How to Build Psychological Safety

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Want to empower your team and build trust ? The goal is to build an environment in which your team trusts you and is willing to take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed. The Build Psychological Safety recipe is a curated set of five Team Tactics designed to help you empower your team.

🧠  Learn how to…

✔️ guide your team members to set goals they are motivated to achieve

✔️ help your team understand how they can best work with you and each other

✔️ create a safe space for like-minded people

✔️ make people feel part of their meetings

✔️ create a culture of sharing 

🃏 Cards used…

⏱ How much time?…
  • Ongoing process: use these tactics regularly and consistently to maintain a great working environment.
✨ Extra reading…

👀 Let’s walk through this recipe using an example: a team of educators at an International School, this session is lead by administration.

1

Use One-To-One to get to know your teams’ individual needs

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⏱ Time: 20 minutes per team member

🧠 Core Objective: guide your team members to set goals they are motivated to achieve. 

The One-to-One tactic supports you in your understanding of where they are now and where they want to be. Getting to know the needs of your team members will allow you to open up opportunities for them to achieve their goals.

“Motivation is the single most important factor in any sort of success.” – Edmund Hillary

💡 Tip: make sure you and your employee knows the definition of hard and soft skills. Hard skills refer to the job-related knowledge and abilities that employees need to perform their job duties effectively. Soft skills, on the other hand, are the personal qualities that help employees really thrive in the workplace.

Instructions

  1. Write three headings: Hard skills, Soft skills and Personal goals on a large surface. For each, ask your mentee to write down as many skills/goals as they can think of related to their practice. (5 minutes)

  2. Together, choose 3–6 items from each list that they will focus on. These are ‘stretch’ goals. If they are going to do the thing anyway, choose something else. (5 minutes)

  3. Draw three large circles with five rings. Plot where they are now and where they want to be, with 1 being “I’m completely new to this” and 5 meaning “I could teach this”. (5 minutes)

  4. Together, work out the steps they need to take to get there. You can look for opportunities to help them develop these skills, too. Check in every two weeks and have your mentee choose a different item to focus on. (5 minutes)

    ⬇️ In the next tactic, help your team understand how they can best work with you and each other with My User Manual.

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2

Use My User Manual to learn how each team member works best

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⏱ Time: 30–45 minutes

🧠 Core Objective: help your team understand how they can best work with you and each other.

The My User Manual tactic gets people’s working preferences out in the open early will help remove friction between team members. This User Manual tactic can help create an environment that promotes healthy working relationships.

“Culture is not in ‘support’ of strategy; it is strategy.” – Adam Bryant

💡 Tip: when new people start, ask them to create a user manual in their first 90 days. Share user manuals when kicking off a new project.

Instructions

  1. Before the meeting, have each team member complete a rough draft of their User Manual to share with the team. (Complete before meeting)

    Give them the following prompts to help:

    • My best working patterns look like…arriving to work 30 minutes early, checking in with my body often, and getting my extra work done during my afternoon break.
    • My absolute requirements to do great work are… open and safe communication between all staff members, weekly check-ins from administration, daily hour long lunch break, access to work development education.
    • The best way to give me feedback is…structured meetings so that I can come mentally and emotionally prepared.
    • When I’m dealing with stress, I…tend to communicate less, have less patience, and need more support from my team with projects.
    • Beyond work, I’m really passionate about…bouldering and going to poetry nights.

     

  2. Split the team into pairs. Get them to spend five minutes asking questions about each other’s manual.

  3. In turns, ask each person to talk about their partner’s manual for 1 minute. They could talk about: something that was new to them, something they have in common or something they like. (5-15 minutes)

  4. Refine then share your manuals in an open space, such as your email signature or internal org chart. (15 minutes)

    ⬇️ In the next tactic, break down silos by creating a safe space for people who share a common interest and passion with Community of Practice.

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3

Use Community of Practice for people that share common interests

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⏱ Time: 1-2 hours

🧠 Core Objective: break down silos by creating a safe space for people who share a common interest and passion.

