Another thought on listening

I wrote about listening a few days ago. Then yesterday, I came across this paper by way of HBR. The paper studies psychological safety and its correlation to how teams learn and adapt. Unsurprisingly, the study finds many positive correlations between psychological safety and team performance. I list a few below.

  1. Direct relationship with performance. Team psychological safety was positively associated with team learning behavior (seeking feedback, discussing errors, experimenting, adapting, improving).
  2. Reduced friction caused by power and team dynamics. Teams with higher psychological safety give back greater returns to their employers in the form of learning, adaptation, output, and feedback to upward feedback.
  3. Teams that are high in “team learning behavior” have high psychological safety and perform better… in fact, it reshapes our earlier thoughts on efficiency.
  4. Team efficiency may be less important for helping teams learn than we thought. Psychological safety may be the friction reducing mechanism that enables more learning and productivity.

You saw the concept “team learning behavior” a few times. The concept describes how a team works. Seeking feedback, continuous improvement, and shipping work are all hallmarks of high performing teams and teams high in “team learning behavior.” It just happens to follow that teams that demonstrate high team learning behavior also are more likely to be high in psychological safety.

One Useful Thing

As a savvy leader, the best thing you can do is create space and time to get better at interpersonal communication.

  1. Listen more and better.
  2. Wait a beat before decision.
  3. Ask more “what if” and “how might we” and “ooh, that’s interesting, how did that…” style questions.

These behaviors act as signals that communicate your desire for more openness. When your team perceives openness, they’ll begin feeling confidence to be more generative. Generative teams ship work. You only grow if you ship.

I hope I’ve shown that three simple behaviors above can start you on a path to increasing team learning behavior and improving the psychological safety of your team.