What if we told you that one simple concept would decrease employee turnover and destructive behaviors while simultaneously improving innovation, team effectiveness, employee engagement, and ultimately profit margins? That concept is psychological safety. While a simple concept, the cultural change required to make it possible is more challenging.

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological safety is the idea that every member of the team is allowed and encouraged to bring their authentic self to work every day without fear of ostracism. This idea creates the space for all voices to be heard and the best ideas to be shared and considered. Most importantly, it creates an environment where human connection, innovation, and courage can thrive.

Why Human Connection?

We are so biologically wired for connection that the Association for Psychological Science links both actual and perceived social isolation to an increased risk of premature death. As an extreme example, prisons across the world use solitary confinement as a severe form of punishment. Studies on the effects of forced isolation on prisoners have identified an increase in anxiety, a decrease in impulse control, hallucinations, psychosis, and a host of other physical and mental problems related to interruptions in human-to-human connection. While solitary confinement in a prison is a more intense–and thankfully more rare–isolation experience than a normal work environment might create, the physical and social isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic should give one pause. Considering that 50% or more of our lifetime waking hours are spent working, meaningful connections with coworkers that are personally and professionally rewarding are more than a “nice to have”; they are essential to our humanity.

Connection to Psychological Safety

Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston and author of “Daring Greatly,” says that vulnerability is the birthplace of joy, creativity, belonging, and love. What leader doesn’t want to have joyous, creative, and connected employees? What organization doesn’t want their employees to have the courage to innovate? Innovation, the act of creating something that never existed before, is necessary for an organization is to compete, grow, and thrive.

This begs the question: where does the courage to be vulnerable come from? Leadership expert Simon Sinek tells us that our courage is external and is derived from our relationships with others. In other words, we need to have close relationships and trust in others to feel the courage to be vulnerable, and we must be willing to be vulnerable if we are to be truly connected. The relationship between connectedness and courage is circular: vulnerability leads to meaningful human-to-human connection, which leads to increased courage that enables an increased level of vulnerability. The end result is a more productive and more innovative workforce.

If employees are more productive, leaders should see a resulting increase in retention and decrease in overall employee cost caused by high turnover. But what about those negative behaviors that not only affect an individual, but also the team? Whether we are talking about self-destructive behaviors like suicide or addiction, or other-destructive behaviors like bullying or harassment. Below are three common themes of destructive behaviors.

1. Destructive behaviors have a negative personal and professional impact on your team members. They also negatively impact the team’s performance and your bottom line,
2. They cannot survive in a transparent environment where people have meaningful relationships and genuine human-to-human connection.
3. These behaviors grow exponentially in an environment of secrecy and isolation.

Fostering an environment of trust and connection that provides psychological safety increases productivity and decreases the incidence of destructive behaviors. Employees are connected and the organization is more successful; in the words of Stephen Covey, it’s a “win-win.”

Deliberately building a culture of psychological safety simultaneously increases the positive traits we want–retention, connection, innovation, and courage–while also decreasing the frequency and impact of destructive behaviors that plague many organizations.

How Do We create Psychological Safety?

Amy Edmondson, Harvard professor and psychological safety expert, says three leadership behaviors promote psychological safety within an organization. First, leaders should framework evolