Assessing psychological safety in your teams
Where does your team sit on the safety ladder? Image from Grounded Curiosity
Thinking about the way that psychological safety is applied in your teams, you can consider it through a lens that has been adapted from a 2007 paper by Professor Patrick Hudson of Leiden University in The Netherlands. He studied safety in a multi-national oil and gas company mainly considering the reduction in accidents and in an industrial setting. Nonetheless, the principles can translate and are applicable for all teams.
As a quick aside, it's hard to imagine a safety culture that is strong on injury prevention and management that doesn't have a strong sense of psychological safety (where members are willing and able to point out risks, near misses, hazards and process improvements).
Where along this 'safety ladder' are your teams?
It seems obvious that high performing teams are looking to move away from pathological (where safety is not considered at all) and towards the generative level. This is where safety is embedded in a team's way of working and is part of a virtuous loop. Safety drives performance through cooperation, information sharing and trust. These experiences help people feel more safe to share and take risks. This makes people experience more safety and so the loop continues.
Most teams aren't operating at this level. The most simple explanation for that is that it's hard work! It takes time, effort and energy to create and sustain a strong safety culture. As a rule of thumb, if you don't at least consider your team's safety culture to be calculative (where safety is considered and known risks are managed), it's an area to focus on as a matter of urgency. If it's proactive or generative your job is to build, maintain and develop this culture. None of this is set in stone and taking your eyes off psychological safety can have the same impact on team performance as it can on injuries.
Some questions for you to consider in your teams:
Where along this 'safety ladder' are your teams?
What is one step you can do to either improve or maintain this level of safety?