These 2 techniques can help cultivate psychological safety at work

There are certain moments that have an outsized effect on a team’s willingness to continue to take risks, admit failure, and challenge ideas. How a leader responds to feedback or challenges is one of these moments. Feedback is a powerful signal of trust from the team member, and what a leader signals back can amplify psychological safety, both for the individual delivering the feedback and team members who witness the moment.

I emphasize the need for leaders to slow down our instinctive fast-twitch brain, which is always there, always ready to help us fight, flee, or freeze. Our twitchy brain is evolutionarily hardwired and not that helpful at work! Consider the following scenario: 

You’ve been leading an intact team for over six months when a new trend has emerged in your industry that’s really shaking things up. As a result, the economics of your space have changed, and your team is under pres- sure to adjust its roadmap and move more quickly. You are expected to lead this shift. Your team is stressed out, spread thin, and beginning to worry about the future. You pull the team together to brainstorm a solution to a key problem, and in the middle of this meeting, a team member raises their hand and says, “I feel like we’ve been here before. I mean, you pulled us together less than a month ago for one of these exercises and now we’re here again. This is getting kinda frustrating.” Their tone is respectful, but their face and energy signals real frustration. Immediately, your twitchy brain starts whispering:

“Don’t they know how hard I’ve been working, too? I can’t help that the goalposts keep changing!”

“I can’t believe they’re calling me out in front of the whole group! Will the team lose respect for me now?”

“Is there an eject button in this conference room? Can I just catapult this person into space?”

Okay, so that last thought is a bit of a joke, but maybe not too far off from how you or I have felt in these tense moments. Our twitchy brains have kicked into a full “fight or flight” response and are giving us a variety of “meanings” to help us understand the moment. How we understand the moment has a huge bearing on how we will choose to act. Unfortunately, these “meanings” are loaded with noise . . . they are potentially inaccurate and harmful, and they are not going to position us to act in ways that bolster psychological safety.

When a leader responds poorly to feedback, it is often in response to not having a technique to slow down their response process, resulting in them acting on impulse.

I have compassion for this experience because it is all too human, especially when the leader is just as stressed, tired, and anxious as the team! But leaders generally want their teams to do their best work, so psychological safety is a key asset, especially in these crucible moments.

Technique 1: Inquire and Affirm 

The behavioral bio-hack I use to work around this scenario is to Inquire and Affirm. There are numerous models illustrating how to respond to challenges or feedback, and many are useful. As part of my personalized approach, I boiled a lot of these down to Inquire and Affirm. It’s super simple which increases the chance that we remember and use it under stress. Inquire is a call for curiosity. So, when you are challenged with feedback, use curiosity to slow down your twitchy brain and buy yourself time. 

To practice this step, I coach leaders to remember the phrase, “Tell me more . . .” as a signal of curiosity. When you find yourself on the receiving end of feedback and you feel your heartbeat accelerating, your mouth going dry, and your internal monologue going into panic mode, remember to slow down. Respond with curiosity first. “Tell me more . . .” or some other form of curious inquiry buys you time to listen more, breathe, and calm your twitchy brain down. In the space of a deep breath, you can remind yourself that our goal is to sustain a high sense of psychological safety, so how we respond in this moment matters.

The second part of this behavioral model is to Affirm. Affirm does not mean agree. Feedback and challenge come in all forms, and sometimes it isn’t even valid. But the act of a team member giving feedback signals trust and you, as the leader, have a responsibility to maintain that trust and amplify psychological safety by affirming their choice to trust you. By slowing down the twitchy brain, we get the chance to use a practiced form of affirmation: to acknowledge that you’ve heard the person and to thank them for stepping forward and offering feedback.

Notice that you’re affirming that you hear what they’re saying and the vulnerability they are showing you by giving you the feedback. This doesn’t mean you have to publicly or immediately agree with the feedback. If you can see feedback as valid and helpful in the moment, acknowledge this. In truly stressful experiences, it can be hard to sort out how we really feel about a piece of feedback. So, the Affirm step reminds us to clearly signal that you’ve listened and express support and appreciation for their choice to give you feedback. And then, if you need it, ask for time to consider, and respond to them in a day or two.

