No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” —Edmund Burke, 1756.
Psychological safety is not immunity from consequences, nor is it a state of high self-regard. In psychologically safe workplaces, people know they might fail, they might receive performance feedback that says they're not meeting expectations, and they might lose their jobs due to changes in the industry environment or even to a lack of competence in their role. These attributes of the modern workplace are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. But in a psychologically safe workplace, people are not hindered by interpersonal fear. They feel willing and able to take the inherent interpersonal risks of candor. They fear holding back their full participation more than they fear sharing a potentially sensitive, threatening, or wrong idea. The fearless organization is one in which interpersonal fear is minimized so that team and organizational performance can be maximized in a knowledge intensive world. It is not one devoid of anxiety about the future!
Yet a 2017 Gallup poll found that only 3 in 10 employees strongly agree with the statement that their opinions count at work. Gallup calculated that by “moving that ratio to six in 10 employees, organizations could realize a 27 percent reduction in turnover, a 40 percent reduction in safety incidents and a 12 percent increase in productivity.” That's why it's not enough for organizations to simply hire talent. If leaders want to unleash individual and collective talent, they must foster a psychologically safe climate where employees feel free to contribute ideas, share information, and report mistakes.
The study [on what made the best teams] examined several possibilities: Did it matter if teammates have similar educational backgrounds? Was gender balance important? What about socializing outside of work? No clear set of parameters emerged. Project Aristotle, as the initiative was codenamed, then turned to studying norms; that is, the behaviors and unwritten rules to which a group adheres often without much conscious attention. Eventually, as Duhigg wrote, the researchers “encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers [and] everything suddenly fell into place.
In hesitating and then choosing not to speak up, Christina was making a quick, not entirely conscious, risk calculation – the kind of micro-assessment most of us make numerous times a day.
Like most people, Christina was spontaneously managing her image at work. As noted sociologist Erving Goffman argued in his seminal 1957 book, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, as humans, we are constantly attempting to influence others' perceptions of us by regulating and controlling information in social interactions. We do this both consciously and subconsciously.
I have defined psychological safety as the belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. 6 The concept refers to the experience of feeling able to speak up with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able – even obligated – to be candid.
We now know that psychological safety emerges as a property of a group, and that groups in organizations tend to have very interpersonal climates. Even in a company with a strong corporate culture, you will find pockets of both high and low psychological safety.
I immediately saw that there was a significant correlation between the independently collected error rates and the measures of team effectiveness from my survey. But then I looked closely and noticed something wrong. The direction of the correlation was exactly the opposite of what I had predicted. Better teams were apparently making more – not fewer – mistakes than less strong teams. Worse, the correlation was statistically significant. I briefly wondered how I could tell my dissertation chair the bad news. This was a problem.
No, it was a puzzle.
The data are consistent in this simple but interesting finding: psychological safety seems to “live” at the level of the group. In other words, in the organization where you work, it’s likely that different groups have different interpersonal experiences; in some, it may be easy to speak up and bring your full self to work. In others, speaking up might be experienced as a last resort - as it did in some of the patient-care teams I studied. That’s because psychological safety is very much shaped by local leaders.
Fear inhibits learning. Research in neuroscience shows that fear consumes physiological resources, diverting them from parts of the brain that manage working memory and process new information. This impairs analytical thinking, creative insight and problem solving.
Working in a psychologically safe environment does not mean that people always agree with one another for the sake of being nice. It also does not mean that people offer unequivocal praise or unconditional support for everything you have to say. In fact, you could say it’s the opposite. Psychological safety is about candor, about making it possible for productive disagreement and free exchange of ideas. It goes without saying that these are vital to learning and innovation. Conflict inevitably arises in any workplace. Psychological safety enables people on different sides of a conflict to speak candidly about what’s bothering them.
In contrast, psychological safety is about candor and willingness to engage in productive conflict so as to learn from different points of view.
Psychological safety and performance standards are two separate, equally important dimensions - both of which affect team and organizational performance in a complex interdependent environment.
