Psychologically strong teams and how to develop one  (Part 1)

Don't (just) create psychological safety in your team. Build psychological STRENGTH.

After a lot of wrestling and editing, I split this into two parts as it's quite a journey to travel.

Part 1 (this article) - deep dive into Psychologically Strong Teams. What they are, why it matters and how to think about this for your own team.

Part 2 (here) - exactly HOW I create Psychologically Strong Teams, spaces and organisations. 

Is there any team you’re working in or with, where you feel you’re not getting people’s full contribution?

There are two teams I interim-led in my 30s that are etched vividly in my memory.

In the first, the dynamic was… spiky. There was conflict within the team, conflict with other teams, conflict with me as their stand-in leader. In our meetings, we alternated between awkward silence and passive aggressive monologues.

It was TRICKY.

In the other team I took over, people were just very quiet! I ended up filling in long silences or answering my own questions. In the end, I wondered whether it was even worth meeting at all as people seemed so unwilling to contribute anything.

Again, it was TRICKY.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Perhaps you have a flavour of one or both of these in a team you lead or support…

The root cause in both scenarios was pretty similar.

People felt unsafe, unanchored and they were on the defensive.

Apart from this being not how any of us want to lead a team, it was completely ineffective. Pulling teeth, wading through treacle. Choose your analogy!

Now, there is a lot of chat about psychological safety. What it is, how important it is, how to create it.

So much content. So much misunderstanding.

I see psychological safety eliciting two opposite views.

1. “Companies are toxic and abusive and this is destroying people!”

vs


2. “The constant need for safety is eroding everyone’s resilience and this is destroying companies!”

The problem with these is that they are binary and polarising. It's my fault or it's your fault.

Either spaces need to be safe or people need to be resilient.

I think we need to raise the bar to developing psychologically STRONG space which expects and handles conflict and continuously widens and deepens the interactions we can comfortably have.

When we focus exclusively on the concept of psychological safety, I see some unintended and unwanted outcomes.

Teams and conversations reduced to the ‘only things they feel safe to say’.

Or people feel newly safe to speak their truth - and in doing so make other people feel much less safe!

Both ways end up increasing conflict avoidance. Whereas we want the opposite - we want more conflict but the healthy, useful, productive kind. I’ve talked extensively about task conflict vs relationship conflict. Me and you vs the problem, not me vs you. We want to open up and deep conversations, not reduce them down.

Psychological strength is a step on from psychological safety. It is a thoughtfully designed and well scaffolded, semi-permanent container in which important conflict can take place in almost total safety.

In a strong space, we are developing an ‘unbreakable’ container of respect in people can work at meaningful and significant depth, in service of their shared goals.

A strong space is active, positive, substantial, generative, systemic, systematic, accountable, solid.

It is a collective boundary in service of what matters, held secure by the leader which anticipates new dynamics.

It is an only going resolution machine that expects new agitation and handles it fairly.

It is something that is built over time and cannot quickly be dismantled.

In a Psychologically Strong Team, people feel:

• emboldened to get to the heart of what matters in service of the team and its goals
• skilled in HOW to say it so that conflict is always centred on the task and never on the person
• that difficult, unpopular and inconvenient things are welcome and will be handled with strength
• that their voice is strong and will be respected, no matter what.
  

Paul Russell talks about strength through the metaphor of rope. Are teams, relationships and organisations strong enough to withstand the load they are placed under?

Crucially, in Psychologically Strong Teams, there is an understanding that work is always somewhat unsafe, that companies are not your family, that expectations are unsustainably high and that people will say and do the wrong thing but that the system expects to continuously address and resolve unsafe situations - all the way from the root cause outwards, in a way that is fair and that is specifically designed to equalise power dynamics and protect the most vulnerable.

Back to my problem teams! Creating psychological safety was only the first step.

Here’s how I developed a strong space with my two teams.

• I created non-negotiable ground rules of respect and group values
• I requested people speak truthfully and used a range of modalities to make that easy
• I helped us all develop our ‘hearing’ to widen our window of welcome
• I introduced explicit healthy conflict formats and language patterns to scaffold healthy conflict
• I addressed systemic issues that were putting excessive pressure on the system
• I took responsibility for setting the tone, holding the space and coaching, coaching, coaching others, to engrain this into the DNA of the whole team.

In part two, I discuss exactly how I did each of these things - and the bumps I experienced along the way to where we finally ended up!

I will also address the massive elephant in the room when we talk about developing a strong space (10 points if you can correctly guess what this is!).

>> go to Part 2 - Psychologically strong teams and how to develop one