Think of your current team. Which set of statements would best describe your team, the ones on the left or on the right? Pause the video and think about this for a minute. Research by Aimee Edmondson and colleagues suggests that if your team is best describe by statements on the left, your team is high in psychological safety. A simple descriptor here is, mistakes on this team are serious, so you're never afraid to tell the manager. If your team is best described by statements on the right, it's low in psychological safety. An example of a statement that describes a team that's low in psychological safety would be, in this team, people are put down for being different. Psychological safety is a shared belief in your team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. If your team is high in psychological safety, teammates are able to show and employ oneself without the fear of negative consequences to their status, their self image, or their careers. Now psychological safety is often a tacit, or taken for granted, belief and assumption in your teams. Meaning that it's not attended to directly or discussed by teammates individually or by the team as a whole. And yet psychological safety has massive implications for how successful your team is in learning and overall performance. The reason for this is that if my team is high in psychological safety, it alleviates my concerns about others' responses and reactions. Do my behaviors that carry the risk of threat for public humiliation or embarrassment, which many learning behaviors do. So if I feel like my team is high in psychological safety, I'm more likely to point out what I think can be errors in our decision making. I'm more likely to ask questions without the risk of appearing incompetent. Not surprisingly, research finds that teams that have well-developed psychological safety make fewer errors, they're much more likely to overcome the common information effect and capitalize on the unique information insights of its teammates. And they're much more effective in learning and acquiring new knowledge. So what are some of the drivers of psychological safety within teams? The first thing to recognize is that team leader behaviors set a very salient standard of what's acceptable or not within the team, thereby profoundly impacting the climate of psychological safety in your team. Being accessible and approachable helps immensely. Take a look at how people notice and evaluate those leader behaviors. Eric is very accessible. He's in his office, always just two seconds away. He can always take five minutes to explain something and he never makes you feel stupid. Explicitly inviting input and feedback from others. Vicky gave us a talk about what minimal invasive surgery is about, what results she expected, and told us to immediately let her know if anything is out of place, and mean it. We're not just talking about your beautiful rhetoric here, but how you behave when you get comments and questions that are not exactly aligned with your perspective. What are your verbals and nonverbals when people communicate bad news to you? Modeling openness and fallibility as a leader helps immensely to drive psychological safety. Steven models this behavior. He will say, I screwed up. My judgment was bad in this case. >> I have been fortunate to know and work with one of the premier mountaineers in the world, Dave Morton. Dave summited Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, six times. He frequently tells me that on his expeditions, people so badly wanna summit that they actively conceal information about their health. Such as when they're beginning to suffer from high altitude sickness. You can see that, that puts not just the person in question in danger, but the entire team at risk because you can not afford to have a disabled person on the climb. So what he does is he models openness and fallibility in his teams. If he's not feeling well he tells that to his teammates. He says, look, I'm really having a tough day today. I'm really out of breath on this stretch. And if your leader feels comfortable admitting to such vulnerabilities, the rest of the team feels comfortable doing so as well. Some of the other factors and drivers of psychological safety that you might wanna employ. One is build and invest in trusting relationships so that people feel comfortable speaking up and opening up to you in a team setting. What that requires is for you to connect with teammates outside of the task at hand. Learn about their pets, their families. Connect with them in their social lives. Use simulations or practice fields. They're very useful for developing psychological safety for two reasons. One is simulated experiences. Create a safe learning environment where you remove the consequences of actual errors, financial or medical. And secondly, they communicate the importance of learning to your team, where you realize that it's not always possible to get it right on the first try. And the final factor, which is quite intuitive but there's a lot of empirical research behind it, is make sure you provide access for your team to resources and information. What empirical research shows is that teams that are rich in resources and information are less likely to feel defensive and insecure when it comes to distributing those resources within teams and across teams. And as a result, they can be much more effective at developing and maintaining the healthy climate of psychological safety. I would like for us to continue to learn from one another in this course. And so I'll ask you to please go to the discussion forum, the thread on psychological safety, and share your ideas, your experiences, your observations, on how we can develop psychological safety in our teams.