I like to say that psychological safety takes off the brakes that keep people from achieving what’s possible. But it’s not the fuel that powers the car.
...making the environment safe for open communication about challenges, concerns, and opportunities is one of the most important leadership responsibilities in the twenty-first century.
But the two most frequently mentioned reasons for keeping silent were one, fear of being viewed or labeled negatively, and two, fear of damaging work relationships. These fears, which are definitionally the opposite of psychological safety, have no place in the fearless organization.
Silence is instinctive and safe; it offers self-protection benefits, and these are both immediate and certain.
No one is fired for silence.’ The instinct to play it safe is powerful.
The workaround bypasses the problem, thereby silencing the signal by getting the immediate job done - but getting it done in a way that is inefficient over the long term.
Workarounds can occur when workers do not feel safe enough to speak up and make suggestions to improve the system.
Their work shows that psychological safety makes it easier for people to speak up about problems and to alter and improve work processes rather than engaging in the counterproductive workarounds.
They found that even when employing a highly-structured process improvement technique, interpersonal climate matters for success.
...more and more of the tasks that people do require judgement, coping with uncertainty, suggesting new ideas, and coordinating and communicating with others. This means that voice is mission critical.
But process innovation efforts only led to higher performance when the organization had psychological safety. In short, process innovation can be a good way to boost firm performance, but a psychologically safe environment helps the investment pay off.
The team also found four other factors that helped explain team performance – clear goals, dependable colleagues, personally meaningful work, and a belief that the work has impact.
...a study in a Midwestern insurance company found that psychological safety predicted worker engagement. In turn, psychological safety was fostered by supportive relationships with coworkers.
...the authors showed that trust in top management led to psychological safety, which in turn promoted work engagement.
In these studies, psychological safety acts (using statistical language) as a moderator that makes other relationships weaker or stronger. Psychological safety has been found to help teams overcome the challenges of geographic dispersion, put conflict to good use, and leverage diversity.
When I studied top management teams with action scientist Diana Smith, we analyzed detailed transcripts of their conversations to show how a psychologically safe climate for candid discussion of strategic disagreement can be created, even in high-level teams confronting strategic challenges, and how this can enable productive decision-making.
One of the most important things to keep in mind, wherever you work, is that the failure of an employee to speak up in a crucial moment cannot be seen. This is true whether that employee is on the front lines of customer service or sitting next to you in the executive board room. And because not offering an idea is an invisible act, it's hard to engage in real-time course correction. This means that psychologically safe workplaces have a powerful advantage in competitive industries.
What many people do not realize is that motivation by fear is indeed highly effective – effective at creating the illusion that goals are being achieved. It is not effective in ensuring that people bring the creativity, good process, and passion needed to accomplish challenging goals in knowledge-intensive workplaces.
The same script – unreachable target goals, a command-and-control hierarchy that motivates by fear, and people afraid to lose their jobs if they fail – has been repeated again and again. In part that's because it's a script that was useful in the past, when goals were reachable, progress directly observable, and tasks largely individually executed. Under those conditions, people could be compelled to reach them simply by fear and intimidation. The problem is that, in today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, this is no longer a script that's good for business. Rather than success, it's a playbook that invites avoidable, and often painfully public, failure.
A former employee reported that members of his Los Angeles branch opened accounts or credit cards for customers without their consent, saying a computer glitch had occurred if customers complained. He also reported that employees lied to customers-saying that certain products could only be purchased together-to hit their numbers. Other tactics to meet sales goals included encouraging customers to open unnecessary multiple checking accounts – one for groceries, one for travel, one for emergencies, and so on – and creating fake email addressees to enroll customers in online banking.
Like Volkswagen, Wells Fargo's avoidable failure was not the result of one bad apple but of a system that demanded hitting targets so ambitious they could only be met by deceit. Employees operated in a culture of fear that brooked no dissent. Rather than manifesting interest in salespeople's experiences while executing the cross-selling strategy and using what was being learned in the field to shift or sharpen the company's strategy, managers sent a clear message: produce – or else.
