Psychological safety and a Pandemic
Make it difficult for teams to be able to share the virus but easy for them to share what is on their mind and how they are feeling! Psychological Safety is an essential ingredient for organisations and teams trying to adapt and
thrive a world of uncertainty and change during and following a pandemic
A thought paper by Chris Eastham, 18 March 2020
Introduction
In the middle of February
2020, in the midst of the CoronaVirus Pandemic Air New Zealand
announced that it will be reducing its capacity on its long haul network by 85
percent. At the same time Amazon
announced that it we being overwhelmed with with demand within its parcel
delivery business. Within two days at
8:15am on 18th March 2020 during
a newstalk ZB news bullitin they announced that ‘creative thinking may be
needed to keep sports and music events going’, then the headlines also
confirmed that Keith Urban had cancelled his planned live concert and instead
performed an online gig which was streamed live from his storage warehouse.
With
the 2020 pandemic creating unprecedented new problems, challenges and change
teams and cross functional groups need to work together more than ever before
to survive, adapt and thrive. In these
conditions, psychologically safety (PS) within teams is vital to enable
agility, adaptability and innovative, while supporting safety, engagement and
mental heath.
If team
members identify exposure or symptoms and need to self isolate, then they need
to trust they can openly report them without fear of discrimination. If multiple team members are off at one time
it may significantly test team capacity and organisational resilience. The wide range of unpredictable scenarios and
problems involving supply chains or customers or other unexpected risks and
incidents that teams will face and need to solve together. This will require high levels of adaptability,
agility and creative problem solving as well as open conversations about
potential risks, hazards and incidents alongside great team work, commitment
and engagement.
PS
is the fundamental capability that drives high trust teams. This paper presents an argument supported by
research that in complex situations such as the ongoing response to the 2020
pandemic PS is a vital pre-requisite capability to enable teams to address all
these factors and maintain high performance and critical risk management.
PS is not a silver bullet for managing all of the workplace
challenges and opportunities and it must combine with other essential
ingredients to enable effective learning, risk management and performance, and
if an approach is not effectively nurtured and supported it could have negative effects. But the research is clear
that if effectively implemented, that it
can be vital for teams achieving high performance working in complex situations
or periods of high and unpredictable change.
Within
the current context of the COVID19 Corona-virus pandemic I believe all New
Zealand organisations and leaders need to understand what it is and how it can
become ’the way we did things around here
to get through it’.
What is Team Psychological Safety?
PS is fundamentally about reducing
interpersonal risk, which necessarily accompanies uncertainty and change (Schein
& Bennis 1965). When applied to work teams it is where team-members
have a shared belief that the team social
environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking and it
enables teams to operate with high trust. (Edmonson 1999)
Studies
show that Team PS allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind,
creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off (HBR
2017).
In high trust teams team
members believe that they are able to and be open about any mistakes they might
make without fear of negative consequences
of self-image, status or career (Kahn 1990, p. 708). This quality
is not essential for all work situations but it
is important when situations are unpredictable and there is a need for
creativity or collaboration to do the work effectively or to adapt to changing
operational environments.
A
leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing
to learn and to trust. General Stanley
McChrystal
Over
years working in a range of team
performance situations across different industries including high performance
sport; clinical health; meat processing; major hazard operations and road
transport across
four different countries I have experienced many first hand examples of PS in work
teams laying the foundation the achievement across all these different
industries.
PS is sometimes promoted as a
capability for a specific outcome like innovation, adaptability or reliability, or
for a specific function like Agile project management, Human Centered Design,
mental health or safety. As an example,
if you visited the website for the Canadian workplace mental health standard
you could be forgiven for thinking that PS was a workplace mental health
capability. If you were to attend a
training course for agile project management you might learn about creative confidence
think that PS is only relevant to innovation and product development.
In the following section I’ll
provide brief history of research that looks up and out, rather than in and
down we can see the diverse relationships and corresponding patterns that can
exist in such a system. Senge 1990 This
is important to the current situation as with the scale of the pandemic issue
is important for organisations to realise that PS is a general workplace
capability so relevant for all organisations trying to adapt to unprecedented
change and uncertainty.
A short history of psychological safety (PS)
PS is a concept first developed in the 1960s and built
on since then. The body of research that
shows the value of PS across the performance and risk landscape as a general
foundation capability for workplace excellence in complex situations.
