Typos, Psychological Safety, and Innovation
“I found a few typos in a style guide…
… but I think our VP in charge of it already doesn’t like me, so I don’t want to tell them — well, I do want to tell them, but I’m afraid to.”
This quote, paraphrased from what a friend of mine working at a startup shared with me earlier this week, exemplifies a culture of low psychological safety. Read on to learn about what psychological safety is, how you can build it in your team, and why fostering it is crucial for innovation.
If your culture has people openly sharing fear about something as minor as typos, what does that say about their willingness to speak up about more important issues?
These fears lead to profound cultural issues that contribute to everything from delays in product launches, covering up harassment, keeping silent on goals & hopes for development, and ultimately employees switching roles or companies as soon as possible.
What is psychological safety & why does it matter?
According to Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmonson, who pioneered the concept, psychological safety is:
“a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”
When you have ‘high psychological safety’ — you get everything from higher reliability and better overall performance, to safer workplace environments as employees are empowered to voice risks or issues, lower churn as employees can share their concerns and feel heard, and overall greater employee happiness.
But when you have a team with low psychological safety , the basic building blocks of any business start to crumble: communication becomes limited and secretive as people build alliances and assess who they can and can’t trust. People fear that their colleges will hold mistakes against them; it’s hard to ask for help or surface issues, and challenging the status quo is avoided out of fear of failure and being seen as weak.
And while low psychological safety weakens a business’s foundation — it destroys your innovation pipeline.
Innovation & Psychological Safety
Innovation thrives when people feel free to fail. When people feel free to fail, they will share new insights and ideas and volunteer to tackle tricky problems. They embrace “Yes, and,” instead of “No, but.” Innovation requires teams to have a sense of psychological safety to be effective — otherwise, they won’t push any boundaries because the team is fundamentally afraid to do so.
And while the absence of psychological safety may not show up as explicitly as “…I don’t want to tell them — well, I do want to tell them, but I’m afraid to,” it shows up in daily moments of self-censorship and secret concerns that someone will think less of you for what you’re about to say.
And while psychological safety is especially important for startups, who can’t rely on established norms or practices to keep the ship running even when psychological safety in some teams is low, and who may be looking to drive an innovative idea to disrupt an industry — it’s vital in teams in established businesses too.
Team-based psychological safety is a consistent predictor of performance — as famously shown in Google’s “Quest to Build the Perfect Team.” Within these teams, it’s the leader’s role to help foster and demonstrate an environment is safe — and that they’ll have your back for speaking up. Welcome and thank the messenger — don’t shoot them.
So what can you do to increase psychological safety in your team?
Edmonson recommends three things leaders can do to foster a sense of psychological safety:
1. Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.
2. Acknowledge your own fallibility.
3. Model curiosity and ask lots of questions.
Watch Edmonson’s TedX talk for a full discussion of the subject & how to build it out in your workspace longer term.
The Center for Creative Leadership also suggests additional ways both leaders and employees can help nurture psychological safety.
And while my friend ultimately told their VP, that says more about their willingness to take risks than the safety in their environment. Think about your team; would you have shared errors that you noticed in a similar situation?
No matter your role in your team, how you act on a regular basis can help build up or undermine the psychological safety among the group.
