Creating our Own Sense of Psychological Safety

Last week, I did a deep dive into the first pillar of Trauma-Informed Leadership, Safety. ?As leaders, before we can truly create safety on our teams, we need to integrate this knowledge personally by looking at ourselves. This week, we’re going to talk more specifically about how you as a leader can look at your own sense of safety in a situation and create safety for yourself.

In our current landscape, we are constantly facing threats to both physical and psychological safety. As I’m writing this blog, it is a week before election day 2024 in the United States (and when I share this, it will be in the couple weeks after the election). No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you have undoubtedly experienced some stress regarding the potential outcome of the election and how it will impact your own sense of safety in the world.

As individuals, we each have our own set of rules about what keeps us safe that might vastly differ from those around us. For some, the idea of bungee jumping sounds exhilarating. For others (such as myself), the idea sounds terrifying! Similarly, for some of us, the idea of having an honest conversation with a team member feels empowering. For others, it makes them want to jump off the cliff without a bungee cord.

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in March 2020, concerns regarding safety took center stage. Suddenly, we were having conversations about whether to wear masks or whether we should work in the office.? Some felt masking was essential to their safety while others felt stifled by them.? Some were scared to come into the office while others were afraid of the disconnection and isolation that working from home entailed. What started as concerns regarding physical safety and illness protection soon became concerns regarding psychological safety. If I was someone who felt physically safest wearing a mask, and my co-worker dismissed it, did I feel safe with that person in other ways? Collectively, we found that the lines between physical and psychological safety began to blur, and our own personal definitions of safety began to change.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has passed, these types of concerns continue to infiltrate our environments and ways of interacting in the world. The collective trauma has activated our sensitivities, and these widespread experiences of traumatic events feel more prevalent now. Now, more than ever, we have seen that when someone disagrees with us on something – whether it’s how to handle a specific situation, or with our political beliefs, we take it as a threat to our personal psychological safety. As a result, I have seen conversations shut down and leaders more hesitant than ever before to bring up issues of contention, feeling personally vulnerable and potentially threatened if they try to set a directive. Instead of having the courageous conversations that need to happen, we back off, fearing that we will create an “unsafe” environment for both us and our teams.

Unfortunately, avoiding this type of situation tends to have the reverse effect. The less we have conversations that need to happen, the MORE unsafe individuals tend to feel. How do we cross that divide? We must first start with ourselves.

In his book, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, Timothy R. Clark identifies the following four stages of psychological safety: Inclusion Safety, Learner Safety, Contributor Safety, and Challenger Safety. We’re going to take some time today talking about each of these and how they impact us personally as leaders to enable us to feel psychologically safe in our own environment.

Inclusion Safety

According to Clark, the first step of psychological safety is inclusion safety. In its purest sense, inclusion safety is being accepted for who you are as a human being. It includes respect for everyone’s humanity; that they have earned the right to exist in various spaces simply by being a person. When we experience inclusion safety, we are free from harm and do not feel judged or threatened by being who we are at our core. We might feel a lack of inclusion safety for many reasons – due to our race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, education level, etc..? With the recent racial reckoning, several organizations have prioritized conversations related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. If these conversations are facilitated with care that addresses both implicit and explicit bias, they provide an extraordinary opportunity to address what has long been an elephant in the room. However, when they surface and are viewed as a display of organizational “tokenism”, they can significantly decrease an individual’s sense of safety.

As leaders, we play a critical role in supporting inclusion safety: it starts with us. Ask yourself the following questions:

·???????? Do I feel accepted and respected in my role?

·???????? Do I feel like all elements of my identity are accepted in the workplace? If not, what is accepted and what do I keep hidden?

·???????? How do I respond when my staff or colleagues make remarks about these aspects of my identity? Does it trigger a response in me? Do I shut down or find an excuse to leave the room? Or do I pretend it’s not a problem?

·???????? In what ways do I create a culture that accepts the identities of my team members?

