Getting to Psychological Safety

What are some of the things that enable a sense of psychological safety? Well, according to modern research, five things are known to enhance feelings of psychological safety:

• Use of practice fields

• Team leader behavior

• Group dynamics

• Trust and respect

• Supportive organizational context

Use of practice fields. Alex Honnold is widely regarded as one of the most talented free-solo climbers in the world. He is known for making long, high-commitment climbs up practically sheer rock walls without ropes. Hanging from your fingertips on an overhang five hundred feet up would, for most people, be terrifying. However, Alex doesn’t describe it that way: “The moment you get scared it’s a negative spiral,” he mentioned in a 2015 interview. “Once you lose control you get freaked out, then you get shaky, then you should be scared because you won’t be able to climb as well. Then you make a mistake, and mistakes are costly. The key is to keep those thoughts away; just climb.”

Alex has clearly found a way to control his feelings of fear in an otherwise terrifying situation. He practiced climbing almost exclusively indoors for eight years before he started to focus on outdoor climbing. Today, before he does any of the long free-solo routes he’s famous for, he typically practices the route a dozen times or more with ropes. In short, Alex has found ways to practice the route over and over so that when it comes time for him to free-solo the route, he can do so without fear.

The use of practice fields is as useful in business as it is in climbing—it is the act of creating a risk-free environment in which to practice an activity so that it can be done with high levels of psychological safety. Airline pilots use simulators, and army platoons use military exercises. Even McKinsey & Company makes use of practice fields—all their consultants routinely run through theoretical client-engagement scenarios in training. Practice fields enable you to adapt mentally to the scenario that you are about to encounter and lessen the fear response, which, as we have discussed, can override higher brain functions, leading to disaster.

Team-leader behavior. It is well known that the behavior of the team leader sets the tone for the entire organization; so, too, with psychological safety. Team leaders create a safe example for others to follow and thus are always an important lever for influencing the behavior of a group. The research shows that when team leaders themselves exemplify behaviors that represent psychological safety, the rest of the group follows suit. The extent to which the team leader does or does not stigmatize those who make honest mistakes, the extent that the team leader discusses how mistakes are inevitable and that what is required is open discussion about them, or the extent to which team leaders discuss their own mistakes and vulnerabilities will drive the level of psychological safety the team experiences. Furthermore, team leaders are in a position to monitor formal and informal group dynamics, set up practice fields, and engage in other practices known to promote psychological safety.

Deliberate group dynamics. Have you ever worked in a group where one person played the role of a “jester,” continually making fun of a situation? Perhaps you’ve worked with an individual who frequently injected negative and critical remarks in group discussions. People tend to take on roles in an organizational context, and those roles may be different from the roles they have outside work. Very often, these roles are informal and are dependent on how the individuals in the group interact. Group dynamics are infectious, and these group dynamics can be either supportive or destructive of trust. Formalizing or discussing group dynamics is one method to ensure that a dynamic exists that is supportive of high levels of psychological safety. For many years, David worked at McKinsey, where new teams are assembled for each new client project. At the beginning of a new project, the team sits down together and explicitly discusses the working styles of all the individuals on that team so that the individuals on the team can accommodate differences in a way that avoids unnecessary criticism. Standardizing certain types of interaction can also help to create the right type of dynamic.

In the military, interactions are highly standardized. The way in which an officer gives orders to his troops follows a prescribed format. The thinking methods that officers use to develop and write those orders follow a standard method that is understood by all officers. The roles of individuals in a fighting unit are standardized and known. The result is that when you place an officer within a new unit, that officer is able to command the unit in a standardized way that is understood by everyone, even if they haven’t worked together before.

Similarly, some organizations, such as Toyota, have a standardized way of solving problems. This means that when people from across the organization understand each other, they can effectively work without unnecessary criticism. The Toyota Code of Conduct is a rather short, eighteen-page document that describes what is required from every employee. Toyota uses the term trust no less than twenty times in this document, and with good reason. “Mutual Trust and Mutual Responsibility” is a core value at Toyota, one that is recognized as critical to the long-term success of the company. When there is genuine trust earned through repeated positive interactions, with credible people who have the interests of others at heart, then it allows you to feel safe in dealing with that person and the entire organization. Everyone working to continually build trust is a requirement and, once that trust is established, amazing things are possible.

From the outside, Toyota may seem hierarchical, but inside, the company in many ways embodies frontline empowerment. Factory production-line workers have within arms reach a cord that they can pull to stop the production line until a problem they have identified is resolved. Toyota has turned the hierarchy on its head. Normally, it would be the factory manager who had the power to force all the resources in the factory to address a problem that he thought was important. At Toyota, it’s the frontline employee who can cause all the work in the factory to stop until his or her issue is resolved. The result is that problems get resolved quickly—most pulls of the cord get released within seconds of them happening. This system both requires and enables extraordinary levels of trust. Frontline employees are trusted to highlight important quality problems, and managers are trusted to solve them. Not only is Toyota the largest car company in the world, it is also, by some measures, the most profitable. In each segment of the auto market that it competes in, Toyota has the highest gross margin. Routinely, their personnel turnover rates are among the lowest in any region where they hire. But more important than this, cultivating an attitude of mutual trust and respect is in some ways the definition of an environment where psychological safety can flourish.

When everyone is engaged in building trust, that creates a foundation where there is no need to attack someone for poor performance, second-guess, or engage in other activities that tend to undermine psychological safety. Most importantly, psychological safety permits respect for the individual—the notion that regardless of their needs or quirks, they are valuable and should be treated as such. When mutual trust and respect for the individual are present, they are a self-reinforcing pair that enables an attitude of psychological safety to exist and further business success.

Supportive Organizational Context. David is 6' 9" and can recall a time when he was a junior officer in the army: “They couldn’t get me a piece of dress uniform my size. I escalated all the way to brigade command and still there was no satisfactory response.”

David tried scrounging kit and equipment stores, but this also proved futile and required a lot of effort over many months. He recalls how it made him feel: “Well, if they couldn’t get me a few pieces of cloth when I am working on a military base, then what hope do they have in getting some other piece of equipment I might need when, perhaps, I might be in the field?”

The failure of the organization in a small way led to a sense that the organization couldn’t help him, perhaps when he might desperately need it. The notion of whether the organization can provide for the individual is linked to the notion of psychological safety. After all, it’s difficult to feel a sense of security when you also feel like the organization may not be able to provide the things you need to be secure. As such, ideas of psychological safety are tied to the capacity of the organization to provide for each individual within it.

Human beings are animals that are only a stone’s throw away from ancestors who lived in an environment where danger was everywhere. Humans evolved a capability to instantly recognize risk and shut down all brain functions that are not essential to dealing with that threat. This adaptation was vital for survival when human beings mostly lived in wild spaces, but in a knowledge-driven, fluid economy, this adaptation is problematic because it leads to shutting down the very part of the brain that needs to be functioning to come up with creative solutions. A people-centric enterprise can create an environment of high psychological safety and thus enable the individuals that work within it to engage all of their mental faculties for a more satisfying and successful organization.

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