Psychological Security on Building Agile Ecosystems.

I write this article from the practical experience that I have had in various workplaces, for me this topic is very relevant, since it is part of the agile culture that we want to create in a sustained way in the workplaces, it has been my turn to be so much in the dance floor, like watching things from the balcony.

I believe that psychological safety is a key factor for the creation of a high performance work ecosystem, the main indicator of the lack of a psychological safety initiative in the workplace is the existence of fear, fear of losing your job is the maximum fear, to expel the fear is one of the antecedents to create psychological security, to eliminate the fear is like fixing a defect, to create psychological security is a process of continuous improvement in the workplace[6], with objectives and elements of quality assurance .

In practice, many members of work teams are afraid when the main managers are present in the workplace, they make use of their authority, their command & control, to supervise their activities or give order as they please, sorry to say but it is a real culture that still prevails in many places, in the middle of a transformation, even sometimes it is more noticeable on people in charge of the transformation project, it is related with the motivators, of authority, positioning and power.

I remember very well in one of the projects in which I participated, the sales executive director and the change management director, suddenly appeared, before starting the daily synchronization, very early, to give a speech to a work team, in charge of a very priority project to the organization, one of those that "move the needle", the central discourse was based on the following premise: "Those who are not productive, if we do not see them working in their place and do not present results, they will be fired, we know that we have started the project with a delay of 2 months, we have issued instructions to the Scrum Master in charge, so that she presents us with daily reports and checkpoints about the performance of each one of you, and we are sure that we can fired you from the company ”: S that was a devastating message.

I think that more often the immediate reaction to a performance problem, without properly diagnosing the causes, is simply to fire people, to give a public example and deployment of power, which gives a message “Stay still and silent, if you want to survive in this work environment ”, this creates a great lack of commitment, there is no empowerment and less ownership of creation, messages that establish or reinforce a culture of mediocrity and poor performance.

According to Amy Edmondson "Psychological safety is» a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass or reject or punish someone for speaking. It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people feel comfortable being themselves, when we refer to a team, the environment they are in has a relevant impact on it, so Its analysis boundary is extended.

Psychological security has to do with organizational entropy, which is represented as those useless activities performed by a collaborator, so as not to suffer a loss of his work, "he is afraid of losing his job."

How high is the organizational entropy, depends on the culture of the company and the values implicit in it.

When a workplace feels psychologically safe, mistakes are seen as a natural part of the learning process, employees are less likely to hide mistakes, managers themselves publicly acknowledge their reliability and are curious to know the causes of mistakes and they offer support for these to fall apart, this is a basis for effective and high performance work in a company.

The psychological security is a foundation of the empowerment of teams, it is a tool for the flattening of structures, hierarchies within the company and the generation of ownership, it is necessary to be consistent with this premise, without it we will only have a group that interacts far from being empowered and / or achieving high performance.

I have shared with other agile coachees how difficult it is to raise customer awareness about the need for a psychological safety initiative in the workplace, now I believe that the key lies in the monetization and the direct and indirect benefits it generates, for example in Google found that there is less chance that a person leaves a team, when a psychological security environment has been established, if we monetize the millions of dollars that it has brought to many Sillicon Valley companies, it is most likely treated as a metric as important as sales, being an independent variable of those that "moves the needle" of the company's profits.

Some positive answers to the following questions and / or affirmations, can help us to give a clue, about the state of the subject in our workplace:

• Keeping up appearances is a priority, of the highest levels in the organization.
• If I take a chance and make a mistake, will anything be done against me?
• Isn't it comfortable to have open, honest conversations about sensitive topics?
• Safeguarding egos is more important than providing adequate solutions to the client.
• The transformation is not for me, it is for others.
• We buy the transformation, everyone must obey me.
• No one in this team, community, tribe would conspire to undermine my goals or efforts.
• Some people form groups, disguised as teams or mentoring tribes, with the aim of eliminating anything that threatens the status quo of its members within the company.
• I have been promised a transformation in 3 months, now they must give me the deliverables.
• The team has agreed that you are a threat to the status quo, so we have decided that you should leave.
• Match the quality of your deliveries make us work hard and we don't have your time, you must leave the team.
• Our team has a strong sense of culture, which can be difficult for new people to join.

The first step of empowerment is to build a powerful culture that allows our employees to feel safe about the activities they carry out, a culture of psychological security is open to innovation and development in every way.

It has been found that people learn more when they feel safe.

Then we need to balance respect for other people in our culture, with an openness to change, acceptance of mistakes, open difficult, open and honest conversations to solve critical problems that had always existed.

If we are managers, and we want to start our path in the matter of establishing a psychological security environment, some resources can help us, the following is a summary of the rework guides, Google initiative, on issues of team performance [4].

Some managers actions to establish a psychological security environment can be the following:

1. Demonstrate commitment.
2. Show understanding.
3. Be inclusive in the establishment of interpersonal information.
4. Be inclusive in decision making.
5. Show conviction and confidence without looking inflexible.

Curiously, some of these approaches, we have observed in content of co-active coaching, behavioral coaching, in Clean Language, Nonviolent Language and effective Communication.

So we need to be successful a strong sense of the acceptance of the diversity of ways of thinking, of the shared identification of purposes and values, of shared understandings and common values, the following actions are some examples that would help us generate an environment of psychological safety in our workplace for all types of teams, agile and not agile:

• Create a clear ad-hoc psychological safety guide for each company, for managers, team members and other roles in the workplace, based on modeling questions with Clean Language, Nonviolent Language and Effective Communication, so that we can Understand what psychological security means in its broadest sense and how we can implement it concretely in our workplace.
• Raise awareness and train leaders and managers in psychological safety, in addition to the teams.
• Create reverse mentoring initiatives, where leading team members (agile champions) can share their knowledge with managers and company leaders.
• Making our teams feel safe, is a value priority to create high performance teams and communities is a priority to create value and high performance, survey and compare psychological safety results.
• Treat psychological security as a metric as important as sales.
• Respect other people as a priority part of the team's culture.
• If we are leaders of a team, community, gender group, tribe or creators of an agile framework, psychological security is also for us, the baker tries his own bread, we must lead by example, remember “People do not believe, what he doesn't see later. ”
• Give people space to take opportunities (internal and external).
• Celebrate both successes and team failures.
• Make clear communication and explicit expectations, transparency, especially.
• Make a regular diagnosis (each month), co-create a backlog with the SMs, PO's and Agile Leaders to gain commintment on each acctionable item, review the outcomes, reflect and adapt on each cycle, visioning and start a new cycle.

Psychological Safety is like an invisible product, responsible for fueling motivation and internal fire in the workplace, without this product that we build alongside the products we deliver to customers, we could not have sustained happiness and high performance. Let's record a happy team, with purpose and expertise builds amazing products.Edmondson and Lei (2014). "Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct," Annual Review Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.

1. Edmondson (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly June 1999.
2. Goman, Carol Kinsey Ph.D.. ‘The Silent Language of Leaders: How Body Language Can Help--or Hurt--How You Lead.’ Jossey-Bass Publishing, April 2011
3. Re:work, Gloogle (2019). Understand team effectiveness. SF,CA. Tool: Foster psychological safety. Recover from https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness/steps/foster-psychological-safety/
4. Dan Radecki PHD.(2018)."Psychological Safety: The key to happy, high-performing people and teams". Academy of Brain-based Leadedrship.
5. Human Space (2019). Survey of Scottish IT Workplace Fear. Scotland, UK. Recover from https://humanspace.work/fear-survey-2019/
6. Amy C Edmondson (2018). “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth”. April 2018.

"Everything changes". Heraclitus of Ephesus.