;
Burkus defined Prosocial Purpose as when each member of the team has complete clarity on the impact of their contribution to the teams’ goals or objectives and a common understanding of the value to others of the work they are doing. In Sinek terms this would be the ‘Why’ of the work they are doing. Significant research suggests that there is a clear correlation between a strong sense of purpose within an organisation and its success. (Coleman, 2022)
We are fortunate in education that our purpose is relatively clear – to enable our students to live extraordinary lives by preparing them with an outstanding education and life experiences. This is true irrespective of whether you are a teacher, bursar, facilities manager or chef. Every individual has a role in delivering the experience for the student. In other organisations purpose can be less well defined, however if the purpose can be identified in a way that resonant it can have a dramatic impact.
A case in point would be the WD-40 story, a company that plateaued but was turned around by their CEO, Grant Ridge. When challenged on the purpose of the company he said “Our products make heroes of people. If you have a squeaky door, it’s driving your family crazy, you solve it and everyone loves you” He constantly reinforced this message of turning normal people in to superheroes until, over time it became ingrained in the organisation. (Burkus, 2023)
Common understanding is defined as the team’s ability to have a deep understanding of everyone else on the team; their strengths, development areas, personal context and ways of working and includes having clarity around roles and responsibilities and communication styles. To enable an optimum level of common understanding, team members know what motivates, or de-motivates, colleagues and how to support them when they are under pressure.
With clarity of roles and responsibility comes accountability – doing what we will say we are going to do and holding others to account if they do not do so. The latter requires an environment of psychological safety to be effective, more of this later.
Psychological safety is an often-misunderstood term. It is not a shield from accountability, being over protective or political correctness. McKinsey define it as ‘the absence of interpersonal fear. Feeling psychologically safe allows people to perform their best at home, school, and work.’ (McKinsey, 2023)
The concept of psychological safety was first discussed in 1965 by Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis in the context of helping people to manage change. It wasn’t until the 1990s that it was developed further when Professor Amy Edmondson studied staff at a Boston hospital looking in particular, at how different teams of nurses performed. She was trying to assess who were the highest or lowest performing charge nurses responsible for a particular floor or department in the hospital. She decided to take the metric of mistakes reported to measure the performance of these teams. She said at the time ‘I didn’t set out to study psychological safety, but rather to study teamwork and its relationship to mistakes’. (Edmondson, 2019)
However, following leadership evaluation to assess those that were better or poorer performers, she noticed that the teams of the better leaders were reporting a higher number of mistakes. On the face of it, it appeared that the better leaders had the worst performing teams. Later, when the nurses were interviewed it became clear that more mistakes were not made but they were better documented. The nurses with the better leaders were not afraid to admit their mistakes. People felt more comfortable admitting errors, so more errors were documented.
Edmonson adopted the phrase coined by Schein and Bennis and argued that good leaders create psychological safety.
So, psychological safety refers to the shared belief within a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. It’s the confidence that team members won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. In psychologically safe environments, individuals feel accepted and respected, enabling them to express themselves authentically without fear of negative consequences.
Psychological safety is crucial for fostering open communication, collaboration, and innovation within teams. When team members feel psychologically safe, they are more likely to share diverse perspectives, challenge assumptions, and engage in constructive debate. This leads to better decision-making, higher levels of creativity, and increased trust among team members.
Leaders play a vital role in creating and maintaining psychological safety within teams. They set the tone by encouraging open dialogue, acknowledging and learning from mistakes, and demonstrating empathy and respect for all team members. By prioritising psychological safety, leaders can unleash the full potential of their teams and create environments where individuals thrive personally and professionally.
Team members working in an environment of psychological safety are less likely to be influenced by group think. Social psychologist Solomon Asch focused much of his research on the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform. The Conformity Line Experiment involved showing a group of students a number of different drawings including the one below.
