Using the most important part of design thinking to help develop your team's psychological safety.
One of the hardest parts about creating psychological safety is not about getting it started. It's the continued efforts needed to make it a part of the team's culture. It’s so easy to go back to old ways of being. Especially when a team gets stressed or overwhelmed.
Interested in using the tools of design thinking to create psychological safety?
Building psychological safety can be a messy process. There are so many different personalities to take into consideration. How do you make sure to keep focused and stay on the right path? It can be difficult to know exactly what to do.
You’ve gotten everyone together for a strategy workshop, but no one seems to be engaged or willing to share their thoughts and opinions. It’s like pulling teeth. You work really hard to get people to openly participate, but it seems like it’s of little use. People seem to feel unsafe speaking up. You are feeling confused, frustrated and emotionally drained from all this work.
You’ve gone through all the work of creating and delivering a strategy workshop. But now there are still things that are unknown. Who is doing what? What tasks are involved? When will these be done by? And so on. When a strategy doesn’t get executed you feel deflated. Like all of the work was for nothing.
Running strategy workshops is a bumpy process. There is a lot to consider and working with groups of people can be messy. People want different things. Some people talk a lot while others stay quiet. It's very easy to go down unproductive rabbit holes.
What are the most helpful psychological safety exercises?
You know deep down that your team is a great one, but there is an issue that keeps coming up. The team does not feel truly safe and comfortable with one another. They need more psychological safety at work.
They keep quiet when asked for their opinion. They don’t work as collaboratively as they can. Sometimes there is a mentality of us vs. them.
What are the principles behind creating psychological safety exercises?
You can tell that the team is not feeling psychologically safe. You see people are having difficulties working with one another. People are staying quiet when asked questions. When you want to brainstorm new ideas, people keep hush hush. When you're trying to figure out a problem, the team averts their eyes.
Ready for meetings that matters?
It’s easier to keep meetings surface level. Keeping hush hush about the real problems that are happening. No one judges you, no one attacks you, no one dismisses you. You keep the peace when staying silent about the real issues. Avoiding potential outbursts and divisiveness that can ensue.
But deep down inside you feel disheartened, and even powerless to speak up. You know there has to be a better way to have these meetings. That these meetings are not at their full potential.
The intentions of meetings are fantastic. Let's work together to get things done. But they seldom feel that way. Conversations jump from one topic to another, people are disengaged and at the end, it leaves people wondering, “Soooo, now what”? People feel unheard, frustrated, and demotivated for the next meeting.
But meetings are such a great opportunity if they are done right. They can deepen relationships, create clarity and leave people feeling motivated!
The satisfaction and sense of accomplishment a team gets when solving big problems is incredible. But solving those problems, like starting new initiatives, can come with misalignment, people staying quiet, and even disagreement that causes divisiveness within the team. Leaving you with a disengaged group of people and plenty of stress.
But if you know what causes these issues and when they pop up, you can work to prevent them from happening in the first place.
When people feel safe to open up in meetings they can share ideas, which fuels creativity. They can share mistakes they made, which allows the team to learn. They can even challenge one another without divisiveness and get stronger outcomes.
But when you ask a team to share, you will often hear crickets. Leaving you feeling frustrated and confused.
Imagine working in a space when you ask people to share and they speak up. People are open and fully engaged in your meeting. There is dynamic conversation and things are getting done.
But there are a variety of reasons why people don’t feel comfortable speaking up. Causing a lot of people to be disengaged and leaving you with silence.
This can leave you as a leader feeling frustrated and confused. Luckily there are things you can do to create a more open and engaging environment.
A unified team culture that gets stuff done and creates impact is what any leader or team members want to be a part of. But divisiveness is something that can easily tear a team apart.
People stop working collaboratively with one another, they create more distance and start working in silos. They start getting angry, frustrated, upset, annoyed, confused, and it just kills the productivity of the team.
As a business consultant who works to develop collaborative and productive team cultures, I’ve worked with many different organizations to get rid of the divisiveness within a team.
In this video talk about where divisiveness often comes from and what you can do to start getting rid of it to create a collaborative and productive team culture.
Clarity in communication within a team is something all team members and leaders want. And yet so much miscommunication happens on a consistent basis. People start wondering if the other person is even making sense. People take something someone says and ends up doing the wrong thing because they misunderstood.
It can cause people to feel frustrated, overwhelmed, annoyed, uncertain. But it doesn't have to stay that way. You can develop a culture of clear communication with everyone.
As a business consultant who works with organizations that develop collaborative and productive team cultures, I’ve worked with many teams to help bring clarity in the way they deepen understanding and improves productivity.
In this video, I will share a simple format that you can use to understand where the gaps and common areas of misunderstanding in communication occur. Supporting you and your team to gain clarity in your team culture’s communication.