How many times did you badly want to confess your opinions and thoughts but took a step backwards in the last minutes of the fear of authority? It happened so many times, right? By definition, “psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up their ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.” Psychological safety training is a necessity for any manager who steps up as a leader for an organisation. This world is now run by innovations and not by autocratic leadership. So, if you don’t ensure psychological safety at the workplace for your employees, you could possibly miss out on the global competition. Psychological safety becomes an essential component in teams as members should have the freedom to voice out their opinions. If the teams are robbed of their right to express their ideas, the quality of the work comes down which may even lead to economic losses to the business. Providing a psychologically safe work environment also increases the probability of finding the key problems earlier, thereby increasing the profits. So, if you want your team to do better, you have certain responsibilities.
Encourage Listening
The first step yet a crucial step is to encourage listening among your team members. You should do this by practising active listening by yourself. This makes the employees comfortable around you and they would trust you with their thought processes. If teams don’t shy away from expressing their opinions, you would touch new heights in the business ventures.
Encourage Growth and Open Mindset
Most of the time there’s an ego and superiority mindset that prevents people from listening to others’ opinions. Make it a rule in your team that nobody should belittle or bring down others for their ideas, thoughts, questions or opinions. This encourages an open and growth mindset among the team members. If you successfully incorporate these mindsets into your teams, you would get the best innovative ideas out of them. These mindsets also cement the relationship between the team members and reduce the probability of conflicts.
Set the Example
Like we have said before, practice what you preach! Actively listen to people, encourage crazy ideas, entertain dumb questions, appreciate the small efforts, criticise constructively and don’t consider any hierarchies. Being a leader, you should be a good example to your teams. Like someone rightly said, reforms happen by action and not by mere words.
Create the Environment
Encouraging psychological safety is not enough, you need to provide a positive working environment for people to fully manifest their potential. You should do this by providing flexible timings and avoiding micromanagement. Try to get your work done by instilling responsibility and not by enforcing authority. Anything built on rules requires constant attention and inspection. But if you create values like responsibility and accountability, your teams would function efficiently without any monitoring.
Acknowledge Others
Everyone needs acknowledgement to move forward in their life. Our brains get triggered by the reward mechanism and whenever the efforts get acknowledged, you perform better than the previous time. This is due to the dopamine hits you receive from the appreciations. If you incorporate this strategy into the work environments, you would be able to get maximum output from your employees. So, no matter how small the efforts were, always appreciate the hard work of your teams. And give psychological safety training to all your team members too as one day they would be leaders in some big projects.
Get Regular Feedback
Feedbacks allow you to self-reflect on yourself. With the presence of feedback, you can do a SWOT analysis of your personality. Ask for feedback from your team and make conscious efforts to become an effective comrade for your team.
