Why the CEO (or any team leader) should really care about team psychological safety.

You are a CEO, Managing Director or team leader and you have probably heard about team psychological safety or maybe have seen the term appear left and right in the news or on social media. So what is this really about? And why should you care?

Whatever your exact job title or role may be, as a team leader you have –by definition – responsibilities over a team. The team’s performance –by and large –is actually your own performance. You will be evaluated on how you do in your role depending on how your team is performing. Performance can be around sales, cost reduction, improving employee engagement or developing new products and services faster than the competition. Whatever the specific area of performance, the performance your team delivers is key to your own success as a professional.

What is needed to guarantee team performance? You may think it’s important to have the best team members, or SMART targets, or a good incentive system. All these are important, but I invite you to look at team performance from a different angle. I share that the key for a team to improve its performance is the extent to which that team can learn. When we talk about team learning we don’t mean learning in the sense of accumulating knowledge or studying or going for a certificate.

Team learning has two components. The first one is learning about the job we're doing: the tasks, the processes, the environment, the competition, our clients or our key stakeholders. The second component of team learning is learning about the team itself, asking questions like “To what extent do I know who in the team is good at this and I could use their help?”, or “Who in the team is struggling with something where maybe I can help?” or “How do people think differently in my team?”. This is about how well do I know my team members and the way they work.

So, with those two components of team learning, why does team learning guarantee team performance? Team learning means that I learned something today from the job or from the members in my team, I can take action based on that tomorrow: I apply what I learned, and this will improve my performance. And the same thing happens the next day. If a team can in a continuous way learn on the two dimensions of team learning, either about the job or about the team, it will almost guarantee to improve its performance.

So, the key to improve team performance is to ensure that the team learns. And that of course brings us to the question “What is the key to team learning?”. Many researchers and practitioners have tried to answer that question. One of the key insights came from Professor Edmondson’s research more than 20 years ago, where she demonstrated that the level of psychological safety in a team is a key driver to team learning. If the team members feel that they can come up with new ideas, ask questions, disagree etcetera with others in the team, then that is the key for the team to learn. In the opposite situation, when team members are not saying anything, not asking any questions –even if they disagree or don’t understand –the team just stands still.

This link between team psychological safety and team learning has been validated academically through many follow-up research publications, but also by Google's own internal study [2] where the company analyzed why some of its teams were doing consistently great while some other teams were struggling. Google came to the same conclusion, namely that the biggest factor by far – actually four times more significant than the others– was the level of psychological safety in the team.

This is why for a team leader, team psychological safety is a key

determinator of how your team will learn and therefore how it will perform. Keep that in mind when you hear about team psychological safety because too often it seems described as a lofty target, an atmosphere, or a culture we should aim for. 

Ultimately, team psychological safety drives team performance and that's why every team leader, whatever the level of responsibility, who is responsible for a team's performance should check out what team psychological safety really is about, how you can impact it and what the key drivers are that make it such a powerful tool to help your team move forward.