Let’s return to the scenario from before and see how Inquire and Affirm can help a leader invest in psychological safety:

Team member: “I feel like we’ve been here before. I mean, you pulled us together less than a month ago for one of these exercises and now we’re here again. This is getting kinda frustrating.”

Leader: “Hey, thanks for stepping up. Can you tell me more about how this feels like the same thing we did a month ago?”

Leader: “I’m hearing your frustration with how intense and unpredictable the last few weeks have been. Thanks for letting me know that this brainstorming session feels like something we’ve already done. I appreciate you stepping forward and naming your perspective. Let me consider it for a bit and get back to you on how the team can solve problems going forward. Can we talk tomorrow, one to one?”

By using the Inquire and Affirm approach in this stressful situation, the leader has increased the chance that the team will continue to have enough trust to speak up in the future. The team member who offered the feedback knows that there is a follow-up action coming tomorrow, and the entire group saw how the leader affirmed the choice to give feedback and offered to consider it carefully. In the one-to-one meeting the next day, this leader may decide to disagree with the team member’s assessment and offer a counter-perspective.

Maintaining psychological safety does not mean abdicating your perspective or responsibility as the team leader. But leaders can disagree in ways that still signal, “I don’t agree with your feedback and I see your perspective and appreciate you taking the risk to share it. You are safe with me.” This is a leadership skill worth cultivating through consistent practice, as it is a powerful way to generate and maintain psychological safety and peak performance on your team.

Technique 2: Setting Team Norms 

In one of my first leadership-level roles, I reported to a vice president who was intent on creating and sustaining a high-performance team in a particularly challenging organizational culture and system. She hired a coach for our leadership team who worked with us in an ongoing process to help us do our best work despite some of the conditions that we could not control.

I remember being excited and a bit nervous about going to my first leadership team gathering with this group. I’d anticipated that we’d start the morning by discussing our strategic plan or looking at the budget for the next year. But, when we got started that morning, the vice president said, “We’re going to get started by creating our team’s Rules of Engagement.” 

We spent the first part of the morning having an open discussion on how we wanted to communicate, interact, and hold each other accountable as a team. We generated a list of commitments and spent time stack-ranking this list and cutting some items. By the afternoon, we had a Rules of Engagement document that everyone felt invested in. This document did not get shelved as an artifact of that offsite. Every time we gathered in the vice president’s conference room, it was up on the wall, reminding us of what we’d committed to. And, at future offsites, we took a smaller amount of time to revisit the Rules of Engagement and consider modifications to the list. It was a living document.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a best-practice example of how to increase and sustain psychological safety for a team. The coach helped us insert principles of feedback into the list of rules, like a commitment to speaking up early and often and a commitment that the feedback recipient would respond with empathy and integrity. An established set of team norms becomes a way to drive psychological safety because a team can insert behavior techniques like Inquire and Affirm into their team norms. Or, you can commit to disagreeing with each other’s ideas and not attack the person as a way of setting healthy boundaries for conflict.

When I raise this leader’s commitment with my clients, they sometimes sheepishly ask if it is too late—or simply weird—to add this if they’ve been leading an intact team for quite some time. The answer is simple: It is never too late to commit to a collaborative process of establishing team norms. You can simply say, “Team, we’ve been working well together, and it’s occurred to me that we will benefit from having a set of team norms for how we interact, give feedback, and respond to challenging moments.”

Leading your team in a brainstorming and ranking process for these kinds of norms often results in the leader learning a ton about their team’s needs and priorities. Building a set of team norms can not only help the team bolster psychological safety, but it might also alert the leader to where future skill-building work is needed, based on what emerges in the brainstorm. And remember, team norms should never become a stale artifact sitting in a cloud drive somewhere. Keep this as a living document. Revisit it with the team often, and reference it when making tough decisions or responding to feedback.

Excerpted with permission from The Alchemy of Talent: Leading Teams to Peak Performance by Vijay Pendakur.