Assessment Log

Psychological Safety

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Learning Objectives: • Understand what psychological safety is and

what it is not

• Recognize the importance of psychological safety in teams and organizations

• Explore how psychological safety develops and how it can be cultivated

• Analyze the impact of psychological safety on learning, innovation, and performance

• Apply key practices to foster psychological safety in real-world settings

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Uptick in mentions of psychological safety in popular media

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Citations of Articles introducing psychological safety

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Amy Edmonson - An Accidental Discovery

• My role in the research team was to examine the effects of team work on medical error rates.

• Nurse investigators collected error data over a six-month period.

• Distributed a validated instrument called the team diagnostic survey

• Hypothesis: The most effective teams would make the fewest errors.

• Results is : The most effective teams would make the fewest errors. Why?

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Definition of Psychological Safety

• Psychological safety is broadly defined as a climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves.

• More specifically, when people have psychological safety at work, they feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution.

• They are confident that they can speak up and won’t be humiliated, ignored, or blamed.

• They know they can ask questions when they are unsure about something. They tend to trust and respect their colleagues.

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Group Sharing

• Recall a time when you speak up in a team. When and what happened?

• If you remain silent to share your view, why?

• Please share your experiences in your group.

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What Psychological Safety Is Not

• Not About Being Nice (Polite)

• Not a Personality Factor (Extrovert or Introvert)

• Not Just Another Word for Trust

• Trust describes an expectation about whether another person or organization can be counted on to do what it promises to do in some future moment

• The psychological experience of safety describes a temporally immediate experience about interpersonal consequences.

• Not About Lowering Performance Standards

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Taken for Granted Rule

Extracted from Fearless Organization, p.33 9

It is related to a fear of insulting someone higher up in the organization by implying that the current systems or processes are problematic.

No one was ever fired for silence.

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Why Silence Wins in the Voice-Silence Calculation

Extracted from Fearless Organization, p.34 11

Why Psychological Safety Matters to your departments and your organizations ?

Insights from the Research findings

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Quality Improvement: Learn-What and Learn-How • A hundred quality improvement project teams in neonatal intensive care units in 23

North American hospitals. Members to report on what they did to improve processes

• These clustered into two sets of learning behaviour. Learn-what described largely

independent activities like reading the medical literature. Learn-how was team-based

learning that included sharing knowledge, offering suggestions, and brainstorming

better approaches.

• Psychological safety predicted an uptick in learn-how behaviours (those that came with

interpersonal risk) but had no statistical relationship whatsoever with the more

independent behaviours captured by learn-what activities.

• Psychological safety promotes learning by helping people overcome interpersonal risk

for engaging in learn-how behaviours.

Tucker, A.L., Nembhard, I.M., & Edmondson, A.C. “Implementing New Practices: An Empirical Study of Organizational Learning in Hospital Intensive Care Units.” Management Science 53.6 (2007): 894–907 13

Reducing Workarounds

• Jonathon Halbesleben and Cheryl Rathert found that cancer teams with low psychological safety relied more on workarounds

• Teams with high psychological safety focused more on diagnosing the problem and improving the process that caused it so it didn’t happen again.

• Psychological safety is important for organizations interested in achieving process improvement.

• Makes it easier for people to speak up about problems and to alter and improve work processes rather than engaging in the counterproductive workarounds.

Halbesleben, J.R.B. & Rathert, C. “The Role of Continuous Quality Improvement and Psychological Safety in Predicting Work-Arounds.” Health Care Management Review 33.2 (2008): 134–144. 14

Psychological Safety and Performance (Edmondson, A.C. ,1999)

• 50 teams– including sales, production, new product development, and management teams – in a manufacturing company in the mid 1990s

• Goal was to establish a relationship between psychological safety and learning behaviours

• The Power of Psychological Safety: • self-report, meaning team members confidentially rated their team’s performance

on a scale of one to seven.

• Evaluated the team’s work and customers who received the work, to rate each team’s performance on a similar scale

• The data showed that teams with psychological safety also had higher performance – a result that held for both types of performance measures.

