 you couple the uncertainty of startup life with the backdrop of a pandemic, climate change, political upheaval and the widespread erosion of trust in our institutions, leaders and media, you have the perfect storm for unleashing unease, and a shortage of psychological safe-havens to turn to.
How do you design and nurture a high-performance culture in this double-whammy unsafe world?
Justin Angsuwat is the Chief People Officer at Blackbird Ventures and has worked as a people and culture leader at PwC, Google and Thumbtack. He spoke recently at the Upside Founder Program about the core ingredients of high-performing teams, and how founders can use these insights within their own start-ups.
“Who is on a team matters much less than how they interact,” says Justin.
In other words, the individual brilliance of your employees plays a small role compared to how well they work together — and that means how safe they feel. The most successful teams aren’t necessarily the smartest, but the most comfortable and willing to listen to and explore each other’s ideas.
This is the basic idea of “Psychological Safety”, the unwritten norms which Google discovered to be the most important factors in determining what constitutes a high-performing team. Psychological safety depends on whether or not the people in your teams feel understood, can speak freely, and can take risks. Easy to contemplate in normal times, but the world hasn’t been “normal” for a while.
Back in the 1980s the US military coined the acronym VUCA to describe the more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world resulting from the end of the Cold War. In the decades since, the notion of VUCA has been adopted widely in business schools and the social sciences. Helping your people feel psychologically safe in a VUCA world has never been more challenging — and more important — for founders.
Feelings-based theories on productivity can seem a little vague, and hard to directly implement in your company. But when it comes to psychological safety, the theory is based on some hard science and research, and full of insights directly related to increasing your team’s performance.
“[Psychological safety] is a team climate characterised by interpersonal trust and mutual respect, in which people are comfortable being themselves” — Amy Edmondson.
Although it’s been kicking around since the 1960s, the term “psychological safety” was first brought to prominence in 1999 by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who defined it as “a team climate characterised by interpersonal trust and mutual respect, in which people are comfortable being themselves”. But unless you were attending Harvard at the time, you most likely missed it. It took everyone’s favourite search engine, Google, to bring the concept into the mainstream.
Back in 2012, Google began work on “Project Aristotle” after they became enamoured with the question “what is making some of our teams stellar, average, or meh?” To Google’s surprise, and after a lot of research, they discovered that psychological safety was the number one determinant in team performance.
All up, there are 5 factors in the Google study that contribute to high-performing teams, and psychological safety is the fundamental building block. Let’s have a look at all 5 of them now.
We all know the feeling of being put on the spot. When we stare into the gaping maw of social embarrassment, it’s common for us humans to keep quiet about our ideas, or the problems we see in someone else’s. “Someone else will say it”, we think to ourselves, and promptly zip up.
This phenomenon has its roots in biology, as our willingness to share our thoughts can be controlled by the fight-or-flight response encoded into our amygdala (an almond-shaped bit at the bottom of our brain), when we perceive the potential for threats such as embarrassment or ridicule from others.
It’s your job as a founder to build a culture where your people feel comfortable in sharing their inklings and ideas without our fear or favour. High-performance, then, is less about the faces on your team and more about the interfaces.

Beating burnout is a hot topic at the moment. We’ve been melting away in front of our screens more than usual after the rapid shift to the always on, always online way of working.
According to recent research, psychological safety can reduce burnout and build resilience in teams, and can also lessen the deteriorative effects of remote work.
Psychological safety has also been shown to facilitate learn-how behaviour (learning from peer-to-peer demonstration) as opposed to learn-what behaviour (learning without peer assistance). In other words, learning and development can become pro-social in psychologically safe environments, taking the heat off managers struggling to provide enough growth opportunities in the current WFH world.
A new Culture Amp study reveals that managers are coming up short on learning and development for their teams. Improving psychological safety could help.
Quite apart from compromising your startup’s performance, psychologically unsafe environments can breed discrimination, harassment, and bullying, leading to the possibility of severe mental health issues, litigation, reputational damage, and exposure for directors and investors.
It can happen to anyone. Christine Holgate, former CEO of Australia Post, was forced to resign by her Chair and the Prime Minister who both later refused to apologise for their harassment and bullying. Australia Post has since had to payout $1m.
Sony Music, AMP, parliamentary staffers, the US gymnastics team, the French Open tennis tournament, and Australia Post have all had their issues in the headlines lately.
One enterprising technology company is tackling this issue head on. Chnnl is a technology platform committed to supporting psychological safety in high-stakes, high-performing organisations, from frontline workers and first responders, to elite sportspeople and interstellar explorers. Startups fit this high-stakes, high-performance frame nicely too.
Dr Elizabeth Berryman left medicine to start Chnnl with the aim of helping people in their millions.
Founder, Liz Berryman, believes that psychological safety not only turbocharges team performance, it automatically mitigates commercial downsides and risks.
At this point, you might be thinking this all sounds a bit too simple. “A healthy, happy team sounds good, but couldn’t this breed complacency?” It’s a valid concern.
Google’s research found that psychological safety only promoted productivity when combined with high standards of excellence, which leads us onto the next pillars of high-performance.
While the best teams accommodate and welcome each other’s ideas, they also have high standards, both for their work and for meeting deadlines.
Doing what you say you’ll do not only builds trust and confidence, it also accelerates your team’s productivity.
When you began your startup journey, you probably had to divvy up what needed doing between all the founders who were involved. But as startups grow, the “I’ll do this and you do that” model starts to break down, and you need more and more specialised people for each job.
If all your employees are well-rounded, there’s always the risk of your company turning into an Under-6’s soccer match, where everyone runs to the ball and no-one ends up scoring.
Regardless of how tightly you like to run your ship, having designated, specialised roles in your company, and clear plans for what needs doing creates the structure necessary for high-performance.
Meaning, with a capital M, is a big, tricky topic of discussion. Luckily, it’s a lot simpler in the context of work.
If you’re crazy enough about an idea to endure the hurricane of being a founder, you likely think your idea is meaningful and will change the world in some way (hopefully for the better). It’s important to make sure that the people on the journey with you are of the same mindset; that they find the work they’re doing personally important and feel a sense of obligation to see it through.
It’s difficult to work if you feel like what you do has no impact within your company, much less on the world.
As a founder, creating visibility is important so that your employees can see that what they do is having a positive, personal, and measurable effect on the progress of their team. This also creates personal accountability, and feeds into your company’s expectations of dependability.
Psychological safety is hard in an unsure world, especially for the employees of a startup. Putting aside the fact that it’s fundamental to high-performance, this is all the more reason to focus on it!
“Especially early on, you are the root cause of pretty much every problem that occurs in your organisation. How to think. How to deal with emotions. How to communicate etc” — Hiten Shah, founder, Kiss Metrics and Crazy Egg.
You could start by asking people to take risks or be more creative, but the clearest messages come from examples. As Angsuwat put it, “the way a founder reacts to someone failing to achieve a lofty idea, or effortlessly succeeding with an easy one, will set the tone for the way their teams view risk-taking”.
Like it or not, founders have an unfair share of influence over psychological safety — you are the ultimate role model. It’s part of the job. Praising the failure of an individual to complete an innovative idea provides a psychologically safe baseline, from which more and more attempts can be made, greatly increasing your team’s chances of success.
According to Angsuwat, “the shortcut to psychological safety” is leading