How psychologically safe do you feel at work? How many times have you been in a meeting where you disagreed with a concept or idea and couldn’t bring yourself to speak up? How many times have you had an idea that you didn’t feel comfortable sharing at work? These are missed opportunities to engage and collaborate. And the cost of the missed opportunities is incalculable—because the silence of individuals and teams represents a road not taken.
Companies spend big budgets getting from something good to what they hope will be something great. We work in a world where customers expect solutions almost before their needs arise, and technological advances frequently outpace budgets. Total quality management, Lean Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints, Agile, and Balanced Scorecard are all methodologies to improve organizational performance and efficiency. Organizations spend years implementing, modifying and perfecting (they hope) the concepts of these philosophies and embedding them in the business, creating a dizzying array of organizational change.
Psychological safety is more critical than all of these philosophies; it’s the foundation of high performance and innovation. Any business management philosophy or system is doomed to failure if the employees tasked with its implementation don’t feel safe to provide input, ask questions, or disagree. By-in is a must for the adoption of any new concept, and if you want employees to become ambassadors of innovation, how do you create by-in? The place to begin is a culture of psychological safety. Safety is low on Maslow’s hierarchy for a reason; only physiological needs supersede the human need for safety and security.
Psychological safety, by definition, is the belief one won’t be punished or humiliated for voicing ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes. It can be measured by gauging a team’s willingness to help one another, its inclusion and diversity, attitude to risk and failure, and its propensity for open conversation. It’s pretty impossible to innovate if employees don’t help one another, don’t speak openly, or nobody has permission to make a mistake. Inclusion and diversity doesn’t exist just because you have a diverse slate of employees—all those employees must participate fully in the conversation. Otherwise, the team may be diverse, but the ideas will not be.
Mistakes are the fact of human existence, and yet we proclaim that, “failure is not an option.” Failure is, in fact, the only option. What matters is how failure is received by the team, and how the organization responds to it. Creating an atmosphere of psychological safety means living the reality of, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and prioritizing psychological safety as a team project—not an organizational buzzword. By making psychological safety the first project in your innovation pipeline, you acknowledge that psychological safety is the project that determines the relative success of all the others.
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