Despite what you may read on social media, leaders are not superhero’s with unlimited resources and energy. They also need to eat, drink, take a break, sleep, etc. Their energy is limited. If they use it on one thing, it’s not available for something else. So a company better uses their leaders’ energy with care.
In an environment with limited or low psychological safety, a big part of this energy is going to be used to absorb the consequences of such environment or to challenge just the very obvious. For example:
- Protect yourself or your teams against the blaming of mistakes,
- Use your energy to show quick-fixes instead of investing in structural solutions,
- Use a lot of energy to challenge the projects which clearly aren’t going in the right direction, or to take more heavy corrective actions way too late,
- Challenge initiatives which are doomed to fail but will eat people’s energy and time in between,
- Challenge nonsense processes that no-one take the time to re-question.
Without speaking about the fact that many of these challenges – if they happen – will probably end up at a way too high leadership levels (wasting the time of those senior leaders) after multiple fruitless iterations at lower levels (wasting the time of those leaders as well).
In such environment, you then realize how much leadership talent, time and energy is wasted just to challenge the obvious – and not even necessarily successfully. And when this leadership energy is wasted just to try to repair the obvious, it’s not available anymore for truly valuable and meaningful dialogues, for structural learning from mistakes, for engaging in inclusive, collaborative decision taking, …
In a high psychological safety environment, you don’t have to waste energy on certain activities (protecting yourself from blaming), on challenging what could have been corrected or stopped a long time ago and on escalating to higher levels.
One benefit of high psychological safety is to suppress a whole range of energy-absorbing, meaningless activities which are a total waste of leadership time and talent, both for the leaders themselves, as well as for the company.