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Psychological Safety and Standards of Performance

Extracted from Fearless Organization, p.18

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• Chi-Cheng Huang and Pin-Chen Jiang collected survey data from 245 members of 60 Research and Development (R&D) teams in several Taiwanese technology firms

• Psychologically safe teams outperformed others.

• Without psychological safety, the researchers explained, team members were unwilling to offer their ideas or knowledge because of the fear of being rejected or embarrassed.

• They emphasized the particular importance of psychological safety for teams in R&D because they necessarily have to take risks and confront failure before they achieve success

Psychological Safety and Innovation

Reference: Exploring the psychological safety of R&D teams: An empirical analysis in Taiwan (2015) 17

Research from Google (Feb, 2016)

• Google set out to find what makes the ‘perfect’ team — and what they found shocked other researchers

• Discover how to build the “perfect team.” The experiment, led by Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, was called “Project Aristotle.”

What Google learned in its quest to build the 'perfect' team 18

Key Characteristics of Enhanced Team

• Psychological safety: Everyone feels safe in taking risks around their team members, and that they won’t be embarrassed or punished for doing so.

• Dependability: Everyone completes quality work on time.

• Structure and clarity: Everyone knows what their specific expectations are. These expectations must be challenging yet attainable.

• Meaning: Everyone has a sense of purpose in their work (i.e., financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, etc.).

• Impact: Everyone sees that the result of their work actually contributes to the organization’s overall goals. Google set out to find what makes the ‘perfect’ team — and what they found shocked other researchers

Research from Google (Feb, 2016)

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Psychologically Safe Employees Are Engaged Employee

• Engagement, defined as the extent to an employee feels passionate about the job and committed to the organization, is seen as an index of willingness to put discretionary effort into one’s work.

• A study in a Midwestern insurance company found that psychological safety predicted worker engagement. In turn, psychological safety was fostered by supportive relationships with coworkers (May, D.R., Gilson, G.L., & Harter, L.M, 2004)

• With survey data from 170 research scientists working in six Irish research centers, the authors showed that trust in top management led to psychological safety, which in turn promoted work engagement (Chughtai,A.A. & Buckley, F., 2013)

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Other Research Findings

• Overcoming Geographic Dispersion

• In an ambitious study of 14 innovation teams with members dispersed across 18 nations, University of Western Australia Professor Cristina Gibson and Rutgers University Professor Jennifer Gibbs showed that psychological safety helped these dispersed teams navigate the challenges of dispersion.

• Putting Conflict to Good Use

• Psychological safety could be that missing ingredient the factor that could make or break a diverse team’s ability to put its different perspectives to good use.

• Gaining Value from Diversity

• In one study in a Midwestern mid-size manufacturing company, a positive climate for diversity and psychological safety together led to more discretionary effort.

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Key Takeaways about Psychological safety • Psychological safety is essential to producing high performance in

a VUCA world.

• Psychological safety is too often missing in today’s organizations

• Twenty years of research on psychological safety finds positive benefits for learning, engagement, and performance in a wide range of organizations

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• Is your department or organization provides high psychological safely?

• If yes, what are the outcomes?

• If no, what are the consequences?

• What strategies you or your managers usually adopt to motivate people?

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Group Sharing

Is Fear an effective motivator

Source: Fearless Organization, p. 14 24

• Worse, many managers – both consciously and not – still believe in the power of fear to motivate.

• They assume that people who are afraid (of management or of the consequences of underperforming) will work hard to avoid unpleasant consequences, and good things will happen.

• This might make sense if the work is straightforward and the worker is unlikely to run into any problems or have any ideas for improvement.

• But for jobs where learning or collaboration is required for success, fear is not an effective motivator. Brain science has amply demonstrated that fear inhibits learning and cooperation.

Source: Fearless Organization, p. 14 25

How to build up Psychological Safety in a Hospital?

Source: Fearless Organization, p. 155-165 26

Background

• Julie Morath came on board as chief operating officer at Children’s Hospital and Clinics in Minneapolis, Minnesota,

• Her goal was simple: 100% patient safety for the hospitalized children under her care. In 1999, few people were talking about patient safety.

