A last-minute psychological safety workshop
The TLDR version
We know psychological safety is important so we devised a workshop to align a group of HR stakeholders on how psych safety contextualises to Synergy. Like the movie inception, when you do a workshop on psychological safety, everyone is thinking about it and polite behaviours get a little weird.
In 2014, Google’s project Aristotle started releasing findings from their 3 year pursuit of answers to the illusive question of what makes high performing teams tick. The researchers found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together [link]. The most significant determinant of these high performing teams was psychological safety, being an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk such as speaking out against something they disagreed with without being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative or disruptive.
With this in mind, it isn’t really a big surprise that my work regarding prioritisation, value delivery and transformation in our new way of working, I would find myself designing a workshop to explore the role of psychological safety in our business performance. As an engineer, this presented a harder value proposition than previous more transaction opportunities like an investment a way to track worker location during COVID or entering a new market with a retail product. As with any element close to our companies cultures, behavioural factors affect all of our activities making it much harder to isolate the effect of an isolated change to one element such as psych safety.
The first prototype layout after our initial discussion.
So there I was, with one of my colleagues (a representative of our culture team) who was asking, “how do I communicate the potential for our business to invest in our people’s psychological safety? I hear a ‘discovery’ workshop might be a good way to flesh this out. How might we do this?” So, with many questions in my mind and a good deal of self-conscious doubt, I jumped in to some exploratory questions:
Who across the business do you think might be well suited to give a diverse response to this question?
Do you think those stakeholders share a similar definition to the phase ‘psychological safety’?
How might we understand the nuance of individual’s lived experiences rather than an ‘average’ person? and
How might we link observed behaviours to impacts to our businesses performance?
In order to stay on the same page while we worked through these questions, I brought up a Miro board [Link to Miro intro] and started drawing up elements to a 2hr workshop or ‘discovery’ session as we went. These visual elements helped us to tease out questions like “Would our attendees be able to answer these questions?” or “Do these insights bring us closer to understanding something about psychological safety that the business cares about?”. We centred much of our discussion around a problem scoping tool that we use widely across the business called an ‘opportunity canvas’ which is sort of like a living business case (learn more about opportunity canvases here).
With a couple of quick discussions later on in the week, soon the workshop day was upon us.
The agenda for the day, focusing on building empathy through divergent thought and then aligning on the opportunities presented by the full view of behaviours that arise from poor or strong psychological safety.
The Miro board after the workshop.
At the end of the day, it went OK. The ‘client’ was happy with the outcome but I was less sure that we had unlocked the full potential of the agenda. One of the goals of these discovery sessions is to get stakeholders on the same page. In that sense, it was a good session. On the other hand, there was something that made me feel a little bit uneasy. As with most workshops I run online, I asked the question “does everyone feel comfortable with taking a recording today so we can capture some of the context behind what we put on the board today?” This being a workshop about psychological safety, one of the hosts asked the very sensible question: “Do we all feel psychologically safe to answer that?” About 50 seconds later, I'd set up an anonymous survey for the participants too flag whether they were comfortable or whether they had some exceptions or whether they simply did not want to record the session.
Of the 18 respondents, 15 responded yes, 2 with modest exclusions and one answered that they preferred not. We agreed that if one person was uncomfortable, we shouldn't record and so we continued with the workshop. Interestingly, after the event, one of the event hosts told me that she had responded ‘no’ just in case no one else would, even if they felt uncomfortable and despite her feeling comfortable with the recording. Both of us agreed that it was a shame that we didn't get a chance to capture the session in retrospect.
That unease came from the observation that the attendees were being overly polite to each other and that there was less willingness to engage in vigorous discussion than in most of the other workshops I’d facilitated. Perhaps it was the topic and that constant reminder to create a safe space or perhaps it was more to do with the audience and the existing social dynamic but whatever it was, it made me feel like we weren't able to hear what challenges key stakeholders really wanted to solve for.
At the end of the 2 hour workshop, we’d aligned on key personae, mapped themes characterising the impacts of good or poor psychological safety to them and voted on key behaviours that lead to adverse business outcomes. We then mined the breadth of knowledge in the room to understand how we might use our existing data sources to test our hypotheses about the size of the business challenge at hand. At this point, I knew the ‘client’ would be able to determine next steps on characterising the opportunity and building the investment case.
Foundational elements to team performance from Google.
The learning that I took away from this experience was that every there are may different success factors to these different types of discovery sessions and it’s an illusive scenario when you nail all of them. Your client might be perfectly happy with the result of the workshop even if you think there was more insight to extract from the attendees. It always pays to watch for an optimism bias in a client and to coach them towards empathising with the wider group of attendees who might have different expectations from their attendance than the client.
This time, I picked up the planning and facilitation of the workshop at very late notice from a colleague who had been consumed by other work. Next time, I’ll ask more questions about the way the client wants their attendees to feel as they leave the workshop. I’ll also challenge the problem statement a little more by asking “who in the organisation cares about this topic” in order to better understand the stakeholder relationships at play and whether some might have goals at odds with the needs of the client. In terms of building psychological safety for a 2 hours session, I think I could have done more to bring out the thoughts of each participant by paying closer attention to who hadn’t spoken yet or who might be interested in explaining more about the context that sat behind their ideas on post-its. There will be a next time.
I hope this story give you some thoughts about how you might run your own online workshops on uncomfortable topics and if you’d like a sounding board on what you think may or may not work. I’d love to learn from your experiences as much as you might learn from mine.
So what can you do to uplift psychological safety in your team, at your workshops or across your organisation? There are some of my favourite readings on the leader behaviours that can really uplift team performance when it comes to creating engagement and psychological safety.
Follow on reads:
Curious about Project Aristotle? See this account from one of the researchers about how psychological safety is the #1 foundation for team performance. Good leaders can help to build this foundational element
Want to learn more about Project Oxygen? This page on Google’s re:Work blog shows the outcomes and recommendations for leader behaviour.
Here are a couple of other interesting management reads:
An older HBR classic article from 2005 on unlocking talent rather than trying to change your people.
