Safety is Leadership Job #1
When you lead an organization, there are plenty of priorities competing for your time and energy. There are programs to lead, feedback to give, hiring and recruiting to move along, a vision to set, and team culture to cultivate. You can never do it all as well as you’d like. You try to balance and delegate, make room for failure, inspire then back off, and generally keep things moving along.
Sometimes tensions and anxiety is high. Sometimes it is particularly busy. Sometimes things are uncertain. Sometimes money or hours are particularly tight. Sometimes the world around you legitimizes hateful rhetoric in an alarming way. In these times, it can be easy to focus on tangible deliverables like closing new business and shipping new software versions. Adrenaline, fear, and maybe nervousness are in the air.
When times are hard, things are uncertain, anxiety is high, it is at these times when the most core attributes, the baseline assumptions of your organization and your workplace culture must be emphasized, re-emphasized, made stronger than ever. It is not the time to take them for granted and focus only on the normal business metrics to weather the storm.
The most necessary and important core attribute of your organization is safety.
I’m not talking about hardhats and air masks, though for some jobs those are important. The kind of workplace safety I’m talking about doesn’t often get mentioned out loud by leaders. A safe workplace is where people accept, respect and engage each other as equals, and where everyone can be certain their personhood is valid.
When you lead an organization, your first job is to create a safe workplace. In a safe workplace, people bring their whole selves to their work. In a safe workplace, people are supportive of each other’s success. In a safe workplace, differences are celebrated and leveraged, not hidden or disparaged. In a safe workplace, when anxiety is high, people pull together, lift each other up, and work to achieve their common goals.
Without safety, people will disengage. Some people won’t feel able to bring their whole selves to work, and you’ll lose out on their full contribution. People will avoid the constructive conflict that leads to the best ideas because destructive conflict is tolerated.
Bring everyone together and tell them that you are committed to maintaining a safe workplace, that you support everyone through this hard time, that by working together the organization will thrive. Tell them that you want to hear their ideas for improving workplace safety, connection, inclusion. Tell them that it is your job, and their job, to root the team culture in safety and mutual support. Make team and individual feelings of safety a core metric of organizational success. Start today.
