The theme of this week’s lecture is about Psychological Safety. It highlights how trust, empathy, and understanding within a team create an environment where people feel safe to take risks and learn from mistakes. If you are new, this is a continuation of the IT2900 Weekly Reflection series, where I share my responses to the weekly assignments of this course.

The previous week’s blog post was titled “You Need to Know ‘Why,’ but Don’t Ask Directly”. You can take a look if you later find this article interesting.

Personal Takeaways

Building trust between me and another person in the team is not enough to create psychological safety. It is important that trust is established across individuals in the team. One key metric is that team members are not afraid to take challenges and fail. The environment where a learning culture is developed and iterated on is important, although it is also important to understand that everyone should not just go straight to failure, and this point links to my key takeaway from this lecture.

When dealing with problems or failures of organizations, Prof. Ben suggests that there are five steps to follow. Step number 3 on the list was figuring out “What should have been done differently?” I personally found this point to be the most insightful, since it reveals and leads to the following points to consider.

1. What it means to figure out “What should have been done differently?”: Normally, the team should have gone with the best solution when they were trying to solve something. However, when that is not the case, it is about a lack of knowledge and information. The most thought-provoking aspect of this point I learned is about finding “What information don’t we have to make the right decision?” By framing the question this way, and thinking back to past experiences when making important decisions, I think I tend to understand myself more compared to thinking about a better solution in terms of the information I already had at that point, which is sometimes difficult to actually find.
2. When failure should be punished: This key learning point follows from the previous one. When people in the team or I make mistakes, what are the boundaries on whether that mistake is acceptable or not? Usually, I think about whether we have already set the expectations and values. However, this approach may be too strict. It is not just about people knowing what is acceptable or not, since everyone will do their best to avoid unacceptability. It is important to judge whether the person made the right (or best) decision based on the information they had at that point in time. If that is the case, it is just that we have more information now, and it is a learning point for the team. Otherwise, we may need to consider more carefully what that person is doing, and whether it will impact the team in the long run.

I found that these two points can be used to create a psychologically safe environment by being explicit that the team is allowed to fail as long as they are doing their best based on what we know. If it doesn’t turn out well, we have learning points that we can take together.

Having a framework also ensures that the practice adopted when managing failures is for the sake of organizations rather than someone taking it personally. When leading teams in the future, I would adopt these methods to ensure that everyone understands that they should do their best, but if that fails, we learn and grow together as a team.

Past Psychological Safe Situations

During last summer, I was in the CVWO programme, where I was working in a team of 10, although usually in a smaller subteam. I usually found the environment to be psychologically safe, in the sense that I was okay with making mistakes, asking for help, or sometimes helping others, since it was an enriching learning environment.

Based on my own understanding as well as the opinions of friends I was working with, we somewhat agreed that there are two interesting key factors that contribute to this safety. Interestingly, they are not really tied to the job aspect.

1. Having Lunch Together: I think this is somewhat related to R (Relatedness) in the SCARF model. When we get to know more about each other aside from how we do our jobs, we all feel a stronger sense of relatedness, realizing that at the end of the day we are all just humans. As a result, we are more willing to ask for help, trust each other’s work, and not be scared of making mistakes in front of others.
2. Understanding Strengths and Weaknesses of Others: This point is a consequence of and related to the previous one. When we actually take time to understand who is good or not good at what, we begin to understand what they are thinking and why they think that way. This is also true in the opposite direction: when we know that team members have certain levels of empathy, we are less scared to make mistakes and ask them for help.

I believe these two things, based on my observations, are factors that contribute to psychological safety in this situation. Although each point gives a concrete example of activities, I think the actual key points are about creating an environment where we can relate to people in the team and understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. We understand that nobody is perfect, we are not afraid to fail, because we know we will come back stronger as we learn.

Advices on Creating Psychological Safety

Using my answer to the previous question as an example, I think one piece of advice I would give to myself and others to create a psychologically safe environment is to make sure that everyone in the team knows themselves and each other well. I think this step is important to understand that people have good intentions to make everything turn out well, and they have different strengths and approaches, which may lead them to make different decisions.

However, nobody is there to judge others, and people in the team should understand this point well. Some people may act in an offensive or aggressive way, but they may simply be the kind of people who talk like that by default and don’t mean to make you feel bad. Understanding these points will make people more willing to make mistakes and grow together as a team. With that said, empathy is a really key point to build trust among the team.