Psychological safety Flashcards
Christensen, M. A. et al, 2022: Building a Toolbox
What is psychological safety?
“An individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an
interpersonal risk”, avoiding being “punished or humiliated for
speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes” within
a group.
(Edmondson, 1999 & 2014)
Feeling safe to speak your mind in a group without
fearing the risks.
- Psychological Safety is a shared group construct
- No matter your own attitude, the environment needs to be conducive of psychological
safety - It’s an invisible social construct
What is impression management?
Noone wants to look: Ignorant, Incompetent, Intrusive, Negative
It’s easy to manage: Don’t ask questions, Don’t admit mistakes, Don’t offer ideas, Don’t challenge the status quo.
What can we do to achieve psychological safety?
Letting off the Brakes.
Give the teams tools for practicing and exploring psychological safety in
a safe, assistive and actionable way. (Toolbox)
- Being aware makes it better. Talk with your team about what psychological safety is to them
- Repeated attention keeps the environment conducive to better
psychological safety. Include working with psychological safety in your workflow in a simple, continuous
manne
What is the tool: Laying the Foundation?
Purpose)
Laying the Foundation” lays the groundwork for working with
psychological safety, through esta1lishing a shared understand of what
it means for your team, and what your goals are in working with it.
Outcome)
A foundational, shared understanding of the concept of psychological
safety within the team, in addition to increased awareness of how it
relates to your team.
How)
1. Watch the Ted Talk from Amy Edmonson
2. Discuss main takeaways
3. What experiences have you had in your team, relating to
psychological safety?
4. How do you think your team could improve 1y working with
psychological safety?
What is the tool: What’s it to me?
Use when)
Your team wants to practice identifying psychological safety in their daily work.
Prerequisities)
The team members should have been introduced to psychological safety, and have an understanding of what the term means.
Tool Description)
* Taking time to write these experiences down can help solidify your team members’ understanding of the concrete implications of psychological safety in the team
* At the end of the work day, each team member takes a post-it note, and notes down an experience related to psychological safety they had during the day. This can either be a moment in which they felt safe to contribute, ask questions, challenge the status quo, moments wherein they held back, or were afraid to seem intrusive, incompetent, ignorant or negative. Give your team members an example before starting. Team members place these post-it notes somewhere visible to them on their desk, such as along the bottom of a monitor. The post-its can be replaced as new ones come in, or be completely scrapped every week.
Purpose)
What’s it to me?” helps your team members develop their own understanding of the role of psychological safety in the team. This understanding can vastly help fuel further discussions about the subject, and can help identify key elements of your team’s practice wherein working with psychological safety might matter the most.
Outcome)
A foundation of what psychological safety means to the team members and their work within the team, which can be used for future work with psychological safety. The post-its can be used as an outcome for sharing, if your team members wish to. Remember to let the team know ahead of time whether the post-its will be shared or not.
What is the tool: Checking In
Use when)
Your team wants to have daily check-ins on the psychological safety within the team.
Tool Description)
Select a statement, rate it , average the score and discuss the score in union.
Purpose)
“Checking in” exists as a call-to-action for discussing psychological
safety in your team.
Team members are enabled and encouraged to discuss psychological
safety related subjects during their work on a daily basis.
Outcome)
Continuously discussing and evaluating the psychological safety within the team can act as a temperature reading of the team’s well-being. Questions and concerns that might be of relevance to your team will surface more easily. Over time, these will hopefully surface not only during “Checking In”, but also in other places!
What is the tool: Celebrating Mistakes
Use when)
Your team is trying new things, attempting to solve a complex problem, or experimenting with a new feature.
Prerequisites)
A team-wide text-based communication medium, such as Slack, Teams, Discord, or similar.
Tool Description)
Being open to experiment and innovate comes with accepting that one might make mistakes, or that one’s experiments might fail. However, these mistakes often come with learning opportunities. Cashing in on these learning opportunities, and sharing them with the team, can help others stand on the shoulders of their co-workers’ experiments in their work.
Dedicate a communication channel, such as a Slack channel, only to celebrating mistakes.
(Vi lavede den i skolen)
Purpose)
Sharing learning experiences, and establishing and documenting a culture wherein mistakes are expected to happen, and are seen as learning opportunities.
Outcome)
Repeated use of the channel establishes talking about mistakes a part of your team’s culture. Over time, the channel will exist as a learning diary of the team, which can provide an insight into specific problems, as well as the team culture. This can also be useful for new employees.
What is the tool: Presenting the Journey
Use when)
The complexity/challenges of your team members’ individual work is not clear to the other team members.
