I put it to you that although employees believe that they will have courage to speak up if they feel safe, the truth is that courage precedes safety. When we have the courage to give feedback, point out a risk, or call out the elephant in the room, that enhances the psychological safety in the group and encourages others to do the same thus creating a psychologically safe environment.
We are often scared to point things out or ask a question believing that we should know the answer (I must have missed that email – I’ll check when I get back to my desk) but this is often the question that everyone else in the room is scratching their head about too. The same can be said for giving a colleague some feedback, surely, they must have heard this before I am not putting my neck out to have it chopped off. However, there are remarkably few people who have the courage to speak up in workplaces (particularly to those in authority) and therefore, it is quite possible that what might appear to be obvious feedback has never been passed on to the individual.
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I was recently coaching an executive on his interview skills. He had a large team and had been recruiting employees for at least 25 years. Although he was really personable and made the candidate feel at ease, he had a tendency to answer the questions for the candidate, and clearly, had an unconscious bias towards certain candidates. "Surely, he has been trained," I thought. Surely, he knows the candidate is required to answer the questions. Surely, he knows the difference between a leading question and an open question? “Does he even know what behavioural interviewing is?” I found myself asking. Time to put on my superhero suit and take a few deep breaths. I started by asking some generalised questions, acknowledged that interviewing can be a difficult skill to learn and after doing it for 20 years, I still stuff up sometimes, pointed out the positives of what he was doing but also made it clear some areas where he could improve and was sure to approach it with a joking and light manner. It was scary, to be honest. He was in a position of authority and I was not convinced he would take the feedback well. I learnt that he had never had interview training. zhe had no idea that unconscious bias meant he was likely to favour someone with a similar educational background to him and did not realise he answered as well as asked the questions. He was eager to learn how to improve. Because I had the courage to address the situation, he felt safe enough to ask for help and now regularly confides in me when he is unsure of something in my area of expertise.
The work of Dr. Amy Edmondson, Author of “The Fearless Organisation”, an expert in psychological safety in organisations backs up my observations. Her model below, taken from: Amy Edmondson, The Competitive Imperative of Learning, shows that in order to step up to the learning zone, we need to feel psychologically safe. The executive was likely sitting in the anxiety zone when it came to interviews. He had never been trained but it had gone past the point where he could ask for help without appearing incompetent, so he was just going through the motions the best he knew how.
In Dr. Edmondson's TED Talk, she relays three things that we can do to create a psychologically safe environment:
1. Frame the work as a learning – if you are looking at a mistake that has been made, approach it as a lessons learned exercise
2. Acknowledge your own fallibility – it is easier for people to be vulnerable when they are reminded that everyone has faults
3. Model curiosity – ask a lot of questions; it encourages people to reveal more and hide less information
Does safety precede courage, or do we need to be courageous to create a psychologically safe environment where people feel comfortable to point out deficiencies or risks? It is a chicken and egg scenario? However, when we feel the need to be courageous, it is generally because we crave safety at the other side. If I have the courage to kill the snake, I will then be safe. If I have the courage to fight against evil, then, peace will be restored. If I have the courage to tell my colleague that they are performing an unsafe act, then, all in the vicinity will be safe. As is often the case, delivery is often the difference between success and failure, Dr. Edmondson’s tips might go someway to assisting those courageous conversations and improving the psychological safety in your team.
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