pSychological safety

Help your leaders and teams understand and improve psychological safety and cultivate the conditions for tangible business benefits.

More evidence is emerging that Psychological Safety is at the core of team
effectiveness. Interest has been building particularly since Project Aristotle
published by Google in 2015.  Studies, going back to Schein in the 1960s and
Amy Edmondson in the 1990s underpin this with academic rigour.
 

After a thorough study of 180 teams, Google concluded that Psychological
Safety is “by far and away the most important of the five dynamics we found, it
was the underpinning of the other four”. 
 

If you…

  • Have challenges creating an Agile work culture 
  • Are worried about delivery not improving 
  • See a lack of innovation, low morale and retention issues 

Then Psychological Safety provides you with a way to begin to improve. However, many organisations are trying to work out ways to address issues of low Psychological Safety or how to begin raising safety levels in their teams.   

How can we help?

We offer you a way into the conversation and the techniques to begin to address the challenges. 

Team Scan 

Let us help you start exploring Psychological Safety within your team with the Fearless Organisation Scan.  This short scan enables you to benchmark your team’s current safety levels and raise awareness of the impact this may be having.  

Cultivating Safety

Following on from the Scan, you have the option to further explore and embed the deeper principles, along with simple and effective interventions that can be used to improve Psychological Safety within your team and organisation. 

This involves a programme of workshops and group-coaching sessions to further explore and practice the elements and habits that contribute to safety.

The Fearless Organisation Scan is a quick and proven way to start the conversation about Psychological Safety. The short scan enables you to benchmark your team’s safety levels with hundreds of other teams.

There are three steps to the scan 

  • A one hour briefing of the team on Psychological Safety and
    why it matters in a team, the wider business and for them, as individuals.
  • A short five-minute survey to be completed by the team.
    This includes the questions that Dr Amy Edmondson has
    been using for years which have been validated to be a
    reliable indicator of safety.
     
  • A three hour team debrief, where we explore the results and reflect on what might be happening within the team and what options are available to them. 

Typically, this can be completed within two weeks. Time that is well spent to raise awareness of how Psychological Safety may be showing up in a team and then how to begin to address such an important topic. 

Bazil Arden and Sophie Manton have been certified by Fearless Organisation to run the scan with your teams.

This series of sessions aims to build awareness and understanding of the
underlying mechanisms of Psychological Safety with specific techniques on how
you can begin to improve safety.
 

We focus on four elements which influence safety. 

  • Raise awareness – by attuning people to sense when safety is low so that
    they can begin to do something about it.
     
  • Learn and adapt – by reframing failure and evolving an attitude of
    experimentation and reflection. Psychological Safety speeds up and
    improves the quality of learning. This is especially important in a volatile
    and uncertain world, where our ability to adapt is key to survival.
     
  • Have real conversations – by having candid conversations where we are able to openly discuss the difficult challenges and not settle for artificial harmony. 
  • Create the space – by enabling everyone to bring their full selves to work through sharing perspectives, increasing diversity and deepening exploration.  
Two x Three-hour Training Workshops  Four x One-hour Team Coaching Sessions 

Two three-hour workshops will help your team to understand and explore the elements of safety.  

The workshops tie this into other related frameworks, like ‘The five dysfunctions of a team’ by Patrick Lencioni and Daniel Pink’s book, ‘Drive’, where he defines ‘Intrinsic motivation’, based on Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.  

 

This is followed by four one-hour sessions, every two weeks, to give people the focus and space to practice these subtle techniques and begin to change habits.  

Each session focuses on one of the four elements. Choose a technique to practice and we reflect and distil lessons from experiences in the previous two weeks. We aim to create a self-sustaining cycle of practice, learning and support, which can continue beyond our engagement.  

 

Importantly, the aim is NOT to grow psychological safety, as nice as that may be! It is to cultivate the psychological safety ‘soil’, in order to grow the business and personal benefits.