Psychological safety has been found to be foundational to highly performing teams. In this presentation we explore what psychological safety is, why it is important, and some practical ways you can help create it in your teams.

1. Highly Performing Teams
& Psychological Safety
Creating a Fearless Organization
David P. Moore
8/13/2020

2. First a little bit about me…
• With CarMax since 2019, came from CapTech and before that
worked at Capital One
• Served on the Data Science Machine Learning (DSML) team,
recently moved to Enterprise Data Lake (EDL) team
• 20+ years in data and software dev, with a passion for agile
practices
• Two Fun facts: I have a black belt in Silkisondan Karate and I
love to play guitar and listen to music

3. Google’s Project Aristotle
• 2+ years
• 200+ interviews
• 180 teams
• Attempted to answer the question: “What makes a team
effective at Google?”
• Discovered that it wasn’t the “Who” was on the team that
mattered as much as the “How” - how did the team interact?
• Found that 5 key dynamics were important, and of those
five, psychological safety was found to be the most
important.
• “Psychological safety was far and away the most important
of the five dynamics we found -- it’s the underpinning of the
other four.” - Julia Rozovsky

4. So what is
Psychological Safety?
Term coined by researcher Amy Edmondson, Novartis
Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard
Business School who defines it as:
“a shared belief, held by
members of a team, that the
group is a safe place for taking
risks”
- Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization

5. What does psychological
safety look like?
Team members:
• Feel safe sharing ideas
• Not afraid Speak up
• Ask questions
• Admit uncertainty
• Are in touch with one another’s feelings
“It describes a team climate characterized by
interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which
people are comfortable being themselves”
- Amy Edmondson

6. Collective Intelligence and
Teams
• From his book “SMARTER FASTER BETTER”, writer and reporter Charles
Duhigg tells of a 2008 study by researchers from MIT and Carnegie
Mellon
• They asked the question if the “collective intelligence” of teams was
distinct from the intelligence of individuals
• Recruited 699 people, divided them into 152 teams and gave them
assignments that required different kinds of cooperation
• The teams that did the best were not necessarily the ones with the
smartest people, they were the teams where:
1. All team members had an opportunity to share in roughly the same
proportion – “everyone has a voice”
2. Teams demonstrated high social sensitivity: skilled at sensing the
emotions of others

7. So why does psychological safety matter?
Within most organizations teams have become
the fundamental organization unit.
People working together in teams can more
effective and achieve more than individuals
working alone.
Truly great teams experience synergy:
the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

8. Factors of
psychological
safety
Psychological safety…
• Is local to a team – it can vary from team to
team within the same organization
• Is directly impacted by a team’s leadership
• Affects the ability of team members to learn
• Lack of it can lead to disastrous results

9. What psychological safety is
not
• It is not about being “nice”
• It is not a personality factor – applies to
extroverts and introverts equally
• It does not mean lowering performance
standards
• It does not mean you always have to agree
“Psychological safety sets the stage for a
more honest, more challenging, more
collaborative, and thus also more effective
work environment.” Amy Edmondson
From “The Fearless Organization” by Amy Edmondson

10. What about fear?
In the knowledge worker economy,
fear is not an effective motivator
• Frederick Taylor’s 1911 work The Principles of
Scientific Management set the stage for much of
the way businesses managed and motivated
employees in the 20th century
• Based on top-down management, command
and control, and external motivators of fear
and rewards (carrots and sticks)
• This is effective in factories, where work is well
defined and routine
• Knowledge workers however need to work
creatively and collaboratively
• Fear has the effect of reducing or even eliminating
the ability to think creatively

11. Some ways psychological safety is lost
• Destructive criticism or sarcasm
• Passive aggressive communication
• “Just kidding” comments
• Exclusive in-groups
• Talking negatively about others when they
are not present
• Interrupting
• Information hoarding
• Turf wars
• Excessive hierarchies in organizations

12. Character
traits to
foster
psychological
safety
• Authenticity: be real
• Openness
• Resilience: ability to be curious
• Courage
• Humility
• Clarity: “Clear is Kind, Unclear is unkind”
• Vulnerability
“My favorite definition of love is giving someone
the power to destroy us and trusting they won’t
use it.”
- Simon Sinek in “Leaders Eat Last”

13. Practical ways to build
psychological safety
• Start with leading by example
• Model listening and social sensitivity
• Ask how people are doing
• Invite team members to participate
• Take time for the human side
• Celebrate success, milestones, birthdays and
anniversaries
• Recognize accomplishments
• Spend time getting to know each other
• Ask how team members are feeling
• Learn to laugh at yourself and have fun

14. Communication is vital
• Talk about communication norms as a team and
understand preferred styles and which tools team
members prefer to use
• Teams, Chat, Email, Text, Calls
• Synchronous vs. Asynchronous
• Allow everyone an opportunity to have a voice
• Add a photo to your online profile
• Use video cameras for online meetings
• Leverage recordings of meeting when some team
members can’t be present so that they are not
excluded

15. Understanding and dealing
with emotions is key
“Anxiety is one of the most contagious emotions that we
experience… calm is equally contagious”
Brené Brown in “Dare to Lead”
• Emotions are the impetus behind all action
• Being emotionally literate is important to sensing your
team’s moods and helping to be buffer in responding to
negative changes or events
“Emotional aptitude is a meta-ability, determining how
well we can use whatever other skills we have, including
raw intellect”
Daniel Goleman in “Emotional Intelligence”
At the end of the day people won’t remember what you
said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.

