Being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career.

Kahn, 1990

Building trust and psychological safety in every team in an organisation is an essential first step to being effective. Psychological safety is a shared belief that team members are safe to take interpersonal risks; admit their mistakes, acknowledge their weaknesses, and ask for help when it’s needed. Where there is trust and psychological safety in the team:

• Innovation improves
• Team members learn quickly from their own and each other’s mistakes
• Problems are quickly overcome
• People are more engaged

If the team has a low level of trust and psychological safety, we know that innovation and learning stalls and gossip and politics breed.

Amy Edmonson has a fantastic TED Talk on the relationship between Psychological Safety and Accountability, as explained in this diagram:

The ideal zone to be in is high levels of accountability and high levels of psychological safety – that’s where people learn. Often people are in the anxiety, apathy or comfort zone; all of these pose problems for team leaders and team members. The aim should be to shift to learning.

Building trust between people and a team environment of psychological safety takes time and preparedness of all parties to be vulnerable. It requires a team leader to actively build a culture that allows people to feel safe and bring their whole self to work. You cannot underestimate the importance and need to constantly reiterate this to a team!

As a team leader, be vulnerable yourself! Set a good example that ‘it is OK to share’. You can help relieve anxieties for people who find this challenging. Be mindful of the different DiSC types – your D and I styles are more comfortable sharing than C and S. Brene Brown’s TED Talk on vulnerability is also a great resource which you can set as homework or watch together and discuss in a team session.

Behavioural Models

Behavioural models help individuals focus on behaviours to support teams being resilient and healthy and recognise those behaviours that may be unproductive.

Adapt offers two simple easy-to-understand models which quickly give teams a common language to make discussion and feedback productive.

I, We, It

This model serves nicely to focus the conversation on matters other than task and is a simple way of looking at the integration of you, the people in the team and the work of the team.

Above and Below the Line

This model is useful for individuals to understand and reflect on their own behaviour and ask themselves at any given time: ‘Am I behaving above or below the line?’. Am I being open, curious and interested?

Conscious Leadership have a great video which every team member should watch to understand this behavioural model – a simple line which you as a team leader will come back to time and time again!

We are all different

A key tool we use to highlight ‘We are all different’ is the DiSC Workplace Profile. To learn about DiSC, read more here: People are Different

Personal Values

Personal values are an expression of what you believe is most important for the way you live and work. They (should) determine your priorities and the choices you make. They are your personal guidance system.

When you are living and working in accordance with your personal values, you feel content and safe. When you find yourself living or working in an environment that feels like you are behaving in a way that is not aligned with your values, you can become stressed and unwell.

Ask the team to organise themselves into pairs. Suggest they work with someone who they don’t interact with as much as others in the team.

Give each pair a pack of values cards to work with.

Ask that someone in each pair nominates to go first and have that person work through the value cards, putting them into three piles: very important, quite important, not very important. Their partner deals the cards to try and keep some pace to the exercise.

When they have completed this, they discard all the cards in the quite important and not so important piles.

Now, working with the cards in the very important pile ask them to rank the values from most important to least important. Again, their partner handles the cards arranging them in order – they can ask is this value more important than less important than the one already on the table – and so on until they are on the table in order of importance.

They then record the top six values, their meaning and questions to check in on whether you are living them.

Because of time, an alternative suggestion is to take the task of fleshing out their values away as ‘homework’. Have them ‘check in’ on the next session by sharing their top two values.

Adapt Values Cards
Define Personal Values

Rely on, watch out for

The purpose of this activity is to help individual team members understand themselves better, to provide a tool that helps team members to know each other better and understand individual strengths and weaknesses, and to continue to build a team culture of trust and psychological safety.

• What I Value
  What are some of your highest values and why are they important to you?
• People can rely on me to
  An important element in building trust in relationships is being able to rely on your teammates. What positive behaviours/strengths can your team rely on you to bring to the table that can support the team delivering on its purpose?
• What frustrates me
  It can be helpful for your teammates to understand what frustrates you. It doesn’t mean they can or should avoid these situations but understanding them will help them work better with you.
• Watch out for
  What are some behaviours that you can display that can make you less effective in a team?