Squadify Connects

 psychological safety could sound like a soft topic, and you might imagine that a psychologically safe team is a place where people are just nice, but there's an awful lot more to it than that.

What is Squadify Connects?

Punchy, actionable insights and tips to make the life of the team leader a breeze.

[00:00:00] Pia: Welcome to a new mini series on psychological safety. This could sound like a soft topic, and you might imagine that a psychologically safe team is a place where people are just nice, but there's an awful lot more to it than that. I'm Pia.

[00:00:16] Dan: And I'm Dan, and this is Squadify Connects. You know, the term psychological safety was coined in the 1950s, but it really came to the fore through the work of Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard, especially through her book, the Fearless Organization.

[00:00:33] Edmondson defines psych safety as the shared belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

[00:00:46] Pia: It's good to know that that's very important. Amy Edmondson stumbled across the importance of psychological safety. When she was studying dispensing teams in hospitals, she discovered that the teams that dispensed therapeutic drugs most accurately also made the most mistakes. This apparent contradiction was explained by the fact that these teams actually owned up to their mistakes so that they could learn and fix them, whereas members in the low performing teams kept their mistakes hidden or to themselves.

[00:01:21] Dan: The message in this example is repeated in research and real terms Every day when Google analyzed thousands of their own teams to understand what drove performance in what was known as Project Aristotle, they found that psychological safety was the foundation to performance.

[00:01:38] So for high performance and of course feeling good about being in the team, people need to feel safe to speak up, make mistakes and learn. It is not a nice to have.

[00:01:49] Pia: So we're starting easy with our experiments in this miniseries, but things will get a little bit more challenging in the coming weeks.

[00:01:57] Dan: Yeah. So for this week, just observe. How psychologically safe is your team? Does everyone on the team actually speak up or do some stay quiet? Do people who admit mistakes so that they can learn openly? Can everyone make suggestions and have an impact on team direction? And how often are you of the team leader actually challenged on your thinking in order to improve on it? So you don't need to act on this information this week. Just observe

[00:02:24] Pia: There's some extra resources in the show notes for you to get familiar with psych safety, and we'll spend the coming weeks in this mini series working with you to make sure your team has the essential foundation in place. See you next time.