The “safety” in the project team is here intended as psychological safety, a concept brought on the business agenda by the organizational behavioural scientist, and Harvard Business School Professor, Amy Edmondson. It is about the creation of an environment in which people feel comfortable to take risks. It is “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes“.
Psychological safety has been recently reported by Forbes as crucial to growth and performance, one of the three invisible forces (together with motivational drive and cognitive diversity) that can make or break a team.
In the article below I wanted to look at those psychological safety attributes that could potentially have huge implications in the dynamics of a project team, especially in those virtual or hybrid working arrangements forcefully introduced with the pandemic. I refer to the S.A.F.E.T.Y. model (by Hull and Radecki) as a guiding principle. I hope you will find the article interesting.
What is ‘psychological safety’?
The notion of psychological safety was first introduced in 1990 by William Khan who identified those physiological conditions (including safety) that are key to personal engagement or disengagement in the workplace. The concept has been further developed by Amy Edmondson, who finally defined it as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”
“It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves”
Amy Edmondson
In 2015 the massive Project Aristotele conducted by Google gave impetus to the subject. The outcome of the project highlighted the importance of safety in making teams more effective, with “members of productive teams take the effort to understand each other, find a way to relate to each other and then try to make themselves understood”.
The S.A.F.E.T.Y.™ model was then articulated in 2018 in the book “Psychological Safety: The key to happy, high-performing people and teams“. The model comprises important social motivators of human behaviour and with an impact on the individual performance. The acronym refers to:
- SECURITY – as in our need for predictability, in terms of consistency, commitment, certainty and change avoidance. This element forms the basis of our relationship and interaction with the world.
- AUTONOMY -as related to our need to feel we have control over our environment and, importantly, that we have choices.
- FAIRNESS – as in our need to engage in (and experience) fair exchanges.
- ESTEEM – as in relation to our need to be regarded highly, derived from how we see ourselves, we compare ourselves to others and think of how others see us.
- TRUST – as in our social need to belong to and protect our “tribe” (team, unit, community of practice, department etc).
- YOU – intended as the final and most important element, what is unique to “you”, such as your personality profile, your biases, how you are influenced, how you influence others, your context (past, present) and your aspirations.
The experts are advising that in the organisation where we work, in the context in which we operate and in the project teams where we take part we should look for all those elements or attributes that might negatively affect or threaten the motivators above.
The present and the future for project teams
As said in the introduction, psychological safety has been recently reported by Forbes as crucial to growth and performance, that can make or break a team.
We know that the pandemic has changed the landscape of work, and recently much attention has been given to the more visible aspects of new working-from-home arrangements. But we are now looking at the future, and it seems that we will have more hybrid working arrangements. According to the Harvard Business Review, “working from home and hybrid working makes psychological safety anything but straightforward.”
There will be a need to look at the implications in the effectiveness of project teams, also taking account of other challenges that were looming onto the profession before the pandemic.
“The future of work is now. Digitalisation and globalisation have sparked radical shifts in how we live and work. The coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis has accelerated these beyond anything we could have imagined.”
OECD report
The challenges
The quote above well sums up the situation. Even before the pandemic there were disruptive forces already threatening the ‘safety’ in teams and the project management effectiveness (as we knew it). The PM accreditation agencies, project management experts and communities of practice have already dedicated a lot of attention to the evaluation of those challenges.
In this blog, I might have touched upon some of those elements, attributes or trends that I consider relevant to the project management profession, to the project team’s dynamics and that might negatively affect (or threaten) the personal motivators. To name some, see the summary below.
Project as ‘Temporary Knowledge Organisations’ (TKO)
In this blog I reported on the emphasis being placed on the role of projects as TKOs and the projects teams as “social networks” within a larger community.
According to Patrick Weaver’s article, there is a trend not to view projects as simply “tools applied to solving problems”, but rather “sense-making communities of practice” by the agents involved. Project teams can be considered as “social networks” that are both independent of the large organisational network and also integral parts of it, at the same time. The social bonds and the related senses of belonging should be effective in motivating project team members to play together. However, the short term nature of these relationships and their forced virtual nature can be detrimental to the ‘safety’ of the team members.
“Ways of working” and trust have to be developed quickly, in a highly virtual context. It is becoming more difficult to identify the “tribes”, as team, unit, community of practice, department, to which we belong and want to be associated with. This belonging is important for a sense of trust and security. Boundaries are blurring, relationships get quite ephemeral, choices are imposed on us by group dynamics and circumstances that we may feel we cannot influence or control. Project team members have to develop extreme self-resilience and an ability to work with limited mentoring or unstructured peer-review.
Artificial intelligence
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has its own course. As for many other professions, the AI path is intersecting also with the one of the project management profession. Data analysis, management of big datasets, online collaboration for data-driven decision making are already required today as project management skills. The increased powers of surveillance and monitoring tools, detailed task management and time keeping are pervasive. What about blockchain or human/machine interaction for PM? Certainly increased mobility and ability to operate in highly virtual environments and rapid responses of the machines and computers will be key, but the utility in project management of more advanced forms of AI and human/machine interaction is still to be established. I think I can safely say that the jury is still out there on that (although virtual reality and augmented reality for project teams may be closer than what we think..).
What is being experienced is that in many projects more detailed and extensive data sets are required to be collected quickly from a wider range of sources and used in different parts of the project, programme or in the organization to generate insights. The moving data and the time pressure create risks of loss of control, in data availability, location, access and privacy threatening the reputation of the organizations and of PM professionals.
AI can be used to help with various project management tasks, to improve the way we create, manage and operate projects. But it can be perceived as a threat to job security and to the status of the professionals engaged in the project. There is also a challenge to the professionals’ autonomy as in many cases control of data is hardly possible.
