So, if you are leading a team, how can you find out if your team is experiencing psychological safety?  You can't just ask them -- an unsafe team won’t answer honestly.  

The most obvious way to measure psychological safety is to use the validated seven-question survey instrument developed by Dr. Amy Edmondson, who pioneered the field.  But there are a number of considerations that may not make this the best choice for casual use.  First, if you are administering the survey, and your team doesn’t trust you yet, you will likely get sample bias, or team members skewing their answers if they think they can influence specific outcomes.  Second, if the survey results don’t lead to concrete change the team can see, it can erode trust.  This method of assessing psychological safety is probably better conducted by an outsider, as part of a larger corporate with planned rollout of responses.

There is another way to roughly assess psychological safety on your team, which I call a Psychological Safety Scorecard.  It lacks the rigour and validation of Edmondson's survey instrument, but has the benefit that you can use it by yourself unobtrusively during any team meeting.  Think of it as a sort of “finger in the wind” rather than a definitive diagnosis.  The method is based on the fact that there are certain behaviours that you will only see on a psychologically safe team.  If you see those behaviours happening in your team meetings, it’s a good sign.

Here is a potential set of behaviours you can look for:

• Team member reveals unique personal information about themselves (something that could mark them as “different” from everyone else)
  
  

• Team member asks for help or mentoring
  
  

• Team member freely admits to making a mistake, or not knowing something
  
  

• Team member shares a new insight to the conversation that goes against current thinking
  
  

• Team member raises a problem with current team processes or projects
  
  

• Team member calls out sensitive topic / elephant in the room / sacred cow
  
  

• Team member corrects their manager’s error or critiques their manager’s idea

If you’ve read Timothy R. Clark’s excellent book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, you will see that these behaviours align with the four stages;  belonging, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo.  This is of course not the only set of behaviours you could use; you might want to adjust this list for the specifics of your industry.  (In my research for this article I found one healthcare team that came up with 31 behaviours that could be observed in their team meetings and correlated to psychological safety.)

The meeting scorecard looks like this:  the behaviours go down the left side, and the names of team members along the top.

How to use it in a meeting:  The first time each team member exhibits one of these behaviours, you put a checkmark in the appropriate box.  If the response of the team is affirming, you put a second checkmark.  If the team responds negatively (e.g. ignoring, minimizing or belittling), put an X.  (You only need to do this the first time because we’re interested in how widespread the behaviours are, not how often any one person does them.)

At the end of the meeting, look at your card.  Are some rows empty?  That could indicate you have more work to do building trust.  Are some columns empty?  That could indicate that certain individuals don’t feel that they belong, or have had bad experiences with previous managers, or that there is a clique in your team that is excluding them, or that they can’t get a word in edgewise.  Think about how you can make those people feel more valued, and believe that their contribution is welcome and matters.  (I’ll talk about some ways to do that in another article).

You may find it difficult to pay attention to both the content of a meeting and to observing behaviours like this.  If you find this is true, see if you can find a trusted observer or coach to sit in on your meetings (being aware this may change your team dynamic).  UX researchers and usability testers are great at this kind of observation.

One more thing to think about before you use the scorecard:  Ask yourself honestly how you react to your ideas being criticized by someone on your staff.  Does it feel like insubordination?  Disrespect?  Do you immediately defend yourself, or do you try to understand where the criticism is coming from?  When you are putting checkmarks in that last row, the response that matters is yours.  And it will have an outsize effect on the psychological safety of the whole team.

I remember an incident that happened shortly after I had been promoted to Director at my last job.  I had come into my staff meeting with what I had thought was a great plan, only to have it shot down by a manager on my team pointing out a problem that I had not foreseen.  My instant reaction was to feel attacked, and to defend my pet idea.  But I shut that down, and instead asked her to “tell me more” (A great phrase when you don’t know what else to say).  When she explained her thinking, I could see that she was absolutely right, and over that meeting her contributions (along with the rest of the team) moved us collectively to a much better plan than the one I had walked in with.  And my thinking moved from reactive defensiveness to a warm understanding that my team had my back.  That manager spoke up not to make me look bad, but rather because she really wanted to help me succeed.

And that is what psychological safety is – the feeling that everyone on your team has your back.  That they’ll tell you when you get things wrong, because they want you to get it right.  They'll help you when you're in need.  They won’t let you walk into a room with your fly open, or toilet paper stuck to your shoe.

If you are a boss, I hope this scorecard will help you get some insight into your own team’s dynamics. Perhaps you are working on your own skills fostering psychological safety and you want to see how it’s progressing month to month.  As your skills improve, you'll find yourself in more uncomfortable conversations -- but better, more productive ones.  And if one day your staff tells you to your face that you are flat wrong about something, you'll know you've succeeded.

More from John  (or follow his RSS Feed )

Psychological Safety Gaps - How leaders are getting it wrong

Toxic Legacy - Why losing toxic employees is only the first step to recovery

Why don't people participate in meetings? - Or, "Why can't I get a word in edgewise?"

Holding a Mirror to Corporate Values - Figuring out what the actual core values of your company are

Whose Opinion Matters? - How culture can make or break your decision making

Micromanagement and Psychological Safety - How a toxic management style impacts team health

The Authentic Team - The problem with bringing your whole self to work