Proakatemia’s alumni week 2022 is still running, right now we are in day three. This year our theme was The Future of Business which included sustainability, leadership and the future of work. We had the amazing opportunity to watch the Nordic Business Forum stream and engage ourselves in dialogue with other team entrepreneurs and the alumni of Proakatemia.

One big theme during this week was psychological safety. I’ve personally heard the term often – sometimes it is described as the goal of a team and sometimes it is used as a marketing trick when a company is recruiting new employees. But what is psychological safety exactly?

Amy C. Edmondson, a Leadership and Management professor at the Harvard Business School, described psychological safety in one interview in the Nordic Business Forum as permission for candor, radical candor to be precise. Psychological safety is an individual’s perception of the consequences of interpersonal risk taking.

Therefore, psychological safety cannot be used as an employee benefit or a recruitment trick. It is not something that teams can list as their goals. Psychological safety doesn’t mean that everyone is always nice to one another. Being nice to everyone only avoids conflict, and conflict is sometimes needed.

Teemu Pinomäki from Tribe Tampere and Selina Kustula from Red Brick Accelerator, our alumni speakers this week, both talked about the importance of the well-being of a team. And my main learning was that actually the most high-performance teams are in fact those who have high psychological safety and also high standards. Also, it has been studied that the most high-performance teams are also the most diverse.

So if we are playing to win and not to lose, we need to check ourselves. We need to embrace diversity, hire exceptional people and pay attention to our leadership skills.

Published on my personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/susannamakela_proakatemia-alumniweek-nbf2022-activity-6978410103590768640-vLbG?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop