Psychological safety is just a piece of the puzzle

Psychological safety has become a central tenet and ambition for all organisational cultures. Everywhere you turn leaders and HR functions are talking about it.

A term ?rst coined by the psychologist Carl Rogers in 1954 in his work on creativity, it more recently came to everyone’s attention because of Google’s Project Aristotle 2012 study into what makes a successful team. It then subsequently became even more of a topic and necessity because of the great work of people like Amy Edmondson and Timothy Clark. I am a fan.

In short, both the research into and lived experience of psychological safety would say that cultures that are more conducive to interpersonal risk-taking – ie. where it feels safe to speak up and think up – outperform those cultures that don’t. This makes sense as high performance boots up on high authenticity.

And then psychological safety took on a life of its own and became a fad, where talking about it, rather than doing it, became a thing.

I have increasingly come to the view that the more I hear an organisation talk about psychological safety, the less psychologically safe it is likely to be.

For me, psychological safety, or lack thereof, is a symptom, not a cause. Nine out of ten times it masks the real issue which is some level of systemic toxicity at the top. By that I mean when the dynamic at the top is unhealthy, unsafe, ego and status-driven, competitive, typically macho (but not always), and has become its own clique.

The irony is the same toxic leaders at the top then start preaching about how important psychological safety is, and how people just need to speak up more, unaware of how unsafe it is to do so. This is because these cliques surround themselves with people who don’t challenge them. It then becomes a safer career choice to agree and collude – which in turn expands the circle of unsafety.

It is very rare for trusted, non-toxic leaders at the top to talk much about psychological safety, because it’s a non-issue.

Now to be fair, lack of psychological safety can’t always be pinned on a single leader, or the top team – although it is sometimes that obvious. It can also be a systemic issue born from legacy dynamics that are passed on from previous generations, which current leaders unconsciously inherit (and then collude with).

I can recount many instances in large organisations where you can track the systemic toxicity at the top back several generations. It then doesn’t matter who sits at the top table because the pattern just continues to play out whoever is in post.

So, let’s switch gears and focus on why psychological safety is so important, and even more importantly how to create it.

Just a piece of a bigger puzzle

In our work of catalysing breakthroughs and tuning cultures in companies of all sizes all over the world intentionally building different levels of psychological safety is fundamental. It is a paramount piece of the puzzle, but it is not the picture on the front of the box.

The picture on the front of the box is peak-performance – which can only be achieved by systemically unlocking new levels of productivity, creativity, innovation and energy at scale.

Peak-performance is born from the quest of always seeking a better way, asking questions that take us and our work to our creative and performance edge, and then living and working at that edge for extended periods of time. It is at this edge, and beyond, that we need to ride what we call the creative-rollercoaster (the dance between the known and the unknown).

However, moving into the unknown and stepping out of our comfort zones often triggers an emotional response, leading people to expertly ?nd ways of collapsing the rollercoaster back to a ?atline – back to the safety and comfort of what we already know and do.

The real skill is to stay on the ride, embrace both the highs and the lows, and use the energy of both to break free and breakthrough – in thought and then action.

It is by riding the creative-rollercoaster, individually and with others, that we increase the quality of our thinking (QoT). And, it is only by increasing the quality of our thinking that we can increase the quality of our actions, and thereby our performance.

However, there are two foundational pieces of the puzzle that enable this: increasing the quality of our energy (QoE) and increasing the quality of our relationships (QoR).

Without attending to and increasing the quality of our energy we can’t ride the creative-rollercoaster. You need energy to get on, let alone stay on. It’s not a passive activity. And to ride it you need your energy to be clear and bright – otherwise it might be you who collapses it.

In turn, deepening the level of contact and trust in teams is key to be able to push, pull, oppose, challenge, and give and receive candid feedback – all essential to working at our learning and performance edge. If it is (psychologically) unsafe people don’t speak up or think up, which by default diminishes the quality of our (collective) thoughts and actions. Remember, it only takes one person to collapse the creative-rollercoaster for everyone else.

Which brings me full circle to how to create and deepen psychological safety.

There are a number of simple but subtle skills that make the difference. They ideally need to be consistently role-modelled by leaders. And, when practised by everyone in a team, magic happens.

Deepening the listening

Let’s start with the most fundamental skill of them all, the one that makes the biggest difference to organisational life and peak performance … listening.

Listening sounds easy but it is a foundational skill. Everyone thinks they are an above average listener – which simply can’t be true. Unfortunately, too many people struggle to listen, and/or listen selectively, and/or listen to reload ie. weaponise what they hear.

The challenge is to listen for understanding, listen for energy and listen for insight … and with deeper practice to listen for what is missing or not being said.

