Is it contradictory?

Psychological Safety is a slightly misleading term. Many people think it's about being nice for the sake of avoiding conflict - that to be psychologically safe, we should avoid holding ourselves and others to a higher standard of performance. We’ll also avoid difficult conversations and feedback, so people feel safe. A psychologically safe environment is often uncomfortable, precisely because it is safe to do all these things. As a result individuals and teams will push into greater performance.

High psychological safety without a correspondingly high performance standard creates a comfort zone. Comfortable, but highly unlikely to yield high performance, learning or innovation. Over time, those comfort zones crumble into complacency and eventually apathy.

So what can our business owner of last week do to raise both psychological safety and performance:

• Aim for 5x as much affirming feedback as corrective. Tell people when they are doing a great job and why. This is significantly more effective in setting a high performance standard than critical or corrective feedback. And corrective feedback will be more willingly accepted when it is needed. People will want to know how to improve.

• Ask for feedback yourself. Listen and act on it. By doing so you set the standard that feedback is part of how we work.

• Give yourself feedback by reflecting on your work, what went well and what could be improved. Show the way on this and set up opportunities for others to do the same regularly. Many micro versions trump occasional large ones like performance reviews once a year.

• Be specific and clear when giving feedback. Many of us shy away from this in an attempt to be ‘nice’. It misses the mark.

• Get to know your team and what motivates them. When people feel you care about them as people, as well as the results, the results will benefit.

PS if you’d like some great questions to ask for reflection and feedback, send me a message and we’ll send them through.