Jenny Shirey Hi, my name is Jenny Shirey. And today I'm going to talk with you about creating a sense of psychological safety and design teams. I'll start off by telling you a story. A few years ago, I started managing a UX team, joining the only design leader. One day I had a meeting with another manager at the company. They asked me this question. As you can imagine, I was pretty surprised. I knew that the team i'd inherited needed to grow in their skills and that the product had some design flaws. But I was hoping that I was coming in and managing a group of people who were fairly happy to come into work and supportive of each other. Instead, it seemed like the designers felt they were in the Hunger Games like Katniss. They were fighting to do what they thought was the right thing, but they didn't feel they had support or a team to back them up. So I have back to my desk after telling this person that I was hoping not to fire anyone that I wanted to help them improve their skills. knew the clock was ticking. And I asked myself, how could I help my designers reach their full potential. What I eventually learned with that team and other teams that I've managed over the past five years, is that it all comes down to psychological safety. And in this presentation, I want to share with you my experiments and failures throughout this journey. I'll talk about what psychological safety is, why it's so important based on my own experiences, and most importantly, how you can implement psychological safety and help build it in your own design teams. We will spend quite a bit of time talking about practical tips and activities that you can do. And I want to point out that while I'm addressing leaders during this talk, the lessons I've learned aren't just for managers. I truly believe that designers can exhibit leadership skills at every level, and individual contributors can lead by example. So let's get started. What is psychological safety? The term was created by Amy Edmondson, a professor at the Harvard Business School. She describes psychological safety as a belief shared by the team that they won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up. She talks about how important this is in workplaces like emergency rooms and airplane cockpits, life and death situations where nurses and junior pilots need to be able to speak up when they see something going wrong. You might be familiar with the term because of Google. In 2012, Google started a project codenamed Aristotle, which looked at over 180 teams to try and figure out what made certain teams more successful than others. They ended up boiling it down into five characteristics and the top one was psychological safety, where team members and the most successful teams felt safe to take risks and be vulnerable with each other. So this brings me to my first truth. In order to have a high performing design team. We all need to feel safe to take risks and ask Help. And this was what I was hoping to do with my team. Before we go into exactly what I did, let's talk about why psychological safety is foundational, not something that you add on after your team is already highly skilled. So I have adopted this diagram from Amy Edmondson TEDx talk. Of course, if you don't focus on either psychological safety or skills, excellence, then you're in the apathy zone. That's bad. But Amy Edmondson, points out that if you focus on skills without looking into psychological safety, you know, people might be good at their jobs but full of anxiety and afraid to speak up or ask for help. If you build psychological safety without focusing on excellence, people will be in the comfort zone. They'll feel good but they won't have the skills that they need to help your company succeed. where we want to be is the place where psychological safety is high and excellence is high. This is what we call the learning On. So keep that goal in mind, it's all about learning. Let's talk about how we can encourage vulnerability and risk taking. I was very excited to do this with my own team. So I asked them to immediately start sharing all of their in progress work with each other on an ad hoc basis. We also took a Strengths Finder quiz and we shared the top five strengths with each other. And we started having weekly lunches together to get to know each other. Jenny Shirey What I found was that Strengths Finder and the weekly lunches were successful, people were doing them and enjoying them, and we started to bond as a team. But sharing the in progress design work just wasn't happening. People weren't quite ready for that. So this brings me to my second truth, that activities have to be adapted for your team's existing safety levels. If you try to push people into vulnerability before they're ready, before they have a sense of psychological safety, it's like you're asking them to jump off the high dive before they've even learned how to swim. What I found through trial and error is that we need to think about the depth level of vulnerability that our teams are in. I'll use the metaphor of waiting, swimming and diving to talk about these different depth levels of psychological safety. Of course, this is not black and white. You might find yourself in different levels even within these steps, but I think this is a helpful framework that we can use to determine where we are as a team and choose activities that are appropriate for teams in 16 depth. Let's start off by talking about waiting in the shallow end. A shallow end team is usually one that has just formed or like this team that I was managing a few years ago. Maybe they haven't had a leader for a while. Some signs that you're waiting in the shallow end include a lack of socializing and a lack of feedback happening. As I found with the team I've mentioned they weren't really sharing their in progress design work. Some teams will show fear and use defense mechanisms. Like blaming others. Other teams will be very happy on the surface because they don't want to get into any negative emotions. Often the members will identify with another team as their primary team. For example, designers and a matrix organization might identify with their product teams more. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, I believe that it's really crucial for UX practitioners to have a team they can go back to, we need to help each other with mutual growth in our particular skills. The most extreme version of a shallow end team is perhaps found in the TV show the office and I hope none of you are in this particular situation. If you haven't seen the show, it follows a group of office workers who sabotage and make fun of each other constantly. And his boss is an HR nightmare who doesn't support the team members? Well, the show is very funny. I hope this isn't your situation. But I don't want to make it seem like I'm judging the shallow end either. It can be a lot of fun. Most teams really enjoy doing activities together. The problem is that if you stay in the shallow end your designers and researchers, they'll miss out on asking for help and taking risk, which we need to improve and get into that learning zone. So here is an activities that you can do while you're waiting in order to focus on creating positive experiences. This will help you to get to know each other as a team and then move into those deeper levels of safety. So sharing meals together, that's a very popular one. And it's an easy thing to start off with. If you aren't in the same location, you can still set aside time for virtual lunches or coffee breaks, where you don't talk about work. I've heard of teams that work in two different time zones that find a time that's around lunch for some people and breakfast for others, you can get creative. Sharing strengths is something I would definitely recommend as well that you can do right away either with a formal tool like Strengths Finder, or simply by listing the things each person is good at and can offer to teach others it's a positive way of getting to know each other better. I also love learning new skills with my teams. We've done things like woodworking classes and cooking classes. If you're in different locations, you can try online trivia games or have a cooking or painting kit delivered to people's homes. Private critiques allow people to start taking risks by flexing their feedback skills. If you critique an existing product, or even your own product, hopefully that won't be putting any of your individual designers on the spot. Finally, Team retros is something I'll go into in a little more detail on the next slide. Jenny Shirey Since I don't have time to go into detail on every activity, Jenny Shirey I put together a few links to articles and downloads that you can find a JennyShirey.com/safety. You might already be familiar with retros, if you work with Scrum teams, this is something that teams will usually do at the end of a two week sprint cycle. For design teams. I find that once a month is normally a good cadence. retros can really be made in low risk, medium risk or even high risk if you want because you can start getting into people's feelings. That can bring up some vulnerabilities. A basic restaurant might ask people to put things on post it notes that the team should start doing, stop doing or continue doing, like this framework you see here. You'll then share these post it notes with each other, maybe do some affinity diagramming, and choose an action items to follow up on. But that's not the only way to do retros. If you look online, there's many different frameworks that you can try. One problem with retros is that they can sometimes turn into complaint this, the people on our team bring up the same problems over and over and they're not sure if they're being solved. This happened while I was working at Splunk. So we iterated on a couple of things. We tried to end each of our monthly retros on a positive note, for example, by sharing something that we were very proud of that had happened over the past week or a month. We also set aside time to implement the ideas and solutions. As you know, it's very easy to come up with all kinds of ideas or lists of things that aren't working. It's important that you actually take time to fix those things. And if you feel like you don't have enough time for an hour long retro every month, you could start by just taking five minutes in a regular meeting to have everyone say one new thing they'd like the team to start doing. This can be verbal and go very quickly. Remember, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. After your team becomes more comfortable with each other, that's when you graduate to swimming in the pool. You'll notice that your team members are hanging out together and there's really good feedback happening during critiques. Often people are willing to share feelings with each other and ask for help. And you'll start noticing that people identify with this group as their primary team. You might not be familiar with 30 rock, but it's a very funny sitcom about a group of