Prerequisites)
One or more team members who have completed a non-trivial unit of work, which they can present.
Tools description)
Teams are commonly asked to present the product of their work. Seldom is the journey that led them to that product shared.
In short, have team members present their journey and the other members asking them questions.
Purpose)
Sharing with whole team experiments, mistakes and learnings that are experienced individually or in sub-groups.
Outcome)
Sharing the learning outcomes of the individual team member’s process encourages a culture of team learning and experimentation. Additionally, the learning outcomes of one team member’s process can aid other team members in their future work when shared.
What is the tool: Three Questions
Use when)
Your team members sometimes hold back instead of asking a question, or voicing a concern, when another team member speaks.
Purpose)
“Three Questions” aims to engage your team members in letting go of their automatic impression management, and instead ask questions that they might have held back on, in a low-risk environment.
Outcome)
While “Three Questions” acts as a team work experience of posing and answering questions, having your team members clarify, challenge or offer ideas to each others work can also increase the quality of work.
Tool description)
Humans are incredibly good at impression management - the skill of making sure everyone around us thinks we are kind, smart and delightful. Rarely do we want to risk looking ignorant, intrusive or negative. This can make us choose to hold back, instead of asking the challenging questions, offering suggestions, or voicing our concerns, even in situations where they would be valid. “Three Questions” aims to address this by prompting team members to ask 3 types of interactions that could normally be viewed as ignorant, intrusive or negative, in a constructive environment.
1. Ask clarifying question
2. Offer idea useful to the speaker’s work
3. Challenge something in the speaker’s description of their work.
What is the tool: Acting on Concerns
Use when)
Concerns of the team seem to exist just below the surface, but it’s hard to find the appropriate time to bring them up.
Prerequisites)
A project which your team is working on.
Purpose)
“Acting on Concerns” gives your team members a prompt to voice concerns they
might otherwise hold back, while enabling your team to discuss what can be
done about the concerns your team can address.
Outcome)
A list of action points that adress potential or existing concerns.
Tool Description)
1. Individual brainstorm writing down concerns for meeting the project goal
2. Put the ideas on a shared board in columns “Things we can change”, “Things we cannot change”
3. 10-min open floor discussing first steps to address the concerns of the “Things we can change”
4. Make a list of action points to address those concerns
What is the tool: The Way Things Are
Use when)
Your team wants to reflect on its activities, the way they work, or challenge the “way things are around here”.
Prerequisites)
A list of the activities your team conducts regularly.
Tool Description)
Select an activity from your list of activities. This can either be done randomly, or by intentional selection, if your team members want to work with a specific activity. Give every team member 5 minutes to individually note down the best and worst thing about how that activity is conducted. After this time, have team members go around the table and share their notes. When the roundtable has concluded, have a free-form discussion of what changes could be applied to the activity, based on what you found from the team’s notes. Look for patterns! “The Way Things Are” can be conducted during an existing reflective meeting, such as a Sprint Retrospective.
Purpose)
“The Way Things Are” is intended to enable a reflective discussion of the way your team works. The tool acts as a prompt to make the team reflect on activities in their work that they might not necessarily have chosen to reflect upon themselves. This can be helpful in starting discussions about activties that might be performed ceremoniously.
Outcome)
The team’s reflective discussion should lead to actionable changes to the selected activity. This should both support a culture where challenging the status quo is encouraged, and provide concrete benefits to the chosen activity.
What is the tool: Meeting from Hell
Use when)
Your team wants to discuss what poor psychological safety could look like in your environment, without pointing fingers or calling anyone out.
Prerequisite)
An upcoming activity that your team will be conducting in the near future
Tool description)
Select an upcoming activity that your team will be conducting. Then:
In plenum, discuss and establish the objective of the activity. In a 5minute collective brainstorm, make a list of all your team could do to make sure that you achieve the worst result imaginable with respect to the objective of the activity. Conduct a simulation of 15 minutes of the chosen activity, wherein team members attempt to realize the items they picked. Go down the list of items your team members selected, and ask your team: “Is there anything that we are currently doing that in any way, shape, or form resembles this item?” If the answer is yes to any item, discuss and write down what first steps will help you prevent those items from happening
Purpose)
Meeting from Hell” allows your team members to express the in-expresseable, and address the skeletons in the closet in a less serious environment
Outcome)
Meeting from Hell” produces action points for avoiding undesirable outcomes in future instances of the selected activity, and can act as a good conversation-starter for discussing psychological safety in your team
