Psychological safety: my top tip for building a high-performing team, fast.

I'm a big believer in building trust and psychological safety quickly when leading a new team. Teams that feel safe and trust each other are proven to perform better. They are more resilient, more creative and more motivated. They are happier.

Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google said “There’s no team without trust," in his Harvard Business Review article.

Trust, and how to earn it is top of mind for me as I've been standing up a new agile squad in my role as Product Owner.

Today as a team we took a big step towards building trust by doing an exercise called Journey Lines (credit: Lyssa Adkins). Each of us mapped our career and life highs and lows as a line graph and then presented our journey to the team.

Sharing your low points is a big ask of a newly formed team so I filled mine out first in the shared doc for all to see. I figure you have to lead by example all the time, including vulnerability.

We learnt so much about each other; finding commonalities and skills we never knew people had. The team left the session fizzing with energy and feeling stronger. It's a great start.

A final thought. Trust is earned over time but lost in an instant. #Trust is not a one-trick pony. #psychologicalsafety #leadership