Revisioning Psychological Safety: An Introduction
Kahn (1990: pp708) defined Psychological Safety as: “being able to show and employ oneself without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career.”
Since then, Professor Amy Edmondson (1999,2012,2013) has done important pioneering work to develop the concept of Psychological Safety and its importance in creating the right culture. Many times, Amy Edmondson has made it clear that psychological safety has to be combined with accountability and with our individual and collective responsibility to speak up, make our unique contribution to the team, and take leadership. To grow and develop we all need feedback, challenge and healthy conflict as well as experiences that, at the time, will take us out of our ‘comfort zone’ and feel risky.
We have also built on the important work of Dr Timothy Clark, who in 2020, outlined four stages of Psychological Safety:
- Inclusion Safety
- Learner safety
- Contributor safety
- Challenger safety
We recognise these development phases, but now believe that every stage needs the right mix of support and risk, care and challenge.
Gradually, psychological safety has become popularised and generalised and has been understood by many to be a fixed state that every team must have. It has become too easy for team members not to take responsibility or speak up, by blaming others or the team or organization, for not making them psychologically safe.
Like many terms in the lexicon of leadership and organizational development, the term ‘psychological safety’ began by usefully in pointing to an area that had not been attended to, but over time has in places become a generalised cliché, an unhelpful ideology and an artificial goal. (see Hawkins 2023: “Beyond High Performing Teams”)
Psychological safety is neither a thing nor a goal. There is no leadership act without psychological risk, for to speak up, and to state your truth and unique perspective, will mean that others will disagree with you, may criticize you, tell you that you are wrong.
Collective Psychological and Relational Maturity
At Renewal Associates we now believe that we need to change from focussing on psychological safety in leadership teams to helping teams explore collective relational and psychological maturity. If a team is experienced by the majority of its members as unsafe, the level of contribution and risk taking diminishes and the collective team fails to mature. However, if a team is experienced as too cosy and comfortable, then the amount of challenge and creative conflict diminishes and the team becomes a mutual admiration society, often projecting all negativity on to the external wider environment. Once again, the team fails to mature. Real psychological and relational maturity come when support and challenge are not polar opposites, but a team has a culture of openness where support and challenge are mutually intertwined, and flow in all directions
From our work with senior teams around the world and across many different sectors, we have discovered that the key factors that help teams to collectively psychologically mature are:
- encouraging full engagement from all team members,
- promoting active listening and the building on each other’s comments,
- developing the collective skill of generative dialogue and creative conflict, where different perspectives and proposals are welcomed and worked through,
- ensuring that the conflict does not become personally antagonistic, and work to find ways of drawing together the opposing views into a higher order alignment,
- Having regular feedback, not just vertically from the team leader to team members, but also horizontal peer feedback between the members.
Here are the 15 Steps we have discovered that teams go through from being dysfunctional to collectively psychologically and relationally mature, but not necessarily in the same order. Sometimes teams leap a couple of steps and sometimes go back and address earlier steps. Even when all steps are accomplished, they need to be constantly maintained or the team when under pressure will slide back to less mature levels.
The Fifteen Steps
- Team members gossip and complain about the team and other team members outside of the meeting but avoid addressing issues in the meetings.
- Team members are fearful of speaking up and contributing to team meetings.
- Team meetings are ‘hub and spoke’ with conversations happening between the team leader and different team members.
- The meeting is dominated by a few powerful people that are actively engaged.
- All team members contribute to team meetings, but some much more than others.
- Difficult issues are referred to obliquely in meetings rather than specifically and directly.
- Everyone receives 360 feedback from all team members.
- Feedback is given regularly and directly to all team members.
- The team has a clear collective purpose which everyone recognises can only be achieved through collaboration.
- The team regularly reviews its dynamics and functioning and commits to new behaviours, protocols and processes
- The Team ensure that every team member contributes in the first 5-10 minutes of the meeting and welcomes every contribution.
- Team members actively build on each other’s contributions.
- The team regularly addresses collective challenges where no individual has the answer, but the team has ‘generative dialogue’ which generates new thinking between them, which no one had thought of prior to coming together.
- There is healthy creative conflict in the team, which does not become personally antagonistic and in which the team collectively addresses how to connect the wider conflicting stakeholder needs.
- All team members and the team as a whole, is continually learning and developing, through a healthy mixture of supportive challenge and challenging support, in service of the team’s wider stakeholders.
Conclusion
It is important that in team and organizational development and coaching, we stop seeing psychological safety as ‘a goal to be arrived at’, but as one step on the maturational journey in developing the psychological and relational maturity that is needed to be a high value creating team, which I have defined as ‘a team that continually co-creates beneficial value with and for all it stakeholders’. (Hawkins 2021)
Bibliography
Clark, T.R. (2020) 4 Stages of Psychological Safety New York: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Edmondson, A (1999) Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44 (2)
Edmondson, A (2012) Teaming, 1st edition, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Edmondson, A. C. (2013) The Three Pillars of a Teaming Culture. https://hbr.org/2013/12/the-three-pillars-of-a-teaming-culture. Accessed August 13th 2021
Gawanda, A (2010) The Checklist Manifesto, Profile Books, London
Hawkins, P. (2005) Wise Fool’s Guide to Leadership: Short spiritual stories for organisational and personal Transformation. London: O Books
Hawkins, P. (2020) Beyond the High Performing Team. Blog: www.renewalassociates.co.uk.
Hawkins, P. (2021). Leadership team coaching: developing collective transformational leadership. 4th edition. London: Kogan Page.
Kahn, William A. (1990-12-01). “Psychological Conditions of Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work”. Academy of Management Journal. 33 (4): 692–724.
