Frame the work 2

Back to: Psychological Safety

It starts with getting your team together

Psychological Safety is a group level concept so you need to work with your team. We recommend that your team gets together often to talk about things: over coffee, during the day, and whenever you can.

If you have capacity to run some workshops together, even better, as you’ll see.

To be honest, we can’t emphasise enough how valuable spending time together is, when it’s purposeful and intentional. An investment in interpersonal relationships is vital for Psychological Safety.

The reason is that even if your work environment might be uncertain or ambiguous, we want to avoid ambiguity and guesswork in how we deal with each other.

In this section, which is the practical aspect of Framing, we have a few targets to hit. Remember, our frame is our team is a learning team.

Getting the team together allows you to discuss, and agree, the things that matter. You’re aiming for shared understanding. This next aspect drills into the detail of how the team wants to operate together. You may have done this with them already, in which case you’ve got a head start.

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.

Personal Styles

A Personal User Manual is a neat little way of avoiding confusion in your team.

With our goals around reducing ambiguity and strengthening personal relationships, this is a good tool for providing information about yourself.

It lets you tell others the best way to work with you, which means they don’t have to ask around, guess, figure it out by trial and error, or fall back on assumptions they may have made about you. You’re able to be explicit about how you do your best work, what you’re like, things that irk you, things people need to know about you, the best ways to interact with you, what will help or hinder trust, and how people can most effectively interact with you.

As a result, there’s less confusion and miscommunication, and a better platform on which Psychological Safety develops. We recommend you download the form, complete it, and circulate it to your team, and get your team to do the same. By all means generate your own if you wish to add or subtract things.

If you wish to pursue something a little more formal and involved, and useful in the work setting, the CliftonStrengths Online Talent Assessment (previously called StrengthsFinder) is a good tool to use, although there is a cost per use.

Side note. As a general rule, personality profiles can be highly variable, so if you want to pursue something further, most researchers would opt for something based on what they call the Big Five. These are the five personality traits Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Tests based on the Big Five include the Big Five Inventory 2 (BFI-2), the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R), and the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised (HEXACO-PI-R). Outside of this, you’re less likely to get anything reliable, valid, reputable, or useful.

You can download the Personal User Manual form below.

Confirm your values

Values are the guiding principles and intentions by which we plan to operate. They are high level, and describe the ideals that are important to us.

However, having values without associated behaviours can make values irrelevant, or simply a list on a wall somewhere.

Behaviours give life to values, and allow us to identify how in accord we are. They provide a useful yardstick to measure our values.

Consequently, it’s crucial that we identify how our values could be expressed in behaviour, and what the team will and won’t accept. Team values may be similar to organisational values, they may overlap, or they may be different because they are more specific to your team.

We’ve created an exercise for you to workshop your values with your team. You can download the exercise as a PowerPoint file and pdf below.

Confirm your norms

While values are high level, norms are those ground rules your team has for how you interact and work together. They can sometimes include values but are different.

Solid team norms help the team function more successfully.

You’ll already have some team norms, whether you’ve stated them explicitly or not. Every group develops norms, some useful, some less so. It’s unavoidable that they develop, and we want to make sure our norms work for us, rather than against us. For that reason, we need to figure out what we want.

As present, your norms could include things like:

• It’s acceptable to text and email during meetings
• Unless it’s genuinely urgent, you have a business day to reply to email
• Phone calls are only for emergencies. Text and email is for everything else
• The first 30 minutes of the day are for socialising
• We all try and go for coffee together
• Automate everything. Never do it manually if you can automate it
• Don’t take personal calls in the office
• It’s ok to be late for meetings
• Nobody ever corrects the boss
• Sarcasm is our key style of humour
• Criticising others is what we do when we get together
• No meetings after midday on Fridays

You can see how these may have developed, even if you haven’t spoken about them. Sometimes we inherit them, while at other times strong personalities impose them. A new team member or leader may change them again.

• What do we wish to accomplish together?
• What ground rules will we play by?
• How do we make decisions?
• How long can discussions and debates go on for? Do we use time-boxes in meetings? For decision making?
• How do we resolve disagreements?
• How often do we need to meet? For how long?
• How will we communicate with each other?
• How do we keep track of our action items?
• How do we deal with team members who do not live up to the team’s expectations?
• What rules do we have to include new team members? To expel existing team members?
• How will we know if we are successful as a team?

Failure and uncertainty

Values are the guiding principles and intentions by which we plan to operate. They are high le

Why these things matter

To keep you on the right track for framing what you do as a learning environment, two things are helpful:

1. Meaning
2. Interdependencies

First, the meaning in the work. We’ve probably talked about this already. Why do we do this work? What’s the purpose? For several reasons this is an important thing to do. Meaning is a key aspect of motivation in complex work like yours, it keeps the importance of the work front of mind, and if you recall the work from Project Aristotle at Google, meaning is one of the five key determinants of a high performing team.

You can phrase it in the format “I perform x function so that y happens”. For example, “I analyse and interpret data from hospital staffing reports so that we can advise on safe workforce planning to avoid patients getting hurt”. Or you could say “I train people on an assessment tool so that people in need get the right amount of help. This reduces unnecessary cost and staff burden”. You’ll be able to think of others.

If you haven’t done it before, take a few moments to think about your role at TAS.

Think about what you do and how it helps TAS or your team achieve its goals, targets, strategic intent, performance expectations, charter, mission, or other outcome you have.

Note down the meaning that drives your functions.

We should all be able to draw a clear line between what we do and why it’s important.

The second aspect is reminding people that our work may be uncertain and is interdependent, with room for error, and for things to go wrong. My role and outcomes depend on yours, and what I do may have a material impact somewhere else. We rarely operate in isolation. This helps bring to mind that the way I go about my role will impact the functions and meaning of another’s.

So when you meet, you could say things like:

set expectations about failure and uncertainty
establish why these things matter, and
build a plan to address areas of need.

(to clarify the need for voice)

• To facilitate speaking up, we need to set shared expectations about
  • failure (understanding failure types)
  • uncertainty
  • interdependence
• Responding to failure
• How will this be communicated?

What do our leaders need to learn to adapt?