According to Wharton Professor Andrew Carton, fear is the biggest enemy of psychological safety. “When fear becomes an entrenched marker of an organization’s culture, it can have toxic effects over the long run. In addition to stifling creativity, it can inhibit collaboration and lead to burnout.”
I can already hear the skeptics moaning, “Well, a little bit of fear is good. It’s motivating!” An experience of mine at a former employer proves otherwise and illustrates that, in the long term, fear truly is not productive. There are much better ways to generate incremental energy and motivation at work.
The Impact of Fear in the Workplace
Several years ago, I worked for a high-profile start-up building solutions targeting Hispanic consumers. The target audience was specifically recent immigrants, so we had to get creative about distribution channels to ensure we were meeting them in the right space. We partnered with two organizations that already had robust distribution to our target segment for their own products and looked to us for incremental revenue. My role was to manage the partnerships.
Several months into my role, I realized that the partners we were working with could not effectively deliver our solutions because of the constraints put on them by their core businesses. It was clear to me that the challenges we were having with them were inherent to their business model and highly unlikely to change for a very incremental revenue stream. So, I went to my boss, the COO, to share my concerns.
We had a positive relationship, and I expected to discuss my analysis of the situation. Instead, as soon as I mentioned that I didn’t think our challenges were fixable with the current partners, he said, “Have you gone native? Whose team are you on?” He implied that, somehow, I had become overly sympathetic to our partners, and instead of pushing them to make the changes we needed, I was giving up.
Immediately, I recoiled. I tried to defend myself once and then gave up on what I saw as a losing battle. For the next few months, I kept my concerns to myself until one day, three months later, the COO himself declared what I had tried to tell him three months ago. These were the wrong partners.
In case you hadn’t guessed, my boss’s reaction to my concerns was exactly the opposite of what you should do to create an environment of psychological safety. Even if I had not been right, managing our conversation positively may have revealed an opportunity to optimize or reframe the situation. At the very least, it could have made me feel that my opinion was valued and heard. Instead, we wasted three precious months of operating income to conclude exactly what I had already shared, and I lost trust in my boss’s desire to hear my opinions. I was afraid.
So, what can you do to achieve opposite outcomes, enhance creativity, and increase collaboration?
3 Strategies to Increase Psychological Safety on Your Team
1. Practice Active Listening
If you have a team member who would like to talk to you about a problem, put away your phone and close your computer screen. Show them that you are listening intently. When you feel you have fully understood, summarize what you understand and ask your team member to confirm that you understand what they were trying to say. Mirror their words back to them by saying something like, “So what I am hearing you say is…”
If you know what the next steps should be, share them. If not, tell your team member that you will consider the conversation very seriously as you think about the issue. When you have decided on your next steps, go back to that person, share what role their analysis played in your thought process, and thank them for sharing.
If you are in the middle of something and cannot give your team member your full attention, ask for them to schedule something later or send an email that you can discuss with them afterward. But don’t conduct important conversations over email. It’s a missed opportunity to build engagement with your team member. We call this “Contributor Safety” and it is fundamental to creating a psychologically safe environment. If the individual is challenging someone else’s opinion or the status quo, we call it “Challenger Safety.” These two types of psychological safety are fuel for ensuring that the ideas you move forward with have been considered from many angles.
2. Don’t Play the Blame Game
If the individual who shared the idea or opinion with you is proven wrong or if they move forward with an idea or opinion that proves to be the wrong approach, do not blame them. Your goal is to create an environment where your team feels comfortable learning and taking risks because they know that if the risk does not work out the way they intended, the team will investigate and learn what can be done differently to prevent the mistake in the future.
If a mistake happens, engage the team in a conversation about what can be done differently the next time to ensure a better outcome. Ask questions like:
- What source of information were we using?
- Was our analysis incomplete?
- Were we feeling pressure to move forward too quickly?
Very importantly, use the pronoun “we” instead of “you.” You are on the same team, and you are responsible for your team’s missteps.
Next, thank your team for giving their attention to the challenge at hand and ask them to what degree they feel comfortable with both the process and the result. Notice that I did not say to ask them IF they feel comfortable with the process and the result—avoid yes or no questions because you get very little information. Using the phrase, “To what degree do you…” opens the conversation.
Finally, express your satisfaction with the team’s ability to respond to a mistake positively. We call this “Learner Safety”. In an environment of learner safety, team members feel comfortable taking risks, asking questions, and expressing curiosity.
You create a growth culture, not a blame culture.
3. Disrupt Stereotypes in Yourself and Others
Sometimes, stereotypes about different groups of people can get in the way of our ability to listen to them in a neutral and attentive way. I happen to be an empathetic person who builds strong relationships, a characteristic attributed to many women. I believe that my boss, in the example I shared at the beginning of the article, assumed that I had created such strong relationships with our partners that I could no longer see or represent our company’s needs effectively. This was not true.
This is a particularly common stereotype of women, but stereotypes can affect people of all kinds, especially people of color. I recently heard a story about a black colleague who was a consultant in a former life. During one of her engagements, she uncovered that the qualitative performance feedback given to black and white employees at the client organization was very similar. However, black employees were consistently rated lower on the numerical scale. Her concerns were dismissed as biased because she herself was black. The company ignored her rigorous analysis and was later sued for several hundred million dollars in damages that they had to pay to current and former black employees.
Most situations don’t carry the very significant consequences of the example I just shared, but the aggregate impact of being ignored, underestimated, or even actively challenged unreasonably is just as harmful. It means that while you may have hired a culturally diverse workforce, you are not yet in a place as a manager or an organization to support and benefit from that diversity.
What should you do? Actively push yourself to learn about the backgrounds and cultures of your team members, but not just directly from them. If you constantly ask them to share what it’s like to be them in the organization, you are saddling them with a burden their non-marginalized colleagues do not have to bear. Instead, read books and articles, listen to podcasts, watch videos, and take it upon yourself to leverage that information to interrupt bias in yourself and others. We call this “Inclusion safety”. Inclusion safety occurs when team members feel a sense of belonging and are confident that they are valued and respected.
Psychological Safety Leads to a Culture of Learning
There is certainly much more to psychological safety than just the three tips above. However, as someone in leadership, focusing on these three elements will go a long way to creating a sense of psychological safety that will benefit your team and organization.
Please do not expect to get it perfect every time. You will make mistakes by dismissing someone too hastily or making assumptions about people’s intentions. But you can use these incidents to demonstrate humility and vulnerability, which contributes to building the learning culture that will help you reach your goals.
About the Authors