• It’s not that most clinicians thought patients were completely safe from mistakes and harm

• They tended to think that when things went wrong, someone was to blame.

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1. Setting the stage • Healthcare delivery by its nature, was a complex system prone to

breakdowns.

• Introduce new terminology that altered the meaning of events and actions in important ways

• Reframing

• Frames consist of assumptions or beliefs that we layer onto reality. All of us frame objects and situations automatically.

• Use the term “study” instead of an “investigation” into an adverse event

• Use “accident” or “failure” instead of “error”

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2. Invite Participation

• Ask staff “ Was everything as safe as you would like it to have been this week with your patients?”

• New Policies Set up

• Set up a core team called the Patient Safety Steering Committee (PSSC) (cross- functional, multilevel group) to lead the change initiative.

• Blameless reporting – a system inviting confidential reports about risks and failures people observed.

• Led as many as 18 focus groups to make it easy for people throughout the organization to share concerns and experiences.

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3. Respond Productively

• Speaking up is only the first step. The true test is how leaders respond when people actually do speak up.

• “Focused event analysis” (FEA), a cross-disciplinary meeting that Morath instituted at Children’s to bring people together after a failure.

• The FEA represents a disciplined exploration of what happened from multiple perspectives

• The goal is not to fight about who was right, but rather to identify contributing factors with the goal of improving the system to prevent

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Leaders’ toolkit for building up Psychological Safety

Source: Fearless Organization, p. 155-165 31

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1 Reframing Failure

• Failure is a source of valuable data. Leaders must understand and communicate

that learning only happens when there’s enough psychological safety to dig into

failure’s lessons carefully

• A.G. Lafley published “The Game-Changer” published while he was still CEO of

Proctor and Gamble. He celebrates his 11 most expensive product failures,

describing why each was valuable and what the company learned from each.

• Ed Catmull’s assurance to Pixar animators, that movies always start out bad, to

help them “uncouple fear and failure.” He is making a leadership framing

statement. Stunning success occurs only if you’re willing to confront the “bad”

along the way to the “good.

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2 Invite Participation - Situational Humility

• Adopt a humble mindset when faced with the complex, dynamic world

• Keep in mind that confidence and humility are not opposites. But humility is not modesty, false or otherwise.

• Humility is the simple recognition that you don’t have all the answers.

• Demonstrate situational humility includes acknowledging your errors & shortcomings.

• Research shows that when leaders express humility, teams engage in more learning behaviours.

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2 Invite Participation - Situational Humility

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Anne Mulcahy, Chairperson and CEO of Xerox,

• Led the company through a successful transformation out of bankruptcy in the 2000s

• Said that she was known to many in the company as the “Master of I Don’t Know”

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2 Invite Participation - Practice Enquiry Asking Powerful Questions

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2 Invite Participation - Design Structure for Input

Examples:

• Cross-functional unit-based team met monthly to identify safety hazards in the oncology unit.

• Employee-to-employee learning structures, as Google has done with its creation of the “g2g” (Googler-to-Googler) network

• 6000 Google employees who volunteer time to helping their peers learn

• build a psychologically safe culture where everyone is both a learner and a teacher.

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3 Respond Productively - Destigmatizing Failure

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• Focused event analysis” (FEA), a cross-disciplinary meeting that bring people together after a failure.

• A productive response to preventable failures is to double down on prevention, usually a combination of training and improved system design to make it easier for people to do the right thing.

3 Respond Productively - Destigmatizing Failure

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• Based on the toolkit introduced, will you apply them in your workplace?

• Any obstacles?

• Do you think that there is any cultural differences?

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Group Sharing

Role Play – Can we Talk?

• Your organization recently launched a new e-appraisal system meant to streamline performance reviews.

• However, after two weeks, HR has received informal signs of confusion, dissatisfaction, and disengagement. As the HR Director, you're holding a listening session with a small team to explore reactions and gather feedback.

• Important: No one has openly voiced concerns yet. There’s a culture of staying quiet or polite.

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