Psychological Safety

Learning from Mistakes and Successes

Most of us are conditioned to avoid mistakes and failing at all costs, with failure presented as the polar opposite of success. In reality, making mistakes, getting things wrong as well as right, and more importantly learning from these experiences help pave the way to future success. When individuals, teams and organisations fear failure, they can be overly risk averse, give up at the first hurdle, and miss opportunities to improve in favour of sticking with the status quo. When they apply a growth mindset to failure, they seek to test and learn, experiment, and are able to maximise learning from both successes and failures. All of these aspects contribute to a high-performance culture that supports both incremental improvement as well as innovation.

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Humble Leadership

Leaders often believe that they need to have all the answers and can feel a lot of pressure to do so. People look to leaders for clear guidance, direction, and expertise especially in times of uncertainty and change. It is however impossible for any one individual to know everything in these and other complex situations. In these situations, we need to practice humble leadership. Humble leadership is about understanding where our own strengths and development areas lie, as well as understanding the strengths of others. This helps us know when to bring in others who may have more expertise or different expertise to us, who may help to flesh out a clearer and more complete solution or approach. Crucially, humble leaders also practise teachability – they are always looking to learn from others. This helps to boost both individual and team performance.

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Building Trust and Collaboration

Diverse thinking often exists within organisations, but organisations frequently fail to reap the benefits of different experiences, expertise, and perspectives because of lack of trust and collaboration between teams. This lack of trust can lead to frustration, conflict, teams pulling in opposing directions, and lower levels of performance, not to mention missed opportunities to innovate. So, what can leaders do about this? Higher levels of trust and collaboration can be built through several key growth mindset mechanisms, such as applying curiosity rather than jumping to judgement and blame when working with others, focusing on shared rather than individual objectives, and creating an environment where robust and respectful discussion and debate are encouraged. This working session aims to bring together teams who need to work together better, applying these techniques to lay the foundations for stronger trust, future collaboration, and performance.​

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The Power of Diverse Thinking

Teams with diverse thinking – a variety of experiences, expertise, and perspectives – perform better when working on complex problems and tasks than teams without it. They have higher levels of collective intelligence, which enables them fill in individual blind spots, be more creative, and make better decisions. Despite the benefits of diverse thinking, all too often we inadvertently discourage diversity of thought in the way we design our teams, manage meetings, and how we interact with others. So, as leaders how can we improve team performance by making the most of diverse thinking?​

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Building Psychological Safety

Teams perform best when there are high levels of psychological safety. That is, when people feel that they can speak up, share ideas, ask questions openly, as well as be open about mistakes and problems. When psychological safety is high, team members share more information, are less judgemental of others, are better able to deal with conflict, and collaborate more effectively. Managers have an important role in creating this type of environment through their words and actions.​

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Inclusion

Inclusion is a fundamental building block of psychological safety. Highly inclusive teams are more likely to invest time in welcoming and involving everyone in the team, no matter who they are. They value and embrace the different skills, experiences and perspectives that different people bring to the team. Understand what makes people feel included by discovering and celebrating differences and sharing stories. Individuals, team members, managers and the organisation share a collective responsibility to foster an environment where others feel they belong and are empowered to contribute.

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Tackling Complexity with a Growth Mindset

Leaders’ ability to engage with complexity is important when solving ambiguous and difficult problems, as well as when looking to assess the reasons for any failure. In complex situations there are likely to be multiple factors that interact to cause any given outcome.

While it can be tempting to look for simple answers, and sometimes seek to blame others if something goes wrong, this can have many unintended consequences. It can leave individuals fearful of providing feedback. It can result in a lack of empowerment to take risks and innovate. It can lead to ineffective and oversimplified solutions to complex problems. And, crucially, it can lead to a culture of cover-ups, where individuals don’t admit to their mistakes and so can’t learn from them. By taking a more nuanced approach that considers the situation and context people are operating in, leaders can identify systemic issues that may be at play and provide valuable opportunities to learn.

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