Why You Must Foster Trust If You Are To Create A Compelling Company Culture

Google's multi-year study to understand how to build the perfect team yielded some surprising results. An elite group of statisticians, psychologists, sociologists and data scientists came together to review half a century's worth of academic studies of groups and teams and then attempted to map the composition of the teams at Google to find out which configuration of people produced the highest performing teams. Despite the glut of data, no consistent patterns emerged as to what comprised a high performing team.

They studied various configurations of people to see under what conditions a high performing team emerged and were surprised to learn that you could not just throw together a bunch of high performers and create a collectively more intelligent or cohesive unit. People who may be adept at maximizing their own personal productivity did not necessarily make a productive team when put together.

After exploring a branch of sociological and psychological research into group norms – the unwritten rules that get embedded into a culture – the researchers stumbled upon a concept that finally shed light on the critical factor that determined the extent to which a team would be high performers: the level of psychological safety that was present.

The term psychological safety was coined by Harvard Professor Dr. Amy Edmonson in the 1990s. Edmonson defines it as a "shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking," and "a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up."

When psychological safety is present, people sense that they can voice challenging, potentially unwanted opinions and give difficult, hard-to-hear feedback to colleagues without it negatively impacting their careers. When people feel safe, they take risks, voicing ideas, perspectives and opinions that they might otherwise keep quiet.

In organizations where psychological safety is lacking, people are unsurprisingly on edge, guarded and defensive. They end up "hiding, lying and faking" their way through the day. They operate from survival mode.

What to do:

1. Bear in mind that everybody is different and look for the various ways in which your people are trustworthy. Find ways to acknowledge this and pay attention to the effect it has on the climate.

1. Study and reflect on your own communication and the communication across the team and/or organization. Does the leadership in your organization talk about the difficult things, or do the tough topics get brushed under the carpet? Set up structures to invite honesty: 360 feedback processes, an "honesty box" for feedback, or focus groups or forums for discussion.

1. Bear in mind that trust manifests differently depending on the relational configuration and that some of us are better at certain configurations than others.

Creating a culture that is based on psychological safety takes time and deliberate effort. Read up on it, be courageous in your self-reflection, and remember that the effort you put into building the culture will reap the rewards multiple times over.