people doing a live show similar to Saturday Night Live. I believe this group kind of represents a swimming pool team. They have their issues and struggles, but in the end, they support each other. So being in the pool is a lot of hard work. You can get to a pretty high functional level. This is where a lot of teams will stay. And it's important to note that when you add a new person to your team, you're going to need to go back and do things at a lower depth level to make sure that that new person feels comfortable. And everyone is getting to know each other all over again. Activities that are good to do when you're in the swimming pool, help you focus on being vulnerable in a safe place. One that I really like is called work with me sheets, and I'll explain that on the next slide. Sketching together is a great thing for designers to do to boost great creativity and help with brainstorming. But it does require some vulnerability because many people even designers don't think that they're very good at sketching. expressing gratitude is a very quick exercise that you can do if you don't have a lot of time. You can pair up team members and have each person say one thing they're thankful for about the other person. Gratitude requires us to get in touch with our feelings, and that's vulnerable. Finally, individual design critiques are very helpful for us as you expect tensioners but as we all know, it takes skill to give and receive feedback well, and it requires us to ask for help and admit that we're not great at everything. So I would say this is the most difficult activity within the swimming pool. I'd like to tell you a little about work with me sheets. It's a really fun tool that I started using when I was at Splunk, to help our team get to know each other Personally, I actually found out about this from one of the people I managed, and the original sheets were created by a program manager who worked at thumbtack. You candefinitely add things to it to make it work for your team. For example, adding images or Myers Briggs types, I would categorize this version as medium risk because you're sharing about your weaknesses and getting into your personal life a bit but you can adapt it to the lower risk if you want to. I use it with my team during a team meeting. People filled them out ahead of time and it took about five minutes per person to go through. But I've also used a shorter version as an icebreaker in a large group setting where people paired up and went through the questions spontaneously So you know, you can be flexible and creative with how you use the sheets. If you do want your team to get personal and vulnerable with each other, I would recommend that you allow people to fill out the work with me sheets ahead of time, and then send set aside a good amount of time for everyone to read through them. Otherwise, if you don't have a lot of time, or just want to keep it casual, you can take out some of the more personal questions and have people share in pairs with each other. Jenny Shirey Okay, let's talk briefly about diving. This is where teams are really getting vulnerable and taking a lot of risks with each other. If you see a team that's diving in open water, metaphorically speaking, you'll notice they're giving an accepting feedback outside of formal critiques. This is what I wanted to do with that team that I stepped into, but they just weren't at that level yet. You'll notice the teams are celebrating differences and creating new norms and values. They're able to take risks outside of their teams because they know that they have that support to come back to sometimes they talk about themselves as if they're part of a family. I would say Modern Family is a great TV representation of this type of team. Jenny Shirey They get into fights, they get mad at each other. But in the end, they can be very vulnerable with each other because they know that they have this unconditional support of their family. So diving into open water, it's pretty scary for a lot of people. But I like using this metaphor, because it shows that there's a lot of beauty that you'll miss out on if you never go into the deep water. So when you're with a team that's at this level, and they're feeling quite safe with each other, you want to focus on taking big risks, you can start doing constructive one on ones with your team. Or you could do something really fun like taking an improv class, which requires a pretty high level of trust with each other. I've also had teams doing regular showcases of their work to outside stakeholders. This requires a lot of courage, but it's very rewarding. In addition team value creation is a great thing to do at this level. So all of this brings me to my third truth. Jenny Shirey Simple regular activities can help us build psychological safety. These are not all super difficult things to do. They simply require that you spend a little bit of time and formany of them that you do it regularly. Jenny Shirey So how did I do this with a team that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk? We started off by doing things like eating together, sharing our strengths with each other. And then we added on product critiques and monthly Team retros. After a few months, we started doing sketching and sessions with each other, as well as individual feedback sessions. And finally, about eight months after I've started, that's when we did short showcase presentations for other teams. And we took an improv class together. You know, this is just one way