Psychological safety is not just a new fashionable term for “feeling good” at work

Posted on 11. November 202211. December 2023 by Tania Pellegrini

Psychological safety is not just a new fashionable term for “feeling good” at work. Creating psychological safety in your team is really the bottom line for any leader or team member wishing to create a high performing team.

Along with motivational drive and cognitive diversity, it is one of the 3 invisible forces that help a team strive. It creates bonding, enjoyment and accomplishment.

For pyschological saftey to flourish, team members need to feel that they are learning from one another

Psychological safety flourishes when individuals learn from one another.

For psychological safety to flourish, team members need to feel that they are learning from one another and can ask for help from each other. If individuals have a crazy idea that they wish to splurt out, they need to feel that they will not be laughed at. In addition, it is the knowledge and gut feeling that they can speak up and be the best version of themselves because they feel valued.

You can feel when a team has psychological safety. You walk into a meeting room and there is murmuring, laughter and ideas bouncing off the walls.

How do we create psychological safety in teams where each individual has a different mindset and different perspective of the world?

We need to learn what the cultural values of our individual team members are and learn how to motivate them accordingly. It’s about understanding who needs more support, who prefers to work independently, who is comfortable speaking up, who is afraid they might make you angry when they speak up, who loves and needs the limelight and show shies away from it.

Ensure psychological safety at every step of team formation

Step 1 – Forming

When the team is at its initial stages, start your meetings discussing individual values, not team objectives. Each team member should have a chance to describe their preferred communication techniques and values before judgments are formed. Judgements will be formed quickly, they are hard to avoid. Once they are formed they are hard to break. Therefore, ideally use this technique early on.

Step 2 – Storming

When the team is storming, let the storm play out. You will feel that something has changed in the team. They might be a bit quieter. Their foreheads may look sterner. They might even start sounding aggressive with one another. Storming is a natural part of team formation. During this phase individuals learn what their role is and what the individual strengths are of others.

If the storm continues, go back to step 1. Figure out which values are not given the space to flourish. This is a sign that individuals cannot really be themselves.

Step 3- Norming

During the norming phase psychological safety begins to take form. Individuals learn to appreciate the differences and strengths of the others. They will start to offer help to one another and exchange ideas. This might just be tentative initially, however eventually it will become the norm.

Step 4 – Performing

This is where the magic happens. During the performing phase, psychological safety is at its height. Individuals walk into the office smiling, singing, and ready for a day of bouncing ideas off each other. They acknowledge the occasional unsuccessful plan or an idea that truly is impossible to accomplish. However, psychological safety is also the sweet satisfaction of projects and ideas that play out and prosper exactly as foreseen and discussed.

Individuals respect one another for their strengths and for their diversity comprehending that it is real cognitive diversity that makes a team prosper.

High Performing Global Teams Thrive on Trust

Posted on 21. April 20203. December 2021 by Tania Pellegrini

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Three steps to building trust remotely

High performing global teams thrive on trust.

If trust is the glue that connects and creates a High Performing Team, and if trust is created through spontaneous “coffee-corner chit-chat” or sharing a beer or coke after work, it’s no wonder we often struggle to feel connected to our team members when working remotely.

Consequently, our virtual communication techniques should replicate what we do (often without much effort) in a conventional team. If you’d like to lead a high performing global team, try these three small gestures below to create the bond which builds trust. In addition, it should in turn build team spirit and accountability, which finally helps increases team performance.

1. Replicate the office-corner virtually

Invite a colleague for a morning coffee just to say, “Hi”. The invitation is literally for 5 minutes. It doesn’t involve talking about work, it is purely to say, “How are things?” Don’t forget to switch on the camera.

This might seem unnatural initially, but just think about what happens naturally at the coffee corner in the office. While preparing your preferred drink you see colleagues from other departments and business units and you have that quick, 3-minute chat about the weekend, about your kids, about movies or perhaps about a new running route you’ve just discovered.

Create a bond

What is so important about these quick exchanges? These short dialogues show who you are as a person other than just as a business colleague and they create a bond. Consequently, by opening up like this, we show, and see in return, a human side to the person that we find difficult to imagine through email exchanges. Most importantly, we discover what we have in common and these commonalities are what help us build a relationship, build trust and therefore accountability. It is trust and accountability between individuals that help high performing global teams thrive.

2. Virtual after-work drinks

Before Coronavirus this seemed like a far-fetched thought. However, this seems to have changed since we have been locked up for weeks and craving conversation. As a result, it seems more natural and it’s been great to see how many people have picked up on it.

Invite your colleagues for a drink after work. You grab a beer, they grab a coke, an ice -tea, a prosecco, maybe a cappuccino depending on what time zone you are all in. Whatever the refreshment, it’s time for relaxing and talking about whatever comes to your mind and exchanging on a more personal note. This is not the 3-minute chat from above. Allow some time to give people the opportunity to open up.

