Psychological Safety and the Role of Leaders

In a previous article I wrote about learning culture and one of the things I talked about is how respect is a key ingredient in exchanges that are intended to foster learning - even if the feedback is not positive the person shouldn’t feel disrespected. We generally refrain from talking about feelings in business, but when it comes to how we interact with each other we can’t disregard our feelings. If a professional interaction leaves you feeling defeated and humiliated it will have a serious negative impact on your motivation, but the same is true for the opposite, if you feel respected and appreciated the interaction will have a positive impact. Psychological safety is much deeper than just respect, but it’s a good starting point.

Psychological safety is about minimizing interpersonal fear. On Wikipedia it’s defined as “the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes”, and this has everything to do with how we feel. Do you feel safe to voice your opinion? Do you feel safe to ask a question? Do you feel safe to say you have a problem and ask for help? How we feel about our interactions matters greatly for what we can accomplish together and leaders have a crucial role to play here.?

I once worked with a leader who didn’t allow any problems to be surfaced. It wasn’t an explicit directive but any time you raised a concern they would react negatively or dismissively and the feedback you would inevitably get was that you needed to be “more solutions oriented”. Of course it’s good to be solutions oriented, but if you make people feel like they are not allowed to talk about things that aren’t going well you close to door to any collaborative problem solving efforts. You create a culture where people are not not comfortable pointing out what’s going wrong, and even more seriously, where people will feel that they can’t ask for help.?

Another leader I worked with believed that “praise makes people lazy”. While that likely came from a misguided place of thinking that people should assume everything was fine until told otherwise, what this attitude did was create a complete feedback vacuum. The only time people got reactions to their work was when something went wrong and this meant that feedback became associated with negative feelings only. How can you learn the difference between good and great in an environment like that? How can you learn from your mistakes? In fact, how can you learn anything at all??

In contrast, some of the best people I have worked with treated mistakes as a natural part of the learning process. Early on in my career I had the fortune to work directly for people that made me feel like they truly had my back. Partly by always telling me when something was good and why, and partly by helping me fix my mistakes. I knew where I had them and when I needed them they were there. Those moments when they stepped in and really had my back have stayed with me to this day. In one case I had unintentionally overstepped the hierarchy with a request and thereby ruffled peoples’ feathers. Since it was early on in my career I was pretty shook up, but my boss at the time didn’t miss a beat stepping in to take the heat while at the same time reassuring me that it wasn’t the end of the world and encourage me to just see it as a lesson learned. Another memory that stands out is with a different boss. We were in a meeting where I was being put under a lot of pressure by a group of significantly more senior people. I had reached the limits of my remit and the situation was getting more and more uncomfortable. At that point my boss swiftly stepped in and redirected all the pressure onto themselves. Not in a way that made me feel small or incompetent, but in a way that felt appropriate and safe. These two leaders showed that they had my back and it made me feel safe.?

Those experiences have had a big impact on how I have strived to shape my own leadership. After all, leadership is about role models, bad as well as good ones, and our own leadership is shaped either as an aspiration or as a contrast to leaders we have worked with. For me personally the most important thing for my own motivation and sense of safety has always been that assurance that someone truly has my back. And that’s a big part of what psychological safety is - knowing that it’s ok to make mistakes, that you can ask for help, and to know that you will not be punished for it.? Because we will make mistakes and we will need help, that’s part of being human. As leaders it’s our job to lay the foundations for that to be possible. It’s our job to make sure people feel interpersonally safe as a way to create an environment of positive growth.?

A big part of the myth about the tech industry culture is based on learning from failure, that’s what experimentation is all about, but after almost 20 years in the tech industry I’m not so sure I agree that learning from failure actually is part of the culture in most companies. Failure means admitting we made a mistake, that we were wrong, and if we fear that admission will somehow be punished or ridiculed, it’s very unlikely that we will do that. Especially if we don’t see this being role modeled around us. To learn from failure we have to look at where we went wrong because we need to understand the mistake in order to learn from it. We have to ask questions, we have to look at different perspectives, we need different ideas and thoughts, but we can only get there if people feel safe to contribute and speak their mind.?

Inclusion and diversity is, as we know from countless studies, one of the key success factors for business, especially when it comes to striking the right balance between innovation and business stability. Psychological safety is a prerequisite for this. If people don’t feel safe, they can’t contribute in a meaningful way. And we also know that the employees who fall into the “minority” categories are much less likely to feel safe. This means that unless you invest in creating an environment where your “diverse” employees feel safe and welcome, it doesn’t matter how many of them you bring in, they still will not be able to have a positive impact. Interestingly the same truth that applies for accessibility - if you improve accessibility it will make things better for everyone, not just people with disability - also applies to inclusion. If your “minority” employees feel safe, welcome and appreciated, so will everyone else. People who feel safe can contribute fully with their perspectives, ideas, experience and expertise, and this is how you drive real and sustainable innovation. That is what real inclusion brings.

Some of my own hardest moments as a leader have been when I didn’t feel psychologically safe with my own leader and I was struggling to buffer that fear towards my own team. I also know that one of those bosses I talked about who had my back and took the heat for my mistake felt that very same pain because I know there was no psychological safety upwards. But even in these difficult situations we as leaders can make a difference, just like my boss did for me, because psychological safety starts at the team level. Even if we don’t feel psychologically safe in the broader context, we as leaders have the agency to do things differently within our own teams. Here we can be clear that we don’t have all the answers, invite contributions and respectful debate, we can show that we are open to feedback and that it’s ok to make mistakes. It is not easy, and sometimes even painful, but it is entirely possible to create islands of safety. This is the most important job we have as leaders - to make people feel safe to contribute. To be clear I’m not arguing for readers to “throw themselves on the sword”, but what I am saying though is that we as leaders have to embrace this part of our leadership as one of our key accountabilities. If we all did this, every single one of us, the ripple effect would sweep through our organizations to the benefit of everyone, including the business itself.

There will always be difficult situations in life and work, and as leaders we will sometimes have to face hard decisions and hard conversations, but it’s our obligation to do our best to navigate those with empathy. At the core of it stands the question how would you feel if you were in that situation? What would help you? Would it be helpful to feel as if asking for help is not allowed? Would it be helpful to feel like you would be judged or ridiculed for asking a question? Of course it wouldn’t. And it can really be that simple - how would you feel? So yes, there is definitely a place for feelings in business, and we have to take that seriously because people who don’t feel safe will not grow and flourish and the same is true for the business where they work. People who feel safe do better work. It really is that simple.

If you want to learn more about psychological safety in business, why it matters and how to lay the foundations, I really recommend reading “The Fearless Organization” by Amy C Edmondson. And to learn about the importance of inclusivity I recommend reading “Move Fast and Fix Things” by Frances Frei and Anne Morris, especially the Wednesday chapter.