Psychological Safety is a system, not an event

As a leader the most important aspect of your role is to create a system where your team feels safe, heard, understood and appreciated.

There are four levels of psychological safety:

1. inclusion - you are part of the group
2. learner - you can reach out for support
3. contributor - you can add to the team's knowledge
4. challenger - you can challenge the status quo

Psychological safety occurs when you can do these actions without fear of repercussion or reprisal. As a leader, it's up to you to create the systems of work that support all of these levels!

Setting a mutually respectful trust dynamic is not a "one and done" event; it is a consistent and repeatable practice of engagement, collaboration, and feedback that allows information to flow between the team, the leader, and the key stakeholders.

Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger. (Adam Grant - Hidden Potential)

You need to build a great "voice" system to become a great leader.

To create the system, you need to think in "systems".

Systems Thinking involves defining the boundary, i.e. where your control begins and ends, who is in your team and who is not, where the teams are located, and the communication mechanisms. This is your "system of interest" or "sphere of control". Once the boundary is defined, you can understand more clearly what is within your area of influence and what is not. You can also define what happens inside your area of influence: what do you and your team do, and what do you create?

This information is necessary so that you can begin to identify your system's inputs and outputs. The inputs are the elements that drive your system's behaviours, actions and decisions, and the outputs are the results of your team's actions. You need to know where your inputs come from, when and how, and you need to know where your outputs go, when and how.

Why?

Your working " system " is the combination of Inputs, Processes inside your boundary, and Outputs, and it is complex.

To create Psychological Safety inside your team, you will need to think about how to create a regular cadence of information gathering, analysis, decision-making, and feedback loops (both internal and external) and how to encourage your teams to collaborate at each stage of the delivery of outcomes actively.  

You will need to work with the team to define the optimal platforms for communication as well as decision-making. You will need to delegate as many decisions as possible, getting them as close to the information needed to make the decisions as you can, and then trust the team to make the right decisions. This means sharing information as widely as you can. This, too, means having an excellent information dissemination tool.

You will also need awareness inputs into the system. Note that "awareness" is not controlling, limiting, or censoring. Your team will need lee-way to access information outside of the system and collaborate with others without your "permission", but you will need to be aware of what information is coming into your system to help your team navigate the white noise in any work environment to optimise decisions.

Making the inputs, processes and outputs clear and available to all team members, coupled with setting up regular and consistent feedback loop forums you can craft an amazingly safe system of work that supports engagement and inclusion while highlighting empowerment and ownership within the team.

This is not easy work, nor is it something that you can just set up. Like any relationship, it needs awareness and maintenance. You, as the leader, are responsible for creating this system, supporting it, and learning from the participants in the system. It's a hard job! But good leaders do it, and do it well!