What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety creates a space where we are included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo – all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalised, or punished in some way.
Stage 1: Inclusion Safety
Inclusion safety satisfies the basic human need to connect and belong. Inclusion safety allows us to gain membership within a social unit and interact with its members without fear of rejection, embarrassment, or punishment, boosting confidence, resilience, and independence.
Stage 2: Learner Safety
Learner safety satisfies the basic human need to learn and grow. It enables us to feel safe as we engage in all aspects of the learning process—asking questions, giving and receiving feedback, experimenting, and when we make mistakes.
Stage 3: Contributor Safety
Contributor safety satisfies the basic human need to contribute and make a difference. We lean into what we’re doing with energy and enthusiasm. We have a natural desire to apply what we’ve learned to make a meaningful contribution.
Stage 4: Challenger Safety
Challenger safety satisfies the basic human need to make things better. It’s the support and confidence we need to ask questions such as, “Why do we do it this way?” “What if we tried this?” or “May I suggest a better way?” It allows us to feel safe to challenge the status quo without retaliation or the risk of damaging our personal standing or reputation.
https://www.leaderfactor.com/4-stages-of-psychological-safety
So how did we reach challenger safety as a team in Nurture Health and Care Ltd and in The Maslow Foundation.
Shaney Ann and I will share our experiences of creating challenger safety in a new business.
We recognise we are small teams however we still practiced the skills to role model psychological safety.
We have become used to teams that are resistant to change and leaders who are frustrated or through fear, shut down and create distrust and their teams who feel over-whelmed and ‘stuck’ unable to find new solutions.
What we have discovered is that our own teams are flexible and excited to try new ideas and experiment.
Our values in the two organisations have psychological safety at their heart, directly in Nurture Health and Care Ltd, with Belonging, Creativity and Ambition. The Maslow Foundation built on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, recognising that belonging and safety are crucial which creates self esteem and Hope, Joy and Meaning.
Our meetings start with what our joyful moments and what we are proud of and although initially was an alien experience, learning about each other outside work and appreciating and celebrating our experiences enables us to understand each other and gave us the opportunity to support each other when things were hard in the outside world.
We have held our meetings in great locations, included our families and have organised opportunities to have fun together.
How do you create inclusion safety?
We believe passionately that every person has value, has strengths which we can champion and as facilitators in meetings, ensure that those who may feel an outsider are enabled to have their voices elevated. Those who are shy, are enabled to sharing their opinion. Those of us who have opinions, stand back and listen.
We practice embracing differences of opinion, differences of style and sharing personal information about ourselves which started with our profiles – and I was proud to be a warrior!
Everyone was welcome – there are no silly questions and no ego.
Inclusion safety is created and sustained through proven acceptance and respect to the group. This reinforced why onboarding is critical when we recruit and this includes an introduction to your group and as leaders we should demonstrate how important you are to that group.
How do you create learner safety?
As some-one who loves learning and is constantly exploring the world, I have taken on board philosophy, technology and really seen the value of proactively role modelled note taking, sharing what I learn and most importantly identifying when I was wrong and when I felt I had changed my mind.
I do need however to remind myself that others experience of learning is often traumatic with failure being showcased and ridiculed and challenged their self esteem.
Our teams bravely collaborate and demonstrate exciting moments of discovery. Our teams always exceed our expectation and imagination.
We need to practice being quiet and allowing others to express their own ideas, disagree and not only champion our own ideas which often do not have the quality of our collective wisdom.
We showcase our wrong assumptions and errors so we can feel confident in the reactions of others when things do not go as planned.
The joy we experience by watching others thrive beats any other investment that we have made. Realising how every person brings greatness to our team is inspiring.
How do you create contributor safety?
Within our small teams, we moved away from job descriptions and accountability to what things have we got to do this week and who is best at what.
We know that it is our differences that enable great ideas to be formed and that the totality of tasks were completed by those who enjoyed them most. Paul Jennings (Operations Director -Nurture Health and Care Ltd) became our telephone agitator chasing placements, James Westwood (CEO – The Maslow Foundation) enabled us to bring together the diverse voices of a team and ensure we all pull together in the same direction.
We ensure everyone has a role and aligned this to their strengths and talents and we mucked in and celebrated our achievements.
In a nurturing environment that offers respect and permission, we entered the stage of contributor safety, which invites us to participate as an active member of the team. Contributor safety is an invitation and an expectation to perform work in an assigned role with appropriate boundaries. Competency and mastery is another topic on which we have blogged.
How do you create challenger safety?
The final stage of psychological safety allows you to challenge the status quo without retribution, reprisal, or the risk of damaging your personal standing or reputation. It gives you the confidence to speak truth to power when you think something needs to change and it’s time to say so. Armed with challenger safety, individuals overcome the pressure to conform and can enlist themselves in our improvement processes.
If you can banish fear and create a nurturing environment that allows people to learn and grow, they will perform beyond your expectations and theirs. Our mission is to ensure we have clear activities and goals and a shared purpose to enable us to deliver results.
I feel as leaders we can be flexible in our approaches and offer many different styles of leadership however for us the presence of fear in our teams, is a failure of our leadership.
At all our meetings, we are able to explore what went wrong alongside what went well safely and consider why this was and learn. This creates a feeling of positivity and moving forward.
Then we ran a pivot or push day and we challenged all over the place!!!!
What prevents human flourishing?
In blogs I have discussed power, desire for individual merit or organisational greed, and the need to work with collective wisdom to enable us to navigate the complex unpredictable environments in which we work. It is connection, not targets that allow us to flourish.
Creating silos of activity is not our normal response to situations. Belonging and connection are far more valuable however our own insecurities and need to feel good enough or the power dynamics leads to exclusion. When we form communities, this leads to differences and loyalty to the group. In our society, this leads to different niches, teams, organisations and systems and comparison becomes embedded, empathy is ignored and fear or envy emerge. Conflicts then start and the impulse to win, compete and foster malice appear.
‘Ironically, in our digital age, we connect and feel alone, compare and feel inadequate’.
Understanding how we are all amazing and that we all belong to the same community overcomes this desire for separation.
Looking at the stagnation of statutory bodies and watching commercial organisations that fail, they frequently cannot change and respond to new sets of circumstances. They are entrenched in habits, custom and practice and create infrastructure which continues the status quo.
The NHS momentarily in COVID gave permission to transform, pivot and change regardless of results but this quickly reverted to blame and sanction.
The process of challenging the status quo should experience conflict, disagreement, and sometimes chaos. When there is punishment and intellectual debate turns into interpersonal conflict, when fear becomes a motivator, the process collapses and people go silent.
How to create Psychological Safety in your team
- Start with yourself, admit that you are human and make mistakes and that we do not have all the answers.
- Be grateful for things the team do for you and others.
- Talk about non work-related matters with your team members and recognise its value.
- Talk about our feelings, we have trapped ourselves into third party communicators divorced from our emotions, but understanding our thoughts AND feelings is important to enable people to reach their potential.
- Make psychological safety an explicit priority, facilitating people to speak up, practicing celebration of things going wrong so we can manage experimentation and ‘reasonable’ risk taking and creating space for new ideas, especially out of the box thinking.
- This builds trust and underpins psychological safety.
