At ACE Group we believe every person has greatness in them, we are committed to the growth of our people and unleashing that greatness. That doesn’t happen by snapping our fingers, rather we have to create an environment that encourages and supports people’s growth.
In our previous post, we wrote about the 5 factors that impact team effectiveness. In order of importance, those five factors are: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact. The first factor, the most important, is psychological safety. Which means that team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.
Amy Edmondson is the woman who came up with the term psychological safety through her research, which she explained thoroughly in her book The Fearless Organization. Why is this important? Because it needs to exist in an environment where people can grow, therefore the organization and business grows.
How do you build psychological safety in your workplace? Below Dr. Edmondson talks about psychological safety and how to create it in the workplace:
What makes a workplace psychologically safe or not?
Individuals feel they can speak up, express their concerns, and be heard. This is not to say that people are “nice.” A psychologically safe workplace is one where people are not full of fear, and not trying to cover their tracks to avoid being embarrassed or punished.
How can leaders create an environment where people feel safe to speak up and be heard?
Leaders can start by creating a positive team climate. A positive team climate is the most important driver of psychological safety and most likely to occur when leaders demonstrate supportive, consultative behaviors, then begin to challenge their teams.
There are 5 ways leaders can help to treate psychological safety at work: make it an explicit priority, facilitate everyone speaking up, establish norms for how failure is handled, create space for new ideas (even wild ones) and embrace productive conflict.
That’s it!
Leaders, the most important job you have is to create an environment where people bring their best everyday; start by creating psychological safety in your workplace.