Safety first
Freedom to share ideas and opinions is a contentious issue in wider culture, and often dangerous on social media. But psychological safety in teams is central to their success. We wanted to know if it is possible deliberately to create it in new systems. So, we set out to try in this parallel study programme with a collective of nine systems trained coaches and nine academic founder teams going through an innovation accelerator.
Using the same five-pillar framework, we wanted to see if psychological safety could be embedded before organic trust had had time to develop.
Transparency is the foundation of trust
We found that trust could be hampered by outside events. In one case, a coach discovered the organisation was running an overlapping process that conflicted. In another, a team leader received programme information not shared with the team, and the coaching group was asked to repair trust it hadn’t broken.
Transparency cannot be assumed, it must be contracted at every level before the work begins.
Shared language is an infrastructure
The tools we use to explore the relationships between people in teams are an important part of the system.
How readily these become part of the normal experience in the team is a measure of their success.
When a shared language supplants techno-consultancy-speak, team building begins.