Psychological Safety - The hidden enabler to growth you might be missing out on
When you’re leading a fast growth business you need a team who can lift you up. They need to be fully empowered, invested and taking the initiative - they need to treat your business as if its their own.
Yet these things come up time and time again as key elements that leaders struggle to cultivate in their people, creating a barrier to growth that is like a silent blight.
So it’s crucial that you know how to make your team truly accountable, instil genuine responsibility, and get them to buy in on all fronts.
What creates true empowerment, like good sourdough versus a fast prove tasteless loaf, doesn’t get cooked up overnight. It takes time and without the right leven falls flat. The key to getting your team to rise lies in an often forgotten ingredient in the mix: safety.
What’s been very clear from the dynamics of successful teams I’ve both observed and worked with over the years, is that the teams that work best have the most engagement and the highest levels of trust. With this comes accountability, a strong flow of ideas, greater ownership and importantly consistent innovation. These teams are naturally more psychologically safe.
Why safety?
Ownership infers risk. A team hungry for success will be prepared at some level to take risk but to do that, they need to feel safe
Safe, not from failure, but safety from judgement. Safe from you losing faith. Safe to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. That level of psychological safety requires a unique environment and consistent leadership approach.
In a fast growth corporate environment where you have to shout to be heard, where there is a high possibility of being shut down for creativity, when the same people repeatedly get air time or when the negative consequences of risk taking are stifling it’s not safe to innovate, to push the boundaries to play or to take even calculated risk.
By fostering a different culture as Nancy Kline suggests in her book “Psychological Safety” one that has equity of voices, where judgement is reserved and consequences are shared. The result is increased safety and a more dynamic and truly empowered team.
Create certainty through change
It’s easy to feel as though you don’t have time to create psychological safety in a fast growth environment, especially when pace can come ahead of anything else. But when we fail to slow down we can deny the opportunity for all voices to be heard and miss the opportunity to hear things that may save us time in the long run.
Moreover, psychological safety garners trust. To be able to speak, share ideas, suggest alternatives without fear of judgement or reprisal can result in far more creative solutions being brought to the table.
In fast growth, high change environments there can be very few certainties. There are fewer things we can depend upon as the scope and scale of the business we’re working in changes so rapidly.
Learn the rules
There are rules to creating higher levels of psychological safety and many of them come down to a few basic premises.
Listen rather than speak
Don’t assume that those you hear from the least have the least to say
Don’t assume that those you hear from most have the best input or thoughts
Give everyone space to think and to finish
Some people speak to think, some people like to think first and then speak – they need equal consideration
When we feel judged it can stop us in our tracks
Sometimes people just want to have their say – once they have they can work their own way round to a solution
Not everything everyone says has to be positive all the time!
Apply these rules and it’s not hard to see the potential positive impact on all of your interactions and the wider culture.
Remember you’re building a culture as well as a business
When you’re leading the business through growth, at all times you’re either intentionally or unintentionally creating the culture. You’re creating organisational norms which will be hard to shift once they’re set. Especially if you can’t see them.
It’s during this stage that it’s really easy to leave people behind. But as in any race, you need the pace setters, the marshalls, the organisers, the pit team.
Getting clear on what kind of culture you want to create is crucial to bridging the gap between accidental culture creation and intentional leadership. The importance of deliberately and intentionally creating the culture we want can easily be overlooked. When under pressure with competing priorities, we end up leaving culture to chance and safety, innovation and motivation suffer as a result.
Focus on key areas
Meetings
Meetings are your key area of group interaction. Get them right and you can set the tone very easily. Observe the rules above with complete commitment and you won’t go far wrong.
Openness
Encourage and celebrate openness. Challenge yourself to drop any notions of ‘information is power’ – or control. The people closest to the detail are often the ones working in the day to day, let them tell you what’s going on. This allows everyone to learn.
Pre and post mortems
Be careful about how often and how much you close off to things you don’t want to hear. Encourage open forum pre-mortems to work through what could go wrong with projects and initiatives and post mortems afterwards to build a culture of understanding and continuous improvement.
Develop emotional intelligence and use it
Emotional intelligence and self awareness are key to creating psychological safety from the top. Non verbal clues you give through your body language, continually show how you feel to those around you. Be intentional with how you the signals you use to communicate what you want to be seen and heard.
Pay attention
Pay attention to the people who you naturally listen to vs those you don’t – ask yourself why that might be and don’t stop there – think about the reactions you have and why. What do you project about who and what is important? What does that tell your team?
Over to you!
Building psychological safety is a way of freeing your team from fear and ultimately unlocks time, creativity and energy in your business. Understanding and embedding it, especially as you grow will build ownership, empowerment and accountability at every level.
At the heart of this approach is a focus on understanding people and respecting their needs so that rather than trying to meet their own needs for security they can be free to be creative, take ownership and take risks.
If you’re curious to embed more of this approach in your business and you’d like to know where to start, why not drop me a line? Get in touch on LinkedIn or send me an email at hello@rebeccamorley.co.uk
