Three Ways to Scale Improvements to Psychological Safety
When we think about how to increase psychological safety, we can look through a variety of lenses. Each view will suggest a different set of practices and each will lead to a different focus for improvement.
In organizations, it is important to consider:
Development for individuals
Development for teams
Organization-wide supports
There are many principles, practices, tools, and techniques in each of these areas. What follows is a high-level introduction to each area and a tool that can serve as a place to start.
Increase Range Through Personal Skill-Building
It is only possible to create psychological safety for others in contexts where you yourself experience psychological safety. Each of us has contexts where we are calm, creative, and connected. And each of us have situations where our fears, conscious or unconscious, are running the show.
One way to scale is to increase our range. The more situations we can be a source of safety rather than a consumer of safety provided by others, the more positive impact we can have on the system.
This is particularly true for people with situational authority. Leaders who are functioning with an embodied sense of safety bring a sense of calm into a room with them that everyone responds to.
Tools to Start Personal Skill-Building
A good place to start is by increasing your awareness of your current range.
This video from Conscious Leadership Group describes a way of assessing whether you are coming from fear or safety.
This handout, also from Conscious Leadership Group, lists some common remarks, behaviours, and beliefs you might notice.
Safety in Teams
Increasing psychological safety in teams can take several approaches.
Increasing the leaders’ range
Increasing the range of individual team members
Using team practices and procedures that create additional safety
Team coaching provided by an outsider
A team can be greater than the sum of its parts. If there is a willingness to learn together and energy to take action, a team can self-organize to learn and grow together. The process can sometimes be speeded up with the help of coaches or teachers.
If the team is struggling with motivation or has individual team members who are deeply resistant, it can be helpful to bring in a coach who has the range to step into the team without fear. One person who can maintain their own psychological safety despite whatever pressures the team is under can provide a sense of safety to the others.
A Tool for Teams
Working agreements
Every team should dedicate time to discussing what ways of working bring out the best of each team member and agree on guidelines for the team that reflect the needs of each team member.
These agreements should be reviewed and revised if necessary as part of onboarding new members. It is also good practice to review working agreements after offboarding a member to avoid accumulating agreements that were customized for people who are no longer part of the team.
Working Agreements by Jane Haskall has some sample terms and three possible processes for creating working agreements.
Organizational Supports
Organizations can support psychological safety across the whole organization by:
Assuring there is psychological safety on the leadership team
Investing time and resources in effective training and development for managers and individual contributors in the skills of creating psychological safety
Not tolerating toxic geniuses
Prioritizing the skills for creating psychological safety in hiring and promotion of managers and leaders
Tools for Organizational Support
Reading Recommendations for Leaders:
Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams reported research on the impact of a leaders’s sense of safety in their books Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results and Scaling Leadership: Building Organizational Capability and Capacity to Create Outcomes that Matter Most.
15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp
Where to Start?
In most cases, it is more important that you start than where you start. Increases in psychological safety tend to ripple outwards from wherever they are.
That said, the more structural authority an individual has, the more impact small improvements will have. Leaders would do well to start with their own skills before training others.