DesignOps 2020: How to Build and Scale Team Safety (Session Notes)

Speaker: Alla Weinberg, CEO of Spoke and Wheel

— The goal of the presentation is how to scale team safety, beginning with  Alla’s own story
— What put her on track to care about psychological safety was an incident where Alla didn’t feel safe
  • She had been a UX designer for over a decade and transitioned to leadership development for designers and business people
  • During one of her sessions, a co-worker walked around entire training she did with notebook and would write down everything they thought Alla was doing wrong and what the co-worker didn’t approve of
  • The co-worker then provided  the feedback to the manager, and not directly to Alla
— Alla lost all sense of trust and sense of safety. Focus on avoiding individual and not sharing any ideas with them
— Alla’s mental energy during the work-day was spent trying to avoid actually working with other person, as opposed to doing her work

 

The Neuroscience of Safety

— Alla learned from the experience is that without safety, people literally can’t think
— She learned neuroscience of how brains work.
  • Human brains haven’t changed that much, and are wired primarily for survival
— Purpose of brains and how brain works
  • According to the triune brain theory: People get 11 million pieces of info through five senses, but only consciously aware of about 40 at a time.
— All information is processed from bottom-up
    • First by basal ganglia, the brain stem (portion of brain tracks information for physical safety) i.e. are we physically safe
    • Next to limbic brain, having emotional reaction to some piece of information. Emotionally can manage things
    • Finally to Neo-cortex, where you think and plan
— If primitive/emotional part detect any danger, they will take resources from part of brain that can think, and  these resources will be redistributed to the rest of your body to help you survive

 

— When you don’t feel safe operating, your IQ drops from 100-120 to 50-70 and brain cannot think

 

— Brain doesn’t know difference from tiger or angry email from manager

 

— Having safety important aspect for own resilience and challenging and all remote

 

— Sense of safety allows internal resources to be more resilient and survive in current times

 

What happens if no sense of safety exists?

Blockbuster
  • Missing video-streaming trend
  • And out of business in less than six years
  • People might have had ideas, but were shut-down by management and didn’t feel safe enough to raise concerns
Uber
  • Not enough safety to talk about bro culture in Uber, until CEO had to resign due to culture
Boeing
  • Boeing 737 MAX crashes killed hundreds of people because engineers didn’t feel safe enough to push back on unreasonable deadlines, due to pressure to deliver

An Activity

— Activity: Think of safe team you have been on (family, informal group). What attributes made team safe? What did you accomplish together as a group? What did you have to overcome  as a group?

 

— Instructions to go to menti.com and type in attributes of what made team safe

 

Things Alla noticed in responses:
  • Acceptance and non-judgement
  • Transparency as a key need
  • Focus on Results

 

— Results focus on: ability to try new things, sense of belonging, respect, vulnerability, authenticity, unconditional support. Sense that you had a person’ back

— Trust is created between two people, safety is created within a group of people
— Safety created in relationship. Relationship is how we think, feel, and behave with one another
  • Best barometer is feeling relaxed in a group and talking to each other
  • No need to strategize about how your feeling, or what needs to be expressed
  • Just relaxed in person’s presence

Activity 2: Relationship Map

— Goal of mapping level of safety you have and how safe your team feels overall
— On piece of paper, draw a circle representing your team.
  • Place yourself in the circle, and where you think you belong in your team
  • One-by-one place other team members inside, on edge, or outside of circle
  • Placement up to you.
    • Can include vendors who are not part of team, but who work with you
— Once done, designate level of safety identified between you and others
  • Solid line represent more safety
  • Dotted line need to be strategic
  • Solid line with slash is break with safety

The end result should resemble the following diagram:

Activity 3: Take a Step Back

— When ready take step back from map and ask what are you noticing, what you need to change, and what you want the map to be
— Ask and share what you are noticing about map

— Takeaways from exercise include less safe relationships than otherwise, and safety in critical places, and building out work and investing in relationship and investing in those relationship
  • Less safety with leadership roles, and safety that you feel
  • Surprise about lack of safety
  • Want to have all solid lines on maps for sure

Ways to Build and Scale Safety

— Structured activities, regularly practiced like meetings help create feeling of safety
— Meetings are the best lever to pull to create safety. Great because they tell what conversations are being had, versus ones that are not having, and ones that need to have
— Example of conversation how we are feeling or mistakes made.
  • Physical comfort in environment
— Suggestions to build out a sense of safety

 

  • Physical Safety: Safety in your body, and primitive brain-stem in body. Especially important and people of color are talking about bodies and lack of safety.
    • Assumption of remote environment to have a camera on
    • Could be viewed as physical threat to others
    • Consider whether body feels relaxed even with environment, and
  • Emotional Safety
  • Psychological Safety  (Most common)
— Focus on physical, emotional, psychological safety for work
— Best practice deals with boundaries conversation

 

