Transforming Team Dynamics: Unveiling the Impact of Training on Psychological Safety and Trust

About a year ago I was at the Harvard Institute of Coaching conference. I was accepted to present a poster on the reduction on burnout on physicians when they took our coaching course (which should be published soon!). I was excited that one of the speakers was Amy Edmonson. I explained it to my husband that she is like Beyonce in the world of psychological safety: she has made an everlasting impact on workplace culture that will last for years to come. Amy Edmondson named the concept of psychological safety, researched the impacts, and identified the positive impacts of creating an environment where people feel free to speak up and not be socially impacted by voicing different opinions.

Like many concepts in the workplace, we have seen the word be given power over individual and group choice. “We can’t progress, there is no psych safety” or “we need to have psychologically safety in our team”, or simply “I feel psychologically unsafe”. The power of saying these words stops groups in its tracks.

A group of seven of us came together, and asked the question: “how do we help groups create and sustain psychologically safe behaviours?” Adding the term “behaviours” changes the very nature of the concept for groups. It gives the power back to people to make a choice in how they react and interact with a group.

We studied and worked with a group of physicians who needed some support in creating safety in a group. We designed a training session where teams co-created meaning of psychological safety, identified the distinctions of safety versus discomfort, built the skills of being a productive group member and skillfully harnessed conflict as part of group success. This training was applied to existing work - we simply helped them learn how to do it in a psychologically safe manner.

We measured Team Psychological Safety and Trust on the group before and after the training. The results were astonishing:

• All but two of the 43 items demonstrated improvement in the team psychological safety assessment.

• Areas of “significant concern” in team psychological safety decreased from being present in 53% of the items to being present in only 12% of the items.

• Of the 12% of the items still identified as “significant concern”, all items had fewer people feeling they were of significant concern and the number of people who raked as such decreased by 23-52 points (out of 100).

• In the ranking of “strength of the team”, the number of times 100% of respondents felt specific items were a strength increased from less than 5% to 34% of the items.

• All items except for two on the Trust Inventory improved. This means the group demonstrated a greater propensity to trust, had a greater sense of trustworthiness, and had more cooperative behaviours.

  
  

Our own data gathering of their meetings found an increase in equality of voice, a greater ability to make decisions (and no need to revisit), an elimination of interrupting others, more fulsome dialogue and discussion, and enhanced engagement in the meetings.

We have learned is psychological safety can be taught, measured, and improved. When this happens, team effectiveness and decision-making is enhanced.

Want to learn more? Watch our video on psychological safety.

We are now offering our course to other clients who are launching a new project, have a long-standing meeting that requires rejuvenation, or a team that needs to be ready to respond to big changes. Feel free to reach out!

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