This is the fifth in series about psychological safety and teams.

Here is the overview:  Emphasizing Psychological Safety Likely Undermined Team Effectiveness.

In Part 2, I argue there is little to no chance that Google's Project Aristotle main conclusion that almost single-handedly caused this over-rotation towards psychological safety is true.

Part 3 suggested it would be better to focus less on silver bullets and the one thing "more than anything else" when trying to increase team effectiveness.  Understanding and harnessing team variation and helping teams find "their ways to win" is a higher leverage approach.

Parts 4, 5 and 6 are dedicated to unintended consequences from this over-rotation towards safety on teams. .

In Part 4, I suggested that psychological safety caused us to forget a maxim about Talent that we all once believed in.

And here in Part 5, I will talk about side effects in team dynamics that teams can easily slip into when they over-emphasize psychological safety.

Defining Psychological Safety

Besides Project Aristotle, the majority of published studies about psychological safety have followed Amy Edmondson's definition: "A shared belief amongst individuals as to whether it is safe to engage in interpersonal risk-taking in the workplace."

Some researchers feel psychological safety is an individual perception...the environment might be seen as fine by some, but perceived as unsafe by others. 

But Edmondson believes the individual perceptions can be aggregated into a group perception of the team.

These are some of the questions that make up her scale. 

1. If you make a mistake on this team, it is not held against you.
2. Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.
3. People on this team sometimes accept others for being different.
4. It is safe to take a risk on this team.
5. It isn’t difficult to ask other members of this team for help.
6. No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.
7. Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

Let's say you had assessed the team broadly as advised in Part 3 on other key aspects of team effectiveness.  And on dimensions such as...Mission and Stakeholder Clarity, the Quality of the Talent, Effective Operating Norms, Resources Needed to Win, etc...the team was aligned and scored high.

But let's say you also determined they were low on some of these or other psychological safety questions.

It would be perfectly appropriate to work with the team to discuss the scores on the psychological safety questions were impacting team effectiveness. 

Read that sentence again please.  I am not a psychological safety hater.  It absolutely can and does play a role in team effectiveness.

As mentioned in Part 3, I believe the role of the facilitator is to help teams find their ways to win.

If I were facilitating, rather than letting my unprocessed savior complex rush in ahead of me and mess things up, here are some questions I would nudge the team to discuss:

• Some psychological safety scores are clearly low.  Do you feel they are holding the team back from being as successful as it can be?
• Does the team believe investing the time to take on the challenge of getting to root cause and then taking steps to address these issues will improve team effectiveness or team outputs?
• And given what you are on the hook to deliver, is now the right time to discuss them?

My approach aside, let's further say you worked with the team to get at the underlying issues. And through that work, they are able to improve the psychological safety scores on the Edmondson scale previously described.

Mission accomplished, right?  Good to go, right?

“Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing glove.” ~P.G. Wodehouse’s Very Good, Jeeves (1930)

All Treatments Have Side Effects

The many crowing about the paramount importance of psychological safety on teams seem to view it as 1) an unalloyed good that 2) teams just need more of 3) to be successful.

As evidence of the "unalloyed good" view, do a search and see if you can find any of its advocates warning about potential side effects from increasing it. I'll wait.

But other than air, sunshine, and gravity, not much of value seems to come for free.

Imagine you circled back a few months after your psychological safety intervention with the team and you heard comments like:

• Before we did that work, people were working hard to be what the team needed them to be for the good of the mission.  We were focused.  Since we started to be more concerned about psychological safety and we started to encourage people to leverage their unique skills and talents, needed roles have been abandoned and our focus is more scattered.  We are not executing as well.
  
• In the past, if commitments weren't being met or the quality wasn't there, we would quickly address it with the team member and get a fix plan in place to make sure the project would not be affected.  The feedback was clear and immediate.  Since we started to focus more on psychological safety, we aren't speaking up as much because people said having their mistakes highlighted was hurtful. 

Further, what if you started to see outcomes such as these:

• A kind of faux harmony and an increase in post-meeting gossip because some people were uncomfortable with direct interactions about performance
• Evidence of Groupthink...a psychological phenomenon that entered the lexicon after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  It describes a particularly festive tendency for groups to make irrational decisions due to a desire for harmony or conformity
• Consensus Creep leading to Decision Paralysis...People increasingly thinking their voice should be heard and that they should be given a vote on every issue.  And, as a result, more decisions are rising up for the group to make as a whole, instead of being made close to the action by those most in the know
• HR starts to show up at team meetings due to complaints about the performance standards and pressure being too high
• Dates and deliverables slip because their is less transparency into performance
• Signs of unethical behavior begin to emerge
  • "Teams high in utilitarianism may utilize the psychological safety of their environment to choose
    the most beneficial option when making decisions, even if that option may be unethical. Once the unethical possibility is raised as a potential option, other team members may feel willing to support the idea, given a psychological safe climate within the team. These findings suggest that psychological safety might not always have a positive influence on team and organizational-level outcomes.  

Now, will all these side effects emerge on every team when psychological safety is increased? 

Of course not.  Just as you don't experience all the "contraindications" (a euphemism if there ever was one) listed in the Patient Labeling that accompanies a new medication you might take.

Can some of them emerge on teams? 

They not only can, they do.

This then is critical: How will the team prioritize norms, manage the inevitable between-norm conflicts, and prevent any one norm from becoming too dominant?

Norms & Norm Conflicts

No matter when you start working with a team, all teams already have norms.  But few on the team can state what they are.  Rarer still were they consciously created and defined.

Therefore, establishing explicit Team Norms, chosen and defined by the team, is a very common and often a very important step in helping teams execute more effectively.

