone’s voice is heard. This is the only way to achieve the much desired diversity of thought.

What is perceived as social threat differs from person to person. The SCARF model provides a handy mnemonic for these differences and lets us think about how to respect the team members’ need for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.

2. Culture follows Structure

“Culture is what we always do and what we never do.”² It is determined by our actions which are a result of our personal beliefs and values, often also referred to as “mindset”. Changing habits and the underlying mindset through sheer willpower is extremely difficult and takes a long time. Focusing on appropriate structure and microstructure changes is a more promising way. This is valid for changes on team level as well as for changes on organizational level. “Structures” include both how communication and decision making are organized and what rules need to be followed.

Structures can be seen as a kind of “handrails” for habits. Changing structures can help training or nudging new habits which support a desired culture change. However, structures cannot ensure everything. The remaining gaps need to be filled by supportive leadership, respectful³ social behavior on the part of all team members and common sense.

Tools & Tipps for Psychological Safety in Teams

• One general rule for ensuring psychological safety and fulfilling all team members’ needs for certainty: Be as clear and transparent as possible about goals and intentions. This applies to the team goal, team structure, meetings, workshops, and trainings. If you as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach are not in a position provide this orientation, you need to ensure that the relevant parties do so.
• There are several reasons why team members should be able to dedicate 100% of their working time to a single team. This is the psychological safety perspective: Part-time team members spend less time with their peers. Possibly they get less opportunities to contribute with their ideas or raise their concerns. Let us suppose that this does not happen to specialists who are split between teams because of their deep expertise. Other part-time team members, however, may not be heard or valued enough and lose interest or even confidence in the team. The same can happen with people for whom it is not finally defined whether they are part of the team or not.
• The boundaries for self-organizing or self-managing teams need to be clear for all — both for the team members and for their environment including management. If there are red lines that the team must not cross, they need to be known to all. Rules that are transparent to everyone and understood by everyone, are more likely to be followed. If they are intransparent, organizational reactions, e.g. sanctions, may be perceived as arbitrary and reduce psychological safety.
• A good team kick-off workshop paves the way for effective team collaboration and needs to cover far more topics than intended team goal, roadmap, and organizational topics. Team members getting to know each other on a personal level and agreeing on some basic team norms is necessary, too.
• When facilitating an activity that encourages team members to disclose personal topics, never forget to mention that no one needs to share more than they feel comfortable with and accept if someone decides not to share.
• Personal closeness is one ingredient for interpersonal trust. Knowing more about your teammates than only what is related to their job role and discovering what have in common is a step towards personal closeness. There are various exercises for facilitating such conversations and fostering relatedness in working contexts, e.g., “Market of Skills” or “Personal Maps”.
• Sharing some personal workstyle preferences is helpful, too. The minimum to be discussed at team start are the topics of feedback and conflict. How can feedback be delivered in a way that is ok for all team members? How will the team deal with conflicts? Introduce conflicts not as a matter of victory or defeat but as a challenge to find a common solution.
• For sure, mistakes, errors and failures will happen during a team’s lifetime. How they are handled has a huge impact on psychological safety. Therefore, ensure during the setup phase of a new team that an error is perceived as an opportunity to learn and improve.
• Nobody is perfect. This is also true when it comes to knowledge and skills. Especially after role changes which require new skills and even becoming “T-shaped”, team members need to trust that it is ok to have gaps in knowledge, that learning takes some time and that asking “stupid questions” is part of it.
• Disclosing errors, learning needs, and sharing any other uncertainty depend on the level of vulnerability that can be shown within a team. If the most influential team members model this behavior, e.g., talking about their mishaps or asking questions when in doubt, others might feel more comfortable doing so. Who are the most influential team members depends on the context. It may either be a leading role, a person with deep expertise, any other informal leader, or a customer representative in a client — service provider relationship. Keeping the “Mutual Learning”⁴ approach in mind can help here.
• In a later team phase, talking about the SCARF factors and what they mean for each team member could be a valuable exercise for creating more understanding within the team. This could be during a team workshop or a retrospective. After introducing the five SCARF factors, each team member ranks themselves on a scale per factor as to how sensitive they are to that factor. Depending on the team, this can be done anonymously. Based on these results follows a facilitated conversation on e.g., what team situations and or behaviors are supporting or reducing each of the factors.
• Changing habits becomes easier when introducing supporting rituals. Meetings and workshops are an excellent playground for this. Meeting outcomes depend on people being at their peak performance, i.e., their most authentic self.
• Meeting structure matters. Communicating a goal and/or an agenda beforehand reduces speculations and uncertainties about the intent. If applicable, the agenda can be created together during the meeting. If so, this should be announced before the event.
• A number of meeting microstructures, rules, and habits support providing space that everyone can contribute, is heard, and feels understood. This does not mean that everyone will get the same influence in finding a solution. But it is the facilitator’s or the team lead’s task to create equal opportunity to contribute and to ensure that individuals do not dominate a discussion. This is even more important in remote meetings. By the way, this is not only about creating an inclusive atmosphere. How likely is it that someone will support a decision or defend an action after a meeting if they did not get an opportunity to participate in reaching them?
• If an event aims to create a common, even innovative result, or learning together, it should start with an activity that makes every participant speak. This can be, e.g., a check-in question or question about the expected meeting result. Why should you so? After being heard at the beginning, even if it is only short, it becomes more probable that a person also contributes during the event. Diane Larsen and Esther Derby put it this way: “When someone doesn’t speak at the beginning […], that person has tacit permission to remain silent for the rest of the session.”⁵
• Different formats support that even more reserved people can bring their ideas and points of view to larger rounds. These formats have in common that they include individual reflection or work in small groups and enforce listening before ideas are discussed in full session. Examples are the 1–2–4-all method or other Liberating Structures⁶, or to allow each person to present ideas timeboxed after an individual brainstorming phase. During the presentation, only fact questions are permitted. A common discussion of the ideas will only start after everyone has finished sharing.
• During discussions, asking questions which invite objection, e.g. “What did I miss?”, “What is missing?” or “What might be wrong with this solution?” helps soliciting different points of view. Amy Edmondson, doyenne in psychological safety in teams and organizations, suggests more such questions fostering a productive exchange of ideas or addressing less comfortable topics, both for leading roles and for team members.⁷:

