Preface:

• Today’s world is all about knowledge workers and they need to innovate continuously.
• For this to happen, they need to be able to share concerns, questions, mistakes and even half-formed ideas.
• Psychological safety is the key to performance in today’s world. Especially in the world of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity)
• Dynamic collaboration between teams is called Teaming. It’s the art of communicating and coordinating with people across boundaries of all kinds.
• Project Aristotle by Google mentioned PS as the underpinning for all other criteria for the best performing teams. Others being Dependability, Structure and Clarity, Meaning & Impact.

The Underpinning:

• Unconscious Calculators:
  • Current Risk of speaking up vs Future benefit of solving the actual problem
  • High importance to interpersonal risks
  • Worry about looking ignorant(don’t ask questions), incompetent(don’t accept mistakes) or disruptive(don’t make suggestions)
  • 85% of respondents in a study didn’t raise an issue with their boss even though they felt it as an important one
• Psychological safety an attribute of groups
  • Speaking up facilitates open and authentic communication, focus on problems rather than people who made mistakes and open opportunities for improvement
  • Microdynamics of face-saving by Goffman
• Accidental Discovery
  • Did better teams really make more mistakes? They don’t make more mistakes but they declare more mistakes.
  • Talk openly about mistakes and errors.
• Fear is not an effective motivator
  • Productivity a phenomenon of the past. Knowledge work can’t be done the same way.
  • Fear inhibits learning and collaboration.
    • It consumes physiological resources diverting them from the parts that manage working memory to the amygdala and other fear response systems to deal with the situation.
    • This blocks analytical thinking, creative insight and problem-solving.
  • Hierarchy is also a problem. We constantly assess our relative status wrt others subconsciously.
  • Psychological safety ensures that fear is no longer a problem. It’s a safe space. One focuses more on learning.
• What PS is not ?
  • It’s not about being nice all the time.
    • It’s about candor and willingness to engage in productive disagrement so as to understand a different point of view.
  • It’s not about personality types.
    • It refers to work climate and climate affects people with different personality traits.
  • It’s not same as trust
    • Trust is individual, PS is a group phenomenon.
    • Trust is about whether you can rely on someone, PS is about temporally immediate experience.
    • Trust is about giving others a benefit of doubt, PS is about if you are given that benefit of doubt.
  • It’s not about lowering performance standards
    • We still need to hold people accountable. It’s just that they can except mistakes and we can work together on it.
    • High PS, Low Standards: Comfort Zone
    • Low PS, High Standards: Anxiety Zone
    • Low PS, Low Standards: Apathy Zone
    • High PS, High Standards: Learning & Performing Zone
• Chronbach’s Alpha for measuring inter-item reliability
• Psychological Safety isn’t enough. We should hold high standards, inspire, coach and enable people by giving them apt and timely feedback.