Creating psychological safety sparks creativity
Nurturing a growth mindset in your team results in better engagement and higher performance.
As a reminder, having a growth mindset is about believing you can develop new capabilities and learn. This means you're likely to take on new challenges, accept feedback and learn from mistakes.
A fixed mindset is where you believe that if you're good at something, it's the result of a natural, innate talent. And that we are either good at things or not. So people with this mindset would find trying something new unnerving.
Like emotional intelligence, a growth mindset can be developed over time. Whilst our upbringing will have impacted our natural levels of growth vs. fixed mindset, we are all capable of shifting to a growth mindset.
In order for people to develop a growth mindset, we need to create an environment of psychological safety.
In a recent article for the Association of Coaching, Jakob van Wielink and Leo Wilhelm describe this as "trust that the team and its leader will not ridicule, reject or punish a person for their views...[and] the expectation that actions by others within the team will be in the interest of the other team members."
So how do you create an environment like that? Try:
- Self disclosure. Share your challenges with the team so that they can see you're not infallible. We're all learning and growing.
- Problem solving segments in team meetings. Encourage the team to bring a live problem and go around the table to gather all ideas on how to solve it. This shows everyone is listened to and problems are all figure-out-able.
- Creating learning opportunities. Invite in external thinking like articles, (this blog!), guest speakers etc to trigger different ways of thinking. Make it clear that no idea is a daft idea through what you say and your body language.
These are the actions that lead to high performance and innovation.
Hope this helps you create a positive and safe environment for creativity in your teams. Interested to hear your feedback.
P.S. The safer your teams feel, the more creative they are, the more ideas and solutions they generate, the higher the contribution they make to business performance. Winning all around :)
