Make psychological safety as tangible as share price and market share

A business delivering their strategy is impacted by lots of external factors out of our control. Geopolitics, economic conditions and the punches thrown by competitors. What is within our control is how teams interact with each other, and the data says two in five colleagues in a meeting are holding back with their views, ideas or concerns.

Before you think it's not your team, 70% of leaders overestimate their team’s willingness to speak up, often driven by ‘naïve realism’, a sense we as leaders know how others are feeling. We need to have the humility to appreciate we don’t know. The good news is we can find out.

We can measure and quantify psychological safety. Yes, in percentage terms. Benchmarked against other organisations. Just like share price and market share. This removes the guess work, inaccurate assumptions and endless hypothesising. How safe colleagues feel to share ideas, concerns and learning from mistakes is not down to leaders, it’s down to them. So ask them through a simple anonymised three-minute survey.

In my experience and from my own research undertaken under the supervision of Henley Business School, barriers include colleagues not wanting to come across as weak, so they don’t ask for help; not wanting to look intrusive or disruptive, so colleagues pull their punches instead of challenging the status quo; and being worried about looking ignorant, so holding back from asking questions.

The short survey discerns between the four domains of psychological safety which include the team’s ability to have open candid conversations; colleague’s attitude to risk and failure; how inclusive the environment really feels and how easy it is to ask for help. Your team anonymously rate seven statements resulting in a one-page report quantifying where your team is, where strengths are, and issues reside. Facilitated by an expert in team coaching and behaviour change, this data is the catalyst for an interactive workshop with the team to enable insight-based actions to give everyone in the team a voice.

So, if you care about creating greater inclusion and diversity, stronger innovation and creativity, or improved engagement and performance, make giving your team a voice as important as the share price and market share numbers you sweat over.