Back to: Psychological Safety
Setting the scene
We’re getting to the detail of how we create a Psychologically Safe environment and give you something to build on with each other.
Primarily, it’s the job of the team leader or manager, and those with most influence, to create culture and Psychological Safety.
They have the most influence and power in a team and thus the most responsibility; twice that of team members. However, it still is a shared responsibility, and not something to leave only to leaders. Everyone has a part.
And because it’s a shared belief held by members of the team that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks, this is something teams and organisations do together. It’s not something to do to a team, nor is it something you either have or don’t. You have more or less of it.
But, and this is critical, leaders and managers, and team members, must do things. Take obvious action. Practical steps. Slogans and promises aren’t enough. Lists on the wall aren’t enough. Everybody has to do visible things, which is what the next few lessons are about. While we’ll cover a few things, we’ll start with one that’s super important.
One of the most powerful tools you have is Framing, and it’s something leaders need to get right.
Framing
Framing is how we set the scene to help everyone get on the same page with what we want to achieve.
Frames are simply a way of looking at things, and we all have them. They’re a product of our learning, background, biases, and assumptions, and we place them on top of what we see in the world. They shape how we see things and how we subsequently act.
We’re usually unaware of them and their impact until we’re asked to think about something differently. You’ve probably heard of ‘reframing’, which is essentially taking a different perspective on an issue to help see it in a different way and therefore create different opportunities, solutions, or outcomes. In other words, putting a different frame on a picture can change how we see the picture and how we might behave.
It’s crucial because context shapes perception. And that’s vital in what we’re doing here.
Here’s a simple example.
See the cat above? Does the context tell you if the cat is going upstairs or downstairs? Is it immediately obvious, or do you have to look for hints or cues and struggle to find them among the ambiguity? Do you check the shadows on the wall, or the direction of the cat’s tail, or note how it’s walking? Can you see it both ways and keep changing your mind? (For fun, you can see how context changes perception in these familiar optical illusions).
If the context is unclear, we’re forced to seek answers from our internal mental models and expertise, which can skew our view of what’s happening, or send us in the wrong direction.
Let’s demonstrate with this picture.
The image on the left shows a meringue topped with strawberries.
Most people see the strawberries as a dull reddish brown.
In reality, there is no red in this image. Not a single pixel.
Instead, you overlay what you know to be true of strawberries onto this image. Your brain ‘knows’ strawberries are red, so it automatically starts to ‘correct’ what you’re seeing. It removes the blue and grey aspect and what’s left is the red hue most people get.
The trick here is that your brain is actively ignoring ambiguous information from the context (in this case the colour of the lighting) in favour of information it’s previously seen to be true. It’s deciding which information it attends to.
It’s a basic illustration, but you see how ambiguity leads us to fall back on things we think we know, even if they night be incorrect in the new context.
This matters because the brain is a prediction machine, constantly anticipating what will happen next based on previous experience, memory, pattern recognition, and contextual cues. New things require more mental effort. It far prefers certainty and efficiency over ambiguity.
When you think about your team, then, you can see how important it is for context, intent, and actions, to be clear and aligned. We don’t want to leave people hunting for clues, interrogating the context to remove ambiguity, uncertain about which way is up, guessing, or falling back on previous conclusions which may now be inaccurate. This is unnecessary mental effort. We need to remove ambiguity where we can and provide certainty. Setting the right context for people is pivotal so they interpret actions and events consistently.
When it comes to situations that are unpredictable, with unclear context, the brain assesses them as a threat in the first instance, for it is exquisitely tuned to threat, and it is generally loss averse before it is reward focused. Framing reduces threat.
Aligning context with actions is where framing comes in. And the key frame is that our team is a learning team.
In Framing the Work, you:
- get the team together and talk
- figure out what’s important to your team
- identify different personal styles
- confirm your values and agree behaviours that support the values
- confirm norms
- set expectations about failure and uncertainty
- establish why these things matter, and
- build a plan to address areas of need.