As research on diversity and inclusivity stacks up, most HR and senior executives agree: Organizations benefit from diversity of thought. Groups made up of people with different life experiences bring together many valuable perspectives. And diverse groups are better able to recognize problems and offer up creative solutions than groups of people with similar life experiences. But what if some team members don’t feel comfortable speaking up? What if they’re afraid to share their concerns or resist asking challenging questions? What if they avoid suggesting innovative ideas because they’re worried about rejection? Unfortunately, many people feel this way. According to a 2017 Gallup survey, 3 out of 10 employees strongly agreed that their opinions don’t count at work. A lack of psychological safety at work has major business repercussions. First, when people don’t feel comfortable talking about initiatives that aren’t working, the organization isn’t equipped to prevent failure. And when employees aren’t fully committed, the organization has lost an opportunity to leverage the strengths of all its talent. “People need to feel comfortable speaking up, asking naïve questions, and disagreeing with the way things are in order to create ideas that make a real difference,” says David Altman, our chief operating officer. “Psychological safety at work doesn’t mean that everybody is nice all the time. It means that you embrace the conflict and you speak up, knowing that your team has your back, and you have their backs.” According to Dr. Amy Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, people must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions out of left field, and brainstorm out loud in order to create a culture that truly innovates.Defining Psychological Safety at WorkPsychological safety is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. What is psychological safety at work in particular? It’s a shared belief held by members of a team that others on the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish you for speaking up. “When you have psychological safety in the workplace, people feel comfortable being themselves. They bring their full selves to work and feel okay laying all of themselves on the line,” Altman says.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety at Work

When a team or organizational climate is characterized by interpersonal trust and a climate of respect, members feel free to collaborate and they feel safe taking risks, which ultimately enables them to implement rapid innovation. A psychologically safe workplace begins with a feeling of belonging. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — which shows that all humans require their basic needs to be met before they can reach their full potential — employees must feel accepted before they’re able to improve their organizations. According to Dr. Timothy Clark, author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, employees have to progress through the following 4 stages before they feel free to make valuable contributions and challenge the status quo.

• Stage 1 – Inclusion Safety: Inclusion safety satisfies the basic human need to connect and belong. In this stage, you feel safe to be yourself and are accepted for who you are, including your unique attributes and defining characteristics.
• Stage 2 – Learner Safety: Learner safety satisfies the need to learn and grow. In this stage, you feel safe to exchange in the learning process, by asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, experimenting, and making mistakes.
• Stage 3 – Contributor Safety: Contributor safety satisfies the need to make a difference. You feel safe to use your skills and abilities to make a meaningful contribution.
• Stage 4 – Challenger Safety: Challenger safety satisfies the need to make things better. You feel safe to speak up and challenge the status quo when you think there’s an opportunity to change or improve.

5 Ways Leaders Can Help to Create Psychological Safety at Work

To help employees move through the 4 stages and ultimately land in a place where they feel comfortable with interpersonal risk-taking, leaders should nurture and promote their team’s psychological safety. Here’s how to help create a psychologically safe workplace:

1. Make psychological safety an explicit priority.

Talk about the importance of creating psychological safety at work, connecting it to a higher purpose of promoting greater organizational innovation, team engagement, and a sense of inclusion. Model the behaviors you want to see and set the stage by showing empathy in the workplace.

2. Facilitate everyone speaking up.

Show genuine curiosity and honor candor and truth-telling. Be open-minded, compassionate, and empathetic when someone is brave enough to say something challenging the status quo. Organizations with a coaching culture will more likely have team members with the courage to speak the truth.

3. Establish norms for how failure is handled.

Don’t punish experimentation and (reasonable) risk-taking. Encourage learning from failure and disappointment, and openly share your hard-won lessons learned from mistakes. Doing so will help encourage innovation, instead of sabotaging it.

4. Create space for new ideas (even wild ones).

When challenging an idea, provide the challenge in the larger context of support. Consider whether you only want ideas that have been thoroughly tested, or whether you’re willing to accept highly creative, out-of-the-box ideas that are not yet well-formulated. Learn how to embrace new ideas to foster more innovative mindsets on your team.

5. Embrace productive conflict.

Promote dialogue and productive debate, and work to resolve conflicts productively. Leaders can set the stage for incremental change by establishing team expectations for factors that contribute to psychological safety. With your team, discuss the following questions:

• • How will team members communicate their concerns about a process that isn’t working?
  • How can reservations be shared with colleagues in a respectful manner?
  • What are our norms for managing conflicting perspectives?

If all this sounds like a tall order, remember that psychological safety represents an organization’s climate and culture. And when you consider the enormity of changing a culture, it can feel overwhelming. But “transformation comes in the form of small steps,” Altman notes, and suggests thinking about it in terms of making incremental changes that yield incremental wins. “Most of us agree we could make a 1% improvement in a goal we have each day,” he says. “Ask colleagues if they’re willing to sign up for 1% each day. By the end of the year, you’re over 30 times better.”  

https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/what-is-psychological-safety-at-work/

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