Building team psychological safety through Action Learning

Ever since Google put the concept of team psychological safety in the spotlight, many have repeated and written about what it’s like and how they feel when there is psychological safety. But few have evaluated how to accelerate this process in a team. And in the end, that’s what will make the difference and boost team performance.

Google spent two years investigating what really makes a team great. Julia Rozovsky, who led the Aristotle project (“the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”) (Rozovsky, 2015), concluded that the most important element that separates high-performing teams from average ones is the level of psychological safety in the team. Reliability, meaning, impact, structure and clarity were also important, but psychological safety in the team was four times more significant. Google published these results in 2015 and, since then, countless articles and blogs have reported the “new” finding, often simplifying what psychological safety in teams represents. One headline said that the key to high-performance teams was “being kind to others”. Actually, that’s not quite true.

More than 20 years ago, Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership and management at Harvard, described team psychological safety as “a belief shared by team members that it is safe to take interpersonal risks” (Edmondson, 1999). Team psychological safety is not an end in itself; in fact, it is the necessary ingredient that allows a team to learn. And when a team is able to learn, its performance will continue to improve.

Many experts have jumped on the bandwagon and started writing about the psychological safety of teams, but only offering interesting cases and descriptions of what teams with high psychological safety look like. And directing all this information towards the team leader, as if the team leader were the only one who impacts the psychological safety of the team. If team psychological safety is so important and really does make a difference to team performance, how can it be developed in a team? Very little concrete advice is available…

Edmondson’s original research identified five fundamentals that impact the psychological safety of the team. The behavior of the team leader obviously influences the team, and team members receive signals from their leader about what is valued and what is not. How a leader reacts to questions or suggestions from team members will either intensify the questioning or stop it. Trust and respect between team members are important and affect the overall atmosphere of the team. Although psychological security in the team is not the same thing as trust, team members need to be able to trust and respect each other. The support offered by the organization in which the team operates is important because, if it is not there, the team’s performance will not develop or will be blocked by multiple obstacles. The fourth foundation is the set of habits and routines that team members develop while working together, as they have been co-created, are known and appreciated by all. The last foundation is the opportunity for the team to practice and improve their teamwork, without the pressure and risk of immediate impact on real work.

As a Master Action Learning coach at the World Institute for Action Learning, I quickly realized, when studying team psychological safety, that there is a strong connection. Action Learning is a problem-solving process in which a small team works on a real business challenge, acts and learns as individuals and as a team (Marquardt, Banks, Cauwelier, & Ng, 2018). Team members ask questions about the challenge, explore the different aspects, build on each other’s ideas and develop a consensus on the core issue (the “real” problem) before exploring solutions. The Action Learning coach supports the process and focuses on the team’s learning. Each of the five fundamentals that form the basis for team psychological safety is clearly strengthened by the Action Learning process.

When a leader entrusts and delegates a real business challenge to a team to come up with proposals and implement solutions, team members feel valued. Asking questions, building on each other’s ideas and reflecting on interpersonal dynamics generates trust and respect among team members. Habits and routines are developed and strengthened when a team works together regularly in a structured way. In Action Learning, the team evaluates the options in a meeting before confirming the validity of the actions between sessions. And when the organization supports the implementation of the proposed actions, the team clearly feels valued and empowered.

So it seems that Action Learning can be a good approach to developing and strengthening the level of psychological safety in teams. I have worked as an Action Learning coach with four teams in four different organizations. The teams worked on urgent and important challenges for their respective organizations: reducing inventories, attracting more team members, improving employee engagement and limiting employee turnover. Although improving communication within the team was one of the objectives of each of the projects, the psychological safety of the team itself was not discussed.

Psychological safety was measured with the original tool developed by Edmondson. Team members rate seven statements – for example, “when you make a mistake, it is never taken against you in this team” – on a 7-point scale, from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. The other themes deal with: raising difficult issues, accepting diversity, taking risks, asking for help, supporting the efforts of others and expressing appreciation. By transforming the rating on the 7-point scale for all seven statements into values (1, 2, 3,…) it becomes possible to calculate an average (between 1 and 7) and dispersion (standard deviation) for the level of psychological safety in the team. A high dispersion indicates different perceptions among team members about the overall level of safety (in other words, there is no “shared vision”) and is therefore an indication of lower psychological safety in the team. After four Action Learning sessions, scheduled over two to three months, the measurement was repeated.

In all four teams, the average psychological safety of the team increased after the sessions (on average by 7%), and the dispersion reduced significantly (40% on average!) clearly confirming that the assessment of the elements of safety became much more aligned within the team (Cauwelier, 2019). In addition, specific components of psychological safety changed dramatically. In one team, responses to the statement “If you make a mistake in this team, it won’t be held against you” rose by more than 20%, from an average of 4.7 to 5.7 after four sessions.

If you want to know more about the psychological safety of teams, just search for the term by adding the word “Google” and you’ll find lots of articles, including on Google’s Aristotle project. If, however, you want to develop a team in a concrete and measurable way and build the foundations of a high-performance team, perhaps you should look into Action Learning!

Peter Cauwelier
PhD, President of the World Institute of Action Learning (www.wial.org) and Master Action Learning Coach.
peter.cauwelier@wial.org

Translation by Marcia F. Yokota

TEXT ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN COACHING BRASIL MAGAZINE

Bibliography
Cauwelier, P. (2019). Building high-performance teams through action learning. Action Learning: Research and Practice. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/14767333.2019.1562693

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Marquardt, M., Banks, S., Cauwelier, P., & Ng, C. S. (2018). Optimizing the Power of Action Learning, 3rd Edition: Real-Equipe Strategies for Developing Leaders, Building Teams and Transforming Organizations Nicholas Brealey.

Rozovsky, J. (2015). The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team. Retrieved from https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/