If you’re not a natural talker, or you have introverts on the team who might struggle to open up, think of easy subjects to talk about that. For example, travel ideas, food, national celebrations and traditions in your colleagues’ countries that you might be curious about.

3. Include ice-breakers into your weekly virtual ops meetings

In a conventional face-to-face meeting, usually one or two people arrive a few minutes earlier than the crowd and a short discussion starts. As each person slips into the meeting room the discussion opens up with more people adding what they have to say and each new added sentence gives us insight into the person sitting in front of us.

Often, these spontaneous discussions lead to creative ideas. This is a an element that is often missing in team conference calls. Namely, when we join conference calls where one person is sitting in Kuala Lumpur, one in Sydney and a third in Stockholm, we don’t take the time to break the ice this way. We log-into the meeting one minute before it starts, the host welcomes everyone and the meeting begins.

Here are some ice-breaker ideas

If you’re running a virtual team meeting find some 3-4 minute icebreakers you can use. Make them short and fun. They can be as personal or impersonal as you feel is appropriate for the team. For example, ask each team member to send a photo of themselves when they were 5 years old. The others have to guess who it is.

Likewise, ask everyone to upload their favourite film /book/football player/pair of shoes and you need to guess which object belongs to which team member. Remember, high performing global teams thrive on trust and trust means letting the other person see how competent you are, how reliable you are, or what you have in common.

Switch on the camera to build trust

Always remember to switch on your camera in these sessions and find a way to convince the others to do so too. It is extraordinary how a smile can help interpret emotions that are usually very dfficult to read over the phone or through email. The visual aid helps us read between the lines when communicating with people who don’t normally say exactly what they think.

These easy to apply communication techniques help us create a connection with our colleagues, which allows us to bond and thereby create trust. Without trust and without accountability team spirit crumbles and when it does, your goals slowly become unattainable.

If you’re interested in our “Global Remote Teams” Course please see here.

Inclusion: It’s as simple as “listening” & learning cultural patterns

Posted on 2. March 202025. November 2021 by Tania Pellegrini

A few years ago, the company I was working for sent me off to Brazil to lead a small team of 4 Brazilian women, all with different work and life experiences. The manager, who was about 35 years old, was the most experienced and the least experienced was an assistant who was about 24. I was excited to be heading there and to learn a whole new set of cultural patterns.

After a few months with the team, I thought it was time to analyse how things were moving forward and if I had considered all the cultural inclusion skills I had learnt. Had I built trust with my team? Had they built trust with one another? Was our communication clear? I asked myself all these questions, and more, and I was fairly content with my answers and gave myself a pat on the back. Boy was I wrong! About a week later, I realised how badly I had been reading Brazilian cultural patterns when one of my team members, (let’s call her Lia), told me how incompetent I was at dealing with Brazilians. Let me tell you what happened.

The meeting in Sao Paulo

Lia and I headed to Sao Paulo for an important meeting. I had 90 minutes to convince a university professor to allow about 100 of his students to do a paid internship with our company. Seems simple right? Well, I thought it was going to be simple. I’d had several similar meetings before, in different countries, and until then I had been successful with my request. I knew the subject matter very well, and I thought I knew what the outcome was going to be. Consequently, I entered the meeting on “Autopilot”. Mistake #1. I didn’t pick up on little signals and body language (the cultural patterns) that the professor was sharing throughout the discussion to show his disinterest. Therefore, I wasn’t flexible enough to change my mode of communication or my persuasion techniques.

“I entered the meeting on Autopilot: Mistake n. 01”

At the end of the 90 minutes, Lia and I walked out of the meeting, our heads down, unsuccessful. The professor was not going to allow his students to join our project. Lia and I stepped into the taxi that took us back to the airport. I was speechless and in shock at how badly the meeting had just gone.

After a few minutes, I turned to Lia and asked, “What just happened in there?” She looked at me and suddenly burst into tears. She was crying and yelling through her sobs, “Tania, you haven’t been listening to me!!!” I’ve been telling you for months that you cannot do things here your way, you have to do it the Brazilian way!” “What? What do you mean you’ve been telling me for months?” “Well, to start with, about one month ago in our team meeting, I said A, B and C. Three weeks ago, I said, X,Y and Z and last week I repeated A, B and C, but you just ignore what I say!”

I hadn’t heard because I didn’t know how to listen

Ooooooh…What a disaster. Lia had been giving me feedback about how to read the cultural patterns to be more efficient with my Brazilian counterparts, but I hadn’t “heard” her feedback. I hadn’t heard it because I didn’t know how to adapt my listening techniques to her communication methods. For Lia, hierarchy was important and I was her Manager. Therefore, she found it difficult to speak to me directly, she didn’t want to seem disrespectful, which means her feedback was very indirect, so indirect that I didn’t understand it. It just went straight over my head.

Lia believed that I didn’t trust her because I didn’t modify my communication according to her suggestions. In her eyes, I was not interested in her opinion or in her ideas. This was all mistaken of course, but that was her perspective. What’s more, I realised that I was probably about to lose the respect and trust from the rest of my team unless I made some changes quickly.

“I had only been listening with my ears”

I hadn’t understood Lia because I had only been listening with my ears and because I was convinced that my method of getting things done was the right one. Lia was putting far more than just words into the message she was delivering. In fact, the words she used were of little significance. Most of the significance came from her body language and the subtle hints she was giving me while smiling.

Did I think that because she smiled while giving me the hints that they were not so important or not serious? For me a smile typically means agreement. Did I not go out to lunch with her often enough and share in personal chatter enough? Maybe that would have created a level of trust with her that could have helped her open up to me differently, or in a way that I would have understood. If I had done more personal sharing, maybe I would have learnt more about her communication techniques and learnt what was feedback and what wasn’t.

Each one of us has a different mindset and therefore a different way of communicating

When we work in culturally diverse teams, each one of us has a very different mindset and a different way of seeing the world and therefore of behaving and communicating. What is a pattern of showing respect in one culture can seem a pattern of disrespect in another.

If we want to be inclusive and bring out the best of each one of our colleagues, irrespective of their background, we need to learn their cultural patterns and the perspective of each one of our teammates is. We cannot assume that just because our company’s corporate culture says, “This is the way we do things around here,” that each individual is going to be comfortable following that path. Inclusion means taking the time, making time, to get to know who you’re working with even though you think that lunch time chit chat or coffee machine chit chat takes you away from reaching your deadlines.

TING

Take a look at the Chinese character below, Ting, (which means to listen). We can learn a lot about listening from our Chinese colleagues. “Ting”, is made up of 4 smaller characters, each one a component of what we should use to listen; our ears, our eyes, undivided attention and an open heart.

How to create engagement in your global team using inclusive feedback

Posted on 25. February 20201. December 2021 by Tania Pellegrini

How often are you asked by your colleagues, “Could you take a look at my presentation and tell me what you think?” This seems like a harmless task. So you take a look and say, “It looks good, maybe just change the blue border around the graph to green.”

Hmmm. What do you think has just been understood by Lila, the colleague who asked for your opinion? Inclusion is not about treating everybody equally, it is about treating each and every individual according to what gives them a feeling of belonging.

a) She thinks she´s done a great job and will just change the blue border to green, or

b) She thinks you hate the whole presentation and she will be up all night to rewrite it all.

Feedback is hard enough when we are dealing with people who have a similar mindset to ours. We´re usually a little uncomfortable telling somebody that the work they have done is not quite what was expected. When we give feedback to people who were brought up in a similar environment to ours, we are usually aware of the best way to do it. We pick up on small patterns of behaviour that are are part of the culture we grow up in. As we grow up, we see, listen and copy how people act and react to what we say and how we say it; be it at school from friends and teachers and then when we join the work-force our colleagues and managers use patterns that we recognise and we copy knowing it works.

However, it is all too easy to make unknown errors working in culturally diverse teams and assuming that just because we work for the same company and are aware of the corporate culture, that we are comfortable using the same communication techniques.

If you´ve been brought up in north-western Europe where one of the most important values is often honesty and equality, then feedback can be to the point and direct. You know that the person you´re talking to will likely appreciate your honesty and not take any offence in what you say. Therefore, with our above sample, Lila will literally only go and change the blue line to a green line and then feel her presentation is complete.

However, if Lila happened to grow up in, let´s say, Far East Asia or Latin America, where generally society values relationship-building and saving Face more that telling the “absolute truth”, then she might have understood that her presentation was indeed not good at all and needed to be redone, completely. In these societies generally feedback is given in a far more indirect manner, using techniques such as not mentioning what was not done well. So the fact that the person above only mentioned the colour of the line around the graph and nothing else, could be interpreted to mean that everything that was not mentioned was not to be re-worked.

Let´s look at the above example again and see how the feedback can be treated if Lila really is from a culture where trust is created through relationship-building and face-saving is important. Ideally you create an environment where a discussion can take place rather than just give your opinion:

Firstly, always give feedback one-on-one, never in public

2. Rather than give your opinion, ask the other person what they think about the work they have just done; “So Lila, how do you feel the presentation looks?

3. If Lila says she likes it, (and yet you think there are still some adjustments to be made) then perhaps ask, “If you had to give it a score from 1-10, what score would you give it?” Lila replies, “I´d give it an 8”. “So,” you reply, “how can we bring it from 8 to 9?” and that is where the feedback discussion begins.

Being culturally savvy means learning to read communication patterns that are different to the ones you were brought up with and knowing when to change your communication techniques (verbal and non-verbal) according to the cultural background of the team member you are facing. If you work in a multicultural team, that could mean either changing your communication with every person on the team or deciding with the team openly and up front which communication techniques will be used to express such thoughts. That would be “creating the team culture” a method of behaviour and communication that everyone on the team is happy with.