A Sobering Moment in a House of Cards

It was a sobering moment. During a workshop with German school principals based on Timothy R. Clark’s four-stage model of psychological safety, we arrived at the level of challengers’ safety. We discussed a situation in which a sophisticated and innovative proposal by a highly motivated team of school principals was shot down fairly badly by the local school board. What were the effects on the four levels of psychological safety?

They were questions such as What is the point of presenting new ideas when we get shot down anyway? (losing challenger safety). Why do we even bother to submit new proposals? (losing contributor safety). How can we justify putting so much time and effort into development? (losing learner safety). Does our team make any difference? Why did we even bother building a team in the first place? (losing inclusion safety).

Once the top level collapses, there is a great danger that all preceding levels collapse like a House of Cards. It was with great concern that I realized how psychological safety is a highly fragile construct. With so much positive human potential at stake, I wondered how we can make psychological safety more robust.

What is Psychological Safety?

Timothy R. Clark defines psychological safety as “a condition in which you feel (1) included, (2) safe to learn, (3) safe to contribute, and (4) safe to challenge the status quo – all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way.” (Clark, 2020, p. viii). Psychological safety is for Clark a culture of rewarded vulnerability. Amy C. Edmonson defines psychological safety as “the belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” (Edmonson, 2019, p.8)

Amy Edmonson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, links to Peter Senge’s concept of the learning organization, echoing the key features of systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building a shared vision, and team learning (Senge, 2009), although more from the pragmatic perspective of development and implementation.

From a learning perspective, we could reframe Clark’s four stages as a logical sequence of subsequent learning processes: learning to include, learning to learn, learning to contribute, and learning to challenge the status quo.

Edmonson goes one step further and suggests that psychological safety is not enough since psychological safety relates to organizational performance standards: High psychological safety but with a low expectation of excellence creates a comfort zone that feels fine with low(er) standards. Low psychological safety with low standards, due to a lack of motivating drivers, leads to apathy. Low psychological safety under the expectation of high standards, in stark contrast, results in anxiety. Only high psychological safety in high standards settings creates an engaging and motivating learning and performance zone (p. 18). It reminded me of Vygotzky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) as we only grow in contexts bigger than ourselves. Both Clark and Edmonson point out that psychological safety is a conditio sine qua non for innovation.

Approaches to Robustness

The following ideas come from notes I scribbled down while reading Amy Edmonson’s the fearless organization. At the end of her book, Edmonson refers to verified survey measures to illustrate the robustness of psychological safety (pp. 213-15). What I present in the following are specific social frameworks that contribute to the robustness of psychological safety from a systemic perspective.

But robustness against what? We can think of internal factors such as authoritarian and Ego-heavy personalities, overworked and burnt-out teams, disruptive team members, loss of team direction, or gravitational factors that pull some members out of focus and away from the project.

We can also think of external factors such as mergers and acquisitions, uncertainty about pending cultural changes, changes in management and colleagues, private issues, drastically changing market conditions, or other disruptive social, economic, or environmental influences. We surely cannot complain about a lack of crises these days.

Developing Safe Spaces and Connecting Communities of Practice

My favorite example of building innovation spaces is the creation of actual innovation spaces, such as innovation labs or dedicated R&D departments. The MindLab in Denmark was one such success story. MindLab was a Danish cross-governmental innovation unit that involved citizens and businesses in developing new solutions for society. I like the example because it was not only about exploring creative projects in a dedicated safe space but also about developing new methods and approaches that could be transferred to other contexts, in this case, public innovation. It was built for interconnection.

Safe spaces can take many forms and variations: established social norms via corporate values and vision, effective daily procedures for safe interactions, or institutionalized safe meetings.

Great initiatives such as the Braintrust at Pixar and many others are described in the chapter Making Candor Real (Edmonson, p. 104 ff.). Safe spaces address groups. They facilitate robustness by encouraging the emergence of trustworthy social networks. Networks, by definition, are more robust than singular, bidirectional relationships.

When embodied as a social and sustainable space, it requires leadership endorsement to be recognized as an official part of the organization. Safe learning spaces depend on professional facilitation, clear communication of organizational goals to position employees in the learning zone, and fine-tuned processes, such as e.g., inclusive onboarding procedures to invite members. Communal spaces are fragile and fall apart easily without advocacy, ongoing support, and proper management.

But networking doesn’t stop here. We can also think of reinforcing safe spaces beyond organizational borders. The term ‘communities of practice’ is defined by Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner as “sustained learning partnerships among people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” (Wenger-Trayner. 2023). Communities of practice can be useful as an additional, external strengthening influence for members of a safe space, as long as these communities are (a) dedicated to the same domain or special interest, (b) extend to members who do not necessarily work together on a daily basis, and (c) develop a common practice of sharing experiences, stories, tools, and problem-solving strategies. The ‘big picture’-strategy is to base encouragement and social motivation on many foundations, not just one.

Leading by Example

As business leaders, we set the stage for organizational culture. Our challenge is the inherent difference in power and position between us and our employees. It’s tricky because even though a person might be considered a “good boss” by being well-mannered and polite, it doesn’t mean that he or she provides psychological safety. Timothy Clark makes a good argument when he states that competent leaders reduce social friction and increase intellectual friction. In other words, it should always be safe to speak your mind. It is safe to make suggestions and to disagree constructively.

In this light, business leaders need to provide opportunities for learning and personal development. They develop aspirations, act as gatekeepers to unacceptable behaviors and attitudes, and demonstrate that they can make mistakes while they rely on honest and open input.

Not all managers possess the communication and social skills necessary to provide this type of exemplary leadership. As a consequence, some companies provide dual leadership, with leaders who specialize separately in social and operational areas.

A necessary condition for exemplary leadership is that leaders develop the appropriate mindset and adopt consistent behavioral practices. Leadership must be consistent in implementing and ensuring psychological safety. As a critical consequence, psychological safety (a) should not depend on a single executive, (b) requires investment in safe spaces, and (c) is accompanied by situational humility to encourage voice. Voice, as both Clark and Edmonson never tire of emphasizing, is mission-critical.

It is the interaction and mutual support between leaders and safe spaces that creates robustness. Ideally, they strengthen each other’s bonds. How to develop this bond would make for a great workshop topic.

Self-Organization

When people are given the freedom to self-organize their teams or departments, magic happens. People do not need to be tightly controlled by checks, rules, and regulations because they are acting on their responsibility. Simultaneously, self-organization frees management from micromanaging its employees. A self-organized department with inherent social cohesion will be more robust against e.g., bad leadership compared to a department that is strangled by top-down rules and assessments.

But here is the problem: What happens if we have teams at a particular organizational level self-organizing, but other levels are still hanging on to fixed mindsets and/ or outdated beliefs, such as, e.g. the ‘great man theory’?

Self-organization can work when coordinated on all levels of an organization. The question is: How can we implement self-organization so that it supports psychological safety constructively for all stakeholders?

Co-Creation

When we create things that we feel ownership over, we develop pride in what we do. We do not just do what we are told – we own what we create. Participation is great because it actively invites stakeholders to take action. But what do we mean when we talk about participation? We can differentiate between an exchange (such as sharing viewpoints, information, or other tokens), collaboration (such as benefiting from a division of labor), and true co-creation. The latter implies e.g., the collaborative creation of a shared social space, of shared values, artifacts, or ways of working, within a common culture.

Co-creation means that we become shareholders in a new game. When we have stakes to lose, we better listen to the voices of others. Co-creation adds robustness to a process as we become not merely collaborators coming from different positions and perspectives, but do own personal stakes in a venture project.

Below: Visualization of strengthening social factors to Psychological Safety as a coral reef-like structure

Self-Assessment

Continuous improvement is not possible without the critical self-assessment of teams, facilitators, and leaders. Reflective self-assessment adds robustness on several levels. Firstly, it reduces social friction and increases intellectual friction (Clark). Secondly, self-assessment encourages openness, praise, and voice. It opens up team development: What can I do to help in the next round? What were you struggling with? What were your concerns? (Edmonson, p.200). Thirdly, we assess our performance as team members, researchers, and problem solvers. We get better at performing in our roles. Prerequisites for an efficient self-assessment are corresponding facilitation, mentoring, and coaching skills.

Client Safety in B2B Settings

Whereby in B2C settings enterprises might not necessarily stay in constant exchange with customers, B2B and B2B2C settings require dependable social transactions between teams (and teaming) of different organizations. This means that psychological safety cascades across value-generation chains.

To safeguard shared value creation, enterprise-to-enterprise communication pipelines need to facilitate inclusion-, learner-, contributor- and challenger safety. B2B settings require a commonly shared innovation and learning space to keep innovating for their customers. Such B2B ‘safety pipelines’ can moderate company-internal fluctuations and stabilize psychological safety across organizations. We may find novel opportunities for psychological research in this field.

Accountability and Transparency

Psychological safety can easily be compromised when hierarchical power structures are permitted to behave as they please, making decisions about employees rather than working with them while disrespecting their autonomy. Thus, transparency about the cultural behavior of everyone, especially management and leaders in an organization, becomes critical to ensuring psychological safety. Everyone must be held accountable not only for what they do in their job but also for how they do it, this is how they conduct themselves within the cultural framework of the organization.

In Closing

In this blog entry, I have reflected on how safe spaces, exemplary leadership, self-organization, co-creation, critical self-assessment, and safe B2B communication pipelines can contribute to making psychological safety more robust against internal and external disruptions.

The key takeaway is that when implementing Psychological Safety in the workplace, we need to have its robustness in mind. The described beneficial social constructs are not exhaustive and we may find many others as inspiration for organizational Best Practices. Psychological safety is a fragile construct that can easily be disrupted by a plethora of influences, leading to a key question: How can we make good things last?

The hypothesis forwarded is: When looking for the robustness of psychological safety, it makes sense to base personal and social motivation not on a single source, such as a well-meaning manager or a newly announced initiative, but on a whole network of supportive grounds, building an ecosystem for new social learning experiences. There are perhaps three criteria to measure the success and effectiveness of such an ecosystem: interpersonal transactions must be clear, reproducible, and adaptable.

References

Clark T. R. (2020). The 4 stages of psychological safety: defining the path to inclusion and innovation. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Edmonson A.C. (2019). the fearless organization. Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. New Jersey: Wiley & Sons.

Senge P., Roberts C., Ross R. B., Smith B. & Kelner A. (2009). The fifth discipline fieldbook: strategies and tools for building a learning organization. Boston: Nicholas Brealey.