Psychological Safety and What It Means for Your Business

The notion of psychological safety is a well-studied phenomenon. The basic concept is centered on the extent to which people believe their actions will avoid personally negative repercussions. Those repercussions are—very often—subtle, such as a dismissive comment from a superior. It is important to understand that this is distinct from avoiding personal responsibility or accountability. It is simply that honest attempts to do the right thing for the team, even if they are mistaken, are not punished.

Through surveys, it is possible to measure the level of psychological safety, and high levels of psychological safety are correlated with the following:

• Higher rates of learning

• Higher rates of creativity

• Fewer mistakes

• Higher levels of team performance

These studies reveal sometimes surprising results. For example, team environments where mistakes are interpersonally penalized have lower levels of psychological safety and actually result in more mistakes. This occurs even in cases where those mistakes may be very serious. Why? If you are going to be penalized for speaking up, emotionally you will be less likely to do it, even if logically you should. Later in the chapter, we will talk about how nurses don’t report medication errors in an environment like this.

RISK-TAKING CULTURES

Silicon Valley is often described as having a risk-taking culture. In many ways, it’s probably more accurate to describe it as having a culture that accepts mistakes or a culture of high psychological safety. As the story goes in Silicon Valley, the reason all the office buildings are two stories high and surrounded by grass is that when you feel like throwing yourself out of the top floor, you wind up just spraining an ankle, only to go home and write another business plan. Typically, failing in a business a couple of times is viewed positively in Silicon Valley, and this is a manifestation of an environment of high psychological safety. Certainly, there are people here who are naturally bold risk takers, who have a risk-taking DNA, and they come here because this is an environment where they thrive.

A state of psychological safety is something that most humans are not predisposed to. In the natural environment, one might look into the distance to see an object, and that object may be unclear. It could be a bush laden with tasty berries or it could be a dangerous wild beast. You might be trying to decide whether to investigate the object further. An optimistic assessment of what it is might lead you to a nice snack, but it could also lead to your death. A pessimistic assessment at least ensures that you will survive to forage another day. As such, humans are predisposed to a state of psychological arousal for threats, and it doesn’t take much to raise this state of arousal. Human beings are predisposed not to move out of their comfort zone, not to go and do risky things, and to generally like routine.

Fortunately, however, things can be done to counter these tendencies and thus enable greater psychological safety, reduce threat-oriented thinking, and enable more cerebral thinking.

THE PEOPLE-CENTRIC ENVIRONMENT

A people-centric work environment is one that is designed to meet the needs of the people who work in it rather than the needs of the most senior person. The goal is to create an environment in which intrinsic motivations can come to the forefront. So, while financial motivations matter, as we learned earlier in this chapter and discuss further in chapter 5, financial rewards can, if misapplied, be counterproductive. If we are interested in creating a people-centric environment, we need to consider several elements: the physical environment, the mindset, and process.

Physical Environment

If you can, slow down for a moment and imagine a place, somewhere you feel happy, safe, and secure—a place where you are relaxed. It could be by the ocean or in the mountains; somewhere familiar or somewhere new. Look around that place and see all the things that you can see. Follow your eyes to absorb all the beauty around you and imagine hearing all the sounds you might hear in that place. As you read these words, imagine reaching out and touching something around you and running your hands through its physical material. It could be warm sand from a beach, grass in a field, water, or stone. It could be anything that is pleasing to you. As you imagine this place and think about it, does it seem like it’s a vacation place? Or does it seem like it’s a workplace?

When people go on vacation, they generally choose to go to a place of beauty to unwind, relax, or whatever the term is that causes you to be able to think well and more clearly. Many of us go to a place that is usually free from threats caused by other people, a place where there are few demands of us and where we are free to create demands for ourselves. For us and our colleagues who write, retreating to a place like this is often where we are most productive, where we have the greatest capacity for creative thought. It is as if the cerebrum can be most fully engaged.

But what if your workplace was like that? Most of us spend our days in an environment characterized by gray walls at right angles to each other, but not all work environments are like that. Here in Silicon Valley, there are workplaces that are eons apart from the towering cube-farms one finds in many of our larger cities. Some of these workplaces have a lot more in common with a resort vacation village. The Googles, Facebooks, and Pixars of the world do a phenomenal job replicating the resort lifestyle in the workplace.

The Mindset

The fundamental mindset of the people-centric organization is one of psychological safety. This does not mean a lack of accountability, but it does mean that honest attempts to do something different are rewarded rather than punished. There are several areas where people are typically vulnerable and are exposed. In particular, these are areas where a mindset of reward is important:

• Feedback seeking

• Help seeking

• Innovation

• Boundary spanning

• Speaking up about concerns / Providing feedback

Feedback seeking is the process through which people try to get information about their own individual performance in order to improve it. It is almost always a vulnerable place to be because you are explicitly asking for things that you might have done wrong and need to improve on. Feedback seeking can be difficult for the ego, but it is vital to be able to grow and develop into a more effective person. It is something that has to be encouraged in an organization that wants to see people who are more effective than they once were.

Help seeking, where one seeks out assistance, always includes, either explicitly or implicitly, the admission that you can’t do the task yourself. While it is a vulnerable place to be, failure to engage in help-seeking behavior means that the corporation will rarely be getting the best person on the job to engage. When there is the sense that exposing this vulnerability will lead to negative repercussions, people stop doing it—and the organization suffers.

Innovation by definition is a process where you try to do something new. It is always fraught with difficulty because there can be no certainty as to whether the new and innovative idea will actually work—if that were known, it would not be innovation. This makes innovation a precarious business. It is frequently expensive and, if you are being truly innovative, must sometimes result in failure. It is often impossible to affirmatively defend an innovative idea as good because there is no data yet to support that view. If you are innovating, you are exposed. When there is a sense that this exposure will lead to negative repercussions, people stop trying to innovate, and that is disastrous for the long-term health of the company. Innovation will be the lifeblood of all companies in the fluid economy and is a prerequisite for growth.

Boundary spanning is about the cross-functional interaction needed to deal with a complex corporate problem. The people in your own group don’t have the right expertise, for example, or perhaps they have just run out of ideas. It’s the type of problem for which you gather all the best experts from as many different backgrounds as you can find in a single room. This type of interaction, where you force individuals to work across typical organization silos, is important for solving problems that either are complex or need added creativity to solve. In a people-centric enterprise, cross-functional interaction is vital to bring the best minds to bear on a complex, multidimensional problem. It is also important because cross-functional interaction is frequently where the greatest creative energy can be found. Yet this always involves an element of vulnerability. By definition, the people that you work with in boundary-spanning activities have to be people that you know less well, and it is not a natural thing to reach out to people who are unknown to you, nor is it even always possible. Unless there is a mindset that a cross-functional approach is preferable in a lot of ways to reaching out to those within your own silo, then you will limit the opportunity to creatively solve problems. In a people-centric organization, the belief that boundary spanning is not only desirable but welcome.

Speaking up about concerns and providing feedback can sometimes save lives. Medical environments are fraught with the possibility of dangerous mistakes. If the environment is not centered on people, the rates of errors increase. Studies involving nurses have indicated that medical teams with high levels of psychological safety tend to make fewer medication errors. Why? On those teams, nurses feel that they are able to point out potential medication errors to more senior staff. Contrast this with teams that are more hierarchical. On those teams, speaking up could elicit dismissive and negative comments from more senior staff. The result is that nurses are less willing to point out medication errors unless they are very certain they are about to occur. It is not merely that a potentially life-saving comment from a nurse is heard and ignored; it is that, after a while, those comments aren’t even made.