Does your team feel safe?
Last week, I kicked off a new series on psychological safety. The focus is to help you understand what it is, why it’s important, and how you can create it with your team.
A quick primer: you have psychological safety when a team is willing to take the interpersonal risk of speaking up about ideas, questions, and concerns. Teams lacking this safety can’t innovate, have high turnover, and are unwilling to give over-and-above effort.
Story time.
A few years ago, Google commissioned an effort they called “Project Aristotle.” The goal was simple. Google wanted to know why some teams were great at innovation and others weren’t.
Because it was Google, they spared no expense in answering this question. Researchers, scientists, and statisticians came together to analyze teams across the company. The results were startling.
After analyzing thousands of data points, there was one significant metric correlated to high-performing, innovative teams. You ready for this? Conversational turn taking!
Google observed communication patterns of project teams in key meetings. For the higher-performing teams, there was an even distribution of conversational contributions by all participants.
In every day terms, it just means people equally spoke up. If you’re a scientist at heart, you’ll ask an important question: causation or correlation?
Do teams with great psychological safety have more conversational turn taking or does more conversational turn taking lead to psychological safety?
Regardless, here’s an actionable tip for you. This is an easy data point to observe and measure with your team. As you sit in meetings, pay attention to the dynamics.
And in particular, pay attention to your own behavior. Do you speak more than your team? Are you always first to speak up or do you go last? Do you verbally recognize people’s contributions—especially your quieter team members?
Remember the most powerful point about psychological safety: it doesn’t cost a thing for you to create! This isn’t sophisticated management theory. Instead, it’s common sense stuff … exercised with uncommon persistence and consistency.
Make it a great day!
Chris
