High-Performing Teams in Tech Need Psychological Safety.

Here is why you should invest in psychological safety and how to build tech teams that are psychologically safe.

The research evidence is clear: teams that score high in psychological safety not only perform better, they also deal better with failure, cultivate a stronger growth mindset and are more resilient in times of uncertainty and change (Frazier et al., 2017).

Teams in Tech are born in and operate within VUCA environments - a world of constant change, uncertainty, volatility and ambiguity. It is surprising that building psychological safety is not (yet) on every tech leader’s agenda.

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological Safety is the belief that you won’t be punished or rejected for voicing your ideas, opinions, questions or concerns. In psychologically safe teams, the individual feels free to express themselves and their ideas without the fear of being embarrassed, humiliated or ignored. Teams high in psychological safety share the belief that mistakes are an opportunity to learn, optimise and grow. Feeling psychologically safe is the foundation to being your authentic self in the workplace.

Why you should invest in the psychological safety of your teams

Tech workplaces globally have gone through a rapid transformation with the move to working from home or hybrid working models accelerated by the pandemic. With diverse virtual teams spread across multiple locations worldwide, the need to build psychological safety is crucial to ensure continued high performance, creativity, engagement and organisational citizenship.

While traditionally performance was measured on technological and process-oriented factors, the tech industry is more and more embracing research findings from social sciences - and specifically from Positive Psychology - to take into account the complex human factors that influence productivity and performance. Google conducted a company-wide study on psychological safety in 2016, which highlighted 5 core concepts for organisations to consider to build effective agile teams. Psychological safety ranked as the number one predictor of team effectiveness and emerged as the factor that underpins all other four concepts for effective teams: dependability, structure and clarity, the meaning of work, and the impact of work.

How to build psychological safety in your Tech Teams

Within the growing evidence-base of promoting psychological safety in the workplace, five key strategies have shown to be effective from a leadership and team perspective. These strategies are ideal to be implemented with a mix of leadership coaching and effective team workshops, equally benefitting office-based and remote teams.

Communication is key

Psychological safety is all about communication: communicating well as a leader and also creating a safe space for the team to voice their ideas, concerns, challenges and worries. This also includes feeling comfortable and accepted to bring all of your authentic self, inviting different perspectives as a means to learn and grow, and leading by example through open, honest and considerate communication.

Curiosity

Curiosity is the glue that makes a group a team. Fostering a mindset of curiosity, inquiry, openness to learn with and from each other is key to building psychological safety in teams. Curiosity is a strength that can be trained, promoted and practised to help your team members become explorers and inquirers. This is a great team activity and can be facilitated as part of a strengths-based workshop.

Conflict as a collaborator

Groups and teams have their own, unique group dynamic. Even in the most coherent teams, conflict is bound to happen. In psychologically safe teams, conflict is seen as a collaborator. A tool to practice discussion and debate in a compassionate way.

However, not everyone is comfortable with conflict. Depending on the cultural background of your team members, there might be big differences in how open people would deal with conflict. It is the role of the positive leader to establish standards and norms within the team on how conflict will be dealt with. This is a group process, consisting of learning, awareness for oneself and others, and a good pinch of compassion.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery

Drawing from the wise words of James Joyce’s Ulysses, teams high in psychological safety treat mistakes as opportunities for discovery and learning. This is often a significant cultural shift as well as a shift in mindset. Often people are afraid to be punished for things that go wrong, especially when the mistake is connected to a direct business outcome. A mobile app frontend engineer who releases a new app version with a bug that leads to a 50% cart abandonment rate, will find it difficult to not go into a feeling of embarrassment, failure and potentially fear for their job. A sales rep who misses an important customer meeting and loses the million euro deal will be equally battling with negative pressure and worry.

Honest mistakes happen to the best of us. Sometimes we don’t realise the impact of these mistakes. Sometimes, like in the examples above, it is painfully clear. The positive leader in tech acknowledges the complexity of mistakes and supports their team to navigate the emotions and the process of learning and rectifying.

Adapt your leadership strategy to the hybrid working model

Boundaries between work-life and private life have become more blurry with the move to working from home and hybrid work. The leader of today needs to consider the person beyond the workplace. Private situations and responsibilities can have an immediate impact on not only outcome-oriented factors like performance and engagement. You also need to take into account the emotional impact of blurred lines between work and private life. It might be more difficult for some of your employees to switch between the private persona and the work persona when working from the same space they live in.

Do you want to build more psychological safety in your teams?

Building psychological safety in your organisation is a process. It starts with enabling your leadership team with the knowledge and tools to act as effective leaders who are sensitive to the individual and their impact on the wider organisation. It also includes supporting your team to work together in a way that fosters individual learning and learning as a team.

I specialise in working with teams and leaders in tech on implementing evidence-based strategies that promote psychological safety, awareness and confidence through interactive workshops, team coaching and 1:1 leadership coaching. If you need a trusted advisor in your journey to build better teams - get in touch!