PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY
Amy Edmondson: Psychological Safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.
Psychological safety is imperative for the long term success of companies. There is a constant undercurrent of cultural churn as companies scale and evolve. Quick growth puts a stress on psychological safety as companies emphasize hiring as fast as possible and subsequently try to onboard the large influx of new hires into a defined process. Introducing variability into the process during this influx would cause unnecessary churn, but non-debatable processes should not be sustained for eternity. In addition with these new hires comes new leaders, who all have their own unique leadership tacts.
Growth and scale benefits diversity. New people will enter the company with their own unique opinions and experience. This is great! Yet without the right tops-down culture of psychological safety, companies and teams will not get the total benefit of a diverse workforce. The magnitude of increased long term impact is dependent on a culture inclusive of clear expectations, collaboration, and psychological safety.
Peter Drucker famously said: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
This is true in so many ways, but let’s talk about psychological safety here. Psychological Safety is a phenomenon which is easy to say and hard to practice. It is dependent on honest relationships and tops-down leading by example. If leadership does not demonstrate this, then no person in the organization will. It is easy for a leader to state that psychological safety is part of the company’s cultural strategy, taking the talk. But if these same leaders don’t lead by example then the culture will devolve to a state of self preservation, to ensure performance assessments aren’t negatively affected by asking questions, making mistakes on big bets, or challenging the status quo.
Going back to our definition, psychological safety is the belief that one will not have negative consequences for proposing alternates to the status quo. Performance assessments are fundamental processes to sustain high performing companies. In the absence of a truly psychologically safe culture, people may unintentionally correlate someone with new perspectives as someone who is not capable of performing the responsibilities. This is a dangerous trap as management needs to hold teams accountable for deliverables but also need to balance a space open to new ideas, questions, and mistakes. This is where tops-down guidance on psychological safety is paramount. Without it, teams will blindly follow the leader to prioritze self preservation.
In practice, short term growth can be achieved without psychological safety as teams may prioritize ‘best practices’ or ‘this is how it is done’ mindset. This can work for a short period of time and have increased success in rather mature industries, where innovation is not a core dependency of long term success. But in emerging technologies, companies need to foster a long term culture of ‘best idea wins’ which means they need to hear all diverse perspectives. A trap I’ve seen leaders fall into is leaning on their historical processes as the only way to perform a duty. From a rudimentary perspective, this makes sense. The leaders personal experiences helped them achieve where they are today so, naturally, their experience is the right experience to follow. Leadership experience should not be ignored but needs to be a boundary constraint that is added to the present and future constraints of the new initiative at hand. Without an innovation of ideas, the teams may stagnate and lag their more innovative competitors.
This is the tip of the iceberg and I’d love to know what you think. How do you and your partners practice psychological safety?