16. Consequences of psychological safety: A tale
of two crashes
• In her book “The Fearless Organization” Amy Edmondson tells the story of two
separate plane crashes both of which can be viewed through the lens of
psychological safety:
• A preventable failure - The Tenerife Airport Disaster of 1977, where two 747s
crashed on the runway, resulting in 583 deaths
• An unpreventable failure – The crash landing of US Airways Flight 1549, the
miracle on the Hudson in 2009 after a dual engine failure, resulting in the
survival of all 155 people on board
• Both of these crashes can teach us something about the impact of how teams
interact under pressure

17. Tenerife airport disaster
• Occurred on the small island of Tenerife
• Planes were diverted due to a bomb scare at the main airport
on another island, causing delays and unusually heavy airport
traffic
• Sudden heavy fog with no visibility
• Pilot of KLM 4805, Captain Veldhuyzen van Zanten, was the
airline’s chief flight instructor
• Communications between the control tower and planes
experienced interference
• KLM Flight 4805 was behind schedule and further delayed
due to last minute need to refuel
• KLM Flight 4805 took off without receiving clearance and
crashed into Pan Am Flight 1736 taxiing on the runway killing
everyone on board and many on the other plane.
KLM 4805 cockpit sequence of events (as recovered from
the voice recorder):
1. Captain Veldhuyzen van Zanten impatiently started
throttling after lining up for take off
2. First Officer Meurs advises that they were not yet
cleared for takeoff
3. The captain replies "No, I know that. Go ahead, ask.“
4. First Officer Meurs radios the tower and requests for
clearance
5. The tower relays back route information to follow
after takeoff, but not explicit instructions that they
are cleared for takeoff
6. The First Officer replies “we are ready for takeoff”
and the Captain interrupts and says “We’re going”
and begins down the runway
7. The tower instructs the Pan Am flight “to report
when runway clear”
8. Upon hearing this, Flight Engineer Schreuder asks “is
he not clear, that Pan American?”
9. The captain responds with an emphatic “Oh yes”
and continues down the runway
10. Moments later through the fog they realize their
mistake as the other plane looms in front of them,
but it is too late to change course…

18. Miracle on the Hudson
• US Airways Flight 1549 took off New York city LaGuardia Airport
• Immediately struck a flock of Canadian geese, losing power in
both engines
• Captain Chesley Sullenberger took over the controls from first
officer Jeffrey Skiles, alerted the air traffic control and
attempted to return to the airport
• Within two minutes the captain determined that they would be
unable to return to the airport and then made the decision to
attempt landing in the Hudson river
• The plane crash landed in the river, and all 155 people on board
survived
US Airways Flight 1549 Sequence of events:
1. Pilot and first officer Skiles and co-pilot and captain
Sullenberger take off LaGuardia airport
2. 90 seconds after takeoff the plane hits a flock of geese.
“Birds” exclaims Captain Sullenberger. “Whoa” replies First
Officer Skiles
3. Both engines fail
4. Captain Sullenberger: “My aircraft” Taking over the controls
from Skiles who had been piloting.
5. First Officer Skiles: “Your aircraft” relinquishing the controls
6. Sullenberger contacts Patrick Harten air traffic controller and
reports the accident and asks to return to the airport
7. Harten suggests several options and Sullenberger replies each
time with “unable” and then “we’ll be in the Hudson”
8. The Captain announces to the plane “This is the captain.
Brace for impact”
9. The flight attendants respond by shouting at the passengers
to put their heads down.
10. Immediately before impact the Captain asks the First Officer
“got any ideas?” and the First Officer responds “actually not”
11. Seconds later they land on the water safely, and are rescued
within minutes by boats. The Captain is the last person to
leave, checking that the plane is empty

19. So how can I
help bring
psychological
safety to my
team?
Lead by example
Seek to understand others
Be authentic
Listen and ensure everyone has a
voice
Stay curious

20. Questions?

21. References
and Further
Reading
• What Google Learned from its quest to build the perfect team,
Charles Duhigg, NY Times 2/28/2016
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-
quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html
• The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the
Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, Amy
Edmondson, 2018
https://fearlessorganization.com/
• Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Amy
Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly 1999
https://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Group_Performanc
e/Edmondson%20Psychological%20safety.pdf
• Guide: Understand Team Effectiveness, Google re:Work
https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-
effectiveness/steps/introduction/
• Evidence of a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of
Human Groups
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47369848_Evidence_of_a_Collective_Intell
igence_Factor_in_the_Performance_of_Human_Groups