At Black Diamond Leadership, our executive coaches help teams achieve peak performance by empowering change and focusing on improvements in essential areas like teamwork, communication, and employee engagement. Why is this so important? When given the opportunity and tools they need, high-performing teams create real value in their organizations, reduce turnover, and innovate.

A high-performing team values personal input, empowers each member to contribute, and decentralizes power to allow its members to manage their everyday lives. These teams recognize member accomplishments and appreciate the importance of both qualities of life and employee engagement.

Success will come when employees believe their contribution is valuable and have the power to give back to the organization in new and creative ways. That’s why members of high-performing teams are multi-functional rather than stove-piped, allowing them to understand the entire organization and how their role fits.

High-performing teams are governed by processes, not structures, and a code of conduct, not strict rules, allowing for innovation. Together, high-performing teams foster innovation, creativity, and excellence and make measurable impacts on their organizations.

What is Psychological Safety?

Another critical component of high-performing teams is psychological safety. Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School professor and the author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, looked at how people interact in complex on-the-job situations and what variables impact the results positively and negatively.

Professor Edmondson’s research into psychological safety spans more than a decade. It provides practical guidance for teams to succeed in a continuously changing world by creating an environment where feedback and critical thought are welcome, not silenced or ridiculed.

She shares, “Psychological safety isn’t about being nice. It’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other. That kind of organizational culture is increasingly important in the modern economy.”

The psychological safety model enables mutual respect through candor and openness, setting high standards, and inspiring team members to reach them. Companies with a trusting workplace continuously perform better and reduce the risk of “headline-making” mistakes. People are empowered to speak up about what they see, helping to avert colossal failures (the headlines you never want to see) and human safety (injury-causing) mistakes. These high-performing teams are dramatically more likely to avoid adverse outcomes.

Psychologically, safety promotes a culture of ongoing learning and adaptability in an ever-changing world. In current conditions – with innovative companies disrupting marketplaces at a dizzying rate and social media increasing the speed of breaking news announcements – you need people to speak up. But psychological safety isn’t a magic bullet. It’s not a specific new tool to be quickly implemented. The results or ‘ROI’ can be hard to measure, with timelines differing dramatically from immediate, short-term effects to gradual, long-term change.

However, psychological safety strengthens the underpinning of everything successful businesses strive for – innovation, teamwork, creativity, engagement, and more. All of these things happen more when you have psychological safety. Rather than embracing FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), it’s time to embrace psychological safety. If not, you’re losing money, allowing for risk, and fostering staff turnover and disengagement.

How can I embrace Psychological Safety to improve my leadership style?

Want help identifying where to begin? Reach out to the Black Diamond Leadership team, and we’ll help you implement an assessment tool to measure your team’s psychological safety, identify gaps, and get you down the right path.

The Psychological Safety Assessment tool measures responses to the following statements on a Likert scale:

1. If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.
2. Members of this team can bring up problems and severe issues.
3. People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.
4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.
5. It is difficult to ask other members of the team for help.
6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermined my efforts.
7. My unique skills and talents are valued and utilized on this team.

Once we evaluate your team’s psychological safety against these markers, we will determine the best interventions (workshop, coaching, group work) and set you on the road to success as we work together to:

• Focus on the learning, not just the results
• Acknowledge our fallibility
• Model curiosity; ask a lot of questions.

For a team to succeed, psychological safety must be established within the group. Employees will not take risks or feel comfortable speaking up with new ideas without feeling safe. This can lead to stagnation and a lack of creativity. If you want your team to perform at its best, we can help you create a psychologically safe environment where they can thrive. Contact us today to get started!