Psychological safety is defined as the “shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” For these reasons, understanding how to foster psychological safety in an engineering context is crucial. Engineering teams often face uncertainty when making complex decisions, for example. For good or bad, engineering has become increasingly dependent on teamwork, substantiating the importance of psychological safety within those teams.
What is it about the need for creativity and innovation and the critical nature of the work done on project teams that makes psychological safety so important to the study of engineering?
Teamwork is the (not so hidden) secret ingredient of a successful engineering practice. When we make use of the diverse skills and mindsets of our team members, we can generate more innovative solutions compared to individual team members alone. But there’s a catch. To make use of the increasing diversity of our engineering teams, everyone needs to feel comfortable tossing out wild ideas, giving honest and critical feedback, and owning up to mistakes without feeling like they’re going to face the firing squad. However, as educators, there is no clear best practice for how to cultivate these environments—known as psychological safety—and that’s what we’re on a mission to figure out.
Specifically, we studied two cohorts of students in a cornerstone design class. One group received a series of video interventions and introduced role playing (intervention) and the other did not (control). To compare the utility of the intervention, psychological safety was gathered at five key time points of a multiweek design project. The results identified three key findings. First, the interventions were successful in increasing psychological safety in engineering teams. In addition, the results indicated the utility of the lenses of psychological safety throughout the design process. Finally, the results identified that groups who used these lenses had higher perceptions of psychological safety in their teams.
What do you see as challenges or obstacles to implementing interventions to further improve psychological safety in real-world engineering classes?
When we began diving into the world of educational strategies for promoting psychological safety in engineering, we had multiple brainstorming sessions. We were tossing around questions like, “How might we develop interventions that make students use best practices for supporting psychological safety?” and “How might we develop interventions for faculty with limited expertise on teaming?” What came out of these early discussions was a mission to develop tools faculty can use to provide effective educational team training without needing extensive training that meaningfully impact a student’s ability to support psychological safety in their teams. We did this by developing a series of short videos and role-playing exercises that could be integrated into coursework at appropriate times throughout an engineering project. But there’s a hitch. In this study our approach was to compare several videos to zero intervention, but faculty might roll out these videos in all sorts of ways. Some might binge-watch every clip, while others might just stick to a couple like the brainstorming and final deliverable ones. We wanted our intervention to be flexible but have yet to figure out how people are using them “in the wild.” We have the recipe and all the ingredients, but we’re not sure what dish everyone is cooking up with our tools.
What other domains might be ripe for psychological safety interventions outside of engineering?
Psychological safety is a critical component of many aspects of our community. Consider hospitals where doctors openly admit to being unsure over the best course of treatment, prioritizing their patients' health over their personal reservations. Consider elementary schools where first graders feel confident sharing their creative work with their classmates without fear of being teased and how this lays the groundwork for their future. Envision boardrooms where ideas are allowed to flow freely and risk taking is encouraged, leading to groundbreaking technological advancements. Psychological safety is the catalyst for open communication, innovation, and growth that helps teams navigate uncertainty, express themselves authentically, and contribute to collective progress.
