How Business Analysts Can Contribute to a Culture of Psychological Safety

How can you help your company build collaborative, durable teams that do exceptional work while respecting budget constraints? The answer might not sit within typical business analyst charts and reports. Research suggests the solution might involve culture.

Google researchers conducted a study to determine what made their teams effective. After two years of interviews, they discovered that psychological safety was the most critical factor.

"Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are...more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives," writes Julia Rozovsky, people partner at Google.

Articles about psychological safety often focus on leadership teams. While it's true that supervisors can do quite a bit to ensure a safe culture, business analysts can share the workload.

What Is Psychological Safety?

Amy Edmonson, the Novartis Professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, is widely credited with bringing the idea of psychological safety to the masses with a paper she published in 1999. The concepts hold firm today.

Companies that foster psychological safety allow employees to speak candidly and fail openly. A trusting workplace may be confused with “being nice,” but that's not accurate. "What it’s about is candor; what it’s about is being direct, taking risks, being willing to say, ‘I screwed that up,’" Edmonson explains.

Psychological safety also involves moving beyond the facts and figures that dominate a business analyst's day-to-day schedule. Connections and conversations are essential. "It’s easier to just give the metrics, that makes me appear hard-nosed. But it’s also out of touch with reality," says Edmonson.

Companies that embrace psychological safety connect with every employee, almost all the time. They use that culture of collaboration to grow and innovate.

Prepare for Tough Discussions

Feedback is part of any business environment, but delivery matters, especially in tense discussions. Companies working toward psychological safety are encouraged to rehearse those moments and be prepared to speak to the issues that might crop up.

Culture consultant Lauren Delizonna, Ph.D. recommends coming to a difficult conversation with concrete evidence that can counter defensiveness. That's especially important if a hot-button issue is on the agenda. A business analyst can provide cost data, schedule aberrations and other hard facts that could move an issue from the emotional to the factual. That preparation could help parties feel like the meeting was helpful, not an attack.

Study Workloads and Efficiencies

Teams that feel psychologically safe can speak up when they feel overwhelmed with tasks and unable to complete the work.

This isn't always easy. To make it happen, team members have to engage in behaviors they might consider risky, such as admitting that they don't have all the answers or enough time to complete their work, says Anthony Hood, director of civic innovation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

You can't make employees speak up. But your analysis could uncover logjams and roadblocks that keep ambitious schedules from working. When a staffer does point out a scheduling problem, you can be instrumental in finding a solution.

Design Effective Meetings

There are many strings to pull when developing a psychological safety plan. Some of them involve meetings. These are the moments at which teams come together to collaborate in real time, and often, those talks need restructuring.

Employees in psychologically safe work environments are comfortable discussing things they don't understand in meetings, and raising difficult issues in front of the team, says Harris Kaloudis, quality and organizational development manager at a community-asset based enterprise in the UK, Has 2B Happy Care.

Simply by observing meetings, you can determine how many times a comment is followed by a phrase such as "I don't think so" or "Yes, but." That will help you discover whether team members feel safe to speak up, and how their contributions are taken.

You could also analyze how often people speak in your meetings. If the sessions are silent, or only involve one or two speakers, those get-togethers could be infused with groupthink, says Gustavo Razzetti, CEO of management consultancy Liberationist. "Practice conversational turn-taking,” he advises. “Provide each team member a turn to speak up. Managers or loud people should always go last —- you don’t want them to influence or intimidate the rest."

If you're running a meeting, this is an easy task to complete. As an analyst and observer, you could also highlight issues for leaders and offer your optimization suggestions for the next meeting.

Incorporate Feedback Into Your Research

Companies that embrace psychological safety encourage communication. Incorporating those data points into your reports could be an excellent first step.

If you spot a trend, an issue, or an inconsistency, ask your team for their point of view. "Curiosity is vital to business performance,” writes Dennis Relojo-Howell, founder of online psychology resource Psychreg. “Ask for feedback from employees and encourage them to ask questions. Start by asking: ‘What can we do better?’."

If you solicit feedback from the team, there may be moments when their ideas don't match up with your analysis. Sometimes, you might even disagree with the comments altogether, and you might keep them out of your final plans.

Foster psychological safety by continuing a conversation, even after your analysis is submitted.

"Once a decision is made, explain the reasoning behind your decision. How did their feedback factor into the decision? What other considerations were made? Even if your employees don’t agree, they’ll appreciate the honesty and transparency behind how the decision was made," writes Greg Barnett, Ph.D., senior vice president of science at The Predictive Index, a company that develops software to predict behavior and performance at work.

Support Frequent Failure

Business analysts often join projects that are in trouble. Your analysis is meant to help determine what went wrong and why. Companies that use psychological safety see failure in an entirely different way.

"Faced with uncertainty, psychologically safe teams are propelled into a performance spiral: where making mistakes is not considered as a failure, but rather as experimentation and learning opportunity," writes Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Ph.D., co-author of “The Team Alignment Map.”

Teams that follow this approach focus on the positives when a mistake is made, writes the team at communications company Slack. Rather than worrying over who is to blame, they hone in on what can be learned from the experience.

Your reports could reflect that practice by highlighting lessons that could be applied to the next project, or parts of the product that could be reused in something more profitable. Interviewing staff could help you deepen that analysis.

"What would happen if leaders got really, genuinely curious when things go wrong? How would it feel to employees if the questions they were asked helped them think BETTER about what happened and creatively solve the problem themselves, without blame or punishment?" writes The People Side, a leadership development and executive coaching company.

Ask the team how they might handle a similar situation in the future. Or ask them to highlight the early warning signs they noticed. If they spotted something early and said nothing, use this as an opportunity to push a culture change.

"Show that reporting of errors is not the same thing as poor performance. Or on the contrary, indicate that not reporting errors is associated with poor performance," writes Angus Ridgway, CEO at leadership development program Potentialife.

Use Data Carefully

Business analysts often have a pool of numbers to draw from, and it can be tempting to use that data to push conversations along. However, that comes with risks.

Someone on your team might speak up about a new idea. If that suggestion is met with a barrage of questions about ROI or a project plan, that person might not ever speak up again, says Jake Herway, senior managing advisor at Gallup.

Think carefully before asking for proof in a meeting. Remember that you can always do a data dive later on, if necessary.

Practice What You Preach

Through your work, you can help to steer companies in the direction of becoming psychologically safe workplaces. Don't forget that you may also have to change.

"If working in a psychologically safe environment is a priority for you, the very best way to get started is by being the role model for your team in regard to what psychological safety looks like," writes organizational psychologist Karlyn Borysenko, principal at consulting firm Zen Workplace.

Own your mistakes, and talk about them openly. Commit to speaking out when you feel overwhelmed or unsure. Take on challenges with grace, and know that your team is there to back you up as needed.

Your work is critical to developing a safe workspace. "Safety in the workplace affects everything from someone’s mental health to their productivity in teams to their overall happiness. Building a workplace that values psychological safety is necessary in fostering a holistic and encouraging work environment, and who doesn’t want that?" the team at Occupational Health and Safety Magazine writes.