Psychological safety means space for "negative" emotions

I'm very proud of my team for rolling out a major software transformation over the last several months. Though ultimately successful, it was a challenging project. We took a transformation that takes many companies 12-24 months, and we rolled it out in 9. People put in a lot of hard work and had to be very uncomfortable at various points. I recently asked the team what contributed to our success. One thing they emphasized: emotional support, especially in times when the team struggled to understand parts of the process.

Sometimes when you're a leader, you have to put your teams in uncomfortable positions, running the train through dark tunnels where only you can see the light at the end. There are a couple of ways you can respond when the team doesn't feel good about what's happening: you can tell them they're wrong and how they should be feeling, or you can tell them that their thoughts and feelings are valid and that you'll support them through the uncertainty.

Leaders who prioritize psychological safety will do the latter. Telling people how to feel doesn't give people support. It often makes them feel worse. It's common knowledge that telling an anxious person to not be anxious... just makes them more anxious. Identifying a psychologically safe leader can, at times, be as easy as identifying whether they tell people how to feel or whether they empathetically ask people how they feel.

Good leaders, leaders who understand human emotions, will know the value of creating space for "negative" emotions. All emotions, whether we think of them as "good" or "bad", have something to tell us. They're our nervous systems trying to give us information. (This is why, in reality, there aren't actually "bad" emotions--they're all helpful and informative in some way.) As leaders, our ability to create space for the variety of emotions felt by our teams can can bring to light issues hiding beneath the surface, strengthen connections across the team, and build resiliency to take on tougher challenges.

So how can leaders respond to tough emotions, and create space for members of our teams who may not be experiencing the emotions we'd want at various times? Again, don't tell them how to feel or that there's something wrong with their emotions. Instead, you may want to pick up a tactic some teachers use, asking a version of the question: "Do you want to be helped, heard, or hugged?" Do they want assistance with something, space for processing, or an empathetic booster?

I asked this of a member of my team recently who was having a hard time with uncertainty. I couldn't resolve the uncertainty, but I could ask if there were other ways I could support them through it. This is what leaders have to do today if we want to say we support "psychological safety." Otherwise, it becomes a buzzword without real meaning, and we create emotional confusion, saying we want one thing and then doing another. It's a skill, for sure. But it's one we can learn if we challenge ourselves and practice.