For instance, an in-depth investigation of Nokia's rise and fall in the smartphone industry between 2005 and 2010, which included interviews with 76 managers and engineers at Nokia, concluded that the company lost the smartphone battle not as a result of poor vision or a few bad managers but at least partly due to a “fearful emotional climate” that created company-wide inertia, especially in response to threats from powerful competitors.
The regulators were, in a sense, disabled from effectively carrying out their regulatory duties by a culture of fear and deference.
When asked why she thought the regulators chose deference even though they possessed this power, her answer was succinct: “they are coming from a place of fear.
In many organizations, like those discussed in this chapter, countless small problems routinely occur, presenting early warning signs that the company's strategy may be falling short and needs to be revisited. Yet these signals are often squandered. Preventing avoidable failure thus starts with encouraging people throughout a company to push back, share data, and actively report on what is really happening in the lab or in the market so as to create a continuous loop of learning and agile execution.
That they found it easier to fabricate false accounts than to report what they were learning in the field is as powerful a signal of low psychological safety as you can find.
Yet to view the customer-accounts fraud as the result of individually-corrupt salespeople does not square with the widespread nature of the behavior in the company, which points to a system set up to fail. Set up to fail by the pernicious combination of a top-down strategy and insufficient psychological safety to encourage sharing bad news up the hierarchy.
When strategy is seen as a hypothesis to be continually tested, encounters with customers provide valuable data of ongoing interest to senior executives.
Early signs of gaps between results and plans must be viewed first as data – triggering analysis – before concluding that the gaps are clear and obvious evidence of employee underperformance.
Chapter 3 Takeaways:
- Leaders who welcome only good news create fear that blocks them from hearing the truth.
- Many managers confuse setting high standards with good management.
- A lack of psychological safety can create an illusion of success that eventually turns into serious business failures.
- Early information about shortcomings can nearly always mitigate the size and impact of future, large-scale failure.
Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” —Sydney Harris
Rocha's statement captures a subtle but crucial aspect of the psychology of speaking up at work. Consider his words carefully. He did not say, “I chose not to speak,” or “I felt it was not right to speak.” He said that he “couldn't” speak. Oddly, this description is apt. The psychological experience of having something to say yet feeling literally unable to do so is painfully real for many employees and very common in organizational hierarchies, like that of NASA in 2003. We can all recognize this phenomenon. We understand why his hands spontaneously depicted that poignant vertical ladder. When probed, as Rocha was by Gibson, many people report a similar experience of feeling unable to speak up when hierarchy is made salient. Meanwhile, the higher ups in a position to listen and learn are often blind to the silencing effects of their presence.
Many who analyze events leading up to tragic accidents such as this one-which could have been avoided had the junior officer spoken up-cannot help pointing out that people should demonstrate a bit more backbone. Courage. It is impossible to disagree with this assertion. Nonetheless, agreeing doesn't make it effective. Exhorting people to speak up because it's the right thing to do relies on an ethical argument but is not a strategy for ensuring good outcomes. Insisting on acts of courage puts the onus on individuals without creating the conditions where the expectation is likely to be met.
The absence of a Director of Nursing at the time of Lehman's admittance, a post that had been vacant for over a year, also signals that the medical and clinical teams did not adequately appreciate the interdependence and complexity of their work.
Raising concerns that turn out to be unfounded presents a learning opportunity for the person speaking up and for those listening who thereby glean crucial information about what others understand or don't understand about the situation or the task.
A culture of silence is thus not only one that inhibits speaking up but one in which people fail to listen thoughtfully to those who do speak up – especially when they are bringing unpleasant news.
...the assembled group could have readily resolved the ambiguity with some simple analyses and experiments had they listened intensely and respectfully. In short, for voice to be effective requires a culture of listening.
The operative word here is “listening.” In the Chapters 5 and 6, you will read about eight flourishing organizations where leaders have created the conditions to make listening and speaking up the norm, not the exception. In these fearless workplaces, it's far less likely that employees will refrain from sharing valuable information, insights, or questions and far more likely that leaders will listen to rather than dismiss bad news or early warnings.
