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Being Open About Our Errors: When is it OK to ask for help, seek feedback or admit mistakes?

Psychological safety: essential to promote teamwork, performance and care.

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts, culminating later this year with a guide for fact-checkers on mental health and well-being. Learn more about the program here.


By Emma Thomasson, Training Manager of the program Mental Health Leadership for Fact-Checkers.

What is psychological safety?

The job of fact-checking is all about establishing more certainty about what is true, engaging critical thinking and correcting false information. That doesn’t leave much room for mistakes, nor for admitting weakness or vulnerability, at least not in public.

Against that backdrop, it can be a challenge for managers of fact-checking teams to create a culture of psychological safety. This is defined as a workplace culture where it is OK for employees to admit to mistakes, ask questions, express vulnerability or suggest new ideas.

There is often confusion over what this term means. It is sometimes thought of as a counterpoint to physical safety. So when preparing for a dangerous or potentially disturbing assignment, journalists are encouraged to think about both physical safety and psychological safety (seen as synonymous with mental wellbeing). However, the term has taken on a wider meaning in the context of team leadership due to research by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson

Edmondson says that team members only engage in close collaboration when they feel “psychologically safe”, knowing that “questions are appreciated, ideas are welcome, and errors and failure are discussable”.

 “People can focus on the work without being tied up in knots about what others might think of them. They know that being wrong won’t be a fatal blow to their reputation,” she said.

Edmondson made a name for herself by studying how teams and organizations deal with mistakes. During research into drug errors in hospitals, she came to the counterintuitive conclusion that better teams seem to make more mistakes, not fewer. She eventually realized that doctors and nurses in these high-performing teams don’t necessarily make more mistakes, but they report more because they don’t fear retribution for being open about problems.

Edmondson’s insights have since been applied to many other organizations and contexts, including Google, which studied thousands of teams and concluded that the top-performing groups had five dynamics in common, with psychological safety being the most important of them. 

The other key factors cited by Google are:

  • Dependability: members reliably complete quality work on time
  • Structure and clarity: a team has clear roles, goals, and plan
  • Meaning: team members have a sense of purpose in their work
  • Impact: members believe their work makes a difference.

When I was drawing this illustration of the Google conclusions at a workshop, I made a spelling mistake. Normally, I would have started afresh, but I decided it was a good way of illustrating the importance of being open about errors.

Looking at this diagram, it is clear that teams in the media industry generally have a very top-heavy pyramid. Journalists usually have a strong sense of “meaning” and “impact”. Perhaps even too much, which promotes an unhealthy obsession with work that drives us to burnout. Meanwhile, during my workshops and training sessions, newsroom leaders I have worked with admit that their teams often lack psychological safety, as well as structure and clarity.

Active listening is key for promoting psychological safety

One of the most powerful ways leaders can cultivate this culture is to practice active listening, which involves listening without judging or jumping to conclusions, and refraining from imposing your own opinions or solutions. That might sound easy but we often find it hard to resist the temptation to interrupt, while we usually jump in to fill any uncomfortable silence in a conversation. But if managers can master the technique, they often find it liberating as they no longer feel under pressure to fix the person’s problems. Often, a team member who feels truly heard will feel supported to come up with their own solution.

Here are some tips for how to practice active listening:

  • Face the speaker and have eye contact.
  • “Listen” to non-verbal cues too.
  • Don’t interrupt.
  • Listen without judging, or jumping to conclusions.
  • Don’t start planning what to say next.
  • Show that you’re listening
  • Don’t impose your opinions or solutions.

Here are some other ways that a leader can promote a feeling of safety in a team:

  • Model vulnerability – show your own humanity and humility as a leader.
  • Admit your own ignorance – celebrate mistakes as learning opportunities rather than shaming people who are brave enough to say they don’t know.
  • Invite participation eg: implement the rule in meetings that no one talks twice before everyone has a chance to talk once.
  • Offer feedback, celebrate success – give as much praise as criticism
  • Don’t avoid conflict – address problems before they spiral out of control
  • Encourage feedback of your leadership – don’t react to feedback with defensiveness

What are the obstacles to psychological safety?

Promoting psychological safety often demands a big shift in organization culture. If a manager wants to encourage team members to admit to mistakes or suggest new ideas, she will need to acknowledge her own fallibility and be open to constructive criticism of her own leadership. It can be time-consuming to check in with team members to make sure that psychological safety is combined with accountability to turn ideas into action.

As Rosemary Igbeka from FactCheckHub noted, “It is important to be vulnerable: we are all human. We can make mistakes.” And Eric Litke, Senior Editor, Fact Check at USA TODAY, pointed out, “It can be tricky admitting failure. I tell junior staff: ‘Here are some things I screwed up along the way.’”

The whole idea of psychological safety is very rooted in Anglo-Saxon organizational culture where challenging authority is more acceptable than in other parts of the world. Employees from countries like Serbia, Nigeria and India that have a tradition of respect for hierarchy, might find it harder to express disagreement with their managers than colleagues from countries like Britain and the United States. Likewise, it might be easier for a manager in a flat-hierarchy start-up to admit fallibility than a boss in a large top-down traditional media house.

Here are some reflections from our participants:

Katarina Subasic, AFP digital investigations editor: “In Serbia, kids in school are not encouraged to ask questions or disagree… kids are not allowed to oppose adults – hierarchy is so strict.”

Eric Litke, Senior Editor, Fact Check at USA TODAY, said: “In the US, we have an independent mindset, which sometimes means we have an oversized concept of our place in the world that makes us very assertive.”

Karen Rebelo, deputy editor, BOOM LIVE, added: “We have a flat hierarchy. We are free to speak our mind. We say if we don’t know something.”

To be clear, psychological safety isn’t always about being nice and agreeing with everyone.

This is not about creating environments where people think it is fine to slack off, or make mistakes without consequence. But if colleagues are afraid to speak up or experiment, organizations will miss out on open exchange, learning and innovation. 

And successful teams need to be able to disagree and deal with conflict in a constructive way.

So managers need to be alert to their own conflict management style if they want to promote good teamwork and be prepared to vary their style depending on the situation. Sometimes, it pays to be more assertive, while other times a more collaborative approach can be more effective.


 
You just read the lessons learnt by our English-speaking cohort, if you speak Spanish don’t miss the takeaways from the Spanish-speaking cohort.
 
 
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