4 Low-Risk Ways to Build Psychological Safety on Design Teams
Many of us are aware of the Google study showing that the top attribute shared by high-performing teams is psychological safety — whether team members “feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable with each other”. In a NYT article about the study, Amy Edmondson described psychological safety as ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”
Google found that these are the top 5 characteristics of high performing teams
As a former designer manager and now in my coaching practice, I’ve observed that encouraging risk-taking and vulnerability leads to happier designers, better feedback sessions, and ultimately better-designed products. That’s a lot! But how do we go about creating this sense of psychological safety in a team?
First, the not-so-great news: I can tell you from experience that there is no instant fix, and definitely no “one-size-fits-all” solution. What works for one team won’t work for another, and you can’t follow certain steps in a certain order and reliably achieve a perfect outcome.
However, the good news is that we humans have a universal need for connection. Building in rituals that help your team safely share their opinions and needs with each other leads to psychological safety. It’s just a matter of how much time it takes and which methods you choose based on the individuals on your team and your company culture.
In this article I’ll share a few exercises that have worked for the teams that I’ve managed. These ideas don’t require too much vulnerability, so I see them as low-risk ways to start building a culture of psychological safety in a new team. As you become more comfortable, you can move on to medium-risk and higher-risk ways of connecting.
This isn’t set in stone; you might end up with a team of feelers and sharers who are happy to dive right into higher-risk exercises, or you might only have a short amount of intense time together in which case you’ll want to ramp up the vulnerability quickly. But if you’re planning on working together for a year or longer, I’d suggest building up people’s risk tolerance gradually.
Share your Strengths
Almost everyone loves talking about what they’re good at! One easy thing to do with a new team is to have your designers share their strengths. In the past I’ve done this by having team members take a test and share the results with the rest of the team over a meal. It’s a nice way to share without getting too vulnerable, and even if people disagree with the results of the test, that makes for a great conversation.
Another bonus is that as a new manager, knowing a person’s strengths will give you something to talk about with your direct reports during one-on-ones. It’s a good way to learn what kind of tasks that person might succeed with. I would never rely on test results alone, but talking over the results with my designers has helped me to understand the kind of projects they enjoy and are good at.
Online test options I’ve tried:
CliftonStrengths test (formerly known as “Strengthsfinder”) - $$$
High5 Test - Free!
“Creative Types” from Adobe - Free! More lightweight and for designers
Timing: do it once with a new team
Cost: varies
The Creative Types quiz from Adobe is super cute and fun
Team Retros
Software development teams have been doing sprint retrospectives, or retros, for years as a method for continually improving teams’ communications and processes. I’ve found it to be a great tool for design teams as well. It’s a lower-risk exercise because people can be as vulnerable as they want to be while discussing problems and solutions that everyone experiences.
For a retro, I’ll meet for an hour with my team, usually on a Friday afternoon. If there’s a cafe or park close by, go out of the office! If you’re online, do it over a coffee or beer! A basic framework is to ask for three buckets of responses:
What should we continue doing? (What’s working)
What should we stop doing? (What’s not working)
What should we start doing? (New ideas)
To avoid bias toward extroverts and give introverted people time to think, I recommend these steps:
Silently write short answers on stickies (10-15 minutes) - ideally hidden from others, so if you’re using an online sticky board try and hide the notes or move them far away from each other to avoid peeking!
Each person reads their responses out loud (briefly)—NO DISCUSSION
Star the stickies the team wants to discuss
Discussion time! Cap it at 30 minutes and 3-4 items
End on something positive (for example: read the “keep doing” stickies, go around and have everyone say something they’re proud of, etc).
The last step addresses the biggest problem I’ve seen with retros: they can turn into depressing complaint sessions. As a manager this can make me feel helpless, especially if the problems are not in my control. Ending on a positive note helps remind the team of what’s good!
You’ll also need time (either in the session or as a follow up) to assign tasks for all of the ideas for improvements that will come up. We sometimes forget that retros are about continually improving, so make sure you focus on addressing problems rather than just raising them.
An even lower-risk way is to send out a survey ahead of time and have someone read the results out anonymously; however then you have to rely on people doing their homework. It really depends on your team so I would recommend trying both methods and seeing what works best for you.
Another key to retros is to keep good notes. If you’re using an online sticky tool like Miro, this is already covered! If you’re in person, it takes some extra work to transcribe the post-it notes, but it’s important to track whether issues are consistently coming up and need to be addressed.
Miro’s retro template with step-by-step instructions
It’s also nice to be able to look back after a few months and see problems that you’ve managed to fix as a team. Make sure to bring these up at your next retro; celebrating team successes is an important part of bonding!
When you get tired of using the same “continue / start / stop” framework, you can go online and search for retro ideas. You’ll find hundreds of creative questions to ask in a retro that will keep things fresh and help you as a manager understand the team pulse and what you need to help with.
Online retro tools:
Timing: Monthly for one hour (not too frequently because you need time to try and fix the issues that come up)
Cost: free!
Learning new skills together
Whether it’s attending a design meetup, taking an online training, or just sharing what you already know, learning new skills as a team is a great low-risk way to bond and grow together. It seems like a no-brainer, but there are barriers to setting up training sessions that result in teams never getting around to it. Finding and organizing training sessions takes time. It will require monetary and time commitments, so you’ll have to make the case to your company that it’s worth the cost.
If you don’t have a training budget at your company, or even if you do but want to do something a little more hands-on, try setting up a series of lunch and learn sessions with your team. Everyone has something to offer — this is a great time to refer back to your strengths-sharing exercise! Be prepared: setting up the sessions, finding volunteers, and reminding speakers to create their presentations will require more effort and preparation from your team and from the facilitator. However it can also boost presenters’ sense of accomplishment and give everyone a newfound appreciation for the skills that the rest of your team has.
I also love having team-building sessions outside of the office learning a skill that’s not related to design. Cooking, improv, and woodworking have been unique and fun bonding experiences for my past teams. Learning new skills outside of design might help them to relax and see things in a different light when they come back to the office.
For design-related learning, you might try one of our classes, such as Storytelling or Psychological Safety. It’s easy to make the case to your boss for budget when you can immediately put the learnings to use at work!
Timing: once a quarter
Cost: varies
Team product critique
We designers love to point out how things could be improved, and another low-risk way to understand your team and help junior designers flex their critique muscles is to do a team product crit.
You can critique an existing product related to the one you work on, or look at your own product. Looking at your own product requires more vulnerability from your team, because it will include areas of the product they’ve designed. In my experience, though, most designers are happy to point out the flaws in the production version of what they’ve designed. You’ll have to gauge your team’s level of self-awareness.
The benefit of a team critique session focused on a product, not an individual designer, is that it helps designers hone their sense of what’s good or not so good for users. It provides a safe space to practice speaking about design in a productive way before asking team members to hold up their own in-progress work for critique.
Before starting, you’ll want to remind the designers to
Talk about how the design addresses the users’ needs (if it’s not your product you’ll have to make educated guesses)
Refer back to universal design principles or heuristics, rather than talking about “likes” or “dislikes”. If your team don’t know what to refer to, Nielsen Norman Group’s “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design” is a great start; or you could get fancy and buy a book like The Pocket Universal Principles of Design.
Timing: monthly, quarterly, or just once
Cost: free!
I’ve found these four practices to be fairly painless and helpful for new teams to learn, grow, and understand each other without jumping right into the deep end of vulnerability. After doing a couple of these, you should start noticing your team is already feeling more comfortable with each other. Congratulations — you’re on your way to building a culture of psychological safety!
A version of this post was originally published my me in 2020. Main photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash.
