I love this concept that Google and Harvard, Amy Edmondson and Harvard and the team at rework at Google, paired up to do a whole bunch of research to try to figure out what makes teams tick. They found that the number 1 characteristic of high performing teams at Google was the degree of psychological safety in that team.

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In this blog I’m going to pick it apart a little bit more. I’m going to share the 4 building blocks of psychological safety. Each of these 4 are going to become extremely practical to you. 1, it’s amazing knowledge to have as a leader or an educator which is who this channel is exactly designed for. But, these 4 building blocks also are really memorable, easy way to actually weave in more psychological safety into your organization. I love things that are practical and tangible. I want to always leave a video with like the answer to the question, “What do I do with my hands?” Or in other words,  you know, how can I implement this? How can I put this into practice to actually make an impact  and a difference? As I share each of these 4 building blocks, I’ll also share a really concrete example from my work with teams organizations and universities helping to build a culture of connection, belonging and trust and amplify and increase that degree  of psychological safety because that is my job. 

4 Building Blocks of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is kind of a big word. There’s a lot of letters in it. The term was kind of  coin, popularized by Amy Edmondson through research at Harvard in the 1990s. And so, I want to just read  you the definition offered on Google’s website for psychological safety. Now, not on Google, but  on the Google rework website. I’ll drop a link to it below. Rework is a really phenomenal effort on  Google’s part to pull together a bunch of research practices, ideas, really practical tools to help  create a more people-focused culture and high-performing culture. Feel free to open  that tab up and check that out another time. A whole mountain of awesome resources there.  

The short version on Google’s website is that psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk. My question is, in terms of why is psychological safety important to an organization is, what happens when people are able to take more interpersonal risks? This is where I came up with the 4 building blocks of what happens. The 4 building blocks, the things that are created when psychological safety gets higher. These 4 ideas are coming from my experience working with clients, talking with people who work at Google, talking and working with some of the top most high performing organizations and universities in the world and seeing what it is that’s created and what it is that happens when psychological safety is included. 

Inclusion

This has become a bit of a buzzword in the last couple years especially with all the racial equity work and the black lives matter movement, right. Inclusion, that word  has gotten bigger and more popular somehow. The way that for me relates to interpersonal risk  is when I show up to work, do I feel like I belong, right? Do I feel- maybe first, do I  feel like there’s connection and do I feel like there’s a relationship of trust? UIltimately do I feel like I belong? I was walking around Airbnb headquarters several years ago and over the top of many other doorways, they have just a phrase written that just says, “belong here” or “you belong here.” I love that idea, that physical representation of reminding  people that you’re in the right spot, just as you are, right. You belong here. We hired you because you belong here. That level of inclusion that is not only an idea that might be you know plastered  on a wall, but it’s also an action that’s regularly happening. One example from a client that I think  is a really great way to promote a culture of inclusion, not just to include somebody in a moment but to promote a culture of inclusion, is doing things that make sure people’s voices are heard.  

Organizations typically like to send out surveys. We like to send out an annual  employee engagement survey, we like to do little pulse checks, we like to get all of this data from people. Yet, very rarely, before I start working with an organization, very rarely does that data  actually get voiced back and reflected back to the organization. It’s one of the easiest ways to make people feel included is to let them know that their voices are being heard. That all voices are being heard, that all perspectives are being heard even if they’re not immediately  acted upon or something changes. For the leader in that organization to say, “I hear you. I see you.” is an invaluable tool to create a level of inclusion. For those who are visually inclined, for  me, if you had a magic wand, this is what inclusion looks like. Where people are really willing to know each other, people feel seen, heard. People feel like they… they’re got and that you’re  ultimately with them, that you’re on the same team. Now, I’m not gonna go into this in depth. I’ve  got other videos unpacking this ask powerful questions pyramid which is what me and Will’s book,  Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter is rooted in. But, this very much is the next best thing to a magic wand. The magic wand doesn’t exist to just like wave and make an inclusion happen, but that is why I wrote the book. 

