Maintaining Safety As Your Organization Grows
When two or three people gather to start a venture, psychological safety between the people has usually preceded the venture. Many organizations lose this safety as they grow, especially if they are growing fast. What can be done to grow without losing safety?
The key is to be conscious of this as a problem early, as you start to grow. Building trust is much easier than rebuilding trust. Being intentional about maintaining psychological safety during each phase of growth lays a foundation that eliminates the need to retrofit for safety later.
Many People Only Know How to Build Intimacy Slowly
Psychological safety in a group is the shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. The foundation is trust that revealing our personal idiosyncrasies, quirks, half-baked ideas, and fallibility won’t result in exclusion. Building this trust requires testing the waters and being received well.
The most common way to build intimacy is to slowly get to know someone. Individual friendships often develop in ways that parallel the development of friendship skills in children.
In small children, parallel play is the first form of friendship. Doing the same thing as the kid next to you is a way of showing them you are just like them. It is a way of demonstrating commonality and willingness to be together.
Next, kids play something with defined rules together, but as individuals. Dress up and pretend play recreating the characters and scenarios they have encountered in life or stories.
Team sports, collective arts (theatre, band, choir, improv) and other group activities come later.
For adults, the pattern often consists of going somewhere to do something you enjoy where there are other people, mimicking their behaviour until you are behaving like them, watching them to learn the implied rules (social norms) of that group, and slowly figuring out what your role in the group can be.
When closeness is formed this way, it takes lots of time: 40-60 hours hanging out, joking around, and playing games to form a casual friendship and more than 200 to become good friends. Hours spent working together don’t have nearly the same impact on building connections as leisure hours.1
Organizations Don’t Have That Kind of Time
We can’t dedicate 40 hours of hanging out time with every person we are onboarding to build relationships with them. We need ways to build relationships faster. Especially when we are growing fast and rapidly expanding.
There are ways to build intimacy without spending all that time. And they are learnable skills.
Theatre directors do this on every show. Plays make emotional connections with audiences when they reveal truths of the human condition that are hard to talk about in person, even taboo. Actors are asked to expose the riskiest parts of human relationship. When you have 3-6 weeks to mount a production, you have to create safety extremely rapidly.
4 Elements of Building Safety Fast
Leading With Embodied Safety
Fear ripples downhill from anywhere it exists in an organization.
Employees respond to the signals of safety or danger expressed in the non-verbal elements of their leaders’ communication.
They mimic the boss’s behaviour. If leaders are actively expressing physiological fear-based behaviour, employees will act out, complain, self-isolate, become submissive, or try to save the day with individual heroics.
If leaders are repressing fear, employees will hide their feelings, become secretive, walk on eggshells around the leader, and otherwise work to help the leader maintain the fiction that all is well.
The more stressful the environment, the more leaders need to invest in their own ability to remain open, honest, courageous, and playful.
Three is the Magic Number
Groups feel like a whole when each individual in the group has meaningful connections with at least 3 other people in the group.2
It is common in onboarding to assign an “Onboarding Buddy” as a point of contact in the organization. This is a good start, but it is not enough if you want to build a sense of psychological safety fast.
Be conscious about facilitating casual, playful 1-1 connections with at least 3 people for each new hire as soon as possible. A simple way to do this is to have a meet the team session that includes a mingle where people are paired up to ask and answer ice-breaker questions. Use breakout rooms to pair people up in remote environments. Make them switch partners three times.
The more you facilitate these connections, the deeper the relationships will become. Make them a habit.
Social Contracting and Working Agreements
Culture is the amalgamation of the attitudes, behaviours, and habits of the entire group. Every time new people are introduced, the culture changes. Everyone must adapt, including leaders. Having processes for doing this explicitly and intentionally creates clarity and safety for both the existing team and the new hire.
Working Agreements in the Reporting Structure
When a new report starts, make time on their very first day for a face-to-face meeting to start co-creating a personalized working agreement with them. In developing this agreement, don’t just tell them what is expected of them. Ask them what they want, ask for what you need, and agree on a mutually agreeable place to start. Acknowledge explicitly that the agreement will get refined for greater effectiveness as you get to know each other better.
As a leader, your willingness to adapt to the individuals on your team demonstrates that who they are as people matters.
Working Agreements Within the Team
When someone joins the team, it is tempting to focus primarily on getting them up to speed on the content of their job. This is a mistake. They will learn the content of their job much faster after they have established a sense that it is safe to learn.
Schedule a meeting for the team to review its agreements about how to create a team culture that brings out the best in the team. Invite the new person to participate as much or as little as they feel comfortable, noting that there will be opportunities for future discussion in regularly scheduled review meetings. Then follow through with the promise of future reflection.
Review the latest version of the social contract. Ask:
Are we fulfilling these agreements?
If not, what can we do to improve?
Are these still the agreements we want to have with each other? Should we make any changes?
Rest and The Speed of the Body
When you are under stress as an organization, leaders must focus on the physiological condition of the bodies working for them. Rest is crucial for kindness and creativity. If people start to get irritable or creativity is failing, prioritize ways that help them rejuvenate.
Different people need different amounts of rest, but every body needs rest. Many of the brightest and most creative people require more rest than average. Thinking is energy-intensive.
Foregoing rest is not efficient.
Think of runners. Sprinters go all out for very short periods of time and then need to rest and recover. Marathoners train to have endurance for a single long race at a time with substantial periods of rest both before and after races. Ultra-marathoners run at a sustainable level of exertion so they are able to keep going for days on end.
Make sure your people get enough rest unless you want to burn them out and train new people.
Choosing High Stress Consciously is an Option
Many people actively choose to work in environments where they are stressed. Uncertainty, overwork, intensity, and the adrenaline rush of not having enough time to do the work feels comfortable.
People whose nervous systems are adapted to high-stress environments need that level of intensity. They will often create drama where it doesn’t exist in order to experience the ease of familiarity.
If this is you, you can embrace it. Be honest with yourself and with your team. Hire people who want the highs and lows and drama.
https://news.ku.edu/2018/03/06/study-reveals-number-hours-it-takes-make-friend