Weekly 10 - Creating psychologically safe spaces

Psychological safety is everything when it comes to healthy at all conversations. It matters because if your teams can't be honest, challenge each other, or have honest conversations, you're not going to get the best out of each other. So what happens when someone consistently scores low but won't explain why? That's something I'll talk about later on in today's 10th Edward Weekly. So before we get into the weeds per se, let's do those scores. Productivity is 4, enjoyment is 4, teamwork is 5, learning is 2, but serenity is a 4, which brings out an average of 3.8. So teamwork has jumped up 3 based on previous weeks, bad conversations and all that good stuff. Serenity has increased a little bit as well because I'm actually making some good progress, but learning did take a hit because I've compromised what I'm doing, all that other good stuff so what's been going on with all things Petal Project so made amazing progress on the redesign. This last week I've managed to redesign the entire onboarding journeys, so the login page, the registration page and the password reset page have all been redesigned and as they're nice to have, I also gave a bit of love to the account profile page, so they're the four areas that I focused on last week. We also managed to clear up all the static build processes on Friday when we had our Fortnite check in, which was great to see because there's a lot more back and forth rather than, you know, just waiting for an asynchronous conversation to catch up. On Friday we also had a really interesting conversation about how we could potentially introduce paid tiers to the application. We don't want to be that guy that goes this is what he could have, but we appreciate as well that we're going from a free tier to a paid tier used to bring value for the people that pay for it. So we're looking at what would make that more valuable. Got some ideas ourselves, but we will be user testing the ideas as well with some of our existing users to see if that would bring them any value. Of course it got me thinking about the pricing, which is a big contentious topic. I've got some ideas, but again I've got some completely radical ideas about how I might roll this out and even say pay what it's worth to you and then put some posing question as to what would happen if you didn't have a healthy team. Again, all three for thought. The really useful stuff though, we have got some nice features that we want to add for paid tiers. So I'm going to bounce those ideas around with a few people I know already using the app. That's a nice user feedback this week as well. So I had one person reach out to me and say, been using Pels myself on Friday and I've already feel more positive after two attempts. So I was like, that's amazing to hear and I'm glad it's bringing you the positivity you're probably looking for. So let me know how that goes going forward. But on the flip side, I also had an interesting conversation with someone who's observing regular low scoring marks from one individual in their team, but they can't work out who it is and why. So this made me ask, well, how are you facilitating your Petals workshops and if not, maybe you need to reset expectations as to what it's for. So it was an interesting insight into how Petals is being used differently to what I'd typically recommend where you have it as part of a conversation, but at the same time it's not as easy as that because I know from Paul two weeks ago and you've got distributed teams across across different time zones. It's really difficult to have that live conversation. I also found out that Petals has been referenced in an upcoming book that will be published soon about real world agility. I won't give too much away yet because I don't want to, but at the same time the author reached out and said, what do you think? I was like, oh, it's really great, lovely to see. Could have made minor suggestions, but yeah, fantastic stuff. So when that gets released I will make sure that that is shared everywhere on my socials and the newsletters and all that good stuff. So what's next? This week I will be looking into the full end to end journey for creating a snapshot, running a snapshot and reviewing a snapshot. So they're my three areas I want to focus on this week. Hopefully I'll get there. We'll see. Might be biting off more than I can chew, but again, at the moment I'm really keen to ramp up efforts to meet our end of year Q1 goal to relaunch the app. And if we can get all the main journeys complete, then I'll start getting some user testing in place very soon. Okay, final bit, let's talk about learnings from the past week. I was listening to A Blink about Adam Grant's Think Again. This is something that got me thinking about team health and what makes a healthy team. So in his book he advocates the idea that great teams challenge each other. They embrace task conflict, but on the flip side they avoid relationship conflict. So this is something you need to bear in mind when you're creating that psychologically safe space that you're comfortable challenging your teammates and peers. You're providing interesting arguments, but you're also resisting that natural urge that can come into play at times. To get personal, you need to be as objective as possible and not damage any relationships you currently have, but equally be comfortable going into those difficult conversations without offending. This also ties into another very classic book around the five dysfunctions of a team. Definitely recommend reading both of these or catching up on what they're talking about. There's lots to learn from here, but how does it align to petals? It's all about creating a safe space to speak up. You really have to think about balancing confidence with humility. Very fine balance that's hard to get right for some people, but with plenty experience and practice you can all do this. And you also need to make sure that you're making sure your voice is heard. This could be through one to ones anonymous comments surveys however, making sure that there are channels for people to provide their feedback. So the main takeaway this week the best teams aren't the ones that have no issues, they're the ones that actually address them. That's it for this week. Stay tuned for next week when I'll bring you more insights. But keep those petals conversations going.