Back to: Psychological Safety
Before you start…
Before you begin, it’s a good idea to take stock of your team to gauge where you need to go next.
Perhaps you have a brand new team, and nobody really knows anyone else?
Maybe you have a longstanding team with some recent additions who have changed the dynamic.
There might be strong cliques and some outsiders.
Possibly there are people new to the team who don’t know how you operate yet?
There could be tensions or old issues, or even elephants in the room.
You could chat to the team, ask for feedback (anonymously if it suits) or ask them to complete the Psychological Safety Survey. (If you want to survey, let us know. We’ll set it up for your team specifically. You can complete Part One, and Part Two, at any time, for your own interest.) You could just jump straight in.
Whichever direction you go, we thought there were some things worth mentioning before you get to the next module.
We’re probably not starting from scratch
Psychological Safety is about creating an environment where it feels safe to take interpersonal risks.
However, unless you’re a brand new team, people will already have interpersonal relationships; some good, some less so.
And we can’t ignore the history that might exist between people.
The image on the left references the work of John Gottman and while he’s talking predominantly intimate relationships, the principles are both relevant and helpful., and apply to the work setting.
In short, Gottman’s research shows that we place far more emphasis on negative interactions than we do on positive interactions.
They don’t have a one-to-one relationship.
This makes sense at a brain level insofar as the brain tends to count loss much more heavily than gain.
So if I upset you, I need to restore our relationship balance, and I do this by creating up to five positive interactions for each negative interaction. I might offer to help, I might say something positive, I might visibly support something you’re doing. They don’t have to be grand gestures, but they do have to be credible. More in that in a moment.
(This partly helps explain why negative first impressions can be hard to shift; we simply don’t manage to get in enough positive things to even out the score, and subsequent behaviours can quickly confirm the initial impression.)
With your team then, each interpersonal relationship already has a balance of positive and negative interactions. It’s like a seesaw, a running tally, or debit and credit in our relationship account.
Some people on your team will have high positive scores with each other, with many more positive interactions than negative, which lets them sustain the occasional negative. Others will have high negative scores, created by a history of negative interactions they’ve never addressed and which greatly outweigh the positive.
This isn’t just theoretical though, there’s good brain science behind it. Your amygdala, an almond-shaped piece of brain, keeps score, based on how it assesses interactions with others and whether it judges them as a threat.
An element of building safety will involve improving any relationships that might be in debit.
Fortunately, you have options.
Building relationships
People generally do better if they have time together.
The diagram on the left shows the factors and time that shift people, top to bottom, from acquaintances to casual friends and through to close friends.
The three common underpinnings are proximity (being regularly near each other), familiarity (becoming used to each other) and similarity (becoming like each other).
On top, we then need to share time, personal information, and do so reciprocally. We both make an investment in each other, to the point we’re willing to provide input without expectation of return.
That said, your people don’t need to be best friends, or even good friends, to work well, productively, and meaningfully together.
They need to have spent time together (regularly and frequently), be familiar with each other, and find similarities (common ground, interests, expertise, knowledge etc.). Colleagues can be familiar, and in close proximity, but we often miss the similarity element. Key here is people spending time to get to know each other by sharing information.
This is asking the other about family, background, likes and dislikes, interests, education, culture, travel, values, and work information such as functions we perform, meaning, what motivates us in the role and so forth. There isn’t a substitute for taking this time to get to know people better, provided it’s purposeful and intentional. And it’s best done over food during the workday. Coffee is next best after food. If you have budget, send people out to lunch together.
(By the way, if people want to move from casual friends to friends or close friends, that usually occurs outside work time.)
What your brain is doing
Your brain’s anterior paracingulate cortex handles information around social interactions. This is especially true when it comes to understanding other people’s intentions during interactions, and when we’re making decisions about cooperating with someone we may not trust. It’s also active when predicting future interaction intentions from previous behaviour.
The anterior paracingulate works hard to help you decide by thinking carefully, weighing information, determining, and concluding about the other person’s actions, history, and agenda. It’s effortful and deliberate thinking.
But after a series of positive interactions, and when trust has built up, this area quietens down, and activity shifts to the septal area. This region deals with social connectedness, working with those chemicals like vasopressin and oxytocin that strengthen social bonds. If you have positive feelings toward someone, empathy with them, feel socially connected and may have even experienced unconditional trust, that’s your septal region working for you.
What that means is that when we trust people, the brain doesn’t need to work anywhere near as hard with them. It cooperates more easily and more quickly because it spends less time and fewer resources deciding how to deal with them, leaving mental resources free for other things. We stop thinking, or mentalising, about whether to trust them because we already do, and our physiology and chemistry then work to strengthen the bond.
There’s a key takeaway from the anterior paracingulate cortex, and it’s this: how I view your intent is crucial.
Credibility, character, and the importance of intent
I want to believe you and trust you. I do. It takes a lot less effort than analysing or second guessing everything you do.
What I’m asking myself is whether you’re credible.
To make that decision, I’m going to weigh various considerations like those you see on the left.
I’ll weigh whether you seem to have the capabilities and results to demonstrate competence because it’s helpful. You seem to know what you’re doing and you seem to have done it well before. That’s good.
But I’ll spend more time on the left of the diagram. While credibility comprises different components, they aren’t all weighted evenly.
Intent counts for more.
A lot more.
