Do I have a psychologically safe environment?

Is it easy to get feedback from the team?

Sometimes you might want to ask your team for feedback on something. Recently I had been feeling disorganized and unfocused at work, and I wanted to know if it was affecting the team. This wasn’t the first time I’ve asked people for feedback in a team meeting, and I have received good feedback from the team in the past, so I knew I could rely on them to be honest with me. A few people noticed that I was sometimes losing my train of thought in meetings, but I always called myself out on it and they could get me back on track. So while it was noticeable, it wasn’t impacting the team. Their feedback was valuable to me, because even though it wasn’t a reflection of my best efforts, the team still felt safe to let me know that.

If you find that you’re in a psychologically safe environment, it should be easy to ask for feedback from your team, to get an honest answer, and to respond appropriately to address any concerns.

Do they make suggestions without prompting?

To get the best ideas out of your team, you need to create an environment where people feel safe to be wrong. I keep pointing back to my Active Commitment post, because so much comes back to that concept.

Sometime after we had started doing 2 week sprints, one of the pod members brought up the fact that our sprint retrospective meetings weren’t providing a lot of value because we just went over what happened, and didn’t come out with solid action items. One of the pod members who had expressed an interest in learning more product management skills offered to take on facilitating these meetings and recording the resulting action items so that we could make sure we implemented the changes.

In an environment that’s not psychologically safe, most people wouldn’t offer a suggestion like this unprompted. They might stay silent and let issues continue. In a psychologically safe environment, they feel comfortable to bring up issues and say what’s not working. They can trust that the work environment can be improved and that nobody’s going to get mad about doing what is clearly the right thing.

Do people get the Sunday Scaries?

In a 1:1 meeting I had with a new hire, we talked about how they were settling into their new role and how things were going. They told me that the thing they liked best about their work was that they weren’t getting the “Sunday Scaries” anymore.

A lot of people experience anxiety on Sunday nights before the work week starts up again. During crunch time that can happen, but if it’s a regular occurrence on your team, that could indicate a problem.

How do I create psychological safety?

Building a culture of feedback

On my team, I wanted to build a culture of feedback. When we have new hires, I like to do a “feedback week”. After everyone has had some time to get to know each other, maybe a few weeks or months, we do feedback week. I’ll write a separate post about that next week, but the jist of it is assigning people to collect anonymous feedback on other people on the team, then delivering it to the recipient.

Building a blameless culture

Another way we build psychological safety on our team is by creating a blameless culture. When things go wrong, we don’t seek out a person to blame. If we were focused on blame, people would be afraid to suggest new ideas or new ways of doing things. We give people the freedom to fail so that they can learn and improve.

In retrospective meetings, we’ll look at what went wrong and how we could have avoided it. When we do this, we’re not allowed to call out a specific person. You can call out a failure of a process, or information gaps, but you can’t blame a person. Some people on the team will occasionally call themselves out, but we only allow that if they are specific about what happened. For example, “sorry everyone, I had the necessary information in an older document, but I didn’t check that the information was transferred to the new document.” That’s fine. They know where they went wrong, and we know how we can avoid it in the future. If someone calls themselves out and nonspecifically berates themselves, that’s not ok. Nobody learns anything from “I’m the worst!”

In retrospective meetings, we always work under the assumption that everyone worked with the best interests of the company in mind, and did not willingly make things more difficult for anyone. This mindset helps us focus on actions, outcomes, and how we can improve in the future rather than finding a person to blame.

By creating a blameless culture, we can be sure that we’re focused on specific actions to improve in the future and not putting all our problems on individual people.

No gossip

On our team, whenever we talk about employee turnover (on our team or other teams), I try to provide as much context as I can about what happened, whether it was due to financial reasons, strategy, or whatever else. If it’s because of something like performance or legal reasons, I am sure to say that I can’t explain in that case. In some cases, turnover on another team may come as a surprise, but that’s a good thing. We’re not in the business of gossip, and we have a lot of respect for the people who come and go from our company.

If I can provide as much information as I can to the team, explain what we can’t talk about, and let them know who they can talk to for more information, the team knows that I do not promote a gossipy culture and so it’s not a habit that we reinforce.

Of course it would be naive to think there’s no gossip that ever happens, but as long as it’s not an unofficial team value, it can be kept to a minimum.

Be as trustworthy as possible

When information flows from leadership, to product leadership, to the product pods, I try to give as much context to the team as I can. I aim to be the conduit of communication between my team and product leadership and senior leadership. By facilitating the back and forth, the team knows that I can be relied on to follow through on what they ask me.

In certain circumstances, I’ll also make a judgement call to update my team with information that isn’t concrete yet. In those cases, it has to be given with the caveat that things could change before we are able to act on the information. In those cases, I keep the team updated about the changes and when a decision is settled. The team appreciates these updates because they can see how some decisions are made at higher levels in the company, and they feel that I’m being more open with them.

Aside from information flows, I also work to make good on my promises. That could mean pushing for title changes and new responsibilities, as well as better compensation for team members that are growing fast. I also balance this advocacy against the realities of the company, whether or not there’s available budget for increased compensation or a need within the company for these titles and responsibilities. When I have these conversations with team members, I always give them as much information as I can. I recognize their contributions and let them know I appreciate their hard work and growth. I also let them know what the potential obstacles may be. By providing all the context, they know what they need to focus on and what is within their control to get what they want.

Wrapping Up

By creating an environment of psychological safety on your team, you can improve trust and communication, get better suggestions and feedback, and you can keep everyone aligned on what is most important for their personal goals and the goals of the company. A psychologically safe workplace runs smoothly because everyone’s motivations are understood and priorities are clearly communicated.