I have already made a comment but this video, and the other material produced by HBR, has got me thinking. What I am interested in is how ideas such as 'team psychological safety' can actually be implemented in the workplace. To me, to have hi quality team psychological safety, you would need to have three things in place. They are: i) Education: (a) What is TPS? Why it is a good thing. etc. (c) An agreement by everyone in the team - up down and sideways - that psychological safety is a good thing and they will support it. (d) Standards produced and agreed on. (I am very big on teams developing sets of behavioural standards.) (e)A culture that supports team psychological safety which includes: managers being role models and openly stating why employees' voices matter, etc. (2) Processes. (a) Clear policies and procedures explaining and supporting team psychological safety. (b)Mechanisms and processes put in place to support and allow team psychological safety. (3) Team members have the ability (strategies and skills) and confidence to express themselves openly, clearly, politely, tactfully and assertively. The last thing we want is for people feeling safe to take risks to speak up and give their opinion when they don't have the appropriate level of interpersonal communication skills and people skills to do it with respect, sincerity and good manners. I know people at HBR a busy but I would love to have the opinion of HBR about this.
I wish my manager did more than just pay lip service to psychological safety. 😒 She obviously read about it in some management book but clearly doesn't know how to put it into practice.
This was terrific. Thank you. I first came across the concept of 'team psychological safety - but not this particular term - five decades ago when I first started work. Now this is a different topic but here goes. Most presenters have no idea what to do with their hands, arms, body, and head when they are speaking. They should be doing things which are purposeful and meaningful to enhance the quality of their communication and their message.
When sitting for a round table meetings for project planning or budgeting the project or else gathering the requirements for people if we make the people feel psychologically safe they would come out with good ideas.
It's important for management to recognize when any of the team members are just not a good fit - whether a troublemaker or highly rejected individual. It happens, the problem is thinking anyone can fit... not true. Some really will do better in a different team with more compatible energy / personalities / experience. It's still extremely common for the one not fitting in to need to speak up and might face a lot of pressure to remain in a poor fit situation. Sometimes changes can be communicated but there's also some incompatible clashes of personalities that you can't change and that's pretty expected. The real team-breakers often come across as covert manipulative or extremely detached and checked out, not really working "with" a team but manipulating or holding back a team, both not as present with the team. They're the most likely to rudely interrupt and speak for someone already speaking for themself - certainly not a team of open communication with psychological safety among these insecurities and possible prejudices against certain inherent characteristics of the team. It's a complicated process but putting together an extremely compatible and same-page / same-vibe team can create a golden opportunity for success.
This was NOT what I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be about how one protects themselves psychologically at work when you are dealing with unprofessional, harassing, right-wing extremists.
Why is everything on psychological safety being adreesed to the so called "team", when the team's response really does not matter. Isn't it the manager who is evaluating the perfomance evaluation and deciding pay, the one who can actually provide or not provide a psycologically safe environment. Am I missing something fundamental. Could someone clarify?
I think you make a really good point. I have assumed the team leader, manager, supervisor etc, is included in 'team'. I had someone on my team I nurture because I knew they had amazing potential and when they made a mistake they did have some negative an unwonted consequences. But they were fair and reasonable and up front. The reason why the whole team needs to be included is because in my particular case, it was other team members who did not want to let them off the hook and hills grudges. Not me the manager.