It
was first explored by pioneering organizational scholars in the 1960s whom (Shein
& Bennis 1965) argued that
psychological safety was essential for making people feel secure and capable of
changing their behavior in response to shifting organizational challenges. An
influential 1990 paper rejuvenated research on psychological safety (Kahn
1990). It presented qualitative studies
of summer camp counselors and members of an architecture firm. The research showed that psychological safety
enables personal engagement at work.
From there, psychological safety experienced a renaissance which
identified links between PS and a wide range of team and organisational capabilities and which has continued to present times.
Amy
Edmondson is another pioneering academic and a contemporary champions for PS and
the power of high trust teams. She is a
professor of leadership and management at Harvard Businesss School and has
published a large body of work on PS. In
2014 she co-published a paper title ‘The
History, Renaissance, and Future of Psychological Safety’ and comprehensively summarized the
far-reaching extent of its influence in work settings. (Edmondson1 and Lei2 2014).
Edmondson and Lei’s paper highlights how PS is highly
similar to the idea of social climate of trust and a powerful enabler for team
and organisational learning. It reviews six decades of research that
investigates PS at an individual and a team level. It confirms the evidence for the impact of PS
on engagement at work, involvement in creative work, knowledge sharing when
people have low confidence in the knowledge they are sharing, speaking
up and offering ideas to improve business processes or improve organisational
function. The paper further discusses
research into fundamental risk reporting practices and how high trust and PS is
important for enabling people to express concern about risks, incidents, or
behaviors that may harm their organizations as well as learning from incidents.
What else is out there?
A scan around other
workplace capability programmes also shows that PS has been identified as a relevant capability for complex risks in the world of health and safety. For example. Christianson explains how psychological safety is
present and required in high reliabilty organisations, explaining that “People need to be encouraged to reveal mistakes so that everyone can
learn from them. Near misses are our free lessons. Learning organizations pay
attention to them and take time to learn from them. (Christianson 20)
The National
Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace states
that organizations should establish and sustain processes to assess and address
leaders for psychologically safe leadership competencies and a free
Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment has been developed for Canadian
organisations https://www.psychologicallysafeleader.com.
Cyber security is one of the
most significant growing risks for workplaces worldwide. Cyber security is complex and so is sometimes
reliant on individual workers not clicking on malicious emails or quickly
reporting if they have. Open and honest
reporting of mistakes like this requires an environment of psychological
safety. Psychological Safety is also promoted
for the benefit of cyber security professionals as a ‘resilient workforce’
having to manage complex situations
As another function specific
example, Agile is a project management approach for complex technology projects
that is also now popular for all types of projects being run in highly complex
situations. Its designed to suit
projects with changing requirements and contexts. Agile relies heavily on high trust project
team environments and a commitment to team learning. The Agile
Manifesto which is the founding document for the discipline promotes the
need for collaboration and responding to change over following a plan and PS is
a capability that is widely promoted and sited in Agile resources, training
courses and articles.
While we may not need
to specifically run ‘big A’ Agile projects within out teams, we will all need
to be agile to adapt to all the changes
that occur from month to month following the 2020 Pandemic.
Why the renaissance - a brave new 21st century world.
As I have described, PS is
most useful for complex goals or risks
or work situations. The world around us is moving faster and faster. In
order to survive and grow, organizations must, therefore, learn to adapt faster
and faster, or be weeded out in the economic evolutionary process. (Shein 1992). Increases in speed of communication and volume of
travel and logistical interactions on a worldwide scale along with other social
changes have dramatically changed the way we interact and led to workplace and
industrial systems being significantly more complex.
PS is an important team level
capability but it is not a silver performance or risk management bullet that is
‘the solution’ for all work situations.
There are many organisational operations or critical risks that require
technical management and engineering solutions rather than highly connected
teams. In addition it must combine with other
essential ingredients to enable effective team learning, or risk management and
ultimately performance, but it is still a fundamental capability for working in complex situations
or periods of high and unpredictable change which is extremely relevant for
all New Zealand organisations throughout 2020 and into 2021.
Things that organistions can do to foster psychological safety.
