If you’re asking how building a foundation of psychological safety differs from good old-fashioned team building, that’s good. You’re asking the right question. Because good team-building activities are the ones that build psychological safety. The difference then is mainly that team building is what you do, while psychological safety is why you do it. This doesn’t mean you can just go back to team building and stay away from all this “soft” psychological safety mumbo jumbo. The fact is that when we know why something works, it allows us to do it better.
The historic problem with team building is that while the majority of us have done a lot of it, some of it has helped and some of it hasn’t. The focus of team building is so often centered around “having fun” that as a result, we never really looked at whether the team-building activities were actually building better teams. Because we didn’t know how to check that the activities, we were doing were building psychological safety.
The danger, of course, with talking about team building is that everyone thinks they know exactly what it is and how to do it. So, before we start with what to do, we’re going to talk about some myths.
The 5 Psychological Safety or Team-Building Myths
Myth 1: Team building must happen face to face.
There’s a monumental shift moving people back to the office right now because “everyone” knows that you can’t build culture remotely. Except you can. It’s just not what we’re used to. For the people who were invited out to lunch or after-work cocktails or weekend golf outings, these were great opportunities to build psychological safety with coworkers. The better you understand people as human beings, the easier it is to build psychological safety. And this understanding often happens naturally in a non-work setting.
But just because it is natural for us to build psychological safety in person doesn’t mean that you can’t do it effectively remotely. The pandemic was not an ideal introduction to remote working for us as a culture. In a time where people were stressed about the pandemic, their kids’ schooling at home, the health of their parents, the future of society, and everything the pandemic entailed, it was not the easiest time to ask people to do non-critical work. Every additional Zoom call was a burden.
That said, for the people who made the effort, they found remote team building was possible. Leaders who were focused on their team’s morale sometimes did fun activities, like a dance lesson or wine tasting. But others just created times for people to talk casually, like “lunch meetings” without agendas (where you eat lunch while you chat with your peers on Zoom).
Myth 2: Team building is guaranteed when face to face.
You can build psychological safety relatively easily when you’re face to face. But that doesn’t guarantee that psychological safety is a result of all face-to-face interactions. When the focus is placed on simply “getting together” or “face time,” we feel we are excused for not checking whether or not we actually built trust (psychological safety) during these activities.
But think about it, if being face to face was all you needed to make a great team then pretty much every pre-pandemic team would have been great. And they weren’t. It isn’t enough just to be face to face. You have to actively manage your team’s psychological safety.
Myth 3: Team building is a one-time event.
Building a corporate culture is not the same as constructing a building. You don’t build the foundation once and then leave it alone. It’s more like the soil in your garden. You need to do some hard work in the beginning (clearing the area, hoeing, watering). But once you’ve done that, you can’t just put plants in and expect them to grow. You need to provide ongoing care by adding water and fertilizer, you need to get rid of weeds and you must protect your plants from pests. And this doesn’t even include what you need to do to care for an individual plant—but we’ll get to that later.
Your corporate culture needs to be built and then cared for similarly. You must build it and then maintain it. Which does not mean just shoveling on a bunch of proverbial fertilizer.
What you’re trying to do is give people the ongoing trust in their teammates and their leaders to maintain long-term relationships. You’re trying to make sure that people continue to feel comfortable that their team will support them if they take risks.
Myth 4: Team building in subgroups always reinforces team building in the larger team.
This is one of those “it depends” myths. You can actually use sub-group activities to effectively build psychological safety. Unfortunately, you can also use it to destroy psychological safety. If a manager invites the same three subordinates to play golf every Saturday, that foursome might develop some solid psychological safety. However, the uninvited teammates will feel excluded, resentful, and uncertain. Building psychological safety for one sub-group would then actively destroy it for the excluded members.
However, this doesn’t mean you can’t build safety among subgroups at all, just that you need to be thoughtful about how you do it. In the example of Discussion Groups last week, my team was too big for us to do the activity together, so we divided into subgroups. But everyone took part. And I joined in all of them. This doesn’t mean that you can’t do subgroup activities with just a portion of the team, but that you need to make sure that if you do, the others don’t feel excluded. I’ll share some examples later.
Myth 5: Team-building activities are (all) fun.
The team-building activities that get highlighted are the fun ones. Rock climbing! Boat trip! Golf! Weekend at the beach! But psychological safety doesn’t need to break the bank. It can happen in short bursts during regularly scheduled meetings. It can happen in team discussions that need nothing but a Zoom connection. Fun is great, but don’t limit yourself to (expensive) fun activities. Think more about how to get the team to know and understand each other, rather than how to entertain everyone.
Summary
We all want the highest-performing team we can get. That’s how we get the best ROI. To get this, we need to first unlearn some habits from before (e.g., same subgroup having lunch every day, no chit chat during Zoom meetings.) And then we need to challenge ourselves to find activities that will create psychological safety. We don’t want to just focus on the team-building activities, we want to focus on how well those activities create psychological safety.
I’d love to hear from you about any activities that you have found to be particularly good for building psychological safety.