It's the belief that you won't be punished or embarrassed when you make a mistake, raise a different perspective, ask for help, or admit a failure.
Google led a multi-year project that looked across 180 teams and identified what makes the strongest teams. Psychological safety was by far the most important criterion impacting team effectiveness.
By creating psychological safety on our teams, we can expect to see higher levels of engagement, increased motivation to tackle difficult problems, and better performance.
Plus, psychological safety encourages people to try new things and embrace conflict— essential ingredients for learning and innovation.
Conflict is inevitable and important for any team; it's a necessary part of getting smart people together to solve a problem. The difference is in how conflict is expressed on a team.
Unhealthy conflict can drain psychological safety from a team and create a toxic, unsafe culture. On the other hand, healthy conflict can promote creativity, innovation, and productive discussion and debate.
How do you know if a team has unhealthy conflict? John and Julie Gottman, two famous social psychologists, studied relationships in marriages.
Many of their findings are relevant to the corporate world. They identified four behaviors that exist in unhealthy conflict and called these the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because they predict the end of relationships:
The Four Horsemen often arrive in packs. When we express one, it snowballs into expressing others. And people tend to fight fire with fire— they react to horsemen with more horsemen.
Examples
Mindy Zhang
A psychologically safe place to share challenges and risks:
Every week, my manager at Dropbox asked his direct reports to write down what was hard, what we were worried about, and where there might be misalignment on the team. We met weekly to talk about these challenges and support each other.
He set the example by first sharing vulnerably about what kept him up at night. He talked about how these problems made him feel— frustrated, concerned, challenged. Whenever we shared difficulties and failures on our teams, he expressed gratitude for our openness.
This ritual made it safe to surface risks and uncover each other's blind spots, so we could collectively get ahead of tricky problems. If we didn't have this level of psychological safety, we might've kept issues to ourselves and allowed them to fester—thereby making them harder for the company to solve.
Developmental Feedback:
Instead of Criticism, we can offer developmental feedback via the SBIO framework. By giving feedback compassionately, we help someone grow and become more effective.
Emotional Bank Account:
Instead of Contempt, we can fill someone's emotional bank account. Each person has an emotional bank account, and we can make withdrawals and deposits. It takes a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions to maintain a successful relationship. By investing early on in gratitude, appreciation, and trust, we can prevent contempt and other behaviors of unhealthy conflict.
Empathetic Listening and Open & Honest Questions:
Instead of Defensiveness, we can employ empathetic listening and open and honest questions. By getting curious, seeking to understand, and staying open to new perspectives, we can stop the cycle of criticism and defensiveness that often accompanies unhealthy conflict.
Above the Line:
Instead of Stonewalling, we can invest in our own well-being to get above the line. When we are feeling red, it's hard to have productive conversations about conflict. Try taking a walk, doing something that energizes you, or taking some time off to recharge.
