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May 2025 - Beyond the Pizza Party- Steps for Growing Healthy Team Culture

A healthy culture is the secret ingredient to high functioning teams. Growing culture requires some thoughtful effort by leaders, but the results – team efficiency, effectiveness, harmony and resilience – are worth that effort. Learn tips and strategies leaders can use to foster healthy team culture.  

Session Summary

Session Hosts:

Dr. Adina McBain and Dr. Lisa Stevenson

Presenters & Panelists:

May 28

  • Co-panelists - Dr. Amanda Brisebois & Dr. Shelley Howk
  • Presenter - Michele D. Hannay

May 29

  • Co-panelists - Dr. Chelsey Topping & Dr. Shelley Howk
  • Presenter - Leah Malazdrewicz
Learning Objectives

At the end of this webinar, you will be able to:

  • Explain the importance of psychological safety in shaping a team’s culture
  • Describe the four areas of focus for building psychological safety on a team
  • Employ practical tools that foster and support team culture

Recommended Resources

Psychological Safety as the Foundation of Team Culture

  • Psychological safety is the belief that it's okay and expected to speak up with concerns, questions, ideas or to make mistakes

  • It is essential for healthy team functioning, learning, innovation, and patient safety

  • Psychological safety often must be deliberately cultivated

  • Amy Edmondson’s TED Talk highlights how high-performing teams appeared to make more errors—but they were simply more willing to report them. These teams fostered a culture of openness, where speaking up with questions, concerns, or mistakes was safe and expected. Climates of psychological safety ultimately promote learning and improvement

Four Areas of Focus to Foster Psychological Safety

Create a culture where speaking up is safe by having leaders openly share their own mistakes and lessons, and by recognizing with gratitude and praise those team members who speak up. 

Research in healthcare shows that when leaders actively seek input and show genuine curiosity, team members are more likely to share concerns and ideas.

Questions like “What am I missing?”, “What concerns do you have?”, and “What questions do you have?” help surface valuable insights.

Research shows that teams with clear, proactive agreements on how to voice disagreement and challenge decisions achieve better clinical outcomes and higher team satisfaction. Teams should co-create guidelines for raising concerns, ideally documenting them as a living agreement, which is reviewed and updated regularly.

Tools to support the development of a team agreement include the SBAR communication technique, or the CUS communication technique.

Organizations with ‘Just Culture’ frameworks have significantly higher rates of safety reporting and learning. The framework shifts focus from "who to blame" to "what can we learn" while still maintaining accountability where appropriate. It encourages reporting and learning from failures rather than hiding them due to fear of punishment.

Insights from Co-Panelists’ Stories 

  • Environmental Impact – Healthy, productive team cultures rarely happen by chance—they thrive with the right conditions and deliberate effort

  • Proactive Reflection – Periodic reminders to reflect on team culture can catch early signs of dysfunction 

  • Team Culture Evolves – Dynamics can shift as new team members join, or as leadership changes

  • Reassessment is key –Teams often fall into routine, and default behaviors develop. It’s essential to reassess whether our practices and communication styles are still effective

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