4 telltale signs your team feels unsafe - and what to do about it

 Empowerment begins with your team feeling psychologically safe.

This week's blog post is specially crafted for leaders, managers, product managers and product owners.  Don't let that slow you down if you have a different fancy job title, of course, but today I'm speaking directly to the leaders of teams!

One of my favorite definitions of empowerment comes from CEQ, Collaborative Equality:

“Empowerment is defined as …the largest amount of voluntary and discretionary action in support of the company’s goals.  It is people proactively, and habitually, doing the right things at right time; people working out what’s needed and acting without instruction; people looking within the team for support, not looking upwards for answers."

Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?  Problem is, it doesn’t just happen!  You have to work every day at creating and maintaining an environment where your teams feel safe to “work out what’s needed and act without instruction.”

Here are some telltale signs that your teams may not feel psychologically safe (and therefore don’t feel empowered):

1 - Leaders contribute more in meetings – If leaders and managers are doing a large proportion of the speaking (or reframing the story) for team members in meetings, it’s probably a good guess that team members don’t feel comfortable expressing opinions, asking questions, or raising potential issues and risks.  You are missing out on an opportunity to grow and develop your team (and improve your solutions!)

2 - Employees don’t reach out for help or guidance – A fear of asking “silly” or “dumb” questions for fear of appearing “out of the loop” or “not knowledgeable”  is a sure sign that you are missing the boat when it comes to creating an empowered team.

3 - Employees avoid problems and difficult conversations – A little conflict is healthy. It promotes debate, surfaces potential issues and generally leads to some of the best solutions to problems.  If employees are avoiding presenting dissenting views or don’t feel like they can take accountability for mistakes, you have an opportunity to improve your team’s psychological safety.

4 - Managers feel the need to protect team members from Sr. Leaders – This is a telltale sign that you’ve got a psychological safety gap.  If managers or other leaders feel they have to shield team members, either through placing themselves between leaders and the team, or by overly rehearsing / polishing / shaping interactions between leaders and team members – well, we’ve all heard the story about the Emperor’s new clothes, right?

If you’re seeing indications of any of these four red flags, you may have some room to improve how your team feels about working together, and frankly that starts with you.  Your teams will take their cues from you – absolutely from what you say, but even more so by how you show up.  One of the most important things a leader can do at an organization is unlock the potential of the people they lead. 

So what to do about it?

Ok, so you've identified you've got some signs your team isn't feeling psychologically safe.  Congratulations - you've already started the first step toward making some improvements!  Jen Colletta shares 3 ways to improve Psychological Safety on hrexecutive.com, and I think it's some pretty decent advice.

Awareness - Being a self-aware leader is critical to creating a healthy, psychologically safe team. 

• Looking at yourself critically and identifying what cues you're giving the team may be uncomfortable, but it's the first step in helping your team be the best that they can be. 
• If you haven't received 360 feedback in a while, reach out to a coach or an HR partner ask them to help facilitate gathering some constructive feedback. 
• Be willing to "look in the mirror" and make changes accordingly.

Curiosity - Curiosity over judgement is a rule of thumb when looking to improve the psychological safety of your team.  Everyone does things for a reason (even if they are unaware of what that reason might be.)  If a team member or partner is being difficult to work with - it may very well be because they don't feel safe.  If people are afraid to fail... well that can result in all kinds of challenging behaviors!

• Ask great questions...Don't give answers and be comfortable in the silence that follows.
• Show vulnerability.  It helps build trust when your teammates see you being vulnerable, too. 
• Invest some time to get to the bottom of "where they are coming from." (A while back I wrote about Active Listening... if you want to get good at being curious, take a look at that post again.)

Connection - When people don't feel connected to the team, there is far less of an incentive to invest in or take risks for that team. 

• When setting goals for the team, make sure everyone is clear on those goals and sees how their contributions contribute to achieving that goal. 
• Create "device free" team meetings (everyone committing to being on camera / face-to-face, shutting down email and instant messaging, and holstering their cellphones, etc...) and then building the agenda so everyone can contribute. 
• Ensure your management style is enhancing the connection to the group. (If you focus on team member strengths, there is a 1% chance that person will actively disengage.  Focus on the weakness?  Now the chance they will disengage is 22%.  Ignore a team member all together?  The chance they are disengaged jumps to 40%!)

Having a team that is psychologically safe (and well on their way to being high performing) starts with you. If you’re seeing one of the telltale signs above (or other antipatterns) on your teams, have a conversation with your coach, scrum master or HR partner.   A team’s culture starts with how their leader shows up.  Creating, challenging and improving safe and empowered teams start with you!

We all win together!