Tag: teams

The Psychological Safety Quadrant Workshop This is an example of a really powerful exercise to qualitatively measure psychological safety, team performance, and work collaboratively to increase both, via a workshop that can be carried out remotely or in-person. This is really effective for short-lived teams, who haven’t had, or won’t have, time to build and…
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Trusting other people When building psychological safety in a team, or in any group context, it’s necessary to foster and maintain trust. Trust and psychological safety are sometimes confused with each other, and whilst they are related, trust is simply a component of psychological safety. Trust can be defined as the extent to which we…
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Creating psychological safety at work, in your team or in your organisation may seem like a very daunting task, and it can be hard to know where to start. Here are ten things you can do right now that will help to create psychological safety at work, and reap significant benefits for you, the team,…
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There are so many leadership books that propose to hold the key to unlocking team and organisational performance that it can be really difficult to decide which ones to actually read. To help you build psychological safety in your organisation, here is a carefully curated selection of books that highlight the importance of psychological safety…
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Psychological safety is created through shared values and positive behaviours, where a culture of trusting, helping, and elevating means that all members of the team can work productively and be their true selves, without fear. There are great benefits to be had through building psychological safety at work. Liu et al (2020) found a negative…
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On a recent Agile Engineering Podcast we discussed cognitive load and how it relates to psychological safety. Cognitive load is also a fundamental aspect of Team Topologies, affects the scale of the domain that a team works with. Cognitive Load Our human working memory, our capacity to learn and solve problems, is a system with limited capacity.…
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Do you want to improve psychological safety and performance in your teams? Are you facing significant challenges that require transformation to overcome? You can download the Psychological Safety Action Pack and put yourself in charge of driving the transformation, but if you would like some extra help in driving true organisational change, improving the performance…
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There’s not a great deal of research or writing available about psychological safety in the military, despite one of the best leadership books available – “Turn the Ship Around” by David Marquet, being about how he used empowering leadership and psychological safety to drastically improve the performance of the crew of the US Navy Submarine,…
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It’s a long and worthwhile journey to build high levels of psychological safety in your organisation, and much of the hard work involves excellent leadership, clarity of direction, effective support, vulnerability, curiosity and much more. However there are some simple exercises that you can carry out with your teams that directly build psychological safety in…
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A safe state of mind. Psychological safety is “being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career” (Kahn 1990, p. 708). That is: psychological safety refers to a personal state of mind of being safe in your team and amongst colleagues; it is not about being protected…
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These posters were reimagined and designed by the brilliant Deisa Teremarias, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Caracas, Venezuela. Normally part of the Complete Psychological Safety Action Pack, you can download all six posters in high quality jpg format by entering your email address below.   And now you can show your love of psychological…
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Psychological safety enables teams to perform well even in uncertain environments, through being able to make mistakes without fear, innovating by trying new and potentially risky endeavours, and through raising concerns or new ideas as they arise. Agile is about delivering quickly in uncertain and changing environments, where the needs of the customer or the…
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How to Measure Psychological Safety We know psychological safety is essential for high performance teams: it enables sharing of ideas, admitting and learning from mistakes, highlighting risks, and challenging (and improving) the way we do things. Psychological safety is the primary foundation for team performance as well as organisational agility and change. Innovation is so…
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It’s no wonder that information security gets a bad press. Consumers entrust organisations with their personal information sometimes only to find that it has been breached and used by criminals or marketeers for nefarious purposes. Some of the biggest breaches, such as those of Facebook, Marriott hotels, or OxyData, consist of hundreds of millions of…
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There are millions of things that you can, and must, do as a leader to build and maintain psychological safety in your teams. But it’s hard to remember millions of things, so here are three key points that will help you create and improve psychological safety, whether you’re in charge of the team or not.…
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