Leadership Wisdom of the Week #31

“If there’s no bad news, remind yourself: It’s not that it’s not there. It’s that you’re not hearing about it.”

– Amy Edmondson, 2023

Many parents know that the moments when their toddlers are quiet are the most dangerous ones. When the continuous questions and commentary stop, they may be doing something they are not 100% certain about – and going ahead with it quietly in order not to alert the grown-ups.

There may be similar forces at work in organisations. How do you genuinely know that your people are knowledgeable, engaged and actively taking the right things forward? How do you know that they are not struggling with uncertainties, missing skills or mistakes they have made?

Amy Edmondson – best known for her research on psychological safety – argues that you actually cannot know unless you actively build a culture of psychological safety. Psychological safety refers to a working environment where people feel able to take interpersonal risks: admitting mistakes, asking for help, disagreeing with colleagues and sharing new ideas.

There is a great difference in most organisations between the number of mistakes made and the number of mistakes reported and discussed so that they can be learned from, rather than repeated or allowed to develop into more serious problems. In a psychologically safe environment, where you actively create opportunities for sharing and learning together, people learn to take responsibility for improving the way they work together.

As leaders, we may sometimes take silence as a reassuring sign. No complaints, no conflicts, no mistakes being reported – everything seems to be going well. But perhaps silence is something we should occasionally become curious about rather than satisfied with. Psychological safety is not built overnight. It develops over time as we create opportunities for people with different personalities and communication styles to contribute, speak up and learn together.

There will always be things that go wrong or do not go as expected. A psychologically safe environment gives us space to share these experiences with colleagues and managers, talk through our feelings and concerns, and avoid being left alone with them. This is not only about helping people feel better at work. Research consistently links psychological safety with learning, engagement and performance.

(https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/four-steps-to-build-the-psychological-safety-that-high-performing-teams-need-today)