Psychological safety and successful teams

I've been looking through my Twitter feed again today and saw a link to this article about successful teams.  As I'm also currently enrolled in The Role of Technology online course, and having just considered a growth mindset in terms of the IB Learner Profile (my decision was that risk-taker is probably the most important aspect for me in terms of my growth mindset), it was interesting to read that psychological safety is seen by Google as being the most important factor in successful teams.

Psychological safety means that everyone in the team can voice their options, ask questions and take risks.  What Google found was that teams with psychologically safe environments were able to harness the power of diversity, so to me this indicates that they would be more creative.  In addition the findings are that employees were less likely to leave these teams.  When I reflected on these points I concluded that the schools where I'd worked the longest did in fact have psychological safety, and those where I stayed a short time generally did not.

For those interested the other factors in building successful teams were:

• Dependability - getting things done, meeting expectations
• Structure and clarity - clear goals and well-defined roles
• Meaning - personal significance for each member
• Impact - the work is purposeful and positively impacts the greater good

With just another 10 days before I return to school I'm going to have a think about these factors in the light of leading the technology integration coaches next year.  Are all of these factors in place in our team and which need to be strengthened?

Photo Credit: michael.heiss Flickr via Compfight cc