Psychological safety: This is not a drill
Nope, not a fire drill. You don't need to go outside. But if you want high performance, then this is a must.
Do you think your team feels safe in their role?
Most common answer - Of course they do!
Most honest answer - They should/I think they do
Most realistic answer - probably not
Even with some reassuring words, team members often feel insecure in their jobs. This can develop from a variety of reasons but if you want your team to excel in their performance, then you must know the answer to how they feel.
Quick litmus test
How easy it is for your team to admit failures or speak their mind without fear?
Do you have a high churn rate?
Is your team highly engaged in meetings and/or offering opinions/questions?
Hard questions to honestly answer but they will give you a good insight into how safe your team members are feeling. Having a culture where team members feel easily able to do the above points has been proven to deliver high growth. At least Google thinks so. They did a two-year study on successful teams and it showed that psychological safety was the key driver to having high performance.
Unfortunately, it is often the managers themselves that are standing in the way of achieving high performance. And yes, there are many different reasons as to why team members won't feel safe or secure, but one of the most common/biggest is the culture around failing.
First of all, you need to realise that failing isn't bad. Failing forward is one of the most successful growth strategies you can have in marketing. And yet, most managers struggle with creating an environment that makes their team comfortable in failing.
This is usually down to two reasons:
1) they don't know how their team feels (yikes!) or
2) they struggle with balancing an environment that is not strict on mistakes for fear of creating an anything-goes attitude.
Fortunately, we can easily address those roadblocks. Before we get there let's just quickly address the hopefully non-existent elephant in the room, encouraging failing. If you haven't read my post on failing forward, then please quickly do so. But for those who don't want to leave just yet, a quick summary.
False belief
A strict culture around failing makes sure people deliver their best work.
Actuality
Studies have shown that organizations where team members feel safe to admit failures experience high performance and creativity through learning.
Alright, and we're back. Now that we agree that you need an open culture around failing, why don't most companies have this? Well, from an early stage we associate failure with fault and unfortunately create an environment around blaming or more commonly known as the blame game. Oddly enough, the failure and the fault do not always land on the same person. To help illustrate this point, have a look at the spectrum of failures taken from the Harvard Business Review.
Take the following example: A person in your team does not upload a report by the agreed time.
Now, if they did this on purpose, (deviance) and actively decided not to create or upload the report, then yes, the blame sits firmly with them. However, what if the reason they did not do it was due to them not having enough time from having too much work on their plate? Would the fault not be on the manager for either not being aware of the team's workload or incorrectly assigning tasks? Or if we take it a step further, what if the team member did not know how to do it? or the process was unclear? The failure still occurs at the same point, but does the fault? As you can see from a few of the examples in the spectrum, the fault for many of the failures does not firmly land on the employee themselves.
This highlights one of the main reasons that companies don't have a psychologically safe environment but also one of the main skills needed to create one. Multi-order thinking. As a manager you must move beyond the first-order reason, i.e. the process wasn't followed, to understand what the second and third-order reasons could be, i.e. not enough time, not enough skill etc. Not only will this make the team more comfortable but you will also cure the disease behind some of the failures that have been occurring instead of just fixing the symptoms.
"We already have a system in place to detect failures"
That's great if you do but if it's not backed by an environment where people feel comfortable admitting and discussing these failures, then it's not worth the email it was sent on.
Back In 2006 Alan Mulhany arrived at Ford from Boeing and introduced a new system for detecting failures. He asked the managers to colour code their reports, green for good, yellow for attention and red for problems. At his first meeting, all the managers handed in green reports. Not a single one with red or yellow. This from a company that had just lost a few billion dollars in the previous year.
No matter the system or company, people need to feel comfortable.
Alright, I'm convinced...how do I do this?
The most important aspect is that your team must trust you. This doesn't come from words but actions. Show them that you will stand behind what you said and if need be protect them.
Start by promoting experiments at the right time and place. Don't push the team to use most of the budget and resources on a new idea at a critical time. Give them the opportunity where if it doesn't work, it is not a big deal. Dive into why it didn't work and put the emphasis on trying something new on what you learnt from the last test. This shifts the priority from achieving the result to learning. The process becomes more important than the result which ironically creates better results in the future.
Of course, there will be failures outside of these tests and this is where your role as a manager truly takes on the task. Don’t discuss these failures in public. Address them in private and remember dive deeper into why the failure occurred and then implement the same structure you have for the experiments. Focus on the what and why of the failure, not the who, and make sure everyone learns from it. The key point here is that you are focusing on learning from the failure and not the who of the failure.
These actions are not easy and the bigger the organisation the harder it will be to implement but remember, failures are inevitable. It's just a question of if you have a team operating at their highest potential and learning from their mistakes, or one that plays the blame game.