Psychological safety. The term says it all. And says nothing. I can quickly see how two misunderstandings could arise:
- Psychological safety as looking at the inner psychological safety of individuals. And leaving open the question for business leaders of why it is relevant for them as leaders of teams (management teams, project teams, boards) or as leaders of organizations.
- Psychological safety as focusing on “safety” in the meaning of “health and safety”. As such it may sound as a typical HR responsibility and not a business leader direct responsibility. Though writing this, I realize I’m probably not doing justice to what “health and safety” means in a manufacturing environment due my sole financial service experience.
A strategic performance enabler
As a result, the term “psychological safety” is not really the best term one could choose to tease the curiosity of leaders and to motivate them to invest time in it. Not doing so would however be a big mistake: when used in the context of leadership and corporate culture, psychological safety relates to an essential requirement to achieve high-performing team performance, resulting in very tangible business benefits:
- A growth mindset
- More engagement by all
- A learning team and organization
- Diversity leveraged through genuine inclusion.
- Collective intelligence enabled, leading to better and more resilient decision-taking.
- Creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation facilitated.
- A higher probability to succeed thanks to more open conversation including on mistakes, failures and difficult topics.
Fair to say that “Strategic-enabler-for-high-performance-inclusive-learning-engaged-teams” is more explicit, but less convenient to use 🙂 .
For leaders caring about their teams
Another confusion that I can see, is thinking about psychological safety in binary terms. A misplaced shortcut could be to think that as a leader,
- you’re either a narcissist, psychopath or manipulative leader, and you should work on psychological safety (actually these type of leaders probably can’t care less).
- Or you’re a “normal” leader and certainly you’re fine from a psychological safety point of view.
Actually, nothing is less true. If I look back at my own 20+years leadership experience, I can think of quite a number of situations where the psychological safety that I believed to instill in my teams was probably not as high as what I would have liked it to be: not because I didn’t care (I think of me as someone who does), but because of various possible reasons like
- my own workload and pressure,
- my lower mental or physical energy levels at times,
- my own perfectionist tendencies (which I took care of in between 🙂 ),
- an insufficient self-awareness when starting to take leadership positions,
- simply a chemistry that still had to take place with the members of a new team I inherited.
So, there are plenty of reasons or situations where the psychological safety in a team is not what a well-intentioned leader would like it to be. And personally, I would have loved the possibility to “measure” it on regular intervals and use it as a basis to have a dialogue with my teams on how to improve it.
Neither all or nothing, nor acquired for ever
Another binary pitfall is to believe that it is an all-or-nothing feature: you either have it, or you don’t have it. And when you have, it’s OK for ever. Nothing less is true again. Not only can you have it more or less, but the reasons why you have it do vary. As explained in Amy Edmondson’s wonderful book “The Fearless Organization”, there are four dimensions that contribute to achieve psychological safety, all of them more or less prevalent in a team, more specifically:
- Willingness to help
- Inclusion and diversity
- Attitude to risk and failure
- Open conversation
And those dimensions will evolve with an evolving team composition, change of leadership, change of team responsibilities, change in business context, crisis situation etc.
So here again, a leader mindful of maintaining a strong level of psychological safety would want to see how it evolves, and how the underlying dimensions evolve. And, when needed, engage with the team on what could or should improve.
High performance as the objective, enjoying being on the team as the outcome
Last important misunderstanding: psychological safety is not about being nice to each other. Nor about being kind. Or about avoiding conflicts and confrontations.
Make no mistake, I think kindness is a very undervalued quality in business. But we all know that in business, it is important to be able to disagree. To dare to put the fish on the table, as one says. To take decisions which are not always agreeable to everyone, and still move on and execute as a team. To not have people shying away from their responsibilities. All of that must remain possible and actually encouraged.
Psychological safety actually helps to achieve this genuinely, more and better.
As an example, a macho leader might say that he prefers being straight and direct, that this fosters transparency and frankness. But which attitudes does this trigger with his team members? How certain is he that his team members don’t feel intimidated and unable to challenge and contradict him. You all know the answer.
Counter-intuitively, psychological safety actually enables true authenticity and honesty: in a high psychological safety team, people know that what matters is not how they and their opinion are perceived. They know that what matters – for everyone around the table – is that better decisions are taken, and that the team performs better altogether.
While “enjoying being on this team” is not an objective of a high psychological safety, my personal belief and experience is that it is a very regular outcome. Despite disagreements and conflicts.
Isn’t that magic ?