An Example of Leadership Success: Building Psychological Safety
Want a team that performs at the highest levels? Make winning fun and learning a critical part of growth? The seventh blog is dedicated to one leader’s determination in developing a high-performing work team that fosters enthusiasm, continuous improvement, and fun in the workplace. Pat’s efforts have led her team to masterfully developing their skills quickly in delivering training and helping new leaders develop their leadership skills.
Pat heads the talent development group, and her team is responsible for providing ongoing training to help the organization’s employees and leaders develop. What makes this example special is Pat’s dedication to helping her team make learning fun, which in turn has produced a team where continuous improvement and innovation is how work gets done. Pat has accomplished this by putting into practice some key elements of psychological safety and making her team’s learning paramount to its success. Pat accomplished this by engaging in the following leadership behaviors:
Investing in relationship development. Pat strategically spends time with her team during one-on-ones and as a group with the goal of relationship development. This includes tasks like regular meetings to ask about how things are going both inside and outside of work, taking the team on group outings and lunches, learning about what’s important to her team’s life and career, and offering help when needed. Based on these discussions, Pat ensures her team has a proper work/life balance by offering time and resources when needed to help the team navigate the two. This investment ensures that her team knows she has their best interests in mind and is a foundation for the rest of the leadership behaviors.
Prompting open communication and collaboration. Pat proactively asks for ideas, concerns, and barriers during meetings and uses open-ended questions to get everyone to share their opinions. During these conversations, Pat focuses on talking last, saving her thoughts and ideas until everyone else has a chance to speak. Pat allows the group to decide what course of action needs to be done and supports their decisions with resources. Creating open communication ensures the team feels heard and builds ownership in how the team supports the rest of the organization.
Focusing on learning and continuous improvement. Pat creates an environment where feedback is helpful and expected within her team. This feedback not only helps the individuals improve, but it also improves the course material itself. After action review sessions are held after each training session to talk about what went well, the feedback received by the audience and what could be improved. Based on the improvement areas, Pat works with the team to refine and improve how content is delivered. If there are gaps noticed in the team, time and resources are given to help those individuals improve their content knowledge or delivery. All of this is accomplished using a non-punitive / continuous improvement approach. This investment in continuous improvement helps the team, content, and service delivery improve over time.
Providing positive feedback and reinforcement. Pat provides ample positive feedback and reinforcement for critical tasks that improve performance and wellbeing. She models this leadership behavior for her team. This includes both daily interaction / job task feedback and more structured interactions. For example, she sits in on training sessions and identifies critical behaviors that make the sessions successful. When needed, Pat also provides constructive feedback, but her focus is on providing positive feedback at a much higher ratio. This not only strengthens critical behaviors, but it makes any constructive feedback be perceived as more helpful. It also ensures her team is performing at their highest levels of performance.
The implementation of these critical behaviors by Pat has created a team of talent development specialists who love what they do and feel comfortable learning and developing themselves. It has created an environment that makes learning fun which is not only good for the team, but it is felt by the participants in their courses and training provided. Creating psychological safety has removed fear and led to a high-performing work team. Through Pat’s hard work, she has a dedicated and high-performing team. Any leader or organization who wants to reap the benefits of psychological safety inside their organization should consider emulating these critical behaviors.
