Psychological Safety
/This phrase has become a bit of a brand now for the modern Corporate. It was first coined by William A Kahn in 1990 and he defined it as “being able to show and employ oneself without fear of negative consequences of self image, status or career.”
In the future I believe a proven lack of psychological safety may be grounds for lawsuits, especially when CTSD gets recognised as a specific and separate anxiety disorder.
Do I now have your attention?
Leaders talk psychological safety but I’ve not really seen hard evidence that they mean it. It’s not focussed on, rewarded, measured or even actually wanted. I’ve dug into this question with many senior leaders and underneath the fine and noble words is a fear that safety means the risk of complacency. The harsh reality is that leaders don’t really want their people to feel safe. Under pressure, the value of positive learning that only comes when people feel safe is not honoured or promoted because it is fundamentally not accepted as valuable. And so negative learning is the name of the game. Rather than learning TO lessons, employees learn NOT to lessons.
So much of what employees do is driven because they are fearful, desperately trying to ensure that a feared outcome is avoided. So much of what managers do unconsciously creates or exacerbates fear in others. Fear of failure; fear of rejection. Fear of being poorly rated by superiors; fear of being poorly rated by peers; fear of being poorly rated by direct reports – trapped in a Cat’s Cradle of anxiety. Fear infects and erodes our core beliefs.
Safety can create complacency, but only in a vacuum. People who feel safe may well take the opportunity to rest, and that’s surely legitimate at times, but it’s the vacuum of poor leadership, facilitation and coaching that we have to avoid.
Leaders talk about psychological safety, and promote employee wellbeing in their rhetoric, but then betray the opposite in their focus and actions, and mostly in their inactions. This creates a disturbing dissonance. Here’s a simple example - with the time difference between the US and Europe, many Video Conferences have to be done in the evening by employees in Europe. It is quite usual therefore for them to be working at home in their evenings. This cannot be described as a genuine choice, since if they did not make themselves available, they simply could not stay in their roles. Their US bosses will of course say that their direct reports have absolute autonomy to work flexible hours but “I don’t want my people to feel like they have to…………” is not the same as “I don’t want people to……..” It’s the same convenient language that allows people to appear to be apologising when they are not – the thoroughly slippery “I’m really sorry you feel that way” method. The former is an abdication that conveniently allows fear to rule the day. The latter would be a stronger leadership statement that could be genuinely promoted for cultural wellbeing - it just wouldn’t be true.
The truth is we do want people to……the argument being of course that employees are superbly looked after and therefore much is demanded of them, and anyway no one is ever sanctioned for prioritising family, well not overtly anyway. The threats that employees perceive may indeed be spectres, but that does not stop those spectral threats from driving unhealthy behaviours. Leaders who hide behind their exhortations are actually negligent in their duty of care.
Large firms these days may well be spending £’000s per year per employee on ‘wellbeing’ and I for one won’t argue against that in itself. But it’s the relativity – I ask these companies how much they are investing per annum per employee on the most vital aspect of wellbeing: having a decent human being as a manager. I think some firms take the easy way out – the easy way is to provide the free food. The hard way is to consistently invest in, monitor and ensure employee psychological safety in the workplace, and the biggest single factor in this is the line manager. When modern businesses invest an equal amount per head in ensuring employees have a decent line manager, as they do in providing hygiene benefits, I’ll buy that they mean it when they say ‘employee wellbeing is an absolute priority’.
Excerpted from “Corporate Emotional Intelligence - Being Human in a Corporate World” - by Gareth Chick
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