Leadership and the Mandate for Psychological Safety
As the challenges facing organizations continue to grow, leaders must take a more active role in influencing their organizations’ cultures and emotional ecologies. This includes taking steps to ensure that work environments are being created that are high in trust and rich in psychological safety.
While most leaders understand the benefits of a high trust environment, many remain unfamiliar with psychological safety and why it may now be one of their most critical priorities.
As defined by Harvard’s Amy Edmondson psychological safety is “when people feel their workplace is an environment where they can speak up, offer ideas, and ask questions without fear of being punished or embarrassed” (Edmondson, 2019).
A New Leadership Imperative
Traditionally-minded leaders may dismiss the notion of psychological safety as just more of “that touchy-feely stuff;” however with worker disengagement levels hovering at around 87%, it’s clear that leaders now have a clear obligation to ensure that their people feel a strong measure of emotional security.
Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan (1994) helped emphasize this point when they asserted that
…leadership involves persuading other people to set aside for a period of time their individual concerns and to pursue a common goal that is important for the responsibilities and welfare of a group.
What it Takes to Put the Organization First
As these researchers see it, if a leader is going to be effective, they need to influence an environment in which people feel safe enough to put their own needs second in order to temporarily put the needs of the organization first.
From this perspective, it makes sense that people will only subvert their own self-interest if they can be consistently certain that it is safe to do so.
It’s Everyone’s Responsibility, But…
While it’s true that, in the end, psychological safety is everyone’s responsibility, leaders have the added responsibility of knowing when to let things play out and when to intervene.
For example, I once consulted with an organization in which a senior manager favored a rather abrasive style of supervision. The manager’s approach was disruptive to the point of causing distress for several of those under his charge.
However, despite these concerns, the organization’s CEO avoided intervening, believing instead that psychological safety was “everyone’s responsibility .”
While such an approach can indeed encourage self responsibility, it can also exact a heavy price. As Pavel Krapivin recently pointed out in Forbes, when psychological safety is not present “people simply do not trust you have their back” (2019).
Krapivin goes on to highlight a study from the University of Toronto that found that a lack of psychological safety “can significantly stunt the creativity of individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole.”
A Call for a “New Normal”
While I am certainly not calling for a return to the days of the of heroic “command and control” type leaders, in today’s organizations leaders do need to exhibit both empowering action and moral courage.
This means that, when necessary, we need leaders willing to take a stand and exercise their authority to ensure that all staff are conducting themselves in a manner that helps ensure the psychological safety of both subordinates and coworkers.
This needs to be the “new normal,” but not because it’s the “nice” or “virtuous” thing to do. Leaders need to model and defend psychological safety simply because it is what is needed if organizations are going to be effective and people are going feel good about their contribution to that process.