Idea Generation

When people are feeling more psychologically safe, they are more comfortable to take interpersonal risks and they are way more free with the ideas  they share. It is really surprising to me how much employees in an organization hold back when they’re not safe. You might be paying employees a full-time salary day after day after  day after day, and yet a lot of times like I don’t know what the percentage is and it’s  different for every employee and every team and every organization, but let’s just say roughly 20 percent of any employee’s potential is just suppressed. The ideas, the possible things that they want  to create or share or little improvements on a process, they just don’t feel safe to share. A friend that works for a big company who we’ll leave nameless here, but he had this amazing idea  to improve this entire like product process line and yet he didn’t want to share it because his manager was really close with this other person and this other person didn’t like it. Silly relational dynamics that didn’t make him feel safe enough and comfortable enough to take the interpersonal risk, to share this idea that actually… the scale that  this process was operating at, probably would, and somebody will eventually share it, maybe. But, it’ll probably save the organization millions and millions of dollars. When you talk about the power of psychological safety like if somebody’s suppressing that idea, whoa! I heard the owner of Burt’s Bees, chap stick and other things, talk about once a  employee who was working minimum- a minimum, I shouldn’t say minimum wage. I’m not sure that they  were getting paid minimum wage because Burt’s Bees is a B corporation and so I’m assuming they paid a living wage rather than a minimum wage, but it was a, you know, bottom rung employee let’s say worked  in that product line and they were trying to go zero waste at the plant. He had this really a  great idea to put a sticker over the chap stick in a way that didn’t create this… it just left  the sticker right on the chap stick as opposed to creating this little tab that then was gonna  end up in a river, lake, ocean, somewhere, right, to just keep it all together. Simple, brilliant idea. It  actually saved the company money etc. Because the culture at Burt’s Bees was if you know something that the top should know, just tell the top. You don’t need to play all these crazy games to get there. Just share the idea. We want that idea generation to come and so for that, really  making it clear that, and I think inclusion builds on this, making sure that people’s… you  want to hear people’s voice. With idea generation, my best tip to put this into practice is to create space for idea generation and intentionally make it not anonymous so, don’t drop anonymous you know…  there is some psychological safety could be said for anonymous ideas, but I would say  you should reward people for idea generation. 

For bad ideas and good ideas. You should reward  idea generation because you’re not rewarding the impact of that idea yet. You might if  it really lands well. It might show up as a bonus or something for them, but the idea here is  that you’re rewarding the act of sharing ideas. As long as you’re rewarding the act of sharing ideas, people will continue to share more ideas. We get building block number 1 of inclusion flowing  and we add in that idea generation, it creates building block number 3 which is innovation, which is tied, actually, very closely I would argue, with building block  number 4 which is implementation. 

Innovation and Implementation

I’m going to talk about these together, innovation and implementation, because I used to work with a creativity innovation  professor and researcher at Penn State University. His name is Dr. Sam Hunter. One of the things I really appreciated in his work is he defined, and this wasn’t, you know, just  him, this is this field, defines creativity as idea generation or kind of associates, I should say,  creativity with idea generation, whereas they associate innovation with implementation.  I want to put these 2 together because you’ve got to have ideas in order to implement them, but  ideas that don’t get implemented, right, isn’t much for innovation, right. You can have an amazing, and  if you’ve ever hung out with a group of friends it’s like, “I have this awesome idea for a pair of AR glasses that you can wear on a run and gamify exercise blah blah.” But they’re never going  to actually go and implement it. Idea generation without the implementation component  isn’t worth anything. And so, the 2 are related to psychological safety. When people feel psychological safety they innovate by coming up with new ideas. They create new ideas, but then  the the safety to take that interpersonal risk and just that risk in general of trying it, and that might even become a fiscal risk, and any company that doesn’t want to stay stagnant or any company that doesn’t want to just stay same old, same old and they want to create something new, needs to increase psychological safety so that innovation and implementation can actually happen.  

Now, for these 2, these are going to be really different based on who you work for and why  you’re watching this video and how you landed here, but 1 very simple, little, practical tool to take  this dynamic to shift from a culture of same old, same old to creating something new, right, to  implementation, innovation and implementation, is do something you do every day with your non-dominant  hand. This is seemingly so unbelievably trivial but I remember working a job one time  and I walked in and one of my co-workers who I was pretty sure was a righty, right. I had seen  his keyboard and his mouse organized in the in this fashion. I walked in one day and he had them  flipped and it’s such a subtle thing but I believe that when you do something with your non-dominant  hand, it is working this… not the same but similar pathways in the brain of getting comfortable with  being uncomfortable. And that is part of how Google and how Amy Edmondson at Harvard talk about and define psychological safety. That it’s not only the leader’s job to set the container of psychological  safety, but you as the individual contributor also need to be thinking about how are you creating  and building that psychological safety for yourself. 

Play with this idea. Do  something every day with your non-dominant hand. See if it works those muscles and think about  on a grander scale, what do you do every day and how can you change that to create something new.