{"id":10822,"date":"2022-07-04T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-04T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/?post_type=article&p=10822"},"modified":"2026-04-22T19:40:46","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T18:40:46","slug":"how-google-works-to-ensure-psychological-safety-for-its-staff","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/how-google-works-to-ensure-psychological-safety-for-its-staff\/","title":{"rendered":"How Google Works to Ensure Psychological Safety for its Staff"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n 4 Jul 2022 <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>Articles<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

How Google Works to Ensure Psychological Safety for its Staff<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n \n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Category<\/div>\n Human Performance<\/a> <\/div>\n
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https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/how-google-works-to-ensure-psychological-safety-for-its-staff\/<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n\n\n\n\n
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Director of People Analytics Abeer Dubey outlines why psychological safety is a requisite of all effective teams.<\/p>\n \n \n \n

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A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners<\/p>\n

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By John Portch<\/h6>\n
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    Psychological safety is the biggest difference between the top and lowest performing teams<\/h6>\n<\/li>\n
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    It requires intentional work on the part of leaders<\/h6>\n<\/li>\n
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    Is it \u2018failure\u2019 or simply a problem to solve?<\/h6>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Quick recap: what is psychological safety?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Amy Edmondson, an organisational behavioural scientist, coined the term \u2018team psychological safety\u2019. She defined it as: \u201ca shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.\u201d When Google announced the results of its Project Aristotle, which sought to understand the characteristics of effective teams. Psychological safety was identified as the biggest factor. The others were \u2018dependability\u2019, \u2018clarity,\u2019 \u2018impact\u2019 and \u2018meaning\u2019. But psychological safety stood out.<\/p>\n

    \u201cThis is a little bit of a clinical-sounding term but this is the best one we have to describe this sense of ability to take interpersonal risks in a work setting,\u201d said Abeer Dubey, Google\u2019s Director of People Analytics, who led Project Aristotle. Dubey was speaking to an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members at 2021\u2019s Virtual Leaders Meet: Total High Performance.<\/p>\n

    He continued: \u201cWe have all been in a situation where somebody senior in an organisation or the hierarchy suggested something and we may or may not agree with that; or some acronym has been thrown out there in a team meeting. Are we in a culture where we feel comfortable raising our hands either in terms of pushing back on a decision made by a senior leader or asking a question that may seem like a stupid question in the context of the meeting?<\/p>\n

    What does that look like in practice?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Dubey painted a picture of psychological safety at Google. \u201cTeams that were good at doing this had that safe environment where people took small interpersonal risks on a day to day basis,\u201d he said. \u201cThey will jump or chime in. This wasn\u2019t just something about feeling good. We could actually see a direct impact on our revenue performance, especially in our sales team.\u201d Teams that feel safe are more effective. \u201cThrough this comes this process of learning quickly and this translates into a direct impact,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

    How can you help your teams to get better?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Google instigated its gTeams programme, which was designed to help the organisation improve across the key characteristics identified in effective teams by Project Aristotle. Of gTeams, Dubey said: \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult to even bring up a topic like psychological safety unless you have a term for it. If there\u2019s no formal construct for that then these things can easily go unnoticed, so I think an explicit practice of going through this type of review is something that can help thousands of companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

    From failure to problem solving<\/strong><\/p>\n

    For astute leaders, there is the potential for failures to become problem-solving exercises for teams to coalesce around. Dubey cites the \u2018pre-mortems\u2019 carried out by the Google X innovation lab under its CEO Astro Teller. \u201cHe got the senior members of his team and he said \u2018OK, imagine if we had actually failed in a project,\u2019\u201d said Dubey. \u201cIf you think about today and what\u2019s working, people always get in defensive mode. He said: \u2018OK, think about it yourself. If we had failed, what could we have done better?\u2019 And it completely changed the dynamic where the thing that could have been defensive became like a problem-solving exercise and everyone came together. He calls this exercise a \u2018pre-mortem\u2019, which is where you imagine that you have already failed and this is what we could have done about it. That\u2019s the kind of thing we ask people to think about. Small things in a day to day setting that can have a huge impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

    Is there truly room for psychological safety in sport?<\/strong><\/p>\n

    In 2021, we published a Special Report that reflected on psychological safety’s journey towards being acknowledged as a competitive edge in sport and, in bringing those pages to life, we spoke to Leaders Performance Advisor, David Fletcher, the Senior Lecturer in Performance Psychology and Management at Loughborough University.<\/h6>\n
    These are an excerpt of his reflections at the time:<\/h6>\n

    \u201cWhat I think will be very interesting looking at the next five years, is the whole wellbeing and welfare movement in elite sport because that\u2019s definitely gaining momentum and traction, with good reason. How do we sit that alongside the demands for high performance and wanting to win? That\u2019s not going to go away either. The best athletes and the best coaches are going to have a real need to win.<\/em><\/p>\n

    \u201cWe\u2019ve seen in the past, whether it be Lance Armstrong or Michael Jordan, this burning desire to succeed at all costs, spills over. There\u2019s a real recognition in elite sport that that does happen and has happened.<\/em><\/p>\n

    \u201cThe question now is how can we manage that will to win at all costs? I\u2019m not sure you can do that in people who really want to win; like the people who are training for an Olympic gold medal. They\u2019re totally single-minded. It\u2019s not necessarily about taking the edge off that, it\u2019s about juggling that to a point where it\u2019s not winning at all costs – it\u2019s winning hopefully without other costs.<\/em><\/p>\n

    \u201cThat\u2019s where I hope psychological safety will play a role within that, where it becomes a more sophisticated culture and climate where we can strive to excel, we can strive to win, but not at the cost of cheating, bullying, abuse, fear of failure.<\/em><\/p>\n

    \u201cIt\u2019s very easy for me to say it but it\u2019s a lot harder in the cutthroat nature of elite sport. When you start losing people\u2019s jobs and positions are on the line; that\u2019s when this really gets put to the test.”<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/div>\n \n \n \n <\/div>\n

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