Reimagining Team Performance Through a Trauma-Informed Lens
In 2012, Google initiated a comprehensive research endeavour to identify the definitive elements of high-performing teams. This initiative, Project Aristotle (named after Aristotle's philosophical principle that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts") examined 180 teams across the organisation, analysing over 250 distinct attributes. The findings from this research contradicted previous assumptions about workplace effectiveness, revealing patterns that challenged Google's own initial hypotheses.
The Evidence-Based Discovery: Team Dynamics Trump Individual Composition
The research team, directed by Julia Rozovsky, commenced with the working assumption that optimal team performance would correlate with specific attributes: exceptional cognitive capacity, experienced leadership, and substantial resource allocation. The evidence told another story.
Following two years of meticulous data collection and analysis, the researchers identified five critical variables that consistently differentiated high-performing teams:
Psychological safety (the capacity to engage in interpersonal risk-taking without experiencing adverse social consequences)
Dependability (reliable fulfillment of commitments with consistent quality)
Structure and clarity (explicit delineation of objectives, responsibilities, and implementation strategies)
Meaning (perceived personal significance of the work undertaken)
Impact (conviction that one's contributions meaningfully influence outcomes)
While each factor demonstrated significance for team effectiveness, psychological safety emerged as the fundamental basis, the essential condition that enabled the development and expression of all other elements.
Understanding Psychological Safety in Context
Psychological safety represents just one of the broader workplace safety types. Organisational research recognises multiple dimensions of safety that collectively influence people at work:
Physical safety: Protection from bodily harm and hazardous conditions
Economic safety: Job security and financial stability
Psychological safety: Freedom from interpersonal threat and social risk
Moral safety: Alignment between personal values and organisational practices
Cultural safety: Respect for diverse identities and perspectives
Within this framework, Dr Timothy R. Clark states psychological safety is "a condition in which you feel (1) included, (2) safe to learn, (3) safe to contribute, and (4) safe to challenge the status quo - all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalised or punished in some way."
Fundamentally, psychological safety constitutes a "culture of rewarded vulnerability" that establishes conditions where team members can:
Communicate authentically without anticipating negative repercussions
Engage in calculated risk-taking and acknowledge errors
Pursue knowledge acquisition through inquiry
Present alternative perspectives and novel propositions, and
Express genuine individuality within professional contexts.
Teams operating in environments with poor psychological safety typically function from a neurobiological threat response, effectively operating in a perpetual state of nervous system escalation - a physiological condition that systematically undermines cognitive flexibility, creative thinking and collaborative problem-solving capabilities (aka not great at work).
The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety
Clark's framework outlines a progression that addresses fundamental human needs in social settings:
Inclusion Safety: Satisfying the basic human need to connect and belong. When inclusion safety is present, we feel accepted as part of the team, regardless of our differences.
Learner Safety: Creating an environment where we feel safe to ask questions, experiment, make mistakes, and even fail. This stage acknowledges that learning inherently involves vulnerability and requires protection from mocking and marginalisation.
Contributor Safety: Empowering people to actively participate in creating value. When contributor safety exists, we feel comfortable using our skills and abilities to make meaningful contributions.
Challenger Safety: Establishing the freedom to challenge the status quo without fear of repercussion. This most difficult stage to achieve allows teams to question long-standing practices and suggest improvements, even when it creates discomfort.
As teams progress through these stages, they intentionally model and reward increasingly significant acts of vulnerability. Upon reaching challenger safety, teams become truly empowered to innovate without fear of failure or punishment.
The Neurobiological Dimension: Trauma-Informed Leadership
While Project Aristotle effectively identified psychological safety as essential for team performance, the research did not fully address a fundamental question: What brain or neurobiological mechanisms facilitate or inhibit psychological safety, particularly when team members bring diverse life experiences, including trauma histories, to organisational settings?
This critical gap points to trauma-informed leadership as the essential connecting element.
Trauma-informed leadership incorporates contemporary neuroscientific understanding of how traumatic experiences modify brain structure and function, particularly in regions responsible for threat detection, emotional regulation, and social engagement. These modifications create lasting alterations in an individual's stress response system, significantly influencing workplace behaviours and interpersonal dynamics.
Research shows that the brain's limbic system, particularly the amygdala, becomes hyper-responsive following traumatic experiences. This heightened reactivity can manifest as exaggerated threat perception, emotional dysregulation, and autonomic nervous system activation in situations that objectively present minimal danger but that trigger trauma-associated neural pathways.
Consequently, many workplace behaviours previously attributed to personality deficiencies or performance inadequacies (like such communication issues, disproportionate reactions to feedback, resistance to organisational change, or collaboration difficulties) often represent neurobiological adaptations to previous adverse experiences. These adaptations, while protective in origin, often impede optimal functioning in professional environments.
