• Agile Coach

This tool measures psychological safety in your team

Psychological safety is the most important thing, essential, the holy grail to achieving ambitious goals with your team. Research at Google and others shows that this factor contributes most to team performance. But what exactly is psychological safety? Is it just about trust? Or is there more to it? In this article, I’ll explain what psychological safety is, how to improve it and how to measure it yourself.

Maybe you recognize it: with your group of best friends you get into a heated discussion about your political affiliation. You don’t shy away from sensitive topics. Even though your views are diametrically opposed, you are not afraid to express and defend your opinion. Even though it may be very different from that of your friends and you sometimes seek the edge, you dare to take the risk of being completely yourself. To remain yourself. Analysis: very high psychological safety!

But what exactly is psychological safety? Psychological safety is defined as the degree to which you feel safe to take interpersonal risks on your team. It reflects how your team labels the social climate and is a measure of team members’ willingness to trust that others will not take advantage of them.

Now the following recognizable situation. You work in a team where “stuff” is going on. You immediately feel tension, an elephant in the room. But no one dares to say anything. People do not address each other. Own opinions are not expressed and team members never ask each other for help. Analysis: clearly little to no psychological safety. But sometimes it’s a little harder to recognize. It creeps into your team. For example, when everything seems to be pais and vree, but people complain about each other at the coffee machine. Or the harmonious team that does not dare to take risks. Again, psychological safety is lacking. And not daring to take risks is a problem. After all, without risk taking, there is no innovation and therefore no progress! Therefore, in our Psychological Safety Masterclass you will learn how to recognize the lack of psychological safety and how to improve the team climate.

How do you improve psychological safety in your team?

Here I give you a few tips for improving psychological safety:

• Lead by example: As a servant leader, allow yourself to be vulnerable. Share mistakes you’ve made and show that it’s not bad to take a risk once in a while. Allow team members to challenge your ideas.
• Be inclusive: Involve everyone on the team, try to give dissenters space to express a different voice.
• Look ahead: Avoid looking for blame. Steer toward coming up with solutions and how to learn from mistakes.
• Stand behind the team: Support and represent the team to the environment. Give credit to the team and ensure that the team addresses each other and deals with conflict in a healthy way.

Now measure psychological safety in your team yourself

Measuring psychological safety is easier than you might think. With a questionnaire developed by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson – scientifically sound, in other words – you can quickly measure how your team rates its social climate. Seven questions provide an overall picture of psychological safety in the team.

We have therefore developed a free tool that allows you to measure psychological safety. With the tool, you easily create a survey for your own team. You share the link with your team and they – completely anonymously! – fill out the survey. The results are immediately available graphically. Include the results in your retrospective and discuss them with your team. Recognizing and acknowledging the lack of psychological safety is the first step to improving it.

Now get to work on your own! Expose your team’s psychological safety and take steps to improve it. Can’t figure it out? Call us, we’ll be happy to help.

Register for the latest Masterclass

Do you grant yourself a boost in the field of psychological safety? Need more tools, knowledge and experience? Then sign up for our latest Masterclass in Psychological Safety that I am co-hosting with trainer & coach Adrie Dolman. Will I see you there?