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- Psychological Safety
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Note: Make sure to read to the end of the newsletter. We offer a free team-building exercise to put the ideas in this newsletter into practice!
This Week at BETTER:
Seth visited Mississippi State to complete a 5 Voices for Teams Bootcamp with their Women’s Soccer program.
Kevin led a session with Florida State’s Booster Club team.
We started our first round of Cohorts last week. We also emailed on Tuesday about Coaches Cohorts and received the most interest in anything we’ve ever offered in one of our newsletters! Scroll back in your inbox if you missed it!
50 programs signed on to implement the Culture Playbook during the month of July and capitalized on our Back to School deal, including our Team Talks series for free! This special runs through August 15th!
Now, onto the newsletter!
The Idea: Psychological safety
Psychological safety has become a buzzword since Google performed a landmark study on its highest-performing teams. However, the term has been around far longer.
In today’s newsletter, we aim to debunk some myths surrounding psychological safety and how to build it within your teams, all in just 5 minutes or less.
“Athletes who perceive a psychologically safe environment are more likely to take risks, share ideas, and engage in open communication with their teammates and coaches.”
Anecdote: Google and Project Aristotle.
Project Aristotle has been written about endlessly in books, think pieces and research articles. We won’t belabor the point. If you’re curious for more, Google it. It’s worth your time. Here’s the bullet-point version:
In 2012, Google built an entire “Google People Operations” department. They gathered their best statisticians, organizational psychologists, and researchers to study Google’s teams to understand what factors led to the best team performance.
They spent two years and millions of dollars examining who ate lunch with each other, what traits the best-rated bosses shared (guess what? Effective Communication was the answer here), and any factor they could quantify.
They assumed before they began that the best teams were simply a combination of the “best” employees. They examined all prior research from any organization before they started. Introverts, extroverts, outgoing, shy, educational background, gender balance. If it could be quantified, they included it.
Results: No “combination” of backgrounds, demographics, or measurable impacted performance. Instead, among their highest-performing teams, they found two things:
Everyone on that team spoke roughly the same amount
The good teams had high “average social sensitivity.” In other words, they were good at sensing how each other felt.
It was then that they discovered the idea of Psychological safety, which Dr. Amy Edmondson had written about in 1999.
Research: Dr. Edmondson
In her study, Dr. Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, wrote the following:
“A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking…a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”
In other words, people feel entirely safe being themselves. When people feel safe being themselves, the collective intelligence and performance of the group increase. It is easier for them to build relational trust.
So, to get your team to perform at its capacity, your athletes, team members, and employees must be themselves and get to know each other through that.
Putting it all together:
Because it has been discussed extensively, the concept of psychological safety has taken on its definition in popular culture (similar to the terms “emotional intelligence” or “introvert,” which are primarily misunderstood from what they were created to mean).
So, how do we begin to build psychological safety in our teams? And, what are some landmines or pitfalls to look out for?
Safety is not the same as comfort:
Think of exercise. If you’re never uncomfortable, you’ll never grow. Psychological safety doesn’t mean you’re always comfortable. You will be uncomfortable. But you will be safe.
Confrontation does not mean danger:
In fact, confrontation is more likely to happen in psychologically safe environments. People feeling comfortable being themselves means that when someone steps out of line or out of alignment with the group, they are willing to speak up from a place of safety.
Explain What Psychological Safety is and Why it Matters:
If you build safety, you must get people to buy into that vision. The path to building a high-performing team that rises above its individual ability is a team full of people who feel safe to be themselves.
Establish Clear Expectations and Norms:
We all know the most common situations where relational trust is threatened. If you’re a coach, you can probably name the 2-3 athletes who bring it at risk the most. Be willing to create specific action plans when that friction happens to build expectations into how we will maintain safety through confrontation.
Build Trust Through Team-Building Activities
As a part of our 5 Voices for Teams workshop, we often take teams through the Marshmallow Challenge as a way to do #4 above (in fact, we did it with a nationally ranked soccer program just this week). We are happy to share the activity with you. Reach out to us if you’d like it!
If these ideas resonated with you, stay tuned for next week, when we will debrief our Self-Preservation tool to explore what keeps people from building relational trust with those around them.
Conclusion:
Building psychological safety is essential for fostering a high-performing team where individuals feel valued and confident to share their ideas. Leaders can create an environment where team members thrive by promoting open communication, emotional intelligence, inclusivity, clear expectations, and trust-building activities. You can commit to implementing these strategies and build a team dynamic that enhances collective performance and innovation.
The Culture Playbook + Cohorts
Coaches have access to a lot of coaching content. What they lack are systems.
The Culture Playbook is 10 leadership ideas with the exercises you need to install the ideas and culture into your program. It’s the exact system we use to help coaches build their programs around mindset, leadership, and performance. We’ve used it at schools like Oklahoma, Mississippi State, and Florida State.
Since the Culture Playbook was released almost a year ago, nearly 1,000 coaches have purchased and are using it for their programs.
You can get it for your program today.
Culture Playbook Cohorts
We are offering Culture Playbook Cohorts if you’re interested in exploring the Culture Playbook on a deeper level.
We’ve had a few dozen commitments over the last week and aren’t starting with very many cohorts, so reserve your spot today!
Monthly Calls + Powerful Content + Practical Application + Community = Accelerate Your Growth