Questions for soliciting and addressing sensitive Issues
(Source: Amy Edmondson 2019)

• Closing an event with a short debriefing or mini-retrospective is another building block towards more inclusion of all perspectives.
• All meetings and workshops are opportunities for team development. Personal relations grow with frequent personal contacts. This is especially important when working remote.
• Consequently, agile events should not be done half-heartedly, but should involve everyone. They offer manifold occasions for productive and inclusive discussions in and between teams. Psychological safety matters in all of them. However, in Retrospectives it is essential.
• Even in teams in which members actually trust each other, it can happen that team members are cautious and self-censor. A possible reason might be that there is a person outside the team that several team members know. Within the team, people trust each other, but they are not sure what individuals report about critical issues to this third person. This could be the case e.g. in a big organization which has moved to self-managed teams but still has managers. If this occurs, then it’s your turn to talk to that person about psychological safety.
• Too much harmony and conflict aversity also can lead to team members holding back controversial opinions or criticisms and hence preventing creative impulses and learning. If you observe this, it is worth sharing your observation with the team and start introducing the phenomenon of “Psychological Safety” — it is not about being nice! Besides such a team conversation, e.g. during a retrospective, you can establish rituals to challenge proposals or decisions within the team on a regular basis. For example, by asking, “Please give me three reasons why this proposal might fail.” The more often unpleasant topics or criticism are brought up, the sooner you get used to it and the less it hurts. The more respectfully the message is conveyed, the better.

I hope this list has shown you one or another new aspect for teamwork. There is no such a thing as a magic wand that will make every team effort great from the start. But there are a lot of smaller conditions you can consider and change. Step by step, one habit at a time.

¹ McKinsey & Company 2020: Psychological safety, emotional intelligence and leadership in a time of flux. Interview with Amy Edmondson and Richard Boyatzis — https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/psychological-safety-emotional-intelligence-and-leadership-in-a-time-of-flux (accessed on July 31st, 2020)

² Unknown source

³ https://www.etymonline.com/word/respect

⁴ Especially the assumptions underlying the “Mutual Learning Approach” support a productive and psychologically safe working atmosphere:

• “I have information and so do other people
• People may disagree with me and still have pure motives
• I may be contributing to the problem
• Each of us sees things others don’t
• Differences are opportunities for learning.”

⁵ Derby, Esther / Larsen, Diana 2006: Agile Retrospectives. Making Good Teams Great. Dallas/Raleigh, p. 5. The authors emphasize the importance of starting with an activity making every participant speak in the context of agile retrospectives. Nevertheless, it matters in any other co-creative event.

⁶ https://www.liberatingstructures.com/ (accessed on 04.05.2021)

⁷ Edmondson, Amy 2019: A Fly on the Wall in a Fearless Organization. What does psychological safety sound like? (https://www-psychologytoday-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-fearless-organization/201906/fly-the-wall-in-fearless-organization?amp, accessed on 04.05.2021)