  • Sense of physical boundaries
    • Not a one-time meeting, and cadence to conversations (i.e. change to immediate working team)
    • Or to physical environment (i.e. moving from office to remote work)
  • How you have conversation, is ask each individual to make two lists
    • What is okay with me/What isn’t
    • Goal of deeply listening to each other, and what works and what isn’t
— Goal is to hear from everyone, and commonalities across people can be made into team boundaries.
  • i.e. Providing feedback via email is not okay, versus having camera on Zoom

— One should feel safe to share things and that in org this sharing of feelings is not okay
  • If no safety, won’t have as much capacity to think analyze/ come up with idea
  • Less ability to think and do work
  • Can be done and in Zoom
— Create an invitation for people to speak, and addressing fears that XYZ will happen
— Have four words (“Happy” “Angry” “Sad” “Scared”), and have the host of the meeting repeat back dominant emotion (i.e. sadness and joy)
— Feelings are body-sensations.
—Have word of “happy” “sad” to describe something you are physically feeling in your body
  • Tightness in stomach when scared
  • Heaviness on chest if feel sad
— If you don’t feel comfortable for words, but can talk about body sensations.
  • Most direct way to talk about emotions
— Psychological safety
  • Feel threat to body/emotions
  • Also important. Feel you can share ideas and mistakes made without fear of retaliation or repercussions
— Have a celebration of your mistakes
  • Have super-light-hearted and ability to learn from experience
  • Have special meeting to capture mistakes made in previous month
— Important for leaders to go first and provide permission for contributors lower down in rank to share mistakes
— More fun you make it, and how regular you are with it. Will catch mistakes so much quicker and feel okay in sharing things
  • People will feel comfortable
—To scale it
  • Share it with your team and specific type of meeting with cross functional partners
—Invite people to ask if they need more physical, emotional, psychological safety in team and what conversation people can be invited to
— At the end of the day, safety is journey
  • Team and you will evolve over time and will need to add/remove something
  • Always ask yourself if you are having conversations needed to feel same

 

Group Questions

  1. How to use meeting to create safety in org that is experiencing meeting fatigue?
Do a meeting audit and have sense of meetings you are having and what is discussed during meetings
Can move meetings into Email and slack. Have conversation you are having and conversations
Removing some meetings, but adding meetings for different conversations
  1. Insight of how open-floor plan spaces impact physical and psychological safety?
Each person has own boundaries for what feels safe.
Personally believes open-floor plans can diminish a sense of physical safety and boundaries
  1. What other methodologies do you use outside of meetings to improve safety and remote team building?
Have people gather and learn something together. Important to have people who have fun activities
Example of team-bonding can include building a virtual terrarium and connecting with each other
There is also coaching with others and for team as a whole
Can only get so far with individual coaching because you are working together as a team and system
  • Seeing patterns people are stuck-in and being able to shift out
  1. What to do about people who are closed/not fully honest in single group?
Need to start small in establishing safety. If you don’t feel safe with immediate team, and establish safety with people, and work your way out
Many people won’t feel safe immediately
  • Start small and build it out
Track and identify issues, and track what triggers may be
  • Create a survey of some sort to ask question about how safe they feel
Sharing an emotion/idea or admitting a mistake.
  • Free questionnaire can be used and is available. Some teams have even created dashboards
Safety is not a specific mood, but about sense of how relaxed you feel around each other
  • Having dashboard where you can see that issue is important, and how folks are seeing

 

  1. How might practices would be different with people who are on autistic spectrum and people uncomfortable with techniques?
  • People on autism spectrum have more difficulty with social cues and can make ideas with social cues
  • Figure out assumptions to figure out what needs to be done to feel safe and have agreements on meeting formats and making people feel safe emotionally
  1. How to start when team members feel very unsafe?

 

  • Have meetings without the leadership at first. Create safety with each other.
  • Power dynamic with leadership and team that is present and is real. Okay to have conversations without leadership to start
  • Build that sense of tribe and safety then move onto what to say to leadership and what to have as well

 

  1. What to build safety in distributed/remote environment?

 

  • Really think hard and be thoughtful about where communication takes place. Text/Zoom/Call/Email. Think about what can be talked about face-to-face, as people get very confused.

 

  • Things that are important via Slack and email. Conversations on Zoom and items on Slack

 

  • Have a clear idea of what’s being asked, and that will create relaxation and how to talk with each other
  1. Tactics to talk about someone who doesn’t want to talk about feelings?
  • Don’t force people to talk about feelings they are not open to talking about
  • Start to say that feel scared that X will happen and share your feelings too
  • Don’t anticipate any response from person. Just express her feelings and how it works. This creates opening space that is okay and worthy of talking about

 

9. How to respond to emotional safety question anonymously?
  • Be willing to start anonymously, if you don’t have sense of safety. People will feel okay to say something. Otherwise people will be reluctant or provide a “bright-sided picture”
  1. How to encourage people to express people when different language skills/communication backgrounds?
  • How you listen, and culturally okay to express
  • Can still hear if people are sad or very upset
  • Just acknowledging the emotions, that you are listening for content and emotional content and inflection
11. Check-in retrospectives and general group trend and have more truthful answers
  • Don’t reveal identity until everyone has submitted their response
  • Can’t follow group trend if you don’t know what people are thinking