When working within a team, the emotion of psychological safety is crucial. For a psychologically safe team, throwing out ideas, taking risks, and masking questions is the norm. 

Psychologically safe team members are those who respect each other’s ideas; they feel that they could suggest ideas, admit mistakes, and take risks without being embarrassed by the group. The best teams discuss ideas frequently, do not let one person dominate the conversation and are sensitive to one another’s feelings.

A team exists because everyone has different skills and every person on the team knows something that no one else knows. If team members feel stupid when they speak up, we limit the team’s chances of pulling off something magical. 

Examples of no psychological safety:

• If someone asks questions like “You are of course familiar with the work of so and so?” The answer “no” is not a safe answer to this question due to the way it is phrased.
• A person has something to say in the meeting and the whole meeting he is thinking “Will I sound stupid?”, “Will people laugh at me?”, “What should I say?”, “How should I frame?”, “Does my idea even make sense?” and the meeting ends.
• It would be so much easier if I could do it all by myself. There is no trust in the team to delegate. 
• Saying “It is dumb idea to do it like this” or if someone suggests something, responding, “It does not make any sense to take this route because…”. Disagreement with the idea can be communicated in a different way, like, “I feel if we do it in this way, it will cause…”

Know that unfortunately we will not be able to create psychological safety every time, which is usually due to the people who have spent time in institutions where individual efforts are prized in a competitive setting. Or whose focus is always to make themselves outshine the whole team.

Creating a psychologically safe environment

Encourage open discussion: If someone in the team is introverted, ask questions like “What does everyone think?” Or “Does anyone disagree?” Does not invite opposing viewpoints. Ask each team member to write down their thoughts and then have everyone share them out loud. And then ask follow up questions to encourage discussion. 

Suggest a bad idea brainstorm: To allow everyone to be silly and adventurous, ask team members to purposefully share ideas which they think are absurd or worst ideas. 

Ask clarifying questions: You can increase psychological safety by asking clarifying questions, as it makes it okay for others to do the same and the feeling of how you will be perceived when asking questions will be gone.

Use generative language: If someone gives an idea respond with “let’s try it!” Or add more to it by saying “ building on that idea…”. Another way is to use “yes and…” It will give confidence to the person who shared the idea to continue sharing.

Enabling knowing each other: Enable team members to know each other personally. Open yourself up to make it easier for the team to open up. Asking questions that get to the deeper level also helps, like when you think of your childhood, what food comes to mind and why? You will get lots of stories out of that question, which will help the team get to know each other on a personal level and also allow them to find commonalities. 

Create team agreement: At the beginning of a project or even a meeting, set the ground rules for how you will treat one another. 

Create processes to enable communication and psychological safety: Create the processes that help communicate preferences and work styles. One way is to ask each team member to create a “how to work with me” guide to make the collaboration easier. Ask the questions like these:

What should everyone know about you?

• What are some honest unfiltered things about you?
• What drives you nuts?
• What qualities do you particularly value in people who work with you?
• What are some things that people might misunderstand about you that you should clarify?

How to work with you?

• What is the best way to communicate with you?
• What are our goals for this team? What are our concerns about this team?
• How will we make decisions? What type of decisions need condenses? How will we deal with conflict?
• How do we want to give and receive feedback? One in one, in a group, informally or during a specified time each week?

If there is conflict, listen to other people and calmly share your perspective. Remember you can’t control others actions but you can control your response. Note that sometimes we need to get rid of bad apples to preserve psychological safety of the team, so keep that option in perspective when dealing with negative and descending behaviour.