The whole is greater than the sum of the parts! Encouraging input from all team members and allowing challenge will lead to improved decisions. Enabling the rebels and dissenting voices might be uncomfortable, but will lead to a team that feels valued and safe. Psychological Safety is critical for successful teamwork and great performance.
If you’re working with a team that hasn’t experienced psychological safety in the past, you may struggle to get them to contribute or challenge any plans or actions.
Inclusion
You can start by helping them feel included. Ensure that they have the opportunity to speak to, or hear from, you directly and that they feel involved in the process. As you build trust and get to know them as individuals you can adjust your style to enable them to input and get involved.
Safe to Learn – Safe to Fail
The next step is to ensure that they feel safe to learn – that they don’t have a sense that they need to know it all already. Sadly, many working environments don’t give employees this feeling. To learn from failure can feel very risky. Championing some risk taking can be pivotal in enabling the team to learn and grow. Taking it a step further and encouraging the team to fail in order to learn can be transformational.
Contribution and Challenge
Then you can move on to enabling them to feel they can contribute – that they can ask questions, or build on a point, without fear of repercussion or ridicule.
The end goal is ensuring they feel able to challenge; to really ask questions about why, what, and how; to be able to hold those discussions without fear of criticism or repercussion
Ultimately if you have a team that have true psychological safety you may encounter a lot more challenge from your team. But, you’ll be able to debate detail and ultimately develop better solutions & outcomes.
Bonus outcomes
A positive by-product is also that team members are bought into those outcomes. They have been involved in shaping the final plan, and so they are more committed to the outcome.
Clearly, there will be times a decision needs to be made quickly, or is unpopular, but your buy-in will always be heightened because you have taken the time to build psychological safety and engagement first.
I can help
I’ve taken teams from negative eNPS to 70+. You can too!
If you want some help navigating this, for yourself or for your team, contact me. We can chat about how I can help.
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