Thriving Teams: through the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety*
(Still) Feeling Fatigued? Finding it hard to Manage your Mind?
Solutions may lie at the intersection of research on Wellbeing and Psychological Safety.
Seemingly every where we turn, we hear of the big promises psychological safety offers; increased customer connection, productivity, ethics, innovation & performance and in a year when Wellbeing in the WorkPlace has never been more in the spotlight, it is now clear it also has a strong impact on the wellbeing of individuals and teams.
How does Psychological Safety support Wellbeing?
In The Wellbeing Lab’s recent report, 3 keys to consistently thriving were identified:
Ability to manage your wellbeing
Motivation to manage your wellbeing
Psychological Safety in the workplace
As managers and leaders, we have a meaningful impact on a team member’s ability and motivation to manage their own wellbeing, by visibly managing our own wellbeing and giving our team explicit permission, flexibility, time & space to balance business outcomes with their own individual physical and psychological wellbeing.
It's also now clear, we can have an additional subtle, but substantive impact on the whole team's wellbeing or "Thrive Factor", through the course of every day, business-as-usual conversations and meetings - by moving our teams through each of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety. (*Dr. T. Clark)
At level 1 - Inclusion Foundations: leaders who create an environment in which it is safe for everyone to be themselves, not just those most like the leader, have teams which experience a high degree of connection, commitment and community.
Honing your curiosity and looking for common connections with those less like you, are great ways to increase the belonging all team members experience in your team.
At level 2 - Learner Safety: leaders who are particularly effective coaches, create team environments which make it safe to ask questions, experiment and make (reasonable) mistakes.
This enables all team members to become more competent and confident on the job, and given how quickly we’ve had to learn, relearn and unlearn this year, (something we’re projected to need to do a lot more of in the future) learner safety, has become a critical core competence for organisations, whilst also contributing meaningfully to wellbeing.
Leaders with great coaching and curiosity skills, who balance showing, asking and explaining, are particularly effective at the development of personal and professional competence and confidence.
At level 3 - Contributor Safety: leaders who create a collaborative team culture, giving team members a degree of autonomy and self determination in how they bring their best knowledge and experience to their work, will access more of their team’s intelligence, whilst simultaneously increasing their thrive factor.
Collective leaders with collaborative mindsets and skillsets, are particularly effective at enabling the contributions and intelligence of their teams.
At level 4 - Challenger Safety: leaders who create a constructive and courageous team culture which enables all team members equally, to ‘spark off’ each other, contributing all of their diverse knowledge, tools, perspective and experiences, will generate breakthrough ideas and innovation.
The ability to make a meaningful difference, is a key thrive factor, and there’s nothing like having a positive impact and creating solutions to new or old problems, to generate a virtuous circle of performance in teams.
Consciously curious and courageous conversations are the key to deliberate discussions, debate and decisions, primed by leaders who make it safe to ‘speak-up’ and challenge (appropriately) in a team environment.
Conscious Collective leaders do the following:
set the stage for a virtuous circle of wellbeing and performance, for individuals, teams and business, by having confidence in their capacity to consistently:
Connect for belonging & community;
Coach for competence & confidence;
Collaborate for intelligence & autonomy;
Challenge for ideas, innovation & impact.
With 3 high value actions for each one of these critical Collective Leadership behaviours, it’s perfectly possible to move a team from one level of Psychological Safety to the next, in just 30 days.
Whilst we know we should be grateful for our situation here in Australia, the truth is it is still requiring a lot of grit and conscious resilience to manage our minds and maintain motivation in what increasingly feels like a marathon, rather than a series of sprints.
Creating an environment where we can acknowledge our struggles, continue to learn, contribute and make a difference, are amongst the most powerful tonics available in our WorkPlace.
We all thrive when we lay the foundations for Thriving Teams: through The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety.
