Empowering Product Teams Through Psychological Safety
Ever wondered why some product teams are high-performing while others may struggle to be continuously effective?
Teams can find it hard to be high-performing even when they have similar conditions, capabilities, contexts, structures, and even challenges compared to others.
Google’s Project Aristotle shows us that psychological safety can play a huge role in driving product innovation leading to greater customer value and business impact. Psychological safety - the belief that you can express ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes without fear of punishment or embarrassment.
That you can be yourself, without fear of reprisal.
Creating a culture of psychologically safe environments is a challenge for product leadership and where I believe ProductOps can play a critical role; ensuring every team member feels heard and valued through the structures, principles and practices of an organisation.
In this article, we will discuss how to assess a team’s psychological safety, and introduce techniques that will help to empower everyone on the team to do their best work.
Psychological Safety and High Performance
Fundamentally, why should organisations care about psychological safety? There is a clear business reason for ensuring psychological safety, simply; psychologically safe teams create more continuous customer value that leads to greater business impact.
Organisational leaders should focus on creating the conditions for their people and teams to thrive through inclusive cultures and clear diversity values.
Inclusivity drives diversity, and diverse teams create more customer value. They’re more likely to understand a wide range of customers and have the ability to bring in fresh perspectives from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Crucial when building products for a broad audience or with a desire to innovate in the industry.
When considering the return on investment for the effort put into creating these cultures, the focus should be on the end business objective. Are the product teams with a stronger sense of safety creating more value? Are they able to be more creative and innovative? Are they more efficient and effective at achieving business goals?
Diagnosing Psychological Safety
Environments that are unsafe come with a set of clear signals allowing leaders to act;
Lack of Motivation
In unsafe environments, teams often struggle with ownership and accountability, decision-making can slow down as everyone waits for one person to take charge. This creates a cycle where nobody feels empowered to move things forward.
One person, often a team manager, can be seen driving all decision-making. This may happen because they impose themselves on the team or because others don't feel safe to step forward with their own ideas. Either way, it signals that team members don't feel empowered to contribute to the progress and success of the team.
In unsafe environments, teams often become disengaged and disempowered. People don’t feel responsible, so they avoid contributing. This leads to a passive team culture, where people wait for someone else to take charge.
Toxic Team Dynamics
Remote work, despite its clear benefits, can still be damaging to a team’s psychological safety. While we can all suffer from "Zoom fatigue" often, a team where everyone is off-camera or only speaks when asked a direct question can be a red flag. Leaders need to keep a close eye out for those team members that were highly engaged, now rarely joining in the conversation.
Psychologically unsafe teams tend to blame their own team members - particularly those that are less experienced, that may have joined the team more recently or are external contractors. This is a sign the team needs to work on their shared understanding of accountability and responsibility.
Resistance to Change
In psychologically unsafe teams, new ideas, processes, and a sense of continuous improvement can often be ignored or blocked. Team members may hesitate to suggest new ways of working or avoid admitting mistakes, in fear of direct criticism. This can significantly slow down progress, hinder experimentation and block innovation.
In unsafe environments, teams will often stick to what they know best - even when it's not working.
Contrastingly, teams with strong psychological safety show clear signs of thriving. There are leading indicators that the team or the organisation’s leaders can identify.
Empowered, Capable, and Aligned
Psychologically safe teams are those that are empowered by leadership to identify and solve the right customer problems with an understanding of the impact on the business. They are highly capable at doing so and are given the time and space to improve their skills. And finally, clearly understand and are aligned around the strategic needs of the business. Ensuring that teams are empowered takes more than just desire, leaders have to take action and build the structures and cultures that allow empowerment to become a reality.
Inclusive and Diverse
As introduced above, psychologically safe teams always welcome diverse perspectives, fuelling creativity and innovation. Team members can be seen sharing ideas and experiments, whether that’s with their ways of working or the product they’re working on. Knowing they'll be heard and valued, regardless of their background or position on the team, empowers them to continue to innovate.
Continuous Learning and Improvement
High-performing teams with strong team health are more willing to embrace a growth mindset, always striving to improve. They view learning as an ongoing process that drives growth both for themselves as individuals, the product team they’re on and the overall organisation’s strategic objectives.
Embracing Psychological Safety
Building a culture of psychological safe teams is an ongoing effort. It requires a constant commitment from everybody in the organisation, starting with leadership. There are a few ways to ensure your teams continue to feel safe, supported, and empowered:
Build Strong Cultural Values
Cultural values are not a set forget activity, they can't simply be something mentioned during recruitment and onboarding but not truly lived. Making them part of everyday conversations, weaving them into meetings and decision-making processes will ensure they’re continuously understood and lived by the teams.
Keep cultural values ever-present when recruiting, hiring and onboarding new employees. Especially in today’s employer-driven market, it can be easy to fall into the trap of hiring someone with the perfect set of capabilities and experience, but failing to test if they fit the company culture.
Effective Team Retrospectives
Retrospectives should be seen as a tool for continuous improvement that should be employed by every team aspiring to enable psychological safety. Feedback happens naturally in our daily interactions, but retros are a structured way to openly share, receive and act.
Three key activities I always introduce at the start of every retrospective;
Safety Check: Firstly we need to understand how safe the team currently feels. Are they ready to openly discuss any challenges they’ve faced either individually or as a team? Using an anonymous method the team members rate how safe they feel, from 1 to 5. If there are any significantly low scores, usually 1 or 2, the retrospective should be immediately paused. In these cases, it helps to bring in an external facilitator to reorganise the retro and reach out to each individual to discuss privately their concerns before moving ahead.
Health Check: It’s important to understand how teams are generally feeling, whether that is impacted from within the team or external factors. On a simple scale of 1 to 5, everyone rates how they feel about the team, the work they’ve been doing and the overall organisation and its direction. Low scores don’t block the retrospective from going ahead, but should be openly discussed if the team feels safe to do so.
Prime Directive: To ensure the retrospective has a positive tone and everyone is on the same page before starting. A team member, rotating each retrospective, should read out loud and agree with the team;
"Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand."
Final Thoughts
Creating psychological safe cultures and environments begins with leadership understanding that it’s a priority; for individuals and their growth, product teams for their continuous discovery of customer value and finally for the success of the business.
It requires constant attention and nurturing to build a culture where people feel safe to contribute, take risks, and learn together to achieve great customer and business outcomes. Focusing on the leading indicators of unsafe and safe teams will help leaders to identify areas for improvement, amplifying the ‘good’ for greater organisational change.
I’d love to hear from you - how are you fostering psychological safety in teams? What challenges are you facing? What has surprised you the most in the process? What is the impact of having teams with strong psychological safety?
Interested in learning more about how psychological safety can make a difference in your organisation and the tools and techniques to make it a reality? Check out the workshop here: chriscompston.com/psychological-safety