...most notably, in what Pixar calls its “Braintrust.”
A small group that meets every few months or so to assess a movie in process, provide candid feedback to the director, and help solve creative problems, the Braintrust was launched in 1999, when Pixar was rushing to save Toy Story 2, which had gone off the rails. The Braintrust's recipe is fairly simple: a group of directors and storytellers watches an early run of the movie together, eats lunch together, and then provides feedback to the director about what they think worked and what did not. But the recipe's key ingredient is candor. And candor, though simple, is never easy.
Pixar's Braintrust has rules. First, feedback must be constructive – and about the project, not the person. Similarly, the filmmaker cannot be defensive or take criticism personally and must be ready to hear the truth. Second, the comments are suggestions, not prescriptions. There are no mandates, top-down or otherwise; the director is ultimately the one responsible for the movie and can take or leave solutions offered. Third, candid feedback is not a “gotcha” but must come from a place of empathy. It helps that the directors have often already gone through the process themselves. Praise and appreciation, especially for the director's vision and ambition, are doled out in heaping measures.
Braintrusts – groups of people with a shared agenda who offer candid feedback to their peers – are subject to individual personalities and chemistries. In other words, they can easily go off the rails if the process isn't well led. To be effective, managers have to monitor dynamics continually over time. It helps enormously if people respect each other's expertise and trust each other's opinions. Pixar director Andrew Stanton offers advice for how to choose people for an effective feedback group. They must, he says, “make you think smarter and put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time.” Stanton's point about having people around who make us “think smarter” gets to the heart of why psychological safety is essential to innovation and progress. We can only think smarter if others in the room speak their minds.
Catmull is honest and human in acknowledging that failure hurts. Embracing failure is far easier to say than to actually put into practice! “To disentangle the good and bad parts of failure,” he says, “we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.” He points out that it's not enough to simply accept failure when it happens and move on, more or less hoping to avoid it going forward. We need to understand failure not as something to fear or try to avoid, but as a natural part of learning and exploration. Just as learning to ride a bike entails the physical discomfort of skinned knees or bruised elbows, creating a stunningly original movie requires the psychological pain of failure. Moreover, trying to avoid the pain of failure in learning will lead to far worse pain. Catmull: “for leaders especially, this strategy – trying to avoid failure by outthinking it – dooms you to fail.
Radical transparency and extreme candor go hand in hand at Bridgewater. There's even a prohibition on talking about people who are not present and thus cannot learn from what's being said. Managers are not supposed to talk about their supervisees if the person is not in the room.
Today, Eileen Fisher, the company, operates nearly 70 retail stores, which generated between $400 and $500 million in revenue in 2016. 31 It's a supplier to many other clothing retailers and has consistently been recognized as one of the best companies to work for. Unlike the businesses featured in Chapter 3 that faced enormous failures, the company has enjoyed continuous growth and thoughtful, productive change, unblemished by financial, legal, or safety failures. Its management practices and governance structures have created a showcase for psychological safety.
Fisher calls herself a natural listener, which helps to make “not knowing” a positive trait. When first setting up her company, she found the combination of these two traits to be an advantage. As she says, “when you don't know and you're really listening intently, people want to help you. They want to share.” Evidently, she's managed to maintain the vulnerability and receptivity of her original “I don't know,” even as she's become a seasoned leader of an enduring brand in the fashion industry. One of the outcomes of managing by not knowing is, as Fisher says, that “people feel safe to explore their own ideas instead of feeling like they just need to do what you tell them to do.”
Eileen Fisher clothing is structured along simple lines and fluid designs. The same could be said for the way the company conducts its meetings. People sit in a circle, with the intention of de-emphasizing hierarchies and instead encouraging what's called “a leader in every chair.” To create the mindfulness and focus conducive to an environment where everyone collaborates and contributes, meetings begin with a minute of silence. Sometimes an object, such as a gourd, is passed from person to person; the idea is the person is allowed and expected to speak when the object is in hand. The point is that Fisher, like the other leaders discussed in this chapter, has institutionalized very specific processes that help create psychological safety.
