Team engagement and psychological safety are both influenced by leadership effectiveness. When both are high, a team likely performs well. But what happens when a team experiences an imbalance? And how can a leader set things right?
On episode 151 of The Science of Personality, Melvyn Payne, commercial director at Advanced People Strategies (APS), an authorized Hogan distributor in the UK, discusses finding the right balance between team engagement and psychological safety.
“In the perfect ideal, everybody’s equal in the team,” Melvyn said. “Everybody has a voice. Everybody is comfortable putting their hands up if they make a mistake but then wanting to improve performance.”
What Drives Team Engagement and Psychological Safety?
The environment a leader creates for their team affects both their engagement and sense of safety. High-performing teams exhibit the right balance between engagement and safety. However, many teams tend to overdo one and underdo the other, particularly on senior leadership teams where everyone is a functional expert. These top executives might be more worried about job security, high stakes, and reputation than about sharing responsibility for successes and failures.
Team development sessions can reveal how leader behavior creates an environment of balance or imbalance. Using the lens of Hogan personality assessment data, APS began to offer a tactical twelve-item questionnaire around safety and engagement. This offering was developed from team sessions where participants seemed to resist confronting issues that were holding back performance. “We’re interested not only in the team working together, but also in individual development scenarios, where [a leader’s] individual behavior has an impact,” Melvyn explained.
Four Zones of Team Engagement and Psychological Safety
Many teams struggle to function with optimal equality and balance across engagement and safety. The model that APS uses to characterize teams can be described as zones in a four-zone grid:
- The High-Performance Zone – (high safety, high engagement). This team likely feels comfortable expressing opinions and admitting failures and wants to innovate, collaborate, be accountable, and improve. Melvyn described it as a balance between everyone heading in the same direction and having a safe space to operate in along the way.
- The Comfort Zone – (high safety, low engagement). On this team, members likely feel free to speak openly and make mistakes, but they may not hold people accountable for results or focus on achieving outputs.
- The Anxiety Zone – (low safety, high engagement). This team likely has a lot of accountability and drive for results but also high tension, discomfort, or anxiety about how failure will be treated.
- The Apathy Zone – (low safety, low engagement). On this team, members likely lack openness and drive. Melvyn mentioned that absentee leadership can generate apathy in teams.
These zones give information about the overall team, but insight at the individual level is helpful too. Even teams in the high-performance zone may have individuals respond to the questionnaire that they don’t feel comfortable asking questions, for example. “Although on the surface it looks good as a collective, that’s a great discussion point for the team. How do we make these colleagues feel more comfortable around asking questions?” Melvyn said, adding that results are always anonymized.
Even more than individual team members, leaders have a responsibility to respond to team data. If an imbalance is revealed, leaders must acknowledge the personality drivers behind their behaviors that are impacting the team culture. To do that, Melvyn directs leaders to a deep understanding of their Hogan data.
How Personality Shapes Team Environment
The three core Hogan personality assessments provide a portrait of how someone is likely to show up at work, including how they lead. The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) describes the values and drivers that motivate behavior from the inside. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) measures the bright side of personality, or everyday personality strengths. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) measures the dark side of personality, or potentially overused strengths that can emerge under stress, pressure, or complacency.
A person’s personality data show the degree to which they naturally feel safe in a group setting and how engaged they tend to be. A leader with high HPI Interpersonal Sensitivity will tend to create an environment where people feel welcome to share their thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, high HDS Excitable, Skeptical, and Mischievous scores could indicate a leader who creates an environment where openness might receive negative consequences. An indicator of engagement is the degree to which someone’s MVPI values match company values, with stronger alignment leading to higher engagement. Someone with a high HPI Ambition score will tend to show high engagement, although not universally. Anyone can become disengaged, just as anyone can feel unsafe.
