Fostering Psychological Safety

We all have blind spots. No one knows everything or can see everything.

Making decisions without being aware of those blind spots can have huge consequences.

That’s why it’s absolutely critical your team and your people are comfortable telling you as the Leader that you’re wrong and that you missed something.

If you haven’t already, you know what to do:

Malcolm Gladwell touched on it in his book Outliers and coined it in the aviation world as “Cockpit Culture”. He shared various examples and argued that flight crews deal with difficult situations differently depending on their culture. Cultures that are not level sensitive and are comfortable challenging one another have a higher safety record, compared with flight crews that respect hierarchy and where subordinates are unlikely to challenge their senior.

The flight crews with the higher safety record work closer together, they challenge one another and are comfortable pointing out to the captain they need to change their approach. In summary, they’re all comfortable being vulnerable with one another and challenging the status quo as it’s for the good and safety of the team and the passengers.

In the corporate world, we refer to this belief of challenging your team and your leader as Psychological Safety.

The concept of psychological safety in the workplace was first identified by organisational behavioural scientist, Amy Edmondson in 1999 in her paper entitled: ‘Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams’.

Her research found that companies with a trusting workplace performed better. 

Workplaces, where employees don’t feel heard and fear reprimand for speaking up, will never flourish, attrition rates will remain high and the organisations will not prosper as innovative ideas are stifled and people never commit to exposing their full potential.

How do I create more Psychological Safety in my organisation?

1. Starts with the Leader - being humble and leading by example. Treating everyone with respect regardless of their position or title, and trying to build an organisation that is not level sensitive. A frontline analyst should be comfortable picking up the phone and speaking to a Director if they want to raise a concern or challenge.

2. Failure - it’s ok to make mistakes, these are learning opportunities for us all to get better. We all get things wrong but if we never try or make decisions we will never make any progress. So encourage and empower people to make decisions and when they get things wrong, handle it with a coaching conversation. What was the reason we didn’t quite hit the mark here? What could we do better next time?

3. Vulnerable - be open and vulnerable with your team. If you don’t know something or a make mistake, let the team know. Demonstrating you don’t have all the answers and encouraging them to help you will build a lot of trust.

4. Coach - stop being the advisor. Be the facilitator, the listener, and the question asker. When someone has a challenge, ask them questions and get them thinking about solutions and the next steps. This will help them open up their level of thinking and will feel more empowered to contribute.

5. Purpose - let your individual people and the team know their work matters. It is important. Attach each and every one of your team’s own personal meaning to the work they’re doing.

6. Enlist - bring your people along for the ride. Enlist them in the ideation and decision-making process. Perspective is critical.

7. Feedback - champion feedback. Feedback is critical to improvement. If you’re not listening to your customers, your team or people closer to the product or service you’re providing, then you’re missing a trick to be miles better. “Team member, I have this new idea and I would really value your feedback. Please poke holes in it and tell me where I could make it better?”

8. Thank you - praise and reward people who speak up and are courageous. Let them know you value their perspective and feedback, and will always be open to listening and hearing when things are not going to plan. This will encourage them to repeat it again.

Are you leading and nurturing an environment for your people where they feel comfortable raising the flag and sharing their valuable perspectives?

All the best

David

Resources Of The Week

• YouTube - Becoming a Leader by Les Brown. Les Brown talks about what Leaders do when faced with adversity, and how they build people up and lead courageously.

• Book - Matthew Syed - Black Box Thinking. When incidents happen on an aircraft, investigators learn a lot from the black box on board. This forms much of the theory behind this great book. What can we learn from evaluating the data from our everyday life? How can we use this data to improve ourselves, just like investigators use data from black boxes to improve the safety of aviation? A very eye-opening read illustrating a shocking disparity in how different industries such as aviation and healthcare approach and learn from failure. It also covers why teams need to be comfortable challenging one another otherwise life-threatening mistakes occur.

• TEDx Talk - Building a psychologically safe workplace by Amy Edmondson - Amy explains why our subordinates have to be comfortable challenging their seniors, it can be the different between life and death.

Quote of the Week

Last week’s issue: Intrinsic Motivators: The Crucial 3

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