Bailleur writes about organisations in the trauma trap where past injustices are not discussed and individuals, teams or organisations engage in unproductive behaviour to try to protect themselves from future pain. Whilst not mentioned explicitly, psychological safety is clearly missing from these organisations living deep in the organisational trauma trap. I only had a passing familiarity with the concept made famous by the Google Aristotle study and discussed by Amy Edmondson in “The Fearless Organization” so I went on a deep dive for more information.
To start, psychological safety shouldn’t really be a noun and you can’t get an external consultant to come in and make it for you. It’s an ongoing practice and commitment by all members of a team or organisation. You can’t just declare it to exist, you have to work at it for a while, both because you will need to earn trust and because other people will need to learn how to practise psychological safety whilst you are not in the room. I was reassured by the FAQs that Edmondson ends the book with including that you don’t have to be the person at the top of the organisation to bring this to your workplace. She also offered the challenge that she sometimes hears this pitiful lament that the people above me won’t implement this from extremely senior leaders, forgetting that whilst there may be people above you in the org chart there are also a lot of people below you and around you that you can directly influence.
So what exactly is psychological safety? It’s a commitment to valuing everyone’s voice, making space for that voice to be heard and a humility that a single person cannot know everything so embracing the wisdom spread across a team.
But how do we implement psychological safety? Edmondson provides a three-step process. Simple but definitely not easy. Firstly you “set the stage”, a leader presents a vision for the organisation or team and reframes error. In an hospital, the vision may be to provide safe care for all patients, so you talk about how care is complex and processes and systems either help or hinder with error free care (rather than the bad actions of individuals as the source of error). The vision may include spotting errors as a way to improve care rather than a symbol of poor care.
The second step is to “invite participation” where everyone in the organisation gets to have a voice, where leaders are curious enough to sit through the awkward silences, staff frustrations and any placating talk to get to a real understanding of the culture in the organisation. Creating spaces where voices can speak and be heard and valued.
The third step is to “respond productively” by first acknowledging and thanking people for speaking up. Then the comes the work of looking forward as an organisation and deciding how best to proceed, how to be helpful and supportive, how to encourage action towards the vision shared in the first stage. This stage may also involve sanctions if people have deliberately and knowingly broken the rules.
These stages need to be revisited frequently, all the time seeking to build trust through compassion, curiosity and a commitment to the psychological safety of the people in the organisation.
The spaces for truth to be shared, no matter how difficult, are how people can start to heal from the organisational trauma. Whilst the truth is unacknowledged, unheard and unspoken, people may feel the need to cling tightly to the hurt lest that “they get away with it”. Once an error, injustice or hurt is acknowledged then the option to move on to a new emotional relationship with the past incident is possible.