Generational change
We are at a significant crossing with generations, with ‘Generation Y’ (also known as ‘Millennials’ or ‘Generation Next’) and possibly ‘Generation Z’ (‘Globals’ or ‘Post-Millennials’) entering the world to project management, taking also positions of responsibility and leadership. These generations present significant differences compared to the previous ones (Generation X or Baby Boomers) in relation to the view on hierarchical placing, attitude towards authority, personal motivators, time management and communication style.
All the elements of the SAFETY model are potentially challenged in teams where representatives of multiple generations are asked to collaborate.
Outsourcing/Co-sourcing
Outsourcing will likely continue to grow in the future. More and more, businesses are starting to outsource not just operational tasks, but also considering the outplacing of high-end critical processes. There is also a major emphasis on building value networks with sourcing companies. Additionally, there is an interesting trend with a new approach that focuses on creating value for both the outsourcing service provider and the client, as “co-sourcing.”
PM professionals are going to be greatly challenged on their soft skills such as diplomacy, negotiation and people skills.
VUCA world
I briefly mentioned the notion of the VUCA world in a recent article on this blog.
The notion of a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous project context is an explosive challenge to the psychological safety of the PM professionals. We are in a state of persistent evolution with change happening faster and often. In the future we will probably deal with a massive rate of change – our project assumptions may not hold ground during the course of the project execution. We can collect a lot of data to try to analyse, develop new models and anticipate trends, risks and opportunities. But basically, we will not know about the strength and validity of our assumptions, with a limited ability to anticipate the true benefits or the impact of a project outcome.
All is interconnected and our actions in a project may have unintended consequences, difficult to predict. And finally, circumstances and conditions will be very ambiguous, with situations having more than one possible interpretation, and this can cause confusion. Circumstances may be interpreted differently by the various stakeholders. “Not knowing” will be a new certainty…
‘Adaptive’ challenges will be difficult to face as they require a change in how we see the world, forcing us to challenge our assumptions, values and beliefs, which can be unsettling for many of us.
PM frameworks
Waterfall, agile, hybrids and what else?
The PM frameworks have been rapidly evolving in response to the increased demands, complexity and ambition of the projects being undertaken. It is important for the PM professional to keep abreast with the changes and to stay current.
The continued changes created a plethora of accreditation standards and titles and this may be a threat to the curriculum vitae of a professional. Some credentials for a PM that took hard work and a long time to achieve may have a short life, with a clear threat to the security of the profession and job prospects.
new, soft skills
All the challenges mentioned earlier have shifted the skills required by a PM professional to a new level. There is much emphasis on soft skills over credentials or on emotional intelligence to allow coping with stakeholders with shorter attention spans, with competing demands, with complex situations that require adaptive solutions.
It is said that leadership will become less about people with titles and hierarchies and more about organic and collaborative processes. The importance of relationships and emotional intelligence will continue to be critical for project managers with the organisations aiming to continue with facilitation of engagement and motivation. However, the challenge will be for us to satisfy our social need to belong to and protect our “tribe” (team, unit, community of practice, department etc).
Above all, there is certainly the challenge with the precariousness of employment which can have a huge negative impact on confidence on one’s own skills and self-esteem.
learning patterns
The conditions above set obviously a new challenge for the learning pattern of a professional. A professional development (CPD) will be truly “continual”, with a need to stay on top in many subjects, some of which may be those that we have never expected to learn about. For the individual it will be imperative to tailor a CPD plan to the personal needs and aspirations. There is an incredible variety of courses and training on demand and online that an individual can choose from. However, it may be difficult to align personal CPD to those pursued by the employer.
The challenge is in maintaining a focus and a path that has coherence and relevance for the profession in a persistent context of instability. The risks are with the lack of benchmarking or validation (due to absence of an organised assessment or reference bodies or due the lack of situations in which to apply the learnings), the lack of connection with peers or with communities of practice especially for those not so keen on connection via digital social networks. This can be frustrating and demotivating for some of us.
Are you at a breaking point?
Or do you still feel safe? Apologies for the very direct question. The most important element in the psychological safety notion is the fact that it is unique for the individual, his/her personality, the biases, the context and the aspirations.
The new working-from-home arrangement imposed by the pandemic might have been a blessing for some, but a nightmare for others. It may have been useful to reveal the cracks in our previous working arrangement and the fragility of our psychological safety, tested in the new virtual context. The good news is that, hopefully, we will soon return to a new working arrangement, with hybrid solutions that might suit better the most, restoring a sort of balance in the profession. This will allow the professionals to look at the other disruptors and adapt to the new trends.
The issue with the deterioration of the psychological safety in project teams must be closely watched by the organisations, and addressed. This can probably be done by building suitable working environments and a mentoring network, ensuring effective team processes, with a close monitoring of the situation with each individual through regular reviews focused on the personal motivators. Booking an employee on a quick training course selected from a standard list in a brochure will not probably be the solution and scoring them against a fixed, standard checklist may be a thing of the past.
In this article I reflected on the notion of ‘psychological safety’ and related the notion to the project management profession. Many challenges and changes are there, threatening the profession, like the extreme digitalisation, the artificial intelligence, the generational mix, the unknowns and complexity in our world and in the project processes and dynamics. This makes the job of a professional in this field not an easy one, a job that ultimately not everyone ….. might want to do or to continue. I hope this reflection was of interest. Please do not hesitate to contact me for any comments and constructive feedback.
Marco Bottacini, Senior Portfolio Manager, GALVmed
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinion of GALVmed.
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