By Stewart Clegg, Torgeir Skyttermoen, and Anne Live Vaagaasar – the authors of Project Management – Creating Sustainable Value.
This is the 3rd of an article series of 4 articles:
1: Beyond the Basics: What Project Management Needs Today 1/4
2: Beyond Waste: What Project Management can do Today (2/4)
3: Beyond Rock Stars: Trust and Psychological Safety in Project Management 3/4
4: Beyond Control: How Project Leadership Maturity Creates Meaningful Impact 4/4
What makes a Fantastic Project?
Some projects are truly outstanding. They deliver amazing results within their set timeframe. Projects, by definition, are temporary forms of organization in which teams are assembled to provide specific outcomes within a limited timeframe. When participants share common goals and expectations of performance, the team becomes the most important asset in the project.
High-performing teams can sparkle – producing results beyond what anyone initially imagined. Team members often describe such collaboration with words like sparkling, flowing, inspiring, energizing, and fulfilling. They refer to the process of creating deliveries together, working well with one another, and experiencing the much-talked-about ‘synergy effect’.
By contrast, it can be dreadful to find oneself in a team where participants lack shared goals, or where members experience distrust and discomfort. While most of us prefer the seamless project team that achieves great results, it is less clear how to create one. What we do know is that psychological safety makes a huge difference to project team performance.
How to Achieve great Results in Project Management
It seems reasonable to assume that to achieve the best results, one must gather the most talented people. Project leaders often try to attract the “rock stars” of their disciplines, believing this will guarantee success.
When putting together teams, managers may look for seniority as well as extroversion, assuming that the right mix of talent, experience, and charisma will make for a high-performing team.
They are wrong.
Research shows that the best players do not necessarily make the best team. In other words, attracting star players does not automatically secure great results because teams are more than a collection of talented individuals. Recall the 2014 FIFA World Cup final in which a Brazilian team of superstars lost 7–1 to a team largely drawn from the Bundesliga.
Why Team Building Matters more than Collecting Star Players in Project Management
Research on project teams emphasizes interpersonal interactions in temporary organizations. As we elaborate in Project Management: Creating Sustainable Value, trust and psychological safety are essential if teams are to become truly high-performing and create sustainable value. Psychological safety enables members to share knowledge, feelings, and opinions more openly – and this openness is what allows great results to emerge.
Managing Uncertainty and volatility in Projects
Psychological safety is especially critical in projects marked by uncertainty and volatility. Often, we do not know exactly what to create, the precise deliveries, or even how to create them when we start. Deadlines are typically tight. Under these conditions, rapid collaboration among team members is crucial.
It is difficult to accomplish high-performing interdisciplinary outcomes in teams where people do not know each other. Under time pressure, members bring different experiences, competencies, and vocabularies – often representing different organizations, disciplines, and cultures. This is why projects are often described as “trading zones.” Achieving high performance under these conditions is challenging. Trust and psychological safety can be the team’s power source.
Project Management Without Rock Stars: What Really Drives Success
Google spent two years, starting in 2012, studying 180 project teams to identify the patterns that led to high performance. They called the initiative Project Aristotle. The study examined 250 attributes in teams of different sizes (3–50 members), all composed of high performers led by experienced managers.
The researchers looked at how personality traits and interpersonal skills (team composition) influenced results, as well as how team dynamics affected performance. They identified four factors that impacted outstanding team performance the most:
- Dependability (team members deliver on time and to standard).
- Structure and clarity in roles and plans.
- Meaning (members perceive the work as personally meaningful).
- Impact (members feel they can influence the work).
Yet something still seemed missing. Searching the literature, the researchers found a 1999 article by Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson, who identified psychological safety as the key factor enabling teams to excel.
Edmondson defined psychological safety as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking,” meaning that members believe they will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, or even mistakes.
Revisiting their data, the Google researchers confirmed it: the highest-performing teams were those with the greatest psychological safety, where members freely shared and discussed ideas, concerns, and questions.
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What is Psychological Safety and How to Create it?
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What Psychological Safety Means in Project Management Teams
A common misconception is that psychological safety means staying in the comfort zone. It does not. Psychological safety is not about being “nice” all the time. Instead, when psychological safety is high, people are able to take on challenges, face fears, and stretch beyond their comfort zones – knowing they will not be punished if they stumble.
Another misconception is that knowing each other well guarantees psychological safety. Not necessarily. Even people you know can humiliate or silence you. Psychological safety is fragile and easily broken.
Yet another mistaken belief is that psychological safety depends on personality traits, such as extroversion. Again, not necessarily. Communication behavior, especially how members listen and interact, matters far more.
How Project Managers Can Build Trust and Psychological Safety
To foster psychological safety, project leaders can:
- Reduce power gradients.
- Establish and uphold a clear code of conduct.
- Encourage norms of respectful, high-quality communication.
- Engage all members actively, ensuring turn-taking in conversations.
- Frame tasks as learning opportunities, not just problems.
- Model curiosity, openness, and humility.
- Admit doubts and fallibility, showing that mistakes are part of learning.
By doing so, leaders create environments where team members feel safe to share and contribute – and where true collaboration can flourish.
Why Psychological Safety in Project Management Must Be Maintained
The good news is that even without “rock stars,” project teams can achieve excellent results if they cultivate psychological safety. The challenge, however, is that psychological safety must be continually created and re-created throughout the project. Without attention, it can fade away.
