Exercise - Psychological Safety

If you are doing this exercise by yourself:

1. Reflect on the factors or behaviours in a team that you think make people feel uncomfortable about speaking up in a team meeting. What makes you feel uncomfortable? Write your thoughts down.
2. Then note down the factors in a team that have made you feel more comfortable in having those difficult discussions. Or perhaps factors that you have seen make others more comfortable talking about something that is difficult for them to talk about.
3. What can you learn from your reflections? Are there some things teams can do to encourage more open discussion? Are there things you can do personally to help others feel more comfortable? Are there actions you can take to empower yourself to be more open in team discussions? (You could try the 'overcoming disempowering beliefs' exercise if you would like to make more of a personal contribution to team discussions).
4. Write down a couple of actions to take in the next few days to help yourself or the team feel more comfortable with open discussions.

If you are doing this exercise as a team:

1. Each team member is asked to spend 5 minutes on their own noting down on post-its all the factors or behaviours they can think of that are likely in general to make others feel uncomfortable about speaking up in a team. This is not a 'name and shame' exercise - it should be kept anonymous, and the factors and behaviours do not need to be apparent in this particular group.
2. Everyone then does the same thing about factors that make people feel more comfortable taking part in a full and open discussion.
3. Put all the 'people feel uncomfortable' post-its on one wall and group them into clusters, and then do the same on another wall with the 'people feel comfortable' post-its. (You might want to use a digital solution like Mentimeter for this process and use wordclouds rather than post-it clusters).
4. Discuss all the ideas in the whole group. What can your team do to reduce the 'uncomfortable' factors in your team and encourage the behaviours that increase the psychological safety of the team?
5. Develop and agree a set of groundrules for your team that will enhance the team's psychological safety.