Psychological Safety: It Takes Two To Tango!

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Laura Delizonna, from Stanford University, stated that “psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off—just the types of behavior that lead to making breakthroughs.”

Psychological safety can be measured by asking people whether they feel that they are punished (in some way) when they make a mistake or are criticized for challenging the status quo.

Leaders must know by now that if they want teams with limitless agility, transformational capability, and radical adaptability, they need to find ways to "hold space" for their team members to feel safe and ‘in it together’ while still demanding impeccable execution and ensuring the exacting standards needed to succeed with transformation and innovation.

We want to create spaces and cultures of psychological safety and mutual trust that afford creativity and adaptation but never at the expense of personal accountability and interpersonal responsibility.

The idea that the context in which we work and live determines the content of that work and play was made clear by psychologist Donald Winnicott. He suggested that the quality of the ‘holding environment’ that a caregiver provides a child, physically and emotionally, is critical in development.?

Just as a good parent—and so therapist—must provide a safe holding environment, or container, for a person to resolve their issues, a transformational leader must hold a ’safe space’ for team members to drop damaging patterns in order to boost the creativity and collaboration needed to adapt as pace.?

As I wrote in Now Lead the Change: Repurpose Your Career, Future-Proof Your Organization, and Regenerate Our Crisis-Hit World by Mastering Transformational Leadership: "As the leader “holds space” for genuine trust and safety, team members can engage in personal transformations that allow them to break through their own limits and so deliver digital, organizational, and systemic transformations."

But what many don’t realize or discuss enough is that psychological safety and trust are two-way streets.?They cannot be created by leaders alone.

Just as a people leader must create a safe holding environment for their people to shine, each team member and report must ensure their leader or line manager is safe… not from being fired but from having fires erupt that they need to fight.

In other words, each employee’s duty is to ensure they share the information that their boss needs to know well in advance of a crisis so that a crisis never occurs. Now some leaders like a good crisis so they can save the day as a hero/heroine.

But most leaders, particularly mature leaders, do not. They have to hope that the safety, trust, and relational strength they are building with their team are reciprocated and that the trust afforded to a report is met with honor, transparency, and trustworthiness.

Many, many senior leaders tell us how the most unsafe part of their job is people one layer down—and sometimes two, three, or four layers down—hoarding information or wanting to look like they have it all under control… but in reality, they are flailing and failing.

Nor is there anything safe and trust-building about missing deadlines without renegotiating them well in advance (for sometimes an employee does not realize the cascade effect of a failure they have made); or sloppy and careless work (not mistakes made while doing one's best or trying out something new) that looks really bad on their boss and the brand/business as a whole.?

This kind of stress damages the minds and bodies of leaders, just as unsafe working environments damage the minds and bodies of team members.

That is why everyone in the organization has a duty to co-create a culture of trust and safety, of in-it-togetherness.

Psychological safety could be measured in leaders by asking them whether they feel that they are given the information they need early enough to avoid the immense stress of crises and fire-fighting and where there is still time to improve outcomes to the expected standard.

While it may be easy to complain about leadership, an empowered place to start building safety and trust around you is by being transparent and proactive with information sharing and honorable with high-quality execution.

We all deserve to work in safe and trusting environments—no matter our place in the hierarchy.?