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I had a fascinating discussion with a session leader this week while interviewing him for a custom
business leadership simulation. The business leadership simulation is going to help build advanced leadership capabilities and one of the competencies it focuses on is creating an environment of psychological safety. My question was fairly straightforward; “Will you share with me a story or an experience where you or another leader did a great job of creating a culture of psychological safety.”
The leader paused for a moment and asked if I wouldn’t be offended if he slightly changed the wording of my question to include “equitable psychological safety.” I thought for a moment, because over the past few years while we have all been learning about psychological safety we’ve been taught that it is an important foundation for creating and maintaining equity and inclusion on teams and within organizations. But I think this leader was saying something different so I asked him if equitable psychology safety is different from psychology safety that supports equity and inclusion.
“Yes, and thanks for clarifying. What I am talking about is psychological safety which is fair for everyone. One of the challenges I have experienced as a member of a team is that while a leader may try really hard to establish a culture of psychological safety there as unchecked inherent biases that come into play. For example, I was recently given some pretty hard feedback that even though I’ve done a good job of creating an environment of psychological safety on our team, certain functions think that it’s not always equitable psychological safety. For example, they shared that it feels like the R&D team can fail fast and fail often, and every time they fail it is celebrated because we are encouraging innovation. But when a commercial Key Account Manager tried to be innovative and fire a key customer because all the account decision-makers only care about price and not quality, instead of being celebrated for thinking outside of the box and being innovative to drive more profitable business, she was made to feel like an idiot. I had to own that and come up with better ways of creating more equitable psychological safety.
It was an amazing conversation, and I was able to extract some best practices from this leader on how to create an environment of equitable psychological safety within a team or organization:
Lead by example – The leader I interviewed shared that when he recognized his unconscious bias toward R&D because he comes from R&D and his microaggressions toward Account Management, he took ownership of it and led by example.
Be 100% aligned with your inspirational value
Share goals and objectives openly – Make sure you are totally transparent with all team goals and that they are known by everyone so everyone can help each other and not wonder if one department is being favored over another.
Call out, share, and process unconscious biases – If you do identify or recognize unconscious biases, call them out and process them for everyone to understand and support so they don’t happen again. “For a time, we were celebrating the coming out of unconscious biases just like were celebrating failures in innovation.
Celebrate all successes and failures as part of group learning – And speaking of celebrating successes and failures, celebrate them all with equity and inclusion so that everyone feels there is openness and transparency in learning to grow together in a safe psychological environment.
