We Are a Good News Organisation
“We are a good news organisation”
“The senior leadership update is too negative – it needs to be reframed more positively”
“Instead of focusing on risks, let’s talk about what we will deliver by when”
You learn that if you question the approach, or highlight risks, you are labelled as negative or seen as someone who is not open to change. You try to raise concerns, but your voice is not heard. And some time later when there is a major outage, something you predicted would happen, you stay quiet. However, you feel resentful that you are the one who must work late to fix the problem you highlighted but weren’t listened to. The heat comes on your team who are blamed for ‘bad engineering’. There is no retrospective to reflect on learnings. Everyone is told this cannot happen again and reminded of the need to work harder, to move forward, faster. You learn that you either need to get on board or stay quiet. You realise it’s career suicide if you challenge. The next time you foresee an issue you don’t bother raising concerns – there’s no point.
Have you ever experienced any of these scenarios? If you were CEO or a senior leader, would you want to hear the real story, or the sugar-coated version? If your proposed change is met with silence or you hear no objections, do you take this as agreement?
There are many reasons for silence. One of them is a lack of psychological safety.
Psychological Safety
Amy Edmondson was surprised when her research found that the highest performing teams made more mistakes. It turned out that this was because they felt safe to admit their errors, whereas the lower performing teams felt the need to cover up their mistakes (Edmondson, 1999). Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as “A belief that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes”. In a psychologically-safe workplace, people know that their voice is both welcomed and expected.” If you are working in a psychologically safe work environment you know that you won’t be punished for speaking up, sharing bad news, asking for support or admitting an error. You may find psychological safety in parts of an organisation but it could be absent in other pockets. In low trust work environments, people play it safe, keep their heads down, and stay silent. It’s hard to have innovation when people are keeping their heads down, and sadly these are words I am hearing a lot from people in tech!
The Cost of Silence
The pace of change in the technology industry requires a focus on continuous improvement and innovation. If employees don’t feel safe to share their ideas, innovation will be lacking. Why hire talented people but not hear from some of them? There are many reasons why people may not share their ideas. There may be a few loud voices of ‘experts’ that make others feel their idea is not good enough. Sometimes there is a mantra of “Don’t come with problems; Come with solutions”. While this might sound like you are encouraging positivity, you lose out on the wisdom of the group. Many people ‘talk to think’ and when they feel safe to share their idea even if it is not fully formed, we benefit from many perspectives making this idea even better. Research on ‘Genius’ and ‘Growth’ organisations, found that when we see someone as a genius, putting them on a pedestal, they can be afraid to take risks or to innovate (Canning et al., 2020).
When there is workplace silence, there is a danger that people don’t highlight potential or actual errors. The phrase ‘accident waiting to happen’ comes to mind when you think of major outages which were not a surprise to many employees. If you consider the far-reaching impact of mistakes being made but covered up due to fear of consequences, the importance of high trust environments with psychological safety is clear. Financial systems have been brought down, reputations have been ruined, economies have crashed and in hospital settings people have died! Workplace silence robs us of small moments of learning. It prevents innovation and high performance as people are spending their energy managing impressions.
High Performing Teams
Google’s Project Aristotle (Duhigg, 2016) was a quest to understand the key ingredients of a high performing team. Through extensive research, including a large number of focus groups, they measured skills, knowledge, personality traits, and behaviours. The results were mixed until they began to look at the environment within which each team worked. The team identified the top five factors that determine a high performing team. The presence of psychological safety emerged as the top determinant of a high performing team. The other factors were dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact.
How Do You Build Psychological Safety?
Amy Edmondson recommends the following activities for creating psychological safety:
- Encouraging teams to bond through day-to-day tasks.
- Normalising opportunities to learn from mistakes.
- Ensuring that everyone is seen. In today’s uncertain tech environment, it is vital that we have input from everyone on the team.
- Seeking input with humility and openness. This involves acknowledging your own fallibility and modelling curiosity by asking a lot of questions and creating a necessity for voice.
To build psychological safety, as leaders, we need to be prepared to be vulnerable; to admit we don’t have all the answers, and to remain curious. It is impossible to sustain high performance without psychological safety and a foundation of trust.
A Foundation of Trust
Psychological safety and trust go hand in hand. The literature on trust (Colquitt, Scott and LePine, 2007) distinguishes trustworthiness (the ability, benevolence, and integrity of a trustee) and trust propensity (a dispositional willingness to rely on others) from trust (the intention to accept vulnerability to a trustee based on positive expectations of their actions). Patrick Lencioni’s pyramid in “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” shows that a foundation of trust is needed to get to (healthy) conflict, commitment, accountability and results (Lencioni, 2002).
