Things That Make You Think
More and more, leaders are waking up to the reality that we live in a knowledge economy and that our team members are a rich, untapped source of new business strategies, product innovation, and methods to improve our day-to-day operations. Not only is our workforce a gold mine for innovation and improvement, but it can also provide early alerts to organizational threats and highlight on-the-ground problems that might be invisible to management.
But here’s the challenge, people don’t bring these things to groups, teams, or organizations where they don’t feel safe. Without safety, people will usually avoid putting themselves out there for fear of embarrassment, judgment from their co-workers, or punishment from management. By not sharing mistakes, highlighting bad practices, or asking questions, learning opportunities are missed. In an environment where people question their safety, keeping silent presents itself as the only safe option, and there is a deep biological need within all of us to have safety. By merely giving our people the experience of feeling safe, we create the optimal environment to get the most out of our team—they speak up, push back, and generally, just bring more to our work.
Research over the last several years has started pouring in on this topic. A 2017 Gallup report showed that if organizations increase psychological safety, it can lead to a 12% jump in productivity. In 2015, Google did an internal study to determine “what makes a good team.” The result? Psychological safety was the most crucial characteristic that determined a team’s success. Results in today’s organizational context are built off the foundation of having psychological safety within our groups and organizations, but knowing this, and being a leader that creates safety, are two different things. How can we build the experience of safety within our teams?
Here are a few tangible ways that you can cultivate psychological safety.
Listen, Listen, Listen
Do you like talking to someone who obviously isn’t listening? Of course not! No one does. As people, we naturally disengage from people like that. Unfortunately, that’s the message that some people walk away having received from us—”I’m not really listening to you.” Daniel Coyle, author of The Culture Code, states that safe teams are often characterized by “overcommunicating listening.” It looks like this: eyes focused on the person talking, eyebrows up and attentive, body still and leaning toward the speaker, mostly quiet except for occasional active listening statements (e.g., Ok, yes, uh-huh, gotcha) that encourage the speaker to keep going. If you want to build safety, start with a greater emphasis on listening as a leader, and calling team members to do the same.
Embrace the Messenger
One of the most crucial moments for building safety within a group is when someone delivers tough feedback or bad news. In these moments, it’s important not just to tolerate the difficult information but to embrace it. Amy Edmondson, who works at Harvard and has studied psychological safety in a wide variety of workplaces, states, “It’s not enough to not shoot them. You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way, you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.”
Admit You’re Fallible
Leaders are often tempted to hide our weaknesses and errors. It’s a natural reaction to most of us because we’ve bought into the belief that leaders should be infallible. But we’re also human, and from time to time, we do make mistakes. People see it. They know it. And trying to deny it compromises their sense of safety. Instead, we should be open, own our mistakes, and invite input with simple phrases like:
- This is just my opinion.
- Of course, I could be wrong here.
- What am I missing?
- What are your thoughts?
Reminder: When asking these questions, don’t forget to listen, listen, listen.
Eliminate Bad Apples
One of the interesting observations that Coyle made in his four years studying highly successful groups is that they cultivated safety by having an extremely low tolerance for what he called “bad apple behavior.” This bad behavior wasn’t so much about the work performance that a person put in, but rather how a person treated others. Allowing relationally toxic people to stay in the room too long is like allowing cancer to grow in our bodies. Toxicity spreads, safety is compromised, and the team is inevitably capped on what they’re willing to bring to the table.
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Reflection Time: How can you cultivate more psychological safety within the team/organization that you serve?