What you’re like to work with, what your character is, what your motives appear to be, how much goodwill you generate and distribute, and how benevolent you are to others outweighs how good you might be at the work. The trick, of course, is that it’s how others perceive you, not how you perceive yourself. And you know the old saying about perception being reality.
In a team environment, which is where Psychological Safety operates, it’s pivotal.
So if someone says something to me that might hurt a little, but I know their intent is genuine, I can accept it more easily than if I don’t trust their intent. Because then it feels simply like direct criticism, undermining, or they have a hidden agenda. Similarly, if someone apologises to me and I believe their intent, it feels sincere. If I don’t, it feels mechanical because that’s what our social scripts say they should do, or they got told to apologise, or as if they’re just box-ticking.
For your own information, or if it’s something you want to discuss with a leader or direct report, you could score yourself on Credibility using the downloadable form below.
How intent can appear
A central aspect of intent, as above, is benevolence, or being kind and well-meaning.
Its opposite is malevolence.
In the 2×2 grid, if you put benevolence against candour, which is being open, honest, and frank, you get the four boxes you can see.
This is a useful way of understanding how people are behaving, and may give you insights into how people interact, or things that may need addressing.
Malevolent Dishonesty. This is mean-spirited dishonesty such as lies designed to undermine, spread rumour, get people in trouble, humiliate and so on. It could be passive aggressive, it could be insincere, it could be overly political, manipulative, and so on. It could be nasty humour. It causes harm.
Malevolent honesty. Here we would say it’s honest, and it might be true, but the intent is still not well-meaning. This can take forms such as outright aggression, outing people’s weakness or errors in public, and aiming to expose people by being ‘honest’, or ‘passionate’, or using ‘being authentic’ as a cover for bad behaviour. Jokes and sarcasm at people’s expense can fit here too if they’re accurate but hurtful.
Benevolent dishonesty. In this quadrant we’re not aiming to harm, but we’re not honest either. It could be white lies through to over-empathising, avoiding challenging conversations and pretending people don’t make mistakes. It avoids hurting your feelings and minimises or denies issues, maybe even blaming others. It’s trying to be kind, but it’s unhelpful and leads to stagnation and poor performance. Emotional safety can fit in here where we avoid candour in favour of protecting feelings.
Benevolent honesty. This is where we need to be, and leaders more so. Our intent is sincere, kind and well-meaning, but doesn’t shy away from the truth. It could be that the truth is challenging or hard to hear, but we’ll find the right time and share it. It’s honest and kind, for another’s benefit and growth, and for the Psychological Safety of the team. It will help the person and the team.
We slide back and forth along these two axes at different times with different people. Context can affect how we behave, so can being hungry and hangry, being stressed, being unwell, and other variables.
For a slightly different version, and from where this is adapted, you can watch Kim Scott on Radical Candour (6m57s).
Our goal is a high performing, learning organisation
Learning skills takes effort and motivation.
For starters, teams need to remind themselves that Psychological Safety is to help everyone perform better. To do that, it will require people to try some new things and, like any skills, keep practising them until they feel more confident. There’s a learning process in play.
You may have seen the Hierarchy of Competence. It’s a tidy little model that describes how we acquire skills.
Remember when you learned how to ride a bike or drive a car?
Until it was important, or relevant to you, until you realised you didn’t know how, you were Unconsciously Incompetent.
At some point you realised you really didn’t know how. Then you wanted to learn. Now you’re Consciously Incompetent; you know you don’t know.
Then you started learning and it got harder. You made mistakes and you got better. It needed concentration and effort. That’s Conscious Competence. You now know you know, but you still have to think about what you’re doing.
But the better you got the easier it got. Now you drive a car without thinking. You’re Unconsciously Competent. You may have even taught others how to drive a car, and witnessed them go through the same stages.
The same thing will apply here. Note that Conscious Competence requires conscious effort. You have to give it a go, and practice until it becomes more natural. (You can read the Competence model in context here.)
So remind everyone that in your endeavours to grow benevolent kindness, set new expectations and create Psychological Safety, people need to commit to trying things (including new things), and acknowledge that learning new skills can be challenging.
It might not always go smoothly. That’s normal.
With any change you’ll know there can be some disruption and uncertainty, even if the change is for good. Consequently, it’s useful to remember that people may make mistakes as they get used to a new context. It might feel hard. That’s ok. It proves you’re learning.
While we’re learning a new skill, our general or team performance may drop a little while we get used to new things.
People acting in ways that are new for them can demand more from us than before, just because it can be unpredictable, and doesn’t fit with the schema we have of them. This might be unsettling and uncertain, and may detract from our general performance.
Similarly, learning a new skill is never perfectly smooth. Sometimes it’s two steps forward and one back. Sometimes it’s one forward and two back!
It’s helpful to acknowledge that it might not all go smoothly while you learn how to do it. It allows us to have these conversations up front, so we reduce downstream tensions.
The important thing is that we stick with the effort and push through the Conscious Competence dip.
Moving forward
So if a team member is trying a new skill or behaviour, in the context of creating the Psychologically Safe learning environment you want, be generous first. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Allow that their intent is sincere. Give them space to try. Yes, that might feel like you’re taking a risk; this is about taking interpersonal risks without fear. You also want them to afford you the same.
You know that performance may drop a little, so make allowance. We want to reinforce the new behaviours so people keep trying, and move through to Unconscious Competence.
This can form part of your early conversations as a team.
Now it’s time to begin.
A refresher
Click the Take Quiz button for a quick and easy refresher.