Fear was a prominent feature of my undergraduate Psychology degree. Aside from the sweat-inducing moments when I was called on in seminars to offer insightful comment on the paper I had ‘lightly skimmed’ (gulp). I recall conducting lab experiments subjecting my fellow students to monotone pictures of faces showing fearful expressions as a means to demonstrate that fear detection is an automatic cognitive process (i.e. before you’ve even had a chance to realise you’re afraid). Then there were Freud’s case studies of phobias and plentiful coverage of various ‘treatments’ for phobias- desensitisation therapy, immersion therapy, drug therapy to name a few. Researchers have also studied why we sometimes enjoy subjecting ourselves to fear-inducing experiences (think of the buzz that you might get from scary movies, haunted houses, roller coasters) as a way to ‘re-calibrate’ our emotional response . Suffice to say that Psychologists have been a bit obsessed with fear as an emotion, not least because it is such a critical one to our survival as a species.
Psychological Safety and the Fearless Organisation
More recently, the term Psychological Safety has made its way out of the psychology research papers and into the organisational and management vocabulary. The accidental discovery of Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School (she was initially studying error rates and team performance in hospital settings),“Psychological Safety describes a climate where people feel safe enough to take interpersonal risks by speaking up and sharing concerns, questions, or ideas.” (Edmondson, 2018, pp. 22).
Essentially it’s about overcoming the fear response that we have when we desperately want to point out in a Senior Management Team meeting that the Financial Director has missed something, but we can’t quite bring ourselves to voice it. After all, he’s probably already considered it and discounted it as an irrelevance and this meeting has been going on for two hours already.
In psychologically safe teams, people:
- Speak up
- Ask questions
- Debate vigorously
- Commit themselves to continuous learning and improvement
Benefits of Psychological Safety
So why is it so important as a leader to create psychological safety for your teams? Studies of Psychological Safety have now been completed in organisations as wide ranging as government organisations, non-profits, educational systems, hospitals, and classrooms. These studies have highlighted that it has an important role to play in both organisational performance and human safety. A culture of silence is a dangerous culture. Numerous airline, nuclear and hospital accidents have demonstrated that when people fail to speak up with their concerns or questions, the physical safety of customers and/ or employees are put at risk. If you’re not operating in a safety critical environment, creating a culture of psychological safety could still reap big rewards. Studies have demonstrated outcomes ranging from better organisational learning, to creativity, knowledge sharing and continuous improvement and change behaviours. It has also been found to be positively related to employee engagement.
Leadership Checklist to Creating Psychological Safety
Speaking up is not a natural act in hierarchies. Self-protection is natural. Psychological Safety must be nurtured, continuously. It must be actively encouraged and barriers to it must be broken down. It is an ongoing aspiration and it takes Leadership to achieve.
Ask yourself: “Am I…..?”:
- Setting the Stage for Psychological Safety?
- Framing the work with clarity? Do my team(s) know what success looks like?
- Framing our strategy as a ‘hypothesis’ that can adapt to changing contexts and requirements, rather than a fixed plan?
- Emphasising the purpose of the work so that others can connect to this? Have I clearly articulated why their work matters? Why it makes a difference and for whom?
- Helping my team(s) to re-frame failure as a useful and valuable source of data? A place from which to learn and grow? A by-product of experimentation?
- Proactively Inviting Participation?
- Demonstrating situational humility? Being humble and sharing what I don’t know and asking for input? Am I involving people in creating solutions?
- Engaging in proactive Inquiry? Am I curious? Do I wonder about the perspectives of others? Do I ask ‘Powerful Questions’? Questions that provoke, inspire, and shift people’s thinking.
- Setting up structures and processes that invite input, foster inquiry and knowledge sharing across team and the organisation?
- Responding Productively to Voice?
- Expressing Appreciation when my team speak up? Regardless of whether it’s a ‘good’ or bad’ idea or question, the initial response must appreciate and acknowledge the courageous act of speaking up.
- Able to listen to and welcome the bad news as well as the good? To become a learning organisation we must actively seek out deviations and challenge assumptions to existing strategy.
- De-stigmatising failure and making it safe to fail? When someone is bold enough to say their project, idea or product is not going to work out, celebrate their bravery. Praise and reinforce it.
- Role-modelling speaking up? Recent history has presented many opportunities to speak up within your organisations: #MeToo, BlackLivesMatter, social inequalities highlighted by COVID-19, climate change, but you’ll likely have some of your own specific to your organisation and context to add to this list.
Contact Us
At Jam People Consulting we’re always happy to talk to organisations about creating climates of psychological safety. Please do reach out if you’d like to know more.