Listening in its highest form is a whole-body, whole being and doing experience.

It starts with slowing down, grounding yourself and creating some internal space that stops the internal monkey chatter.

Then it is about putting yourself in service of someone else so you can give them a damn good listening to. When people feel really heard (and seen) we know the building blocks of psychological safety are in place.

Being curious

Next is the skill of asking questions so as to elicit other people’s point of view, born from being curious about what they are saying and why they are saying it. It is important not to ask questions as a hollow activity. Don’t ask a question unless you genuinely want to hear an answer, because people intuitively pick this up and become wary and guarded – diminishing contact and decreasing trust.

Working with difference

Noticing, valuing and leaning into ‘difference’ is the next building block. It’s difference (ie. something and anything that is different to my current view, norms, preconceptions, assumptions and beliefs) that people often feel threatened by. You only have to scale this up to politics and religion, and any other dogmatic conscience group, to see how difference is often perceived as a threat. And yet, when we put our differences into creative relationship, it becomes the magic ingredient for people and teams to become greater than the sum of their parts.

Disclosure

Another subtle skill that makes up the fabric of psychologically safe spaces and cultures are acts of disclosure ie. taking a risk in sharing a thought, sharing the thinking behind your thinking, and/or sharing the feelings behind your thinking. When leaders think out loud with their teams and disclose, it often has a domino effect, such that others start to disclose too – creating a positive reinforcing loop.

This is in?nitely more possible if those around you are good listeners, curious and not threatened by difference. Feedback

Feedback

A sign that psychological safety is building, as well as how to deepen or thicken it further, is giving and receiving feedback. I’m not in this instance talking about giving someone feedback on their performance (on them), rather I mean giving someone feedback on their work. Knowing how to give feedback that unlocks, inspires, challenges and disrupts all at the same time is a real skill. As is learning how to receive feedback.

It’s important to point out that it makes a massive difference when the intent of the feedback is clean ie. in service of helping the other person be successful and do great work – as opposed to being driven by a hidden agenda or bias. Again, when it’s the latter it is quickly picked up and distorts the ?eld, collapsing psychological safety.

So, let me try and bring all of this to life…

How often do people in your team ask you for a slot at your next team meeting to share something they are struggling with and are really trying to push to the next level?

Unfortunately, the opposite is usually true, as most people would rather be left alone, keep their head down, and just get on. This is what drives mediocrity by the way.

Moreover, if YOU were to ask them to give an update on a tricky or challenging piece of work at your next team meeting, they would probably see it as something they would rather not do, and might start looking for reasons to get out of doing it. As the meeting looms they will undoubtedly be hoping that you will run out of time in the meeting for their session, and more importantly will hope they don’t get any tricky questions in the session itself – so they can get out as quickly as possible. They may even have resorted to the exact opposite of what psychologically safe cultures do and that’s stakeholder manage people before the meeting.

All of this is the antithesis of a peak-performing, psychologically safe culture.

The ambition instead is to build energetic and psychologically safe cultures in which people proactively seek out opportunities to share work in progress and actually want to get candid feedback that helps them make their work better, more connected and more impactful. They want challenge and they want to leverage the collective and diverse intelligence of the team in real time and through real conversations.

To play this optimal game and work at this higher order, people need to know how to slow down, get present, deepen their listening and put themselves in service of people who are willing to disclose their latest thinking out loud (even and especially when it is not fully formed), as well as share the thinking and feelings behind their thinking. This resources people to be able to give them candid and challenging feedback that pushes them, their thinking and their work to the next level.

When this happens, you know you have made it.

These micro-skills are the bedrock of psychologically safe cultures. They tune the micro-interactions and space between us, making interpersonal risk-taking not just possible, but more importantly the norm. Because when we do, insight and learning ?ow and we are able to leap forward with every interaction, exchange and meeting (QoM).

So, please, please, please stop talking about psychological safety and start doing it.

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About Nick

Dr Nick Udall is a co-founder and the CEO of nowhere, a core catalyst, a keynote speaker, author, and former Chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership.

About nowhere

nowhere is a small, specialist company who have spent the last twenty-?ve years working behind the scenes and at the highest level with large, complex, legacy corporations, and cabinet governments, catalysing breakthroughs and building peak-performing cultures of innovation – cultures that operate at a higher order of productivity, creativity, innovation and performance.

nowhere works mostly with industries that are in transformation – food security, the energy transition, big pharma, big tech, ?nancial and capital ?ows, sustainability, peace keeping and defence – where fundamental mindset shifts, new organising forms and next generation leadership are increasingly needed.

www.now-here.com