When Fisher describes how projects and initiatives come about in her organization, she emphasizes encouraging employees to be passionate and giving them “permission to care.” For example, an assistant, Amy Hall, rose in the company to become Director of Social Consciousness by following her passion for how the company was running its factories and treating its factory workers, eventually becoming involved in setting standards for how factories operate worldwide. In 2013, at a four-day off-site company sustainability conference, the staff made a commitment to produce only environmentally sustainable clothing by the year 2020. Although the idea had not originally come from Fisher, she wanted to lend her support and realized the importance of simply saying, “yes.” Although she doesn't call herself a CEO, she realized that “saying yes gives people permission” to go forward.
In 2015, CEO Bob Chapman and co-author Raj Sisodia published Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, a book whose title concisely declares the company's mission to “measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.
Barry-Wehmiller rallied from the economic downturn relatively easily and by 2010 reported record financial results. In other words, by continuing to make its team members feel safe and cared for during a crisis, the company created a win-win situation for everyone.
He learned that trust – employees feeling trusted by management – was key, and that time clocks, break bells, and locking inventory in cages inhibited that trust. Chapman describes immediately getting rid of what he calls “trust-destroying and demeaning practices” inappropriate for responsible adults. Listening sessions, as they are called, have since become institutionalized times where team members are asked to speak their minds.
I don't mean to imply that working in a fearless organization takes more effort or a tremendously difficult undertaking. It doesn't. But initially, when we've been entrenched in fear and its attendant mental frameworks, it's not always obvious.
Catmull, E. & Wallace, A. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. New York: Random House, 2013. Print.
Malcolm, J. “Nobody’s Looking At You: Eileen Fisher and the art of understatement.” The New Yorker. September 23, 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/09/23/nobodys-looking-at-you Accessed June 12, 2018.
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” —Marcus Aurelius
Equally important, they were trained in threat and error management (TEM) and CRM (also sometimes called Crew Resource Management). Both programs teach ways of thinking and decision-making. CRM – a program that, among other skills, instructs aviation crews to speak up to their captain when they feel something is wrong and likewise instructs captains to listen to crew concerns – is especially well suited to creating environments of psychological safety.
In other words, clinic staff who themselves feel supported by high levels of psychological safety are able to support and bond with patients, which contributes to positive clinical outcomes.
Having begun his career at Daini in 1982, when it was still under construction, Masuda was intimately acquainted with the plant. That knowledge allowed him to give each group detailed instructions about where to go and what to do. to give each group detailed instructions about where to go and what to do. Concerned that fear might interfere with workers' ability to remember his instructions, he made the groups repeat the instructions back to him before they left. The point was not to command action but to assist them in acting quickly should the situation change, and their safety be compromised.
Masuda influenced the workers to act, even as the ground shook beneath their feet. Through his calmness, openness, and willingness to admit his own fallibility as a leader, Masuda created the conditions for the team to make sense of their surroundings, overcome fear, and solve problems on the fly. Although their physical safety was in constant danger, they felt psychologically safe, and this allowed them to come together, try things, fail, and regroup. In the many moments of fear for their lives over the course of those days, interpersonal fear within the group was nearly nil. Masuda's words and actions set the tone and reassured workers that they could – and must – save the plant.
…if thou shalt be afraid not because thou must some time cease to live, but if thou shalt fear never to have begun to live according to nature- then thou wilt be a man worthy of the universe which has produced thee.” - Marcus Aurelius.
Gulati, R., Casto, C., & Krontiris, C. “How the Other Fukushima Plant Survived.” Harvard Business Review, 2015. https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-survived Accessed June 13, 2018.
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. —Naguib Mahfouz
She introduced new terminology (“words to work by”) that altered the meaning of events and actions in important ways; for instance, instead of an “investigation” into an adverse event, the hospital would use the term “study;” instead of “error” she suggested people use “accident” or “failure.” In subtle but important ways, Morath was trying to help people think differently about the work – and especially about what it means when things go wrong. These leadership actions comprise what I refer to as framing the work.
