The Safety Imperative

I’m afraid

Man, I have fears

I need to be safe

?

From the song ‘Fears’

By Michael D., Larissa Leite

I find unsafe environments incredibly frustrating. Consequently, I cannot help writing about them to stamp them out. Sometimes I feel as if I am shouting into the face of the wind, and no one can hear me.

The contrasting conduct between the leader of a technology program team and the leaders of an academic institution was striking.

I engaged the team leads of a $300 plus million-dollar technology program on the first day of a leadership development and team-building facilitation.

The program manager responsible for the contract participated fully. He acted openly and vulnerably. He upped the safety in the room and within his team. He modeled the behavior he wanted and expected others to follow to benefit the team, the company, and the client.

In comparison, I found the deans of a college engaged in a coaching and training program to be withholding, invulnerable, and resistant to participating meaningfully in development sessions that included their direct reports.

They did not believe they had to, and their collective decision created a dramatically unsafe environment in the process. Did the deans think others would fail to notice and respond in kind?

The deans were unwilling to acknowledge or accept even a hint of responsibility for their adverse impact on others despite the resulting tension and strained communication it evoked.

Leadership matters! No more than when carrying out the crucial responsibility of creating and sustaining safety.

Safety creates the foundation for team and organizational success. Yet leaders routinely abdicate their responsibility for it.

Some believe it is soft (which could not be further from the truth). Others are convinced it leads to complacency or loss of control. Still, more believe people work best under threat, that fear is the best motivator, and that it is necessary to compete. What leader does not want to compete and win?

The program manager was keenly competitive. Yet he knew if he wanted to win, he needed to develop a team willing to support the mission, go the extra mile to achieve desired goals and support one another in the process.

My primary charge is to help deepen the safety among his team.

The requisite element is safety. I am referring here to psychological safety. Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as 'a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.'

However, a lack of psychological safety in many work settings, like healthcare, corresponds directly with physical safety. When nurses do not feel safe enough to challenge doctors’ decisions even when they believe the physicians are wrong, undesirable consequences occur, up to and including death. The same is true in your organization. What metaphorical or literal ‘deaths’ appear in your company?

When psychological safety exists in organizations and teams, associates feel free to speak their minds and take risks on behalf of their team, company, and customers. Constructive conflict is more common, as the best ideas and methods get debated to generate the most valuable outcomes.

?The confounding results of increasing psychological safety are that errors go up.

When nurses or other associates feel safe, they report mistakes and problems more frequently, and the number of issues seems to grow, at least in the short term.

Calling out issues makes them visible, more difficult to ignore, and, consequently, more likely to be fixed. Over time the number of problems goes down.

Even if the number of errors does not decrease, they will differ because the others have been resolved.

Any leader seriously committed to excellence and sustained success must dedicate themselves to creating and maintaining safe work environments, psychologically and physically, without exception. Stop pretending otherwise and start exhibiting the authentic leadership of vulnerability for the sake of yourself, your associates, and your clients.

Creating Productive Teams

Through exhaustive research, Google identified the strongest correlation of team performance is ‘how’ a team interacts. They created a checklist for leaders to sustain psychological safety.

According to Google’s findings, leaders need to

1.????refrain from interrupting – interrupting establishes a norm of disrespect that undermines trust.

2.????demonstrate active listening – summarizing and reflecting their understanding of what someone has said

3.????admit to others when they do not know

4.????not end a meeting unless everyone has spoken

5.????actively encourage people to express their frustrations

6.????call out and name inter group conflicts and resolve them through open discussion

The converse of a safe work environment is a threatening one. An unsafe work environment invites and initiates profoundly negative and demoralizing emotions such as shame. Shame generates undesirable impacts at every level.

Yet when leaders deny how they and others contribute to unsafety, threat is precisely what they produce.

The lack of safety is the unaddressed elephant in the room for many teams and companies. Unsafe conditions create elephant breeding grounds where everyone must collectively pretend root problems do not exist until associates walk on eggshells and nothing of significance remains safe.

No one dares to call them out for fear of retribution or worse. Doing so becomes a career derailer. Problems go unresolved as a result. New ideas get stymied and lost, and the people who most want to make a positive difference leave.

Shame's Impact on the workplace

Unsafe work environments thrive on shame. Shame is a team killer.

Shame -

1.????makes people reactive and unconscious

2.????blocks empathy and self-awareness

3.????is contagious – experienced individually, interpersonally, and collectively

4.????causes emotional pain

5.????limits emotional experience and expression

6.????generates black or white, good or bad, all or nothing thinking – like that of a child

7.????provokes protective defenses

8.????blocks growth, development, and healing

9.????induces feelings of superiority and inferiority

Does anyone believe these represent qualities of winning teams?

Don’t you seek to be part of a winning team?

Don’t we all want to be winners?

The answers to these questions are self-evident. We all aspire to be on winning teams. The vital question is whether we are willing to do what is required to create and maintain them.

If we are, we need to conduct ourselves accordingly. We need to build safety, not undermine it.

Fostering psychologically safe environments requires courage, awareness, humility, and skill – all of which can be learned and developed.

The most explicit expression of safe environments is shared laughter. A close second is a pervasive accountability. The freedom to admit mistakes without being ridiculed raises responsibility and commitment among team members.

While shame kills teams, safety provides the lifeblood for flourishing teams.

Where are your teams and your company on the shame-safety continuum? Where do you want them to be? What are you willing to do to get there?

Please reach out to me if you want help leveraging the extreme benefits of the shared laughter found in psychologically safe environments for yourself, your team, and your organization. I welcome the connection.

?Robert Hackman is the founder and principal of 4C Consulting and Coaching. He provides executive coaching for leadership impact, growth, and development for individuals, teams, and organizations. Committed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, he facilitates trusting environments that promote unusually candid conversations. Rob is also passionate about the power of developing Legacy Mindsets and has conducted over 50 Legacy interviews with people to date.

A serious man with a dry sense of humor who loves absurdity can often be found hiking rocky elevations or making music playlists. His mixes, including Pandemic Playlists and Music About Men, among others, can be found on Spotify.

Bravely bring your curiosity to a conversation with Rob, schedule via voice or text @ 484.800.2203, or [email protected].