Boost Psychological Safety On Your Teams With One Simple Technique
Psychological safety is when employees feel free to speak up, express their opinions, suggestions and objections, and contribute to a team without fearing judgment, criticism or reprisal.
It's not a complicated idea, but it's a powerful one. For example, Google famously ran a study (code-named Project Aristotle) that revealed psychological safety was the top factor differentiating their highest-performing groups.
And the Leadership IQ study, The Risks Of Ignoring Employee Feedback, revealed the following: Only 24% of people say that their leader always encourages and recognizes suggestions for improvement. But if someone does think their leader always encourages and recognizes employee feedback about suggestions for improvement, that person is about 12 times more likely to recommend the company as a great employer.
Yet notwithstanding psychological safety's seeming simplicity—just get people feeling comfortable with speaking up—it's surprisingly rare in today's companies. Even executive teams struggle to achieve true psychological safety. For instance, a study called How Effective Is Your Executive Leadership Team? discovered that only 14% of senior managers strongly agree that the members of their executive team are comfortable disagreeing with each other.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to nudge teams and encourage greater psychological safety. Imagine that you've just announced a new process change in your department, and you're pretty sure that some of your employees are not on board. Unfortunately, those employees are unwilling to openly share their concerns, so you don't have the information you need to fix the process and get their buy-in. Of course, you're also concerned that if they don't share their concerns with you, their doubts will emerge as passive-aggressiveness over the next few weeks.
To surface your employees' concerns, you're going to use the nominal group technique. Here's how it works: First, during your next meeting, you'll give each person a blank sheet of paper. If it's a virtual meeting, use a web meeting tool that allows people to write responses. Second, provide these directions:
"I would like to hear everyone's ideas about the potential benefits and risks of the new process change. So we're going to pause the meeting for five minutes, and during that time, I'd like each of you to write down at least two potential benefits of this process change and at least two potential risks. Please be as detailed as you can. At the end of the five minutes, I'll collect the papers so we can tally and discuss the benefits and risks."
Third, after you've collected everyone's responses (whether on paper or via your videoconference whiteboard or chat), you will then lead a discussion about those benefits and risks.
The nominal group technique allows you to surface a response from every single member of the team without having to put them on the spot in front of the group. Of course, it's better if they're willing to verbalize their ideas openly, but oftentimes, when the group isn't feeling enough psychological safety, this maneuver is required.
There is, however, one more step you need to take in order to significantly boost psychological safety. When you're leading the discussion of the collected responses, address each one, and when you get to some of the more painful criticisms or suggestions, be sure to say "thank you" to the group for raising the issue. It typically takes a few instances of using the nominal group technique, coupled with the leader's positive reinforcement, to alter the team's psychological safety. But once people start to see that their ideas are valued and welcomed without criticism or reprisal, you'll hear their input without the extra steps.
