Why is Psychological Safety so Hard to Achieve? Especially at Scale?
Psychological safety is “a team’s sense that there won’t be negative consequences for taking certain risks, expressing their ideas and concerns on certain topics, speaking up with questions, or admitting mistakes.”
There are two elements of psychological safety that are hard to achieve in the modern business world
The first is “a team’s sense” and the second is “there won’t be negative consequences for taking certain risks, expressing their ideas and concerns on certain topics, speaking up with questions, or admitting mistakes.”
A Team Doesn’t Have a Team Sense Unless it is a True Team
A true team, as opposed to a group of people who work together, has a collectively shared objective that the individuals prioritize above their individual goals.
They feel like a whole. Beyond the knowledge that “we are all in this together” is the felt sense of oneness. Every team member has the subjective experience of being an indispensable part of the whole.
From a physiological perspective, the team members experience the flow of oxytocin that arises in the presence of “my people”.
This is hard to create in an individualistic culture and needs a combination of principles and recurrent practices that continually recreate the feeling.
More challengingly, if you create this feeling in a single team, you may experience the dark side of oxytocin. Oxytocin got a reputation as the “love” hormone because of press around studies showing that oxytocin was a prime mediator of the felt sense of belonging. But that characterization is incomplete in a crucial way.
Oxytocin is the us/them hormone. Oxytocin mediates the felt sense of who is close enough to be protected when there is danger and who are potential sources of danger. Anyone who is part of “us” gets cared for, and anyone else gets protected against.
So, paradoxically, feeling too much like your “team” is your centre of belonging can make the rest of the company feel like outsiders who need to be protected against.
A CEO who wants to optimize psychological safety in their organization must focus heavily on creating a collectively felt sense of the entire organization as everyone’s in-group. This gets harder as an organization grows.
The Fear of Negative Consequences is Rational and Emotional
Psychological safety is limited by team members’ senses of the risks involved in speaking the truth, being imperfect, or thinking differently.
Each individual is making calculations about risk all the time.
How likely am I to lose my job over this? My chance of a promotion? My job related health care?
If I lose my job because of this, how easy will it be to get another one? Will I be at risk of losing my housing, my car, my reputation, or my healthcare?
Will my teammates hate me if I say this thing? Is it kinder to name this problem or let it slide? Which choice will create fewer problems in the future?
Psychological safety requires protection against catastrophic failure.
The more any individual feels or believes they need THIS job, the less psychological safety is possible for the entire team.
In a tight job market in a country without a social safety net, only the independently wealthy or naive feel safe enough to take risks. In an easy job market with a robust social safety net, people without workplace trauma are much more likely to judge a wider range of risks as unlikely to result in catastrophic failure.
People who have workplace trauma have difficulty contributing to the team’s sense of safety. Workplace trauma is far more common than it is discussed. Organizations that want to increase team effectiveness through increased psychological safety need to assume a wide prevalence of workplace trauma and use trauma-informed management practices.
Corporate Leaders Aren’t Incentivized For Psychological Safety
In the US, for example, corporate leaders are legally required, through definitions of fiduciary duty and case law, to prioritize short-term shareholder value.
Many techniques for maximizing short-term shareholder value decrease psychological safety in both the short- and long-term.
CEOs of public companies rarely have enough safety in their roles to invest in psychological safety.
Bad Experiences with Psychological Safety Initiatives Poison the Well for All Organizations
If people take a risk that results in negative consequences, they learn not to take that risk again.
If people are in environments that talk about their commitment to psychological safety and they take a risk and are punished for it, they learn not only not to take such risks but also not to trust people who promise them it is safe to take risks.
They take those fears with them to their next job, and because of their history, the new organization will have to work harder to convince them to be willing to take risks.
Psychological Safety is Frequently Hard Because the Soil is Poor
Gardeners know that it is much harder to grow plants, often impossible, if the environment will not support the particular species. Before planting, experienced gardeners know to consider the microclimate and amend the soil.
Effectively increasing psychological safety often requires the organizational equivalent of amending the soil and not planting seeds that the current environment cannot support.
Creating Psychological Safety at Scale is Hard Because It Requires Dealing With Many Challenges Simultaneously
Each challenge mentioned above points to complex relationships between people, organizations, political governance, and legal systems. Each of them appears differently within the context of each organization.
No two settings have the same points of leverage available, and no two settings will respond to the same interventions in the same way.
No two people have the same skills or relationships. Learning from other people’s successes and failures, therefore, is limited to extracting principles that might apply in a different context.
Big changes in organizations tend to decrease psychological safety and must be handled very skillfully to increase people’s willingness to take risks, so most success comes from frequent repetition of small steps.
Creating psychological safety at scale is hard because it is frequently slow, subtle, and indirect. Progress can be hard to see and hard to measure. Motivation can be hard to maintain. What to do next can be hard to ascertain.
This begs the question of what can be done and I will try to unpack some of the principles that might help in future articles.