According to Google, the #1 trait of the best teams is the presence of trust or what they call psychological safety. The presence of psychological safety enables people to take risks and share their opinions while creating the foundation for real collaboration.
How to Create Psychological Safety in Your Team (Video Transcript)
“Several years ago Google kicked off a study that looked at its teams across the organization to identify those traits that would be predictive of the highest performing teams. The number one attribute that was predictive of those best teams was the presence of psychological safety, and in fact the best leaders are those that can foster that sense of psychological safety within their teams and their companies. There are a number of ways that you can start to build the presence of psychological safety. One thing is to be vulnerable, but not to disclose your deepest and darkest secrets but share those things that concern you. If the marketplace is incredibly turbulent, share some of your concerns, but also talk about things that you've overcome in the past - whether it's developing new behaviors as it pertains to your leadership or communication style - share those things with your team to be vulnerable. You'll start to create trust and people will also be willing to share some of their concerns as well. At a high level, you can create a series of ground rules of what are some of the behaviors that we're going to tolerate and we're going to encourage within our team context and that can go a long way towards establishing a baseline in terms of how people should act and behave with their team members. As a leader it's really important that you model those behaviors that you want to see because what you say is less important than what you do. You can also start to measure some of the the things that could lead to psychological safety - you can ask questions in a pulse survey to get a sense for whether people feel comfortable with sharing openly in the group or even sharing with you as a leader because if you can measure those things you can start to make some of those behavioral shifts over time that can really boost the psychological safety in your team. If you're looking to really level up your game as a leader, look for some different ways that you can help increase the psychological safety in your team and watch as the engagement of your team goes up, the productivity goes up, and ultimately the performance will go through the roof.”