What does everyone on your team know, but won’t talk about together?

This is one of the key questions I ask when I am fact finding with a team before we get into coaching. The response will give me so much information about what’s happening and what might be standing in the way of them moving forward.

What would your answer be? And if there are things you won’t talk about together in an open forum, why not?

Psychological Safety: The Foundations of Team Success

We know that creating a psychologically safe culture in your team is vital to its potential for happiness and success. So what is a psychologically safe team culture?

It’s quite simple really: It is an atmosphere where permission is given for everyone to speak openly and freely, safe in the knowledge that they will not be treated unfairly, judged, ridiculed or made fun of for what they have to say. The team consciously commits to allowing people to admit their fears or anxiety and people own up to mistakes. Everyone feels comfortable being vulnerable and trusts that their team mates will respond in a mature, respectful and adult way to what is expressed.

Why is Psychological Safety So Important?

What if you don’t have this kind of permission and commitment within your team? Instead, you have an atmosphere where people are afraid to express themselves. They don’t trust that they will be treated fairly and they fear judgement, ridicule or ill treatment in response to any truth they share. What happens then?

You end up with a herd of elephants in your room. All sorts of issues will be present, which people will be too scared to openly discuss. These might be task and work related, or they might be relationship and team behaviour issues. All sorts of things could be going wrong and yet people don’t want to talk about it. Barriers go up because people are protecting themselves or watching their backs, focus goes away from work, engagement drops, and targets don’t get met.

What to do about your elephants

If you feel your team has elephants in your room, you have a choice. You can leave them alone and hope they go away, but Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

You need to tackle these elephants. But first, you need to create the right conditions for your team to be able to do so.

Step one – Understand your baseline

Start having conversations in the team to find out where the everyone sits currently. Ask people individually how they relate to this concept, educate them about psychologically safety and inform them that you want to create a more psychologically safe atmosphere. It’s important you find out how close or far they are from having these open conversations.

Step two – Establish the WIIFM

If you are going to ask people to talk more openly, this might be a scary prospect for them. You have to answer their WIIFM – ‘What’s In It For Me’? It may take courage and sacrifice for this to happen, so you have to give people reason to voluntarily do things differently. Sell the concept to them – establish its benefits, and lay out your expectations.

Step three – secure commitment

Look everyone in the eye and specifically ask them if they are prepared to commit to being open and honest in front of each other. If you have done the first two steps correctly, they should realise this is now something that is happening and they should want to say yes. It’s vital you ask this ‘yes/no’ closed question. If they say no, then go back to the first two steps until people are prepared to say yes. Establish ground rules for everyone’s behaviour that will support a psychologically safe atmosphere in advance of a group conversation – see step four.

Step four – Start the conversation

You may never be truly ready but at some point you have to start the conversation. Create ground rules, request people to come prepared to talk, and as the leader you should expect to go first. Leading by example – being the first to demonstrate vulnerability and model the right behaviour is vital. If you need help to have these conversations, then get someone from outside the team to come and help you have them. It might take courage, it may be stormy, but you have to start somewhere.

Step five – keep going

Once you have started having that first open, honest conversation, don’t look back and don’t give up. Creating a new habit like this requires courage, discipline and commitment. It’s a bit like riding a bike. You will fall off, but just get back on again. Keep talking. If it doesn’t work so well at first, remind people of the WIIFM and the behaviour protocol you have all signed up to, and try again. It probably won’t happen overnight, but it can change surprisingly quickly.

Hopefully, it won’t be long before the team is ready to tackle some of the elephants. Getting these issues out in the open and being brave enough to discuss them can shrink them quite drastically. I have worked with teams who were so worried about discussing the real issues. With patient encouragement and the right set up, they surprise themselves with their ability to talk about things they thought they would never be able to address openly with each other. Soon there’s even laughter and words like ‘I can’t believe we haven’t had this conversation already’ or ‘I had no idea we all felt the same way’.

I help teams create a psychologically safe culture when they are unable to do so by themselves. If you want to talk to me about how I do this, please get in touch andy@theteamspace.com or 050 559 5711.