What's it to me?
👥 Individual | 🕒 10 min | 🔄 Daily | 🛋️ Required Comfort: 1
Use When
Your team wants to practice identifying psychological safety in their daily work.
Prerequisites
The team members should have been introduced to psychological safety, and have an understanding of what it covers.
Tool Description
As an early step of working with psychological safety, it can be helpful for team members to identify how it manifests in their daily work. Psychological safety is subtle, but experienced to varying degrees every single day. Taking time to note these experiences down can help solidify your team members’ understanding of the concrete implications of psychological safety in the team.
This tool aims to help you find patterns of where psychological matters in your particular context.
At the end of each work day, team members note down an experience related to psychological safety they had during the day. This can either be a moment in which they felt safe to contribute, ask questions, challenge the status quo, moments wherein they held back, or were afraid to seem intrusive, incompetent, ignorant or negative. Give your team members an example before starting.
These notes need not be shared directly, but team members should aim to use them to identify common situations in which psychological safety matters to your organization over time. This should encourage discussions about how to work with psychological safety in your team, and will be helpful for using other tools in this compendium.
Purpose
“What's it to me?” helps your team members develop their own understanding of the role of psychological safety in the team. This understanding can vastly help fuel further discussions about the subject, and can help identify key elements of your team’s practice wherein working with psychological safety might matter the most.
Outcome
A foundation of what psychological safety means to the team members and their work within the team, which can be used for future work with psychological safety.
The notes taken can be used as an outcome for sharing, if your team members wish to. Remember to let the team know ahead of time whether the notes are expected to be shared or not.