And, again, norms around psychological safety could absolutely make the cut if the team feels they are part of the critical few that will best enable them to win.

While establishing explicit norms is generally a powerful step for teams that will improve execution, any and every team norm, taken too far, will have deleterious effects:

• Too much emphasis on accountability on can drive out experimentation & innovation.
• Too much teamwork can squelch individual effort.
• Too much emphasis on quality can turn into painful bureaucracy and reduce the speed of execution

Before we started prostrating ourselves at the alter of psychological safety, we used to know some common sense things.

Part 4 argued that we used to know how important Talent was to team success as underlined by the maxim first who then what.

We also used to know...for so long that the first time it was written down it was in Latin...that anything pushed too far is going to cause problems:

 Sola dosis facit venenum (the dose makes the poison) ~Paracelsus Third Defense, 1538

This then is critical: How will the team prioritize norms, manage the inevitable between-norm conflicts, and prevent any one norm from becoming too dominant?

I am not advocating for a Serengeti-like environment in the workplace.  I am advocating for clear norms and clarity about which norms take precedence so people can decide if that is the right place for them to grow and succeed.

Managing Between-Norm Conflicts

Consider this story from former NFL quarterback Alex Smith, who played/survived 16 seasons in the NFL (edited slightly for readability):

In film review, you go over your last game.  It might have been a very  tough game.  Most good coaches, they don't go over your great plays. They review the crappy stuff, which sucks.  But that's most coaches' mindset: You've always got to get better.

It's emotional, especially if you lost or you played badly.

And there's always the guy that gets defensive, he tries to say "But this guy did this. And this guy did that." And they're all very valid things, but it doesn't get you anywhere in that conversation. It's just a waste of time.

You learn pretty quickly, just don't be defensive. You get in there and you just take it, right on the chin.

Brutal, no? The psychological safety crowd must be aghast!

While clearly not a lot of fun for the player on the hot seat, I want to suggest that it might not be as bad as it sounds.

Because what you have is an environment where a crystal clear understanding is in place: choosing to be here means that you know the norm of "staring at the brutal facts" is going to take precedence over "any discomfort you might feel when we stare at your brutal facts."

Think this is just another sports story that doesn't apply to great companies? Think again.

Consider this excerpt from the Founders podcast episode #376 on Jensen Huang the founder of Nvidia, who has run that company for thirty years! (Edited slightly for readability).

"So there's this maxim like "praise publicly, criticize privately." Jensen does not believe this. He criticizes publicly so that the entire organization can learn from a single person's mistake.

His antidote to backstabbing, to gaming of metrics, and to political infighting is public accountability and, if need be, public embarrassment. Jensen says, "I just say it out loud. I've got no trouble calling people out. Feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn from this? We should all learn from that opportunity." 

Jensen is not doing this to intentionally hurt people's feelings. He's doing this because he puts the work up as the most important. He has this great line where he says, he 'tortures people into greatness'."

In the same podcast, they tell a similar story about Steve Jobs.

Jony Ive did an interview after Steve Jobs passed, recounting this conversation with Steve. He's like, "You know, you were kind of harsh with your criticism (of the team). We had put a lot of heart and soul into this." And I asked Steve, "Could we not moderate the things that we said a little?" And he said, "Why?" And I said, "Because I care about the team."

And Steve said this brutally brilliant, insightful thing. He said, "No, Jony, you're just really vain. You just want people to like you. I'm surprised at you. I thought you held the work up as the most important, not how you believe you were perceived by others."

I am not advocating for a Serengeti-like environment in the workplace.  I am advocating for clear norms and clarity about which norms take precedence so people can decide if that is the right place for them to grow and succeed. For the coach, it was improving and winning that came first.  For Jensen and Jobs, it was the work that came first.

Naive leaders and coaches just try to increase psychological safety because Google researchers said it was better.

But when a team decides it wants to increase the amount of psychological safety (or any norm for that matter!), more experienced leaders and coaches help them prepare to handle the inevitable norm conflicts that will rapidly reveal themselves as the team engages in its work.

In the case of psychological safety, those explorations and choice points might look like:

• How do we call out poor performance and still maintain respect for individuals? 
• How do we encourage people to bring the best of themselves while at the same time making sure they are doing what the team needs them to do? 
• How do we encourage people to raise issues and provide input, but be clear that they don't get a vote on everything? 
• How do we let people experiment and take risks but stay focused on the primary objectives and metrics?
• How do we balance speed, outputs, and mission success with the feelings/needs of people on the team?  In other words, how do we decide when people need to put on, as the saying goes, their Big Girl/Boy Pants and when do we need to pause and deal with team dynamics that are affecting execution?
• And how will the team make these decisions about norm conflicts...consensus, majority, unanimous, autocratic?

Of Mice and...Tradeoffs

You might remember the children's story of The King, the Mice, and the Cheese.

The King loves cheese, but the palace has a mice problem and they are eating his cheese.  So the wise men suggest he bring in cats and soon the palace is overrun with cats. Then they suggest bringing in dogs to drive out the cats...and then tigers to drive out with the dogs..and then elephants to drive out the tigers. And then, you guessed it, mice to get rid of the elephants.

A popular meme these days is:  No solutions.  Only tradeoffs. 

If that is truly the case, you help your teams, not by blindly introducing new norms or turning up the dial on existing ones. 

Rather, better leverage comes from helping them think through how they will manage the tradeoffs that will be, as they say, "coming soon to a theater near you."

The final installment of this series will discuss the most, in my view, egregious consequence from the over rotation towards psychological safety:  the lowering of our aspirations...not only for teams, but for the individuals on them.

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is an executive coach, organization consultant, and designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond, a consulting service that has helped hundreds of leaders stepping up into challenging new jobs get the best start of their careers.