Introduction to Team Leader’s Actionable Guide to Psychological Safety

In today's rapidly changing and competitive business environment, creating a positive work culture that fosters collaboration, innovation, and employee well-being is paramount.

While there are several contributing factors to creating this productive and thriving work environment, research shows that the impact of managers or team leaders in the workplace can be more influential than that of a therapist, spouse, or doctor in the day-to-day life of their employees. 

As a result, this responsibility often falls to managers and team leaders to ensure their team members feel safe to take interpersonal risks and express their ideas and opinions without fearing negative consequences like being judged and ridiculed. 

No matter your industry, fostering psychological safety is one of the most important and common threads among the teams performing the best and most consistently at work. Without it, members can fall victim to spending too much mental and emotional energy managing how others perceive them, resulting in poor productivity and problem-solving, low employee satisfaction, and a lack of innovation.

So while being self-aware and recognizing the gravity of your influence as a leader is essential to creating a safe space and culture at work, it's in the one-on-one moments and dedication to building trust through understanding principles and practices associated with psychological safety that you can help employees create an inclusive and high-performing work environment that nurtures innovation, collaboration, and individual growth.

But how does a business accomplish this task?

To help, we have compiled a guide that delves into the concept of psychological safety and its numerous benefits to both employees and organizations in creating high-performing teams.

The following contains actionable tips, tested and implemented as part of Project Aristotle, and the effort to improve the organizational development of struggling teams at Google with direct insights from one-on-one interviews and onsite workshops with team members conducted by Regroup CEO, Trista Taylor. 

Developed and executed with a common goal to build trust and equip these teams with the skills to nurture a safe environment to communicate and work together, the importance of addressing psychological safety emerged as focus number one in the effort to transform an "us" vs. "them" mindset that was ultimately affecting the productivity, morale, and increasing the risk of failure for these teams. 

How can Regroup help support and empower your team? 

As experts in strengthening managers and team leaders, we invite you to dive in and explore how building personal relationships of trust and having more empathy, open collaboration, and space for shared learning as a leader can lead to increased productivity and improve team member satisfaction and engagement.

By applying and revisiting the following tips included in our guide on creating a culture of psychological safety for team leaders, we hope that you, too, can build a work environment where safe communication is the norm and witness how that helps contribute to your team's performance, happiness, and growth.

If you need help supporting your team or managers or have questions about building a more psychologically safe team, get in touch and book a call. 

For more information on team development and coaching, visit regroup.co and explore how we are helping innovative companies build thriving leaders and teams.