that you might want to arrange your activities across time. So I encourage you to ask yourself right now is your team waiting, swimming or diving? This will help you to choose activities that are appropriate for your level. The final truth I want to share is that of course, you're going to make mistakes. And that's totally okay. I've made a lot of them. One very common mistake that we make is to think that we just don't have enough time. This is a screenshot from an actual product leaders calendar, and maybe your calendar looks really similar. But I would encourage you to think about how you can turn existing meetings into opportunities for building psychological safety. Ask yourself, what's the smallest, easiest thing I can try? If I take just one minute, what could I do? I would check out Dropbox dot design the team, they're made something called creative conversation cards. You could experiment with asking one of those questions at the beginning of a regular meeting. Do that for a month and just see how it goes. Jenny Shirey Another mistake that I've made is getting too excited and expecting my team to be vulnerable right away when they weren't quite ready. Instead, I encourage you to ask yourself what is my Team need right now. Think about their existing safety depth level. Think about what they know how to do, whether they need training in some areas, and what their emotional needs are. And remember that each person will have different needs. So you'll need to get to know your team as individuals. Right now, it's a very difficult time for many of us, we're being very vulnerable, trying out things that we've never done before. We need to be gentle with ourselves and others right now, it might not be the best time for you to throw exercises with your team that require a lot of vulnerability. And that's okay if you need to stay in the shallow end for a while. Jenny Shirey Finally, we make the mistake of thinking that because we're the leader, we don't need to be vulnerable. Jenny Shirey This is something I've done many times myself. I used to be very uncomfortable sharing my emotions and feelings with my direct reports. I was afraid that they might not respect me anymore. But it wasn't until I started to talk about my emotions at work, and also tell my team What are I was struggling with that I started to feel like we were a family. Of course, you don't want to overshare. But when I noticed that when I acknowledged my weaknesses in front of my team or talked about the things I was working on, they felt more comfortable coming to me and asking for help. And then I was able to help them grow in their skills. So ask yourself, How can I lead by example, this might be as simple as saying, hey, team, I want to try out this activity. I've never done it before it feels a little uncomfortable. I'm definitely going to need your help and also for you to give me feedback when we're done. When talking about vulnerability, of course, I'm going to reference Bernie Brown who writes about and studies vulnerability. In Daring Greatly, she writes that as leaders, we need to cultivate the courage to be uncomfortable, and to teach the people around us to accept discomfort as a part of growth. So that's part of your job as a good leader and remember that being a leader isn't dependent on your title. Jenny Shirey To wrap up, I'd like to recap The truths that I've learned and share it with you. In order to have a high performing design team, we need to feel safe to take risks and ask for help. Second, activities need to be adapted for your team's safety levels. Third, simple regular activities can help us build psychological safety. And finally, you're going to make mistakes and that's okay. Remember, it's the learning zone, not the perfect zone. If you're a leader, here's three things you can do right now, when you go back to your team. You can consider your team's current safety depth. Jenny Shirey You can choose the smallest, easiest thing to do. And of course, you can embrace the discomfort. Jenny Shirey If you're not a manager or design lead, you can still take action. You can suggest an activity to your leader. Maybe you offer to lead it yourself so that you can showcase your leadership skills and not Add more to their busy schedule. You can model vulnerability yourself, and you can share these ideas with your leaders. Before we end, I want to go back to this question that I was asked a couple of years ago. You might be wondering what ended up happening with that team? Well, I'm happy to say the team grew from five to 10 designers, we kicked off a successful product rebrand. And we released designs that helped us increase our demo requests and triple our sales leads all very good things. But the thing I was most proud of was what my direct manager wrote about me in my LinkedIn recommendation, he wrote that he had seen us go from a group of individual contributors to a coherent team with a strong identity and shared vision. Through the activities and hard work we did together. We not only had more skilled designers and a better product, we also learned to take risks and support each other. Jenny Shirey So I hope my story and learnings can help you to create psychological safety in your own teams. If you need help through workshops, trainings or individual coaching, you can contact me. And of course you can find out more information on my website at JennyShirey.com find me on medium and Twitter as See Jenny Design. Thank you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai