Psychological Safety for Organizational Change

Guess who’s back?!!

I haven’t been consistently writing for months now and I’m disappointed in myself for that. Ironically, the massive changes that my own organization is going through are largely to blame.

I can’t say I’ll be consistently writing again but I wanted to share with all of you my notes from a recent conference I attended.

I attended the World Business Forum 2024 in New York. Each speaker was incredible and as I relisten to the talks and consolidate my notes, I expect several valuable posts to reach your inbox.

In today’s post, I want to share some takeaways from Amy Edmonson’s talk on Organizational Change. I hope you enjoy!

First off, why do we need to care about psychological safety?

The main point of her entire talk was that people need psychological safety in order to be willing to change. She gives two main reasons for this:

1. People have agency. We each get to choose our behavior. Sound familiar?
2. People need freedom from fear to be able to choose change behavior.

Further, lots of research, to include Google’s quest to build the perfect team, confirms that psychological safety is a direct predictor of persistent performance differences across teams. This is largely because “success in an uncertain world depends on high quality bets. High quality bets depend on high quality conversation. High quality conversations don’t just happen by accident - they must be led.”

To emphasize the part of the leader in this, Edmonson says there are two vital leadership/management jobs:

1. To create psychological safety for candor (or, she adds, you will miss stuff!)
2. To inspire and clarify what it looks like to do a good job.

As I listened to this, I thought about how we develop strategy. Isn’t strategy all about determining where to place your bets and how to increase the chance that they are high-quality?

Obviously, the need for psychological safety is evident in all parts related to the success of our organization. Similar to trust, it is so hard to cultivate and so delicate to maintain.

Well, what exactly IS psychological safety?

In her book, the fearless organization, Edmonson defines psychological safety as a belief that the context permits interpersonal risks - that speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes will be welcomed and valued.

It’s also helpful to acknowledge what psychological safety is NOT:

• being nice (which is not the same as being kind)
• a guarantee that all of your ideas will prevail
• a license to whine
• freedom from conflict
• permission to slack off

Definitely commit that list to memory!

Ok cool but I'm already exceptionally busy at work and creating psychological safety is time consuming and hard. Are there times when I should prioritize it over others?

Why, yes. I’m glad you asked. Edmonson gives us a great rubric for determining when psychological safety (or the lack thereof) will have an outsized impact on your ability to achieve results.

You can deprioritize psychological safety under under the following conditions:

• Uncertainty is low - the tasks that need to be accomplished are very well prescribed and it’s really clear cut what has to be done to get the results (no judgment, no problem solving.)
• Interdependence is low - employees don’t need to coordinate, collaborate or team up with others to get things done.
• Subjectivity is low - it is immediately and objectively easy to determine how good a job someone did on their work.

But let’s be honest, how much work really falls into those categories these days? Certainly not anything interesting, challenging or important.

Let’s move on…

Instead, you MUST prioritize creating an environment where the team feels psychologically safe if your work is categorized by subjectivity, uncertainty or interdependence.

Ok thanks, now what?

Well now I'm going to issue you two challenges as a leader. 😄

Challenge #1

Take stock of the work that you and your team are responsible for, no matter how minor. Ask yourself to what degree do you need to have psychological safety on your team.

If you conclude that it needs to be prioritized, you MUST spend the time to assess its current level and raise it. I’ll leave it at that because 95% of all teams out there likely need to raise the level of psychological safety on their teams.

I see a post about HOW to do this in the future 🙂

Challenge #2

Before I share the challenge, I’ll share three things that Edmonson indicated make it extra challenging to assess and cultivate psychological safety on a team where you are the boss. In this case, think formal manager versus general leader. LOTS of research shows the following:

1. People find it very hard to disagree with the person in charge.
2. We tend to like people better when they agree with us. (How would we have ever learned this without research he he?)
3. We actually subconsciously think people are smarter when they agree with us. (This is a sad fact that I’m sure is true.)

Given those three insights, the challenge is to reflect on the following question:

As a leader, how can you use this knowledge to take intentional actions to mitigate the chance that these human realities degrade the level of psychological safety on your team?

Colin Powell was a master at this. I’ll leave you with a quote from him.