All of us frame objects and situations automatically. Our focus is on the situation itself, and we are typically blind to the effects of our frames. Our prior experiences affect how we think and feel about what's presently around us in subtle ways. We believe we're seeing reality – seeing what is there.
She asked a question. “Was everything as safe as you would like it to have been this week with your patients?
In his book The Game-Changer, published while he was still CEO of Proctor and Gamble, A.G. Lafley celebrates his 11 most expensive product failures, describing why each was valuable and what the company learned from each.
Some failures are genuinely good news; some are not, but no matter what type they are, our primary goal is to learn from them.
Framing the work is not something that leaders do once, and then it's done. Framing is ongoing. Frequently calling attention to levels of uncertainty or interdependence helps people remember that they must be alert and candid to perform well.
Others perhaps took it for granted that people knew to speak up. Our survey measure rated three behavioral attributes of leadership inclusiveness: one, leaders were approachable and accessible; two, leaders acknowledged their fallibility; and three, leaders proactively invited input from other staff, physicians, and nurses. The concept of leadership inclusiveness thus captures situational humility coupled with proactive inquiry (discussed in the next section).
In sum, leaders who are approachable and accessible, acknowledge their fallibility, and proactively invite input from others can do much to establish and enhance psychological safety in their organizations. Powerful tools, indeed.
For more cases and detail on the power of inquiry as a fundamental leadership skill, I recommend Ed Schein's thoughtful book, Humble Inquiry.
To reinforce a climate of psychological safety, it's imperative that leaders – at all levels – respond productively to the risks people take. Productive responses are characterized by three elements: expressions of appreciation, destigmatizing failure, and sanctioning clear violations.
In short, psychological safety is reinforced rather than harmed by fair, thoughtful responses to potentially dangerous, harmful, or sloppy behavior.
Leadership at its core is about harnessing others' efforts to achieve something no one can achieve alone. It's about helping people go as far as they can with the talents and skills they have.
For instance, I've studied senior management teams in which a lack of psychological safety contributed to long-winded conversations (indirect statements, with veiled criticisms and personal innuendo, take longer than candid ones), elongated meetings, and an inability to come to a resolution about crucial strategic issues. Decisions that could have been resolved in hours stretched over months.
Questions cry out for answers; they create a vacuum that serves as a voice opportunity for someone. Especially when a question is directed at an individual (and expressed in a way that conveys curiosity), a small safe zone is automatically created.
The personal challenge for all of us lies in remembering, in the moment, to be vulnerable, as well as to be interested and available. To do this you will have to take on the small interpersonal risk that your attempts may be ignored or, worse, rebuffed. But in my experience, the odds are low. Assuming a modest level of good will in your organization, most of the time your colleagues will respond well to genuine expressions of vulnerability and interest. So, give it a try. Pause; look around. Whom can you invite into the safe space for learning and contributing to the shared goal? See what happens.
To the extent that you feel you fall into that category – a rare genius who has perfect pitch in terms of what the market wants – you may be able to specify the work that needs to be done clearly enough for others to merely execute. In that case, go for it! You will be able to forfeit seeking or listening to the input of those who work below you in the organization. Henry Ford, after all, was said to have complained, “why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” But for the rest of us, I wouldn't recommend that approach. Few business leaders today can afford to squander the brainpower available in their companies. At the very least most of us need an honest sounding board. But better yet, we need people to bring their ideas to work to help us create better products and a better organization.
Psychological safety doesn't guarantee effectiveness. It just makes it easier to find out what people have to offer. Sometimes, that's a happy surprise. But when people feel able to express themselves, and you find that what they say is not adding value, then you have a responsibility to help. To coach. And even though it's not fun to give people that kind of feedback, it's better to know that someone is in need of it than to remain in the dark. Moreover, it's only fair to let your colleagues know that the impact they're having is not what they're hoping it is.