Stages of​ psychological safety in a team

*published on LinkedIn on Sep 8, 2019*

Psychological safety has become the bed-rock of building a solid team. It is every managers desire to build a psychologically safe team but just like most management terms, this one too is difficult to measure and assess.

Though it may not have a direct measure, we can use few proxies to measure psychological safety in a team. Below are stages of psychological safety based on certain team dynamics.

Stage 1: Team members start discussing about the ‘bad’ aspects of their job

It is quite common to discuss how great your job is and how meaningful your role is. This is how most discussions start in a new team. Then comes a time when the team starts to discuss about the shortcomings of the role or job, how their role is not adding value and where they feel powerless and helpless in their roles. This is where the team attains the first stage of psychological safety. 

Stage 2: Team members start discussing the shortcomings of their manager

No manager is perfect (no matter how much they think they are!). Every team member keeps on assessing their managers from Day 1 and start building a perspective. The team members do not start discussing about their managers’ area of development right away but slowly with time, team members start discussing about their manager among them and then with the manager himself/herself. This is a very critical milestone in team lifecycle and this marks the achievement of Stage 2 in psychological safety.

Stage 3: Team members start discussing about each other’s area of development

With discussions on shortcomings of the role and manager becoming commonplace, the team goes on to the next stage of psychological safety when they start discussing development areas of each other and start giving feedback to set each other up for success, this is the last stage of psychological safety in the team.

Normally the stages will follow the order, team starts with how to make the role better, then how to make the manager better and finally how to make each other better.

After understanding the stages comes the question of how do I put this framework in place and how to influence this journey. Simply look around the teams that you are part of, you are leading or you are influencing, look through the team dynamics to understand which psychological safety stage they are at. Talking about benefits:

  • First benefit will come through acknowledgement of the team dynamics
  • Next benefit will be the ability to plan on how do you take each team to the next stage in the psychological safety lifecycle
  • Managing a team becomes very easy once you know the stage. The journey is always gradual and management interventions will yield different results based on the stage of the psychological safety so you get to pick which levers to influence and when

Disclaimer: The article is based on my personal opinion. Neither any of my past organizations nor the current one subscribes to this line of thought.

83 thoughts on “Stages of​ psychological safety in a team”

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