The Impact of Trust
Research shows that trust positively impacts team performance and business results. Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report: 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, and 76% more engagement. “High-trust companies hold people accountable but without micromanaging them. They treat people like responsible adults” (Zak, 2017). In his book “The Speed of Trust” Stephen Covey talks shares the concept of a “trust tax” and a “trust bonus”. He says that “Change moves at the speed of trust”. When trust goes down, speed goes down and costs go up. When trust goes up, speed goes up and costs go down (Covey, 2006).The power of Trust is clear, but it is not about trusting blindly. Teams need a clear ‘Who’, ‘What’ and ‘How’. It is essential to set teams up for success by ensuring everyone believes in the ‘why’ and are aligned on an (inspiring) vision and strategy. It is also essential to staff the team well, provide the right tools and technology and be clear on expectations. Adam Grant in his podcast edition “How to build teams that don’t suck” speaks about the need for shared experience (there is a value in long lived teams) and shared responsibility (mission cohesion matters more than social cohesion). Designing for shared responsibility involves solving hard challenges together, creating a common identity, and everyone understanding their contribution to key goals.
When Trust is Missing
There is a Dutch proverb that says that trust arrives on foot but leaves on horseback. The presenting problem is usually not the problem. It is often necessary to look a few layers down to understand the real issue, rather than the symptoms you are observing. When tech leaders talk about challenges attracting, engaging and retaining top talent, lack of trust may be one of the key issues.
If you have hired great people, why not trust them to do the work you hired them for? With the right supports, skills and competencies, when trust is placed in people, they will generally perform to your expectations and higher! Self Determination Theory (Deci, Olafsen and Ryan, 2017) tells us there is a universal need for autonomy, competence and relatedness. Lack of autonomy shows up as micromanagement, signalling a lack of trust. The result? Lack of engagement, and costly turnover. Increasingly new hires are vetting your culture as much as you’re vetting their skills and experience. In today’s connected world, it is becoming easier for candidates to check if your organisation’s culture lives up to what you say about it. Does your walk match your talk?
Information Flow Reflects Organisation Culture
The book “Accelerate” (Forsgren, Humble, & Kim, 2018) references research into human factors in system safety and in particular accidents in technological domains that were highly complex and risky (Westrum, 2014). Westrum highlighted how decision making quality was impacted by information flow. He identified three types of information flow in organisations: Pathological (power-oriented), Bureaucratic (rule-oriented) and Generative (performance-oriented). In pathological organisations the messenger is ‘shot’ and failures lead to scapegoating. In bureaucratic organisations the messenger is neglected, and failure leads to justice. In generative organisations, messengers are trained, and failure leads to conscious inquiry. Westrum found that the definition of organisational culture predicted performance outcomes.
Creating Conditions Where Everyone Can Thrive
Can everyone on your team show up as their best selves and contribute to the success of the business and customers? In meetings are a couple of voices dominating the conversation? Are decisions based on the opinion of a HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) or based on data, user insights or collaborative input. Are employees spending their energy just ‘surviving’ in a culture where they don’t feel valued or recognised? Do you have a few ‘go to’ people in your team or do you ensure everyone gets opportunities to grow? Whose voice is not being heard? Opening multiple channels of communication can ensure different communication styles and preferences are catered for and we hear from everyone on the team. To build great products, we need diversity of thought. Our workforces need to represent the diversity of the customers we serve. We need to create the conditions where everyone can do their best work! It starts with trust!
References:
Baskin, K. (2023). Four steps to build the psychological safety that high-performing teams need today. Harvard Business School – Working Knowledge. Available at: https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/four-steps-to-build-the-psychological-safety-that-high-performing-teams-need-today
Canning, E.A., et al. (2020) ‘Cultures of Genius at Work: Organizational Mindsets Predict Cultural Norms, Trust, and Commitment’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(4), pp. 626–642. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219872473.
Colquitt, J.A., Scott, B.A. and LePine, J.A. (2007) ‘Trust, trustworthiness, and trust propensity: A meta-analytic test of their unique relationships with risk taking and job performance’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(4), pp. 909–927. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.4.909.
Covey, S.M.R. (2006) The speed of trust: The one thing that changes everything. New York: Free Press
Deci, E.L., Olafsen, A.H. and Ryan, R.M. (2017) ‘Self-Determination Theory in Work Organizations: The State of a Science’, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4(1), pp. 19–43. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032516-113108.
Duhigg, C. (2016) ‘What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team’, The New York Times, 25 February. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html.
Edmondson, A. (1999) ‘Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), pp. 350–383. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999.
Forsgren, N., Humble, J., & Kim, G. (2018). Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations.
Grant, A. (2023). How to build teams that don’t suck. WorkLife with Adam Grant [podcast]. 24 Oct. Available at: https://www.ted.com/podcasts/worklife
Lencioni, P., 2002. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Westrum, R. (2014) ‘The study of information flow: A personal journey’, Safety Science, 67, pp. 58–63. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2014.01.009.
Zak, P.J. (2017) ‘The neuroscience of trust: Management behaviors that foster employee engagement’, Harvard Business Review, January–February.
