With constant change and uncertainty, your people need to feel safe to speak up, challenge ideas, and take initiative. As a leader, you play a huge role in creating that safe environment. When your people feel safe, it’s easier for them to embrace change, contribute ideas, and come with you on the journey rather than just doing what they’re told.
As a leader, what are you doing to make your people feel safe when there’s a lot of change happening around them?
I was recently running my “Future Scenarios” program with a group of senior leaders, where they look at what’s coming up in the future and – just as importantly – plan how to bring their people along on the journey.
In the program, I share Google’s “Project Aristotle” research about high-performing teams. Named after Aristotle, who said, ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, Project Aristotle sought objective criteria for team effectiveness.
Google expected the key factors were things like having the best engineers, the people with the greatest expertise and experience, and the people most qualified to do each role. But they found, to their surprise, that the real factors had little to do with expertise or experience. Obviously, that was important as a starting point, but the real factors were what are sometimes called “soft” skills.
The most important is psychological safety, which is how safe people feel about taking interpersonal risks at work. You want your people to feel safe taking risks around their colleagues – even with something as simple as, say, asking a “stupid” question at a meeting.
When you make it safer for them to fail, you make it easier for them to succeed.
So, in my program, we discussed psychological safety and the leader’s role. Later in the day, a participant said,
“Oh, yeah – that’s related to the conversation we were having about psychosocial safety.”
That led to another conversation because psychosocial safety is different from psychological safety.
They both relate to the employee experience and how safe they feel in the workplace, but they’re different – and that matters for you as a leader.
Psychosocial safety is how your organisation has created a workplace to protect people from mental, emotional, and physical harm. This includes legal obligations, physical hazards, bullying and harassment, working hours, mental health resources, and so on.
The key is that psychosocial safety is broadly the organisation’s responsibility, while psychological safety is YOUR responsibility as a leader.
Of course, everybody in the team plays their part in creating a psychologically safe environment, but ultimately they’re led by you.
Your team members know whether they feel psychologically safe with you, and also whether you support psychological safety for the group when you’re in the room.
As with many other things, it’s more difficult to create psychological safety in uncertain and volatile environments. Anxious and stressed people are more ready to criticise others, more insular, and less open to new ideas. They often think “Don’t rock the boat” or “Don’t make waves”.
That gives you a bigger challenge. On one hand, you want your people to feel safe rocking the boat and making waves – but you don’t want them to capsize it in the middle of a storm!
What are YOU doing to create psychological safety in your team?
If you’d like to know more about this, join my free public online presentation “Keep the Change” about creating a culture of change and adaptability in your team.
I’ll see you in the future.
