Did you know that psychological safety is the most important differentiator in high-performing teams?

According to research, psychological safety is foundational to team success.

The term psychological safety was first coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson. She defined it as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking”.

Earlier in her career, Amy Edmondson conducted a study between mistakes and teamwork in hospitals. Most of us would hypothesize that high performing teams made fewer mistakes, right? Wrong! What Amy found was astounding. It turns out, higher performing teams reported more mistakes, rather than less. After further investigation, Amy learned that it wasn’t about how many mistakes the team made, but rather how safe team members felt to talk about them. High performing teams had an “interpersonal climate in which everyone, from the lowest ranking employee to the highest, felt empowered to speak up.” Amy’s future studies further proved that psychological safety was critical to team success.

In another study, Google spent 2 years observing 180 teams to find out what makes a team successful. They called this research, Project Aristotle (per the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, “The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.”). At first, they thought if they put the best and brightest talent in the same team, they would be the highest performing. It turns out, this hypothesis was wrong! “What really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together.” They found that psychological safety was the most important differentiator in high-performing teams. Teams that have less psychological safety experienced increased interpersonal conflicts and greater fear of negative consequences.

Psychological safety is like an octopus with many different arms and its hands are in every pot:

Psychological safety intersects with many different concepts that we know of today. One of them is diversity and inclusion. We know that teams with greater diversity and inclusion outperform their peers. I have news for you! We cannot realize the benefits of a diverse team without team members feeling safe to speak up and contribute their diverse points of view. Belonging and inclusion efforts are all negated in the absence of psychological safety.

Another intersection is the success of leading and working in hybrid teams. Psychological safety will be critical for us to successfully shift from fully remote to hybrid teams, as one size no longer fits all and we need to trust each other more on varying ways of working. Furthermore, in light of the great resignation, employees today seek out work environments where they can bring their whole self to work, making psychological safety even more important for hiring, engaging and retaining employees.

So why does psychological safety matter?

Psychological safety is the most important differentiator of high performing teams. If everyone feels safe to express themselves, questions that might never have been asked will be asked, people will debate ideas to get to the best idea, new ideas will be shared, mistakes will be identified quicker and corrected, learning will happen faster and together, team members will feel safe to innovate; all these behaviors are what makes the team perform better together. So, if you want to unlock the power of your team, invest in your team’s psychological safety today.

Looking to improve your team’s psychological safety? Check out our Whole Self Workshop at www.LeadershipWow.com