The last year has obviously been unimaginably difficult to us all but in particular hard for those who were part of newly distributed teams working from home. Many employees have been asked to all of a sudden perform their work outside of the office and while we were able to offer them the technology tools to do their daily tasks, we have rarely offered them any help in understanding their own emotions and the team interaction patterns that derived from the “new reality of work”.
Since we design a technology product going to the very heart of the team dynamic by measuring and improving Psychological Safety, we decided early on in the pandemic to open access to everyone so that we provide the employees using it with the assistance they needed in such turbulent times and providing that help over the last few months to tens of teams across the world and from all fields of business, has taught us some important lessons fast.
The main one amongst them has to do with discovering a latent voracious appetite for understanding and bettering the dynamic inside the team. In the absence of any tools, it had been previously impossible to see this appetite through anything else but the requests for assistance employees would launch to Human Resources or Learning and Development when they felt their team culture is becoming toxic or non-performant.
Given access to a method to see data on how they collectively interact as a team, we found that team members immediately had a very proactive reaction and approach: “What now?” they asked themselves “What can we do so we minimize the negative behaviours we sometimes engage in and replace them with some of the positive ones?”
In other words, once we changed lens and focused on the team, not the organisation as a whole or the individual hero -as we had wrongly previously placed at the centre when we had thought the emotional wellbeing of the team was the responsability of the team leader-, we’ve witnessed an extreme appetite from teams to improve and be autonomous in their ability to progress and grow.
Autonomous Teams and Data
Autonomous, (or “semi-autonomous”) self-managing, self-improving teams have long been heralded as integral to the future of work in particular when it comes to new, innovative, agile practices. This is because by distributing learning and decision making at the team level we decentralise and avoid bottlenecks that can limit their speed and performance and we live in a fast-changing technology-driven world where both of those are crucial.
Furthermore, teams that can be in charge of their own performance through collaborative leadership and self-improvement actions are more robust and resilient with a higher degree of job satisfaction and therefore retention. Additionally, in a welcomed side-effect they tend to score as far more focused on purpose and that has a real economic impact as shown in research from McKinsey.
What we found was that the more access to granular information on their behaviours that teams have, the more interested they are in bettering all the discerning aspects.
For instance, if they can clearly see they engage in a specific negative behaviour such as Impression Management (the act of not speaking up in front of the team for fear of appearing incompetent, ignorant, negative or disruptive) which will soon have negative effects on their Psychological Safety, they are instantly interested in finding out what they could do to prevent that in the future. Should they be offered ideas of exercises, experiments, workshops or any type of human interventions that have been proven as effective by other teams struggling with the same issue, they’d be able to start working on correcting that behaviour on their own, without needing direct help from any other HR professional or department, therefore, becoming self-sufficient in terms of the health and wellbeing of their own team.
If, by contrast, they notice a positive behaviour such as being engaged or being courageous slip, then again they can choose an action their team will execute independently to reverse that trend.
All that is expected of the organisation in this instance, is to offer them the ability to reliably collect data on these behaviours then ensure they have access to knowledge on what they can do to themselves, independently to raise awareness and encourage the positive ones that will make their team psychologically safe and therefore high performant.
Increasing Psychological Safety for Performance
Psychological safety (the ability of a team member to speak up openly and engage in the team without impression management or fear of negative consequences to self-image, status or career (Kahn, 1990) has long been seen as fundamental to high performing teams as found by researchers as well as the famous Google Project Aristotle.
In the field of technology, the DevOps community is more and more empathic in its belief that it is the cornerstone to creating the teams from “the digital elite” – those companies that perform best in today’s world of tech and reports such as the “DORA Accelerate” place it at the centre of every other indicator but while this is the industry that has taken the lead on the research, the topic of psychological safety is universal for every team in any field concerned with sustainability and competitivity.
Unfortunately, simply understanding the importance of Psychological Safety and autonomous teams is undeniably important but insufficient to start seeing improvement.
To achieve Psychological Safety, what teams need first and foremost is visibility over each and every positive behaviour that composes it from whether their team members have a strong emotional bond, learn and engage together, to whether they are open and courageous and remain flexible and resilient in the face of adversity all the way to every negative fear-based behaviour that ultimately hinders it. They need it dissected and split into actionable components.
Once they have enough data to understand how they are doing on each of these aspects, teams will immediately, as we found, be inspired and emboldened to find ways to act on this newfound insight by encouraging the positive behaviours and placing suggestions of what actions they can take at their fingertips empowers them to change the data for the better.
Thankfully, in a self-enforcing healthy cycle, strengthening Psychological Safety in itself can increase the desire for autonomy of teams as they realise they are “masters of their own destiny” when it comes to improving their team dynamics and therefore ensuring high performance so it is our duty to empower teams with the tools to gather the data and perform the human interventions they need for a healthy team dynamic that helps them win.
People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age by Duena Blomstrom (Bloomsbury Business) is publishing on the 13th May 2021. Available at bloomsbury.com and at all good bookshops.
