By request, I wanted to film a follow-up to a video that I created on why psychological safety is important, which you can find linked here and I wanted this video to be a really robust tutorial on how do you build a culture of psychological safety? In this video, I’m going to share 3 ideas, really concrete methods for you to increase psychological safety in your own organization. Kind of channeled and inspired by Amy Edmondson at Harvard who has kind of popularized and coined this term “psychological safety” and paired up with Google to do all this research to find that psychological safety is the number one predictor or indicator of high performing teams at Google.
Blog Note: The following is an adapted and edited transcript of one of our daily YouTube tutorials. We know sometimes it is easier to scroll through written content which is why we are publishing here. Because of that, there may be typos or phrases that seem out of context. You’ll definitely be able to get the main idea. To get the full context, visit our YouTube channel here.
How To Build A Culture Of Psychological Safety
I’m going to share those 3 in some of my own languages that I think you’ll find really sticky and practical. Then I’m also gonna share 2 very concrete exercises that I use regularly with clients to amplify a culture of connection belonging in trust. If this is your first time to the channel, I’m chad Littlefield and this channel is designed for leaders and educators to help make connection and engagement easy. In the next handful of minutes, I am going to download what is in my brain from working with some of the top universities and organizations on the planet and put it into your brain on how to build a culture of psychological safety which has all sorts of other benefits as an organization.
Framework The Work as a Learning Problem
The 1st suggestion that Amy Edmondson makes in her Ted Talk is to frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. Think about somebody who works in marketing coming to you and presenting a social media strategy and you saying, “Is this really going to work? I’m not super confident that this is going to be an effective strategy.” As opposed to a learning problem asking that person when they came, “When you put all the strategy together, what did you learn? What were some of the best practices that you learned that you think will help make the strategy really successful?” Do you see how that totally flips that dynamic from a culture of knowing. You’ve got to know things to a culture of being rewarded for learning. What are you actually learning in that context? And that brain shift from knowing to learning is a really, really powerful one in an organization. Carol Dweck talks about it from a standpoint of a fixed versus growth mindset. I like the language of knowing versus learning because as human beings, we all know things and sometimes we get a little bit too attached to those things that we know and we forget to learn new things constantly, right. That jumps us to Amy’s 3rd suggestion, I’m gonna skip number 2 for a moment which is ask a lot of questions.
Foster a Culture of Curiosity
If you are familiar with me and Will’s work and “We and Me,” you know that we’ve put together a book called “Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter” and in it, a whole bunch of tools on how to foster that culture of connection and curiosity. In the next few seconds, I want to give you a little bit of a visual slideshow of 3 concrete ways that you can foster a culture of curiosity, both in your own brain and in your team or organization as a whole. The 1st one and one of the first ideas that we talk about in the book is really noticing. Looking around and finding something that you’re curious about and asking about it. This applies virtually and in person. I think we forget sometimes when we jump on Zoom or any other video platform that there is… even though no words have been said, the conversation’s already begun. There’s so much data right on the screen in that grid in gallery view, but there’s also so much data from all the asynchronous communications and conversations that have happened before depending on how connected with your co-workers are, there’s all the data from people’s social media posts, etc. Yet, I think social media is a perfect example of this, we see somebody’s updates or posts or something and we just are in a mindset of knowing, right. We just know it and we forget to be like a bit curious about it, right. Even though we just got a picture and a snapshot we’re like, “Oh yeah, I know what’s going on. Yeah, you got engaged.” As opposed to being curious like, “How did you get engaged? What was the story? What did it feel like etc.” Just igniting that curiosity.
2nd one is be genuinely curious about the next person you cross paths with at work or not or at home and ask follow-up questions. You know, kids, one of the things we found when we were doing research for the book is that kids ask 300 to 400 questions a day, adults ask 6 to 12 questions per day. Even though asking follow-up questions seems obvious, most of our brains are wired to have conversations like this: A sentence that ends in a period, sentence it ends in a period, a sentence that ends in a period. Yet an amazing level of psychological safety can be created when you’re interested and genuinely curious about another person. Thinking about on that conversation being sentenced to ends in a period, sentence that ends in a question mark, sentence ends in a period, sentence ends in a question mark, sentence that ends in a period. You don’t want to be all question marks because that’s an interrogation, not a conversation.
Number 3 way to build curiosity, learn something about somebody else every single day. Bill Nye, the science guy, one of my favorite quotes from is “everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” Make it a point to learn something. People have brains and hearts filled with lifetimes of experience that you haven’t been around for and one of the only ways to access them right now until we get computers plugged into our brains or Elon Musk installs a neural link in us, but right now the best that we can do is ask really great questions rooted in our own curiosity. Rewinding a bit, the 2nd thing that Amy Edmondson shares about in her Ted Talk, such a powerful idea which is acknowledge your own fallibility. I have a piece of language to share with you on this that is… been transformational in my own way that I interact and build psychological safety with clients and I’ve also got a phrase, 4 word phrase that if you put this in your back pocket, you will immediately be a better leader and educator and more effective at increasing the psychological safety in your sphere. The 1st dynamic of admit your own fallibility, my language for that is our brains are wired for that fight-or-flight response. But I would add to it, I’d say maybe it’s a little bit more of a fight, flight or a need to be right. Not just to like “Oh, I like to be right.” But we have a deep unconscious and sometimes conscious need to be right. To admit your own fallibility, we’ve got to be in this space of openness, right. We’ve got to be open to possibilities that currently aren’t in our sphere.
Admit Your Mistakes
The best way to shift from one to another is Amy Edmondson’s tool: admit your own fallibility, or our language for it is admit your mistakes, right. Own them with people. Now, the cool thing about this 4 word magical little phrase that I’m gonna share with you is that it almost preemptively admits your fallibility. It preemptively acknowledges to your team that you don’t know everything, you don’t have all the answers. Now, on this phrase, I picked up from a leader that I used to work with, it was really brilliant and holy smokes I wish that every president of every country or prime minister, anybody else knew… every politician had this phrase in their back pocket and it is “my current best thinking is…” We are so poisoned by our need to be right that especially as leaders, we feel the need to have it all together. We feel the need to make decisions confidently and charge ahead which is fine, right, you want to speak with conviction as a leader and, you know, you just cast a vision and move an organization forward but you don’t know everything, right. There is a so much data in the world, especially right now, we’re living in this like time of infodemic where there’s so much information contradicting each other and so the best we can do as leaders and educators is to operate under our current best thinking. As you’re rolling out your strategic plan or your vision or you’re starting a team meeting, to be able to say, “You know, from all the data that I’ve consumed, my current best thinking is blank.” And then maybe shift from a place of knowing to learning and saying, “My current best thinking is this. What is your current best thinking? And go ahead and unpack some of that.” Really, really lovely tool. All right, keeping the momentum going here, I’m gonna speed things up psychological safety that I do on a regular basis with the organizations and universities that I work with.
If you want to increase psychological safety tomorrow, right, maybe put one of these exercises on your docket. Both these exercises use card decks that come packed into the connection toolkit that we’ve created for leaders and educators to use themselves. One comes from our deck of We! Connect cards which have questions on one side and actions on the other ,and the other comes from We! Engage cards which have quotes on one side and images on the other. Now, if you want to get the actual decks and the kit, cool. There’s a link below, but there’s also a link to a free version of both the We! Connect cards and the We! Engage cards so that you can do this exercise. Either print them out and do it or you can do it digitally in a remote context. I believe information should be free and experiences is how I run a business and so, experiences in stuff and tools, they are really cool decks, people like them. There’s my 2 second pitch to get them. Here are the 2 exercises. The 1st one with We! Connect cards. There are 60 questions here that we spent 2 years researching to actually pick specifically a set of 60 questions that were psychologically safe that increased knowledge of both personal and work information about each other in a comfortable but challenging way.
Those 60 questions, my favorite exercise to do with them and there’s 10 plus exercises that you can do, but my favorite exercise to do is lay out all 60 questions on a table or desk or put them all on a remote whiteboard of some sort and have the group remove every question that they feel like they could answer for everybody else in the group, right. If I feel like as me, Chad, could answer this question for every single person in the group, I would remove that from the deck. Now, here’s the thing. I’ve done this with dozens and dozens and dozens of teams and I’ve never ever, even teams are really close with each other that have worked together for 5, 10 plus years, I have never had anybody remove more than 5questions out of 60, which (A) means they’re a pretty good set of questions but (B) creates this wonderful awareness and opportunity that there’s way more to learn than we know. What I’ll often do with those extra 55 questions that people couldn’t answer for each other is say, “Awesome! We have some connection before content or an opening plan for our weekly staff meeting for the next year.” By the end of that year, if your team does not feel way more psychologically safe, you can write me an angry email and I’ll send you another free deck of cards or something. The 2nd exercise leans on what Jennifer Stansfield, an awesome facilitator in New Hampshire, calls shielded discussion. For this exercise, you can also just use imagery. If you have any image any card deck that’s got a bunch of images or you want to cut images out of a magazine or print them offline, you can do that or print out the digital version of all these cards and you just lay the images. I’ll just show you a few of them here. You just lay the images out on a table or again a remote whiteboard and you invite people to choose a card that represents something that makes them feel really safe or choose a card that represents how they define trust. And what happens is people choose an image which inherently creates a metaphor for psychological safety or trust or whatever the prompt that you’re giving to them.
When they share it with the group, they share it in the shielded way of, “Oh, I’m sharing this idea because the card allowed me to not because I’m being really vulnerable or risky right now.” You can use that specifically to hone in on trust or psychological safety but you could also lay out the cards and say choose an image that represents an idea that you want to implement in the next year, again creating that shielded discussion fostering idea generation making sure everybody’s included and also making that learning more engaging and visual. If you don’t want to leave building psychological safety up to chance in your organization, give me a ring. My info is below. Find my email, reach out. We’d love to share my availability and the ways that I work with organizations. Would love to start that conversation and have that.I make these videos as practical as possible so that you can rip off and steal a bunch of ideas but sometimes, it’s helpful to have a guide walk along with you and help increase that connection, belonging and trust because that’s all I do for a living is make connection and engagement easy for some of the coolest leaders and educators on the planet.