Are you Safe?

CVL Senior Consultant, Megan Sullivan, shares her thoughts on the importance of fostering Psychological Safety, and building a foundation of trust and understanding for team success.

A few months back I received a call from Brett Aldrige, Chief Operating Officer of the Te Roopu Waeture/Regulatory group with Waka Kotahi. Here’s how he described the situation:

“I contacted Megan to help me with a very dysfunctional team with little to no trust or safety to even be in the same room together. The team was also under considerable pressure to deliver a large, complicated and strategically critical project for the organisation. At the start of the process the individuals involved entered into a the process as a last resort but with little expectation of progress.”

Admittedly, that is not a fun place to start. But at CVL we are incredibly passionate about our work, our clients and our beliefs about leadership. As the famous quote goes “if you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.” It is important to us that we have a clear and strong voice around the important work we do.

Everything starts with inclusion.

Inclusion is the foundational cornerstone for high performance and innovation. Until people feel safe and invited to let down their guard, be their authentic selves and say what’s on their minds, the value of diversity is drained and the ability to innovate is compromised. Dr Timothy White outlines well the stages of Psychological Safety and the need to build foundational inclusion first before building towards Learner Safety, Collaboration Safety and ultimately Challenger Safety. Challenger Safety is where you cross the innovation threshold and reap the benefits we see so often with Psychological Safety because you start to see the behaviours catapult team performance to new horizons – debate, healthy conflict, raising issues and being in that “stretchy space” of ideation and value-mining. This is the coveted dynamic teams try to unlock.

Here's the challenge.

In today’s complex work world where everyone is running and reacting at pace, we are frequently seeing diverse and dispersed teams come together under tight deadlines with high stakes deliverables where Challenger Safety behaviours are needed to deliver well and nail it – yet they are often bypassing the foundational relationship-building required to safely move into these challenging behaviours and the result can be catastrophic for teams. Think about how you might react if someone debates you or gives you feedback or challenges your ideas when you don’t know them or know where they are coming from? The result is typically distrust, hurt feelings, and increased isolation. The alternative is that the team avoids these challenging behaviours altogether, which makes sense. I am highly unlikely to challenge you if I don’t think we can recover well. Stretching into that Challenger Safety zone requires more courage and therefore more risk. If we have not built up the goodwill bank through shared vulnerability, trust and connection, there is nothing to borrow against when things get tricky and we are likely to get stuck, unsure how to move forward. At CVL we are noticing more teams are coming to us at this stuck point. Such was the case with Brett and his team.

Time to hit the reset button.

The team was comprised of highly capable, motivated, and caring individuals which is important to note because there can be a tendency to try to scapegoat and blame individuals when we find ourselves in a toxic dynamic and yet the problem and solution is very rarely around a single individual. The path forward is to “slow down to speed up,” to hit the reset button and “humanise the team.” Doing this requires a deliberate focus on mechanics (our rules of engagement, how we will come together, our approaches for communication) and dynamics (our trust and relationship quality). We spent time defining our agreements around our meetings (ie questions over answers, no interruptions!) and mindset (the journey will be bumpy and that is ok). The impact of this initial work is it creates a safer “container” for the group to let down their guard because there are set expectations. We spent time with Whakawhanaungatanga – understanding where everyone comes from, important milestones that have shaped one another and how we show up. What inevitably results is the awareness that we have more in common than we think, more that connects us than divides us. The softening of the dynamic was palpable. People started to SEE one another.

There is no quick fix in recovering team dynamics. It requires a deliberate and intentional approach.

In addition to the relationships to withstand and recover from these courageous (and therefore more risky!) behaviours that become essential for innovation in today’s world, teams need a galvanizing aspiration – a vision of the future everyone gets excited about and deeply accountable to that compels them to excellence.  Because if I am not committed to the future we are trying to create I am very unlikely to challenge my team members – it just won’t feel worth the risk (remember we are asking for courage and there is no courage without risk). Amy Edmundson talks about the relationship with Psychological Safety and Accountability to Excellence being intertwined for performance. If we only have high safety but no accountability to excellence we see people comfortable but not contributing. If we only have accountability to excellence with no safety, we see people anxious and stressed out. When we have high safety AND accountability to excellence we see people engaged and innovating. So in addition to our mechanics and relationship building, we also focused on coming together around our important mission and bringing that into focus as an anchor to “snap” back to when the team gets in the weeds. In today’s work pace it is a struggle to convince teams of the value of slowing down to do this foundational mahi – it feels counterintuitive. However, when we allow ourselves to slow down to ground ourselves in authentic connection with a shared vision, we can often accelerate progress and things can recover quickly, as Brett discovered.

“The journey we undertook with Megan, and are still undertaking, was eye opening for the speed at which progress was made. The power of taking the time to get to know each other, our drivers, histories, strengths and challenges in a safe environment in building trust has facilitated a culture of inclusion and safety in 3-4 sessions. There is still a considerable journey to go but the team has built a foundation of trust and understanding that allows us to regroup when things don’t go well and have a conversation that centres us back on process and substantive issues and allows us to deepen the relationships that are being formed.”

Here are some of the things we have noticed make a real difference.

• Strong “all in” leadership support. Leaders need to authentically participate and be visible throughout the journey.

• Continuous focus on relationships – every meeting, every opportunity. We have a mantra – people over position, people over process, people over procedure – humanize all your spaces. Avoid the trap of thinking you don’t have enough time. A little bit of time and intention goes a long way.

• Develop strong mechanics to hold a container of productivity together – define your meeting agreements and what you will do when things get tough. Do not leave it to chance – these “rules” offer safety.

• Reinforce a shared commitment to move and think forward – this prevents the urge to jump back to the past when you have setbacks or when things get tricky – and they will get tricky.

• Engage the team in the process and solution – collective ownership is critical to moving forward. Leaders should shift from being in the middle and negotiating with every individual to a facilitator role, encouraging the collective work of the team.

• The biggest tip is to not let it get to this breaking point. It is much harder and takes longer to put the pieces back together after they are broken than it is to create the right foundation up front, as Brett reflected below.

This type of investment in team building should be made upfront as a matter of criticality for all teams with a desire to perform. If you are keen to know more, get in touch. We are currently running a series of short 2-hour sessions to help bring awareness around Psychological Safety.