The Community of Practice tactic help you to solve problems, promote best practices, and develop people’s skills while fostering talent. The primary output is knowledge created through connecting people with similar interests. Communities are usually formed by discipline, such as Content Design, Engineering, Delivery, etc.

💡 Tip: keep going! Some weeks you’ll get only a few people and others lots; it takes time to establish. Often “sticky” subjects with emotional buy-in interests people. 

Instructions

Set up your community:

  1. Clarify who the community of practice (COP) is for (they tend to be organised around a discipline); boundaries help people feel safe. Use Lean Survey to discover people’s needs. (15 minutes)

  2. Get Buy-In from teams/managers who could otherwise prevent people from coming. (15-30 minutes)
  3. Find a regular time for people to get together; often every one or two weeks works well. (5 minutes)
  4. Run an activity in the time you have together. There are a number of things you can do in a COP: (30 minutes)
    • Share your current work obstacles to allow the group to help troubleshoot it.
    • Learn a new skill or methodology together.
    • Talks on useful lessons you think might help others.

Keep it running:

  1. Invite other disciplines, and use a shared space to store your communities of practice outputs.
  2. Use Agile Comms to promote your community.

    ⬇️ In the next tactic, make people feel part of their meetings with Inclusive Meeting Playbook.
 
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4

Use Inclusive Meeting Playbook to make people feel included

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⏱ Time: 1 hour

🧠 Core Objective: make people feel part of their meetings. 

The Inclusive Meeting Playbook tactic supports you in setting up a successful meeting. Meetings are important for sharing ideas and discussing decisions. Yet power dynamics often get in the way, and people don’t speak up. Help attendees feel safe and confident to contribute in their next meeting.

💡 Tip: decide who to share your final version of your inclusive playbook with using Communication Matrix.

Instructions

  1. Get together with the people who you regularly have meetings with.

  2. Ask half the people to write down their tips to allow these positive (green) behaviours during meetings. The other half writes down what stops (pink) these behaviours: (15 minutes)

  3. Theme Sort the positive answers to the questions. Discuss the answers and see if anything is missing. (15 minutes)

  4. Write a summary for each topic from your Theme Sort using a title and bullet points for each. (15 minutes)

  5. Make posters to do a Lean Presentation for your inclusive playbook and make sure to share it with your team. Encourage people to speak up and Say What you Mean if guidelines are broken. (15 minutes)

    ⬇️ In the next tactic, form habits of sharing work early and often without eating into your team’s precious time with Daily Sharing.

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5

Use Daily Sharing to create a culture of sharing

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⏱ Time: 30 seconds per person

🧠 Core Objective: form the habit of sharing work early and often without eating into your team’s precious time. 

The Daily Sharing tactic improves culture and helps prevent repeat work. People are busy by default; start changing behaviours with small habits. Spend 30 seconds a day sharing what you’re working on right now.

“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger.” – James Clear

💡 Tip: communal rituals like this have a tendency to die if they’re left to one person. Make sure the whole team owns it.

Instructions

  1. Pick a shared area the whole team can access. A Slack channel works well.
  2. At an agreed time (it needs to work for all) ask the team “What are you working on?”. Explain the following:
    • If you spend more than 30 seconds a day preparing for this, it’s way too much.
    • You can share anything, a screenshot of a polished design, a paper prototype, a photo of a team out researching or even an email or spreadsheet. The goal is to share early and often.
    • Sum up your post in a sentence, keeping it light-hearted.
  3. As people share their work, encourage conversation, reactions and collaboration.
  4. The person who asks the question today nominates someone to do it tomorrow, so every day someone makes it happen.
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6

What next?

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Congratulations you have completed the Build Psychological Safety recipe! You have started to empower your team and build trust.

Now that you are working on fostering an environment where your team members believe they can take risks and make mistakes, you can start working on building a strong and dependable team by understanding its complex web of connections with the How to Build an Effective Team recipe. 

Do you have questions, tips or tricks, etc? Join our Slack community of over 13,000 professionals.

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