The one thing your team needs so they can give you their best

Hi {{first_name|there}},

Most new managers work hard to look like they have the answers. This week we’ll look at why the opposite approach gets the best from people, and makes you a better leader in the process.

You can have a highly talented team, but you will never see their best work if the people in the team don't feel safe enough to show it.

When I started practising law a big part of what I had to do was give the impression that I was highly skilled, knowledgeable and experienced. I wasn’t, but I had to pretend that I was, because nobody wants to turn up at court and find that the lawyer they have hired has never handled a case like this before.

When I moved from practising law into leading a team, I thought I had to do the same thing. So, I put a lot of energy into looking like I had all the answers, because I assumed that was what was required. And in doing so, I set myself up to fail because my apparent certainty about everything came over as if I wasn’t interested in what anybody else had to say.

I'd made it slightly unsafe for anyone to tell me I was wrong. And, if you are new to leadership and quietly worried you're not quite up to it, you might recognise that instinct.

There's a name for what was missing, and a large body of research behind it: psychological safety. Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, defines it as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, safe to ask a question, admit a mistake, disagree, or float a half-formed idea without fear of being embarrassed or punished (Edmondson, 1999).

This is not a soft, nice-to-have idea. When Frazier and colleagues pulled together 136 separate studies covering more than 22,000 people, they found that psychological safety consistently predicted both performance and people's willingness to go beyond the job description, way more than things like engagement or how much they liked their boss (Frazier et al., 2017).

Psychological safety is probably the closest thing we have to a reliable precondition for a team doing good work. Google found this when its Project Aristotle study showed that psychological safety was the factor above all others that set its most effective teams apart.

But one point is worth being clear about, because it can trip up new managers. It would be easy to hear "psychological safety" and assume it means keeping everyone comfortable and being nice.

It doesn't.

A team can be perfectly pleasant to each other and still not discuss what matters. Safety is what makes the hard things possible: disagreeing with a decision, challenging your boss, admitting something went wrong. That's why creating it is a genuine leadership skill rather than a leader’s personality trait, and why making it safe for people to disagree with you specifically is harder than being liked.

It also works less directly than you might expect. In a study of over a hundred teams, Kim and colleagues found psychological safety didn't improve performance on its own. It did so by freeing people up to ask questions and share what wasn't working, and that learning drove the results (Kim, Lee, & Connerton, 2020). As the researchers put it, psychological safety is the engine of performance, not the fuel.

So how do you build it? It's worth saying up front that a single workshop and a bunch of pretty slides won't do the job. When O'Donovan and McAuliffe reviewed the research on interventions to improve psychological safety, they found one-off training rarely shifted deeply held habits around speaking up. What made the difference was steady practice and visible support from the leader (O'Donovan & McAuliffe, 2020). So treat the steps outlined below as everyday habits, not a one-time fix. Here are five to start with.

People take their cue from you. If you can say "I don't know" or "I got that one wrong", you give everyone else permission to do the same. You could also try framing the work honestly when it's genuinely uncertain, something like "this is new and complicated, so I'll want everyone's input, not just mine". I've written before about why admitting you don't know makes you stronger, and this is a big part of the reason.

"Any questions?" reliably produces silence. A more specific invitation tends to work better, for example, "what might we be missing here?" or "what's the risk I'm not seeing?". This is part of what researchers call inclusive leadership, being open, available and approachable, which has been shown to raise psychological safety and, through it, people's willingness to speak up and report errors (Lee et al., 2021). But note, the asking only counts if you then listen properly rather than waiting for your turn to talk.

The moment that sets the tone is the first time someone challenges you or owns up to a mistake. If you thank them, plainly and where others can see it, you've just shown the whole team that speaking up is safe. If you get defensive or irritated, you've taught them the opposite, and they tend to learn that lesson quickly.

Try not to rely on people being brave. Build it into the routine instead, so that contributing isn't a risk someone has to choose to take. You could go round the table so everyone has to say something, or run a quick 'pre-mortem' before a big decision ("imagine this has failed, what might be the reasons why?"). And keep an eye on the quieter and more junior voices, who tend to need an explicit invitation to speak, particularly where challenging someone senior could feel risky (Lee et al., 2021).

If you want people to surface problems early, the mistakes that come from doing difficult work honestly can't be punished the way genuine carelessness might be. Separating the two, and treating honest errors as something to learn from rather than something to hide, is what lets a team talk openly about what's going wrong while there's still time to fix it.

This is the part I'd most want you to take from all of it, if you're still finding your feet as a leader. The instinct, when you feel like an imposter, is to look certain and avoid being questioned. But that's the wrong way round. A team that feels safe to speak up will catch the things you miss, teach you the parts of the job you haven't learned yet, and make you a better leader far faster than any amount of pretending.

Building psychological safety isn't only a gift to your team. It pays you back too, and it's the reason why you can lead people who are better than you without it costing you your authority.

So, if there's one thing worth building in your team if you want them to be the best they can be, it's the simple confidence that speaking up honestly, including to you, is safe.

Your job is never to have all the answers. It's to build the conditions where your team's contributions and questioning can help fuel their performance and your own growth as a leader.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

Coaching - Building psychological safety, especially in a team you have recently inherited or one that was until recently made up of your peers, is hard to do on your own. It is exactly the kind of people leadership challenge I help new leaders work through in 1 to 1 coaching, and I have a few spots open at the moment. There are more details here.