Psychological Safety
Self-actualized Agile teams must provide space for people to disagree, voice concerns, experiment, and take risks. Learn more below.
Last updated
Self-actualized Agile teams must provide space for people to disagree, voice concerns, experiment, and take risks. Learn more below.
Last updated
We are all the way at the bottom of the Agile pyramid for strong teams. Psychological safety is the first thing that must be built in order to build self-actualized Agile teams.
Psychological Safety is the core foundation on all Agile teams.
Psychological safety is a shared understanding that team members will not reject or punish people for speaking out, taking risks, or failing.
Psychological safety is a required pre-requisite for Agile work. Without it, Agile teams cannot become fully Agile. Agile teams who have a shared mission, responsible collectively, require psychological safety in order for collaboration to happen. It provides space for people on teams to take risks that are healthy for team progress. With it, they can organize themselves and grow.
If teams can't speak out about things that need to be improved, how can they respond to change? How can they collaborate? How can they produce working results?
Team mates must trust each other to proceed in their work. Trust is earned as teams understand each other and feel comfortable with each other.
Trust happens in many ways. Teams must trust that activities will play out. Teams must trust that even when work fails, the team will progress together. Teams must trust that teammates have each others' backs.
Team mates should not be reprimanded for taking risks or speaking dissent about things that move a team forward. There must be a shared understanding that teams can fail safely knowing they will progress and adjust.
Teams should be built with many diverse perspectives and backgrounds. To build psychological safety, each person needs to understand perspectives and people. They need to acknowledge each other, share an understanding, and listen to what they are saying before responding.
Teams that build empathy with each other produce strong psychological safety to be themselves around the team. This is important for empowering teams.
In addition to trust and empathy, team mates need to respect each other in their work. Respect shows itself in providing room for people to own work, or asking others' opinions before deciding.
Teams who have strong psychological safety discuss and convene to build consensus after listening to each person's perspective who wants to be involved in the conversation.
Team mates need to feel a strong sense of ownership, and value on their team.
Dynamics of power should be shifted and distributed such that each teammate is included in decision making. Each teammate should be included in ownership of work, and have choices of how they get involved.
Each teammate should feel the power of belonging, and feel their work has meaning. Teams should provide inclusive environments for personalities and perspectives to build a strong psychological safety.
People need to provide space for team mates to be vulnerable and open with each other. Conflict can only be resolved when people know about it, and can speak about it constructively. Disagreements and dissenting opinions should be encouraged when they help a team progress in their work and when teams can talk it out constructively.
They must always respect and empathize with each other through their open conversations. Teammates should be open with each other and candidly discuss items that bring out growth in teamwork, even when they are uncomfortable to discuss.
Every person on the team has a role to play in providing room for open discussions and open perspectives.
Strong teams not only allow work failure, they embrace failure as part of their culture. They provide room for people to take risks if it will progress the team in their work.
By giving each other room to try new things, to experiment, they will produce stronger work together and build stronger trust with each other.
Here's a way you can check to ensure that psychological safety is strong on your team:
Make every member of the team feel like they have room to speak their mind.
Actively listen when others have things to say, and make team feel like their voice matters.
Give people the room for people to bring their own personalities and unique capabilities to the table in the way THEY want to do so.
Allow room for team mates to challenge the status quo, and experiment with new ways of working.
Encourage failing “fast”, i.e. failure and quick reflection and quick adjustment based on what the team thinks they should do.
Let people take the risks that THEY decide to take, that could lead to failure or disaster, for the purposes of allowing them to build up decision making prowess.
When teams feel a lack of psychological safety, they may be afraid to speak up, and they may lose their motivation to work. They may become more distant or absent in the team. They may think there's no point in bringing feedback up. These are signs that psychological safety may be lacking on the team. When psychological safety is lacking, the team will storm.
This could be due to many things. You as a teammate should work to understand what's going on in the team dynamics before concluding how to resolve it. Teams must work together to identify issues with open conversation and respect toward each other.
Every team member plays a role in success here. Leaders, managers, or team peers may contribute to a lack of psychological safety equally.
To uncover opportunities to build psychological safety, It may be best to proceed with one-on-one conversations, or discuss things in sprint retrospectives constructively. It's important to build empathy and respect for individuals so that they're heard in these discussions. You can only build a psychologically safe team together, united, as one team. Everyone needs to be bought into psychological safety.
Here's a video about psychological safety and agile: