Emotional conversations create Psychological Safety in a team and subsequently psychologically safe teams are more resilient to crisis and negative changes.  Googles Project Aristotle in 2012 searched to find what it takes to build the perfect team, New York Times magazine article by Charles Duhigg; 2016 ‘What Google learned from its quest to find the perfect team’ describes how particular group norms are vital to success.  They found that psychological safety more than anything else was critical to making a team work. 

Google found two team norms drove team success:

1. Members spoke roughly the same proportion.  If everyone got the chance to talk, the team did well.

2. ‘High average social sensitivity’ Intuiting how others’ felt.  Knowing when someone was feeling left out or upset.

These skills are learnt through team and group coaching creating a shared belief that it is safe to take risks. You may feel that it’s too hard to talk emotionally at work and some feel work is not the place for emotion. However, suppressed and unexpressed emotion does a lot of damage. It causes stress, reduced creativity, inability to solve problems to name a few.  And overall, suppressing feelings reduces resilience to the negative impacts of crisis and changes that teams experience.  

It's hard for the leader to recognise the barriers to ensuring the environment is psychologically safe as members may be playing an unconscious role assigned to them to agree or acquiesce.  Despite people saying that they do speak up, because they are vocal in meetings etc., it doesn’t mean everyone feels that they get a chance to talk or that members can speak to power.  Despite leaders saying they do include everyone what actions do they take when someone feels left out?

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