Psychological safety is not
something that can be implemented through a bolt-on off-the-shelf training
programme. For organisations to receive
the full performance and risk management benefits from their teams being
psychologically safe they need make a whole of organisation commitment. Edgar
Shein, who first proposed the idea, identifies four essential elements for a
system framework that fosters a psychologically safe environment (Shein 1992)
1)
Provide opportunities
for training, coaching and practice
2)
Establish norms that
legitimize the making of errors
3)
Establish norms that recognise
innovative thinking and experimentation
4)
Reward efforts in the
right direction
Its
not hard to hunt around on the net to find guidelines for cultivating PS. Here are a range of ideas that can be
incorporated into a system framework that have been adapted from Forbes
& HBR:
· Create Rules Of Engagement
o
Create
and define the principles for engagement to clarify what the expected behaviors
are provide ways for people to provide feedback to be able to honor the
principles
·
Establish peer practice
networks for managers and teams
o implement a peer mentoring program in order to support
a positive workplace culture
·
Have leaders model A
Learning Mindset
o give leaders simple coaching frameworks (e.g. the GROW model) so they can
quickly problem solve through a learning mindset, with coaching questions to
problem-solve and learn after a mistake is made.
·
Find that right balance for your organisation
o Encourage
Managers find an appropriate balance of encouraging open communication related
to the task at hand and providing constructive feedback to limit irrelevant
questions, comments, or discussions. The
balance will be different depending on the organisation or team.
·
Bring Employees
Together
o
Create structured team experiences that allow employees to
take risks, trust each other, make mistakes and realize it's OK.
·
Promote and support
employees to develop mental resilience and personal responsibility in work
situations
o Start by having leaders share
personal stories where they have had to learn, adapt and grow this skill.
·
Train some people in
psychological first aid and encourage empathy and compassion
o
Start by creating an environment where
it is obvious that showing compassion for others is appreciated. When you
truly care for others, it is easier for them to feel safe, more creative and
more engaged.
· Take
Action And Confront The Behavior
o
There are subtle ways
to undermine co-workers that can be threatening and cause distress. Addressing
the behavior and trying to understand the root cause can often lead to solving
the issue.
· Measure
effectiveness
o
See the example below (The Psychologically Safe Leader assessment)
Ideas for fostering leadership
A leaders job is to set the stage then
model and promote good practice so that managers and team members can create
psychological safety within their teams.
·
The Psychologically Safe Leader assessment (PSLA) is a free resource
developed in Canada by Dr.
Joti Samra, R. Psych. and her MyWorkplaceHealth.com team : https://www.psychologicallysafeleader.com/
Leadership development skills to practice from HBR
·
Adopting a
leadership style that promotes psychological safety is particularly use for
many 2st century work situations where there are too many variables or there is
to much change to be able to fully understand the situation through
analysis. So teams need to
foster cooperative relationships and work together to solve complex problems
and learn for their successes as well as from mistakes. Consider the following leadership skills and
refer to HBR
article for more information:
o
Approach conflict as a
collaborator, not an adversary.
o
Speak human to human.
o
Anticipate reactions and plan
countermoves.
o
Replace blame with curiosity.
o Ask
for feedback on delivery.
Conclusion
When
the stakes get high and workplace situations become complex and unpredictable
people need to increasingly collaborate and work together. What ever industry, in these types of
situations Psychologically Safety provides teams the foundation to be more
agile and innovative, safer, healthier.
Appendix
1.
High-Performing
Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It, Laura Delizonna August 24,
2017, https://hbr.org/2017/08/high-performing-teams-need-psychological-safety-heres-how-to-create-it
2.
Schein, Edgar H.; Bennis, Warren G. (1965). Personal
and organizational change through group methods: the laboratory approach.
New York: Wiley. ISBN 978-0471758501.
3. Edmondson,
Amy (1 June 1999). "Psychological
Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams" (PDF).
Administrative Science Quarterly. 44 (2): 350–383
4.
Kahn, William A. (1990-12-01). "Psychological Conditions of
Personal Engagement and Disengagement at Work". Academy of Management
Journal. 33 (4): 692–724.
5. Systems
Thinking is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than separate
things, for seeing patterns rather than static snapshots. It is a set of
general principles, spanning fields as diverse as physical and social sciences,
engineering and management. (Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: the Art and
Practice of the Learning Organization. New York :Doubleday/Currency, 1990.
Print.)
6.
Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an
Interpersonal Construct. Annual Review
of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. Amy
C. Edmondson1 and Zhike Lei2 Vol. 1:23-43 (Volume
publication date March 2014) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091305
7.
Build a Healthy Safety
Culture Using High Reliability Organizing; David Christenson, U.S. Wildland
Fire Lessons Learned Center Conference Paper 2007
8.
How Can
Organisations Learn Faster? The Problem
of Entering The Green Room: Edgar H. Shein, MIT Sloan School of Management
1992,
