Build better teams with psychological safety

What are the foundations of psychological safety?  This section goes over the general strategies that underly the ability to create teams that can innovate.

Understanding yourself is imperative for generating psychological safety.  In this lecture, learn about why that is and what you can do to build your own awareness.

Emotional intelligence is all about how you process and understand emotions.  This lecture describes one view of that concept and how having certain skills will help you enable psychological safety.

Starting an interaction with curiosity instead of judgment can have a huge effect on the course of that conversation.  Learn how important starting with an open mind is for fostering psychological safety in others and how to shift your mindset to be curious.

In the book "Mindset" by Carol Dweck, the concept of a "growth mindset" is described as the focus on always learning instead of accomplishments and objectives.  Having a growth mindset can make a huge difference for psychological safety.  You will understand how to build the mindset for learning as you go instead of being afraid of failure, which is critical for innovation.

Leaders have an outsized influence on the psychological safety of the team.  In this section, you will get a better understanding of how to use the position of leader to make sure that the team has the safety to speak up and take risks.

A common misconception about psychological safety is that it is all about being nice and creating a comfortable atmosphere.  The truth is that just psychological safety alone won't help with innovation unless there is accountability as well.  This lecture will explain how to use these concepts together to make sure the team has the tools to create and thrive.

As a leader, understand how bias affects your relationships is critical.  There are many types of bias - in this section, you will learn about some of the key ones that can ruin team dynamics and harm innovation and how to avoid them.

The ego of a leader can drive the team to focus on pleasing one person over doing what is best for the team.  This lecture describes how ego can harm psychological safety and what practical steps you can take to set it aside to ensure that the team can focus on the correct objectives.

Adam Grant describes the art of rethinking in "Think Again."  This ability is crucial for leaders to have for psychological safety.  In this lecture, you will learn about how rethinking and staying open minded is important as well as techniques to help you update your opinions.

Sometimes as a leader, you have to choose which attributes and traits you are going to use and which you are going to set aside.  In this lecture, you will learn about how to unlearn different capabilities to make sure that psychological safety is build.

There is so much study and discussion about what to do if you are a leader to foster psychological safety.  But what if you aren't the leader of your team, or your team doesn't even have a clear leader?  This section will go over how to build team cohesion and trust from anywhere in the team structure.

Part of having psychological safety is the ability to challenge ideas.  This lecture describes how to model respectfully challenging with purpose so you can help demonstrate what a healthy discourse with disagreement can look like.

How feedback is received can have a big impact on whether people feel comfortable providing it in the future.  This lecture describes techniques to help you take any feedback in a positive manner so you can show that it is welcome and desired.

You can help the team work together by making sure you encourage everyone else with their ideas and suggestions.  In this lecture, you will learn techniques to have positive interactions and build up your teammates so everyone will want to collaborate and innovate.

I realized that one way that I encouraged teamwork was to become the binder that held the team together, even if I wasn't the leader.  In this lecture, you will learn how to become the glue for the team so you have the respect of everyone and authority to build psychological safety.

Now you know why psychological safety is important and what goes into it.  How do you use this information?  This section has tips for implementing all the ideas you have learned so far.

In the book "Immunity to Change" by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, techniques for effecting behavior changes are described.  To effectively develop psychological safety, you may need to understand why some behaviors you have are hard to change and employ tactics to allow you to choose differently.  This section outlines some of those tactics and how to change.

How do you get all the different facets of psychological safety into practice?  One idea is to treat the concept as a basis for the ground rules of how your team operates or how meetings are conducted.  This lesson will give you some ideas around how to use what you have learned as a way to keep everyone on the same page about building a culture of sharing and risk taking.

It is important to realize that changing behavior may take time.  This lesson provides methods to start your journey and stay on the path to adopting the changes you want to see so that you can reach your psychological safety goals.

Now that you know about psychological safety, how do you make sure that you can put yourself into a position to use that knowledge.  You have to find a team that has the same values and culture - this lesson helps you identify whether a manager has those values that align with psychological safety.

Wrap up of the course covering why this topic is so important and the various techniques learned along the way.