Are you giving yourself and your team ACTIONABLE ways to be more inclusive?

Many discuss “psychological safety.” When most use this concept, they mean creating an environment where people express themselves without fear of retaliation. But an office where team members share ideas without worrying they’ll be harassed, bullied, or fired is the bare minimum. To achieve organizational missions that improve the world, we need more than just safety against bad behavior.?

In addition to being protected against punishment, psychological safety means a climate where people are encouraged, rewarded, and expected to transcend the status quo, group think, and inertia. It mitigates bullying, but it also disrupts the desire to conform. Leaders need team members to challenge them. Society needs new perspectives, experiences, and ideas. Why? Because every human group falls into lazy habits and needs to be saved from complacency, assumptions, and overconfidence.

The next brilliant idea? Someone on your team already has it. The next innovation that will launch the human community into a new era of prosperity? It’s already here. But these new thoughts are buried because human groups have an uncanny ability to pressure thinkers to keep thinking the same thoughts. Creating psychological safety means people aren’t afraid they’ll get fired for proposing a new idea. But it also means people aren’t afraid they’ll get the hassle of getting questioned, second-guessed, and smirked at they support the status quo. Psychological safety might be for the marginalized voice fearing they’ll get punished. But it’s also a set of processes that ensure leaders feel safe, encouraged, and even required to draw new perspectives when it’s plain old messy, frustrating, or tiring to do so.

So, how do you know you’re creating an environment where the best ideas come forward? Not just those thought by the loudest and most overconfident? Not just the thoughts that are most comfortable and mediocre? Here are some inclusive things that disrupt bandwagon bias to let everyone thrive.

1. Ask real questions

Humans have a deep desire to fit in. If a group asks a question, most don’t give a real answer. They spend their time looking for the answer that will help them conform. Break up this habit by modifying your questions. Take closed questions with right/wrong answers, and replace them with open inquiries that have multiple answers. Your best friends: the phrase “How can we X?” “What else?” “Why might [an unpopular opinion] be most beneficial? Avoid stacking multiple questions. Ask one, stick the landing, and give people time to think. People will play chicken, waiting for you to crack and start answering your own questions. Most of us will. Fight that impulse. Sing a song to yourself, spell your name with your tongue on the roof of your mouth, twiddle your thumbs. Do whatever you need to do to let enough time pass for them to think and know you’re serious about hearing from them.

2. Freewrite

One of the best ways to ask a question, especially in meetings, is to create time for freewrites. Pose your question on a slide projected on the screen. Then tell everyone you’re going to take a few minutes for everyone to write down their answers. Tell them to write non-stop. Even if they’re writing, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” keep writing until ideas come to them. Let it be known that you’ll discuss ideas after freewriting time finishes. This gives people a few minutes? to think through their answers, edit their ideas, and build up their confidence. Many people are from groups who’ve been socialized not to speak in public. Others confuse their comfort with public speaking for having quality ideas. Freewriting puts people on a more level playing field. It gives more reserved people time to pull forward and the overconfident room to question themselves. This simple strategy gives people from different backgrounds with different styles more chances to share ideas.

3. Use surveys

Many use surveys too infrequently, too late, and when stakes are too high. Beyond taking the pulse of your organizational culture, use them for small-stakes meetings. Build confidence by getting people to think new thoughts. Get them to share the unusual ideas by providing anonymity. Collect a pool of proposals for even small ideas. That retrains teams to value as many perspectives as possible. Check out in-meeting software that allows people to share ideas anonymously in real time. Explore taking polls in the room. Creating an inclusive environment takes some practice. Key to this is getting more thinking from more people. Fundamental to that process sometimes requires separating thoughts from the thinker. With the anonymity this tech provides, people are more likely to think creatively. And seeing a wider range of thinking is key to people eventually feeling comfortable enough to attach their names to unusual ideas.

4. Structure for inquiry

Study after study shows that fundamental to inclusion is psychological safety and pivotal to psychological safety is inquiry. By default, most assume the point of a meeting is to finish the meeting. We also start thinking the point of a decision making process is to guess the opinion of the most powerful decider and support it as quickly as possible. To create inclusion, restructure meetings for creative exploration and brainstorming. Pose questions that are low stakes and open-ended. Stay with one question until the room has brainstormed a large number of answers. Allocate a certain amount of time where the entire group has to brainstorm the virtues of the most unpopular ideas. Break groupthink by creating spaces where constructive dissent is rewarded and required. Of course, there are plenty of meetings where this won’t work. Sure, you have meetings where you have to put out fires. But you also have plenty of standing meetings that are “fire drills.” Use them to build the inclusive and psychologically safe environment of inquiry where everyone is valued because there is time for every idea to be considered.

ACTIONABLE ITEMS

The items here focus on creating a more inclusive environment where everyone can thrive. But they also increase engagement, discussion rates, and the quality of ideas. They create psychological safety, but they also create better thinking. As good leaders know, the purpose of inclusion might be to ensure people from all backgrounds can flourish but the steps it takes to achieve that task also produces plain old better decision-making.?

Other Resources

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