Saying “This is a Safe Space” Makes it Less So
Leadership Roles Have Faulty Feedback Loops
If you are facilitating a meeting, running an event, teaching a class, leading a company, or hosting a party, you are the person least capable of assessing whether or not the space is safe or not.
Your role makes you inherently difficult to be honest with when something isn’t working in the event. Your vested interest in the success of the event makes you less likely to receive negative feedback well and everybody in the room knows it.
Until you have proven that you receive feedback well and take responsibility for repairing the unintended negative impact of your actions, only the most courageous people will think about giving you useful feedback that a space isn’t safe enough for them to participate.
Some people bring their safety into the room with them
In any setting, there will be some people who believe they belong and don’t experience any fear about inclusion, looking foolish while they are learning, participation, or challenging the status quo.1 You don’t need to worry about their safety. You do need to worry about their ability to create safety for others.
Their sense of safety may inadvertently heighten the experience of not belonging for people who do not bring that sense of safety into the room unless they explicitly welcome and include everyone.
Declaring a Space Safe Makes it Less Safe
Psychological safety is the collective sense that interpersonal risks can be taken without risk of punishment or exclusion. The safety in a team is capped by the experience of the most vulnerable person at any given moment.
If you as a facilitator declare a space safe and someone experiences harm from anyone in the group, your trustworthiness will have been undermined by that harm whether you contributed or not. The perceived risk of telling you that it was not, in fact, a safe space is greater than it would have been if you said nothing at all.
The Intention to Create Space Makes Space Safer
Your undeclared intention to create safe space does help make a space safer, as long as that intention motivates you to act.
It makes it more likely that you will think proactively about how to make everybody feel welcome. It also makes it more likely that you will notice signs that people aren’t feeling welcome to participate fully.
A declared intention to create a safe space, however, is likely to have mixed impact.
The indication that you are trying will make some people more willing to give you the benefit of the doubt when it comes to risking speaking up or the possibility of pointing out a problem.
Other people will respond to a stated intention with skepticism. By now, most people know that the easy interventions don’t work. And people who are trying hard sometimes take feedback about unintended negative impact very badly.
Invite Participants to Collaborate on Creating Safety
A way to predictably increase the safety in a setting quickly is to state your desire to create a space where people feel safe enough to be courageous and ask for their help doing that.
A simple process for a low-tension setting
Ask the assembled group what they would need from the group to feel safe enough to be courageous. Note that it is okay for that to change over time and that revisiting this discussion when something needs to change is expected.
Treat all statements as requests. Discuss the requests to get shared understanding.
Propose a set of agreements that capture the requests.
Ask for a visible demonstration of acceptance of the agreements.
If someone is reluctant to accept the agreements, ask what else would need to be added to make it acceptable. Focus on adding. Changing or amending serves to exclude the intial speaker and decreases safety for everyone who notices.
Remind people that this was a beginning and if anyone thinks it needs to change, it should be revised.
If you have a standing meeting, a team, or a multi-part event, have a default cadence for reviewing whether the agreements should be changed.
Psychological Safety is Localized, Individualized, and Negotiated
Have this conversation every time you get a new person on a team, run a new event, or start a process you haven’t done for a while.
You cannot create a set of guidelines that will create psychological safety for everybody in an organization of any size. What makes one person feel courageous may feel threatening to another. The uniqueness of people matters. You have to create different agreements for different groups of people.
At an organizational level, scale requires having a baseline of unacceptable behaviours that won’t be tolerated and normalizing the process of creating custom agreements specifically for and with the people involved in something for the duration of that event.
Scaling psychological safety requires repeated processes of negotiation about what intentions and behaviours will be committed to in the neverending process of creating, maintaining, and repairing psychological safety.
It is worth pointing out that some people feel that sense of belonging everywhere because they have never experienced the alternative and others feel it because they have cultivated the ability to create it. They tend to disrupt safety in different ways when they do. People who haven’t experienced exclusion are most likely to not notice harmful practices or disbelieve reports of their impact. People who have cultivated their own ability to bring their safety wherever they go are more likely to lack compassion for people who have not yet developed that skill.