Mike Lyons explains how psychological safety works in teams. When people feel blamed, stress redirects blood flow from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala, causing roughly a 40 to 50 point IQ-equivalent loss. A $12,000 production error becomes a learning opportunity instead of a firing offense when teams skip blame.
Questions this video answers
Launched in 2012; findings released in 2016.
Roughly a 40 to 50 point IQ loss.
About $12,000.
David Marquet; the "seven sins of questioning" (from Leadership as Language).
Chapters
Google launched project Aristotle in 2012 and released its findings in 2016. The study aimed to identify the key factors that make some teams more effective than others. It involved analyzing data from hundreds of Google's teams and reviewing academic studies on team dynamics. The research team found that the most important factor in team effectiveness was not necessarily who was on the team, but rather how the team members interacted with each other. And psychological safety emerged as the most crucial factor. So what is psychological safety? A place where it's safe to take risks, share my opinions and admit my mistakes. That's where I want to work. And something else really clicked with me when I dug a little deeper. When we're doing deep analytical work, we're using the part of our brain that lives right in front. It's our prefrontal cortex. There's been a lot of studies that show when humans are exposed to stress or fear that the blood in our brain moves. It shifts from the prefrontal cortex down to our amygdala. And the amygdala is the part of your brain that handles the fight or flight response. When we're put in situations where the blood flow shifts from the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala, it equates to roughly a 40 to 50 point IQ loss. What does that mean? It means if you take someone like me of average intelligence and give me a 50 IQ point loss, then I'm going to be intellectually impaired. So look, if you can't get behind the idea of creating a psychologically safe work environment because it's just the humane thing to do, at least get behind it because you're going to get the most intellectual horsepower out of your team. Part of creating this environment where people feel comfortable asking questions means that we have to acknowledge the power of language. David Marquet points out in his book Leadership as Language that when we ask questions as leaders, it's important that we do so. A way that invites people to contribute he gives us the seven sins of questioning, and some of these might be eye opening for you. Consider leading questions. These are questions that guide the respondent towards a specific answer. Don't you think we should use scrum for this project? Instead, try what project management approach do you think would work? Or question stacking. Asking multiple questions at once, overwhelming the respondent. How's the sprint going? Are there any blockers? Do you think we'll meet the deadline? A much better way to ask that is, how's the current sprint progressing? Consider why Questions. Questions that can make people feel defensive or judged like why didn't you complete your tasks yesterday? Instead, try what challenges did you face with yesterday's tasks? Okay, how about dirty questions? These are questions that contain assumptions like why are you always behind on your sprint commitments? Instead, try I've noticed some tasks are taking longer than estimated. Can you help me understand the situation? Or binary questions, questions that only allow for yes no answers. Is the team ready for the next sprint? Instead of that, try how would you assess the team's readiness for the next sprint? Okay, two more self affirming questions. These are questions asked to confirm your own opinions or decisions. Like I think we should extend the sprint by a week. That makes sense, right? Instead, consider what are your thoughts for options on addressing the current sprint challenges? And finally, aggressive questions, questions that come across confrontational or accusatory. Who's responsible for this missed deadline? Let's switch that up. Try what factors contributed to us missing the deadline? And how might we prevent this in the future? Marque argues that by avoiding these sins and asking better questions, leaders can foster a more open communication and encourage creative thinking and that will improve psychological safety within their teams. Let's talk about something closely related to psychological A blame free culture. In a blame free environment, we focus on learning from our mistakes rather than pointing fingers. I was working as a senior director of Enterprise Solution Delivery and one of the team members accidentally got some code into production that shouldn't have and it ended up costing the organization about $12,000. Before we could fix it, the developer had checked in the code. The person was in tears. I remember they were just devastated by what had happened. They didn't want that to happen. I met with the CIO at the time and we were talking about like what do we need to do to learn from this? And I said, well, we have two choices. We could punish the developer and sort of make an example of them, or we could reward the developer and find a problem in the system. I mean, it was obvious the developer didn't want this to happen. There was something in the system that was a problem. We actually ended up giving the person an Amazon gift card and a thank you note. Thank you for helping us find a problem in the system. And I remember they were overjoyed with that. Relieved. That set the stage for a blame free culture. You might call that celebrating intelligent failures. We learn from our mistakes. Now here are some other practical ideas for you to try. Encourage blameless retrospectives after projects or incidents. Focus on what happened and how to improve, not who's at fault and lead by example. When something goes wrong. Model the behavior of seeking solutions rather than culprits. Use we language instead of you language when discussing challenges and setbacks. Consider a no blame policy and make it part of your team's core values. As we wrap up, I want to leave you with a couple questions to consider. Think about a time when you felt psychologically safe at work. How did it impact your performance and creativity and and what's one concrete step you can take this week to promote a more blame free environment on your team? Creating this kind of environment isn't just about being nice, it's about unlocking your team's full potential. It starts with how we communicate, the questions we ask, and how we respond to success and setbacks. In the words of Amy Edmondson, in a learning organization, mistakes aren't a mark of failure, they're the currency of progress.