The Neuroscience of Safety: How Trauma-Informed Approaches Support Psychological Safety
Understanding the polyvagal theory developed by Dr Stephen Porges provides essential context for how trauma-informed leadership facilitates psychological safety. This neurophysiological framework explains how our autonomic nervous system operates in three distinct states:
Ventral vagal complex (social engagement system): Associated with feelings of safety, connection, and optimal cognitive functioning
Sympathetic nervous system (mobilisation): Activated during perceived threat, triggering fight-or-flight responses
Dorsal vagal complex (immobilisation): Engaged during extreme threat, resulting in shutdown, dissociation, or freeze responses
These states directly influence our capacity to engage in the behaviours that constitute psychological safety. When individuals perceive threat (whether real or triggered by past trauma), their nervous system shifts from the ventral vagal state to sympathetic or dorsal vagal activation, physiologically inhibiting the cognitive and social functions necessary for psychological safety.
Trauma-informed leadership applies six core principles that systematically address these neurobiological processes to support Clark's stages of psychological safety:
Safety - Deliberately creating physical, emotional, and psychological conditions that support ventral vagal activation. This neurophysiological state enables inclusion safety by reducing threat activation.
Trustworthiness and transparency - Establishing predictable patterns that reduce neuroception of threat, supporting the parasympathetic regulation needed for learner safety.
Peer support - Facilitating co-regulation through social connection, which neurobiologically supports both learner and contributor safety by mitigating autonomic defensive responses.
Collaboration and mutuality - Recalibrating power dynamics to reduce threat responses, enabling the neurological conditions for contributor and challenger safety.
Empowerment and choice - Counteracting trauma-induced learned helplessness by activating prefrontal cortical regions associated with executive function and decision-making.
Cultural, historical, and gender considerations - Acknowledging how sociocultural factors influence trauma processing, stress responses, and interpersonal safety across diverse populations.
Emotional Escalation and Regulation: The Nervous System Connection
Trauma-informed leadership addresses a critical aspect of team functioning that conventional leadership approaches often overlook: the neurophysiological escalation patterns that influence team interactions. Understanding these patterns provides insights into how psychological safety becomes compromised and how it can be restored.
Research on threat response cycles shows that emotional escalation follows predictable neurobiological patterns. When a person perceives a threat (which may be triggered by seemingly innocuous workplace stimuli that connect to past traumatic experiences), a cascade of physiological responses can ensue:
Initial threat detection: The amygdala activates the sympathetic nervous system
Physiological arousal: Heart rate increases, breathing becomes shallow, stress hormones release
Cognitive narrowing: Executive function diminishes, limiting problem-solving capability
Emotion amplification: Feelings intensify beyond the actual situational threat
Behavioural adaptation: Flight (withdrawal), fight (aggression), freeze (immobilisation), or fawn (people-pleasing) responses can emerge
These neurophysiological reactions directly undermine the conditions necessary for psychological safety. When operating in a threat-response state, people can’t necessarily access the neural networks required for the complex social cognition that psychological safety demands.
By being conscious of these underlying neurobiological mechanisms, trauma-informed leadership creates conditions where people have a greater chance of being able to physiologically access states conducive to psychological safety.
The Neurobiological Imperative for Trauma-Informed Psychological Safety
Project Aristotle established psychological safety as the foundational determinant of team effectiveness. Concurrently, trauma-informed approaches provide the neurobiological framework necessary for understanding how psychological safety operates at physiological and interpersonal levels.
The integration of these two domains - organisational psychology and trauma neurobiology - offers a comprehensive model for understanding team functioning. This integrated perspective recognises that psychological safety doesn’t emerge spontaneously, and it can’t be implemented through superficial cultural interventions. Instead it needs deliberate attention to the neurophysiological conditions that can enable a person (or team’s) capacity to engage in psychologically safe environments and behaviours.
In organisational environments characterised by increasing complexity, uncertainty, and diversity of life experiences, trauma-informed leadership addresses the neurobiological prerequisites for psychological safety. By attending to the autonomic nervous system states that influence cognition, emotion, and behaviour, this approach creates the conditions where Clark's four stages of psychological safety - inclusion, learning, contribution, and challenge - are more likely to become neurophysiologically accessible to more people.
The empirical evidence from Project Aristotle, combined with contemporary understanding of trauma's effects on brain function, suggests that trauma-informed approaches to psychological safety represent a necessary evolution in organisational practice. This is not merely a matter of interpersonal dynamics or cultural preferences, but rather a recognition of the fundamental neurobiological processes that underlie human social functioning.
As organisations continue to navigate increasingly complex challenges, the integration of trauma-informed principles with psychological safety practices offers a neurobiologically grounded approach to cultivating the conditions for sustained organisational effectiveness and genuine, human, wellbeing and connection.
Comments