Psychological Safety: It’s About Good Leadership

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Psychological safety, no matter how you spin it, boils down to basic good leadership. And good leadership is best measured by one question: Do people feel safe to bring you the bad news?

There’s always bad news. People make mistakes. Expectations aren’t met. Frustrations arise.

Don’t gauge the health of your leadership by the amount of bad news, but by how people deal with it. If you aren’t hearing bad news maybe people don’t feel safe to tell you the truth. You can’t simply have an “open door policy” and expect that people will bound through that door. You have to get out of your office, engage, be intentional about listening to concerns, genuinely care about your people, value their input, and, above all, be honest about mistakes you make. You have to model bringing bad news responsibly – without blaming or criticizing.

Good leaders who make it safe to bring the bad news unlock potential, foster trust, drive innovation, and improve team performance.

What are you doing to make it safe for people to bring you the bad news?

As leaders, is there value in sharing our mistakes, or is it okay to keep some things private?

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Sharing mistakes can foster a culture of learning, trust, and psychological safety within an organization. When leaders openly discuss their errors, it encourages team members to take risks, be innovative, and learn from failures without fear of punishment. Sharing mistakes demonstrates confidence, promotes humility, fosters collaboration, and improves performance through better problem-solving and faster resolution of issues. Sharing mistakes is critical to create a climate of collaboration and discovery.

It’s not appropriate to share mistakes in order to get unnecessary sympathy or to share confidential information. Sharing mistakes has to serve the team. It won’t make your team stronger by confessing you made a bad personal financial investment or you treated your spouse poorly before you came to work.

How do you discern between what needs sharing in the workplace and what is better kept private?

The relationship between accountability and grace – when to hold the line and when to let it go

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When our daughter was a teenager she asked to change her curfew for a special event. We wrestled with the decision as she took the time to build her case. We eventually changed the curfew, and to this day I don’t know if it was the right decision. Often there is no “right” decision, but going through the struggle of the decision gave our daughter a clear message -that we care.

If you are blindly pleasing people or thoughtlessly and continuously coming down on people, you likely aren’t building a high trust culture. Sometimes you simply don’t know when to hold the line and when to let it go. But if you are invested in the struggle, people will know you care and will lean into trusting you – and you will ultimately get the desired results from your people.

A Token Of Appreciation

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After my webinar on Psychological Safety this past week, I had a great conversation with Marg, my VP of Client Care. We reminisced about when she was the Senior Manager of Learning and Development at Lilydale and I consulted on some projects there. Lilydale was established over 75 years ago as an Alberta Farmers’ cooperative and today is a proud member of the Sofina Foods family. It always promised to provide Canadians with great tasting and high-quality Canadian poultry products as it built an incredible culture with some incredible leaders.

One of the great tools they used for building and reinforcing their culture was a Token of Appreciation. You were encouraged to give this token to anyone you sincerely appreciated. It was a coin, along with a little poem, to remind them not to take each other for granted and to continue strengthening the muscle of expressing gratitude.

I’ve learned that this kind of tool has to be built on sincere, honest, and caring relationships – which were evident at Lilydale. No tool can compensate for failure to connect.

Trust may not be what you think it is.

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Like so many words, trust is both over-rated and misunderstood. I often hear, “I’m not going to engage here because there’s no trust,” or “We have to work on getting trust before we can achieve results.”

One thing I know about trust is that it is not a prerequisite. Trust, like confidence, isn’t something you need before you do something. Instead, do something right and trust will follow. If you want trust before you take a risk, there’s no risk. There’s no action. And there’ll be no trust.

Instead of waiting for, or worrying about, trust, get to work on a worthwhile project and trust will emerge from your actions. Be intentional about building cohesiveness through clear expectations, empathic communication and the safety to speak up, and trust will be your reward.

In short, the feeling of trusting someone is built on right actions. You don’t feel your way into right action. You act your way into right feelings.

And getting trust leads to more trust. Trust begets trust.

There are people who do not feel safe at work. They don’t feel safe to speak honestly, offer ideas, or be themselves.

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There are people who do not feel safe at work. They don’t feel safe to speak honestly, offer ideas, or be themselves.

They fear that sharing concerns and mistakes will mean embarrassment or retribution; that if they are honest, they will be humiliated, ignored, or blamed. They fear asking questions when they are unsure of something. They sit on their hands, stay within the lines, underperform and become dissatisfied.

When people are afraid, they stay dangerously silent, they disengage, they lie, and they leave if they can. Or worst of all, they quit and stay.

Far too many managers – knowingly and unknowingly – believe that fear motivates. Too many managers are unaware of how unacknowledged stress and anxiety breeds fear. Brain science has demonstrated that fear inhibits learning, productivity, engagement, innovation, and fulfillment.

How can we, as leaders, create safe workplaces?