·???????? In what ways am I not as inclusive or accepting with my staff as I’d like to be?

To create safety for ourselves and others on our team, we must first create a baseline of inclusion safety – a belief that we belong and are accepted just as we are. For many teams, this might be the most challenging step that takes intentional efforts that might ebb and flow over time.

Learner Safety

The second step of psychological safety is learner safety. Learner safety is our innate need to learn and grow, which comes with feeling comfortable making mistakes. To achieve learner safety, we must feel like there’s the freedom to explore our environment and try new things, even if we fail at them. As leaders, it’s important for us to think about both our own sense of learner safety and the environment we are creating in our team to encourage learning. I have met so many leaders (me included) who loved learning but were terrified of making mistakes. Here’s the thing, though - mistakes are inevitable at work.?

I often joke that I make several mistakes a day as a leader.? Some of these mistakes are quite small and will never be brought to anyone’s attention.? Other mistakes require a level of accountability, and an apology as the situation demands.? We are hard-wired to make mistakes.? Just think about it – none of learned to walk effectively when we took our first steps.? We fail tests in school, we say something hurtful to a friend – all of these are mistakes that help us learn.? When we make a mistake, it can set off all the trauma reminders in our brain, alerting us to past mistakes that may have felt threatening to our entire existence.? I want you to ask yourself – what happens for you when you make a mistake? Do you feel a sense of shame and guilt? Do you try to hide it? Do you try to confess to it to pre-empt any consequences? Do you minimize it, telling others that it’s not a problem?

As you become conscious of your own responses to making mistakes and remedying them, you can then begin to create a culture for your team that is more tolerant of those who make mistakes. As leaders, our staff are watching us and when we berate ourselves or deny our mistakes. Our team members are likely to do the same.

Contributor Safety

The third step of psychological safety is contributor safety or feeling comfortable contributing your views or expertise to the common good. We may have brilliant ideas, but if we’re not comfortable sharing those with our team, they ultimately mean nothing. We’ve all been in meetings where one or two people feel completely comfortable contributing their thoughts on every topic (and may dominate the whole conversation) while others may sit there quietly and rarely, if ever share. Contributor safety includes having a balance where everyone in the room or on the team feels comfortable contributing their expertise or perspective in one way or another. An introvert may not be comfortable sharing their view in a room of 20 people but may feel comfortable sharing it in a small group of 2-3 or in writing before or after a meeting.

As a leader, how do you create space where everyone feels safe to contribute? Do you allow multiple ways for individuals to share ideas? Do you emphasize the importance of everyone’s voice and follow your words with affirming actions? For yourself, how comfortable do feel contributing to the group? How do you balance your contributions with those of your team members?

Challenger Safety

The fourth and final step of psychological safety is challenger safety. Challenger safety is exactly what it sounds like – our comfort with expressing dissenting or questioning viewpoints with others in the room. Too often, teams can become victim to “groupthink” or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or responsibility. In teams characterized by groupthink, there’s a lack of innovation or excitement, with team members likely following the opinion or perspective of one or two individuals with a stronger voice. One of the best ways to counter groupthink is to introduce a counterargument or dissenting view in the room.

As a leader, how comfortable are you with presenting a challenge to an established norm or when one of your team members does so? Do you feel uncomfortable, worried that there will be conflict? Or do you welcome this external perspective into the room? During your individual interactions with your team members, how comfortable do you feel challenging your staff assumptions or beliefs when it’s important to the given situation? How comfortable are they in coming to talk to you about changes they think you, or the team, need to make?

Conclusion

As leaders, we play an important role in establishing a culture of psychological safety in our teams, but it begins with us and our own individual sense of safety. Looking at each of these domains and asking ourselves how comfortable we feel is the first step in creating safe cultures. Next week, we’ll dive a bit deeper and talk about how we can apply these concepts to creating psychologically safe teams.

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In what areas described above do you feel psychologically safe? Where are areas in which you’d like to increase your sense of safety? Comment below.

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