Practical Leadership Lessons: Fostering Psychological Safety Through Process and Behavior
Create psychological safety by combining processes and behaviors to enable your team to thrive.
Written by Ben French | Leadership consultant, executive coach and founder of Ordinary Leadership.
Psychological safety has become a byword for team success. A search for articles on team building will yield as many articles on creating psychological safety through leadership behaviors as on other forms of team development. The term, coined by Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson then further expanded on in Google’s Project Oxygen, emphasizes the ability of individuals to speak up without fear. Much of this work has focused on how individuals in leadership positions act and behave towards their team to create this environment. As Lipmanowicz and McCandless (2014) point out, the challenge is that “the boss may want more participation in shaping next steps, but if everyone doesn’t step up, this reinforces the patterns of making decisions at the top”. In other words, psychological safety requires followership as well as leadership.
While we tend to focus on a leader or manager’s ways of acting, the importance of creating an environment where psychologically safe behaviors can thrive is overlooked. As the award-winning leadership thinker Ira Chaleff notes, “Organizational cultures are built by memorable acts at all levels of the organization…acts that come to represent how the organization views itself, what it values, and what it aspires to.”
In reality, creating the conditions for psychological safety within a team requires a combination of individual behaviors and team processes.
How to use team processes to foster psychological safety in three simple steps
If you want to create an environment where psychological safety can last, you need to encourage individual behaviors and establish processes that enable everyone to engage and be heard. Many excellent blogs and articles discuss the behaviors needed to create psychological safety, but less has been written about how to use processes to create these environments.
Simple frameworks and processes have many benefits, and you don’t need to be an expert to apply them. They work because they address the things that reduce psychological safety in conversations, such as people feeling they do not have equal space to think and speak.
Here are three simple steps that will help you make more use of processes in your team to foster psychological safety:
1. Establish clear routines: Use processes that create safe spaces for open communication and collaboration. This can be as simple as creating a space for discussion without judgment in team meetings or using post-its to capture everyone’s thoughts when brainstorming.
2. Create equity of time to think: This is a concept from Nancy Klein’s coaching work on “time to think”. Within teams, the key principle is to ensure everyone has the same time to speak or think. This can feel clunky, but it is invaluable for making sure everyone can be heard in a brainstorming or idea-generation phase of work. Set a timer, during which only one person can speak, and no one can interrupt. If that feels tricky, use post-its and silence to capture ideas from the group before discussing.
3. Institutionalize reflection and learning: Create opportunities for debriefing failures and sharing lessons learned. Use structures that remove hierarchy and allow ideas to emerge from the group in these settings. A powerful structure is the 1–2–4-All model. In this, you encourage everyone to reflect alone, then reflect in pairs, then fours, and then back to the whole group. This ensures everyone is heard and able to express themselves.
The thinking behind this leadership lesson
While having open dialogues in your team is essential, relying solely on behaviors can be challenging. Creating a psychologically safe process in a team involves establishing routines and ways of disrupting existing behavior patterns, and creating new expectations for how conversations and engagements happen. This is what it takes to create safe spaces.
This “disruptive” process can be a more structured approach to a meeting to allow everyone to reflect and think, such as those discussed above. We tend to resist creating these processes because they feel clunky and artificial, and we want to engage in free flowing “dialogue”, but back-and-forth patterns of conversation favors the more vocal, those with power, and the more extroverted.
As Chaleff wisely perceives, there is a lot we can do to lower the courage needed to address team problems by intentionally creating environments and processes that invite and elicit constructive feedback.
Learning more
To further explore the concept of psychological safety and adaptive organizations, consider the following resources:
- The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow
- The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to and for Our Leaders by Ira Chaleff
- The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential by John C. Maxwell
Ben French is a leadership consultant and executive coach, specializing in organizational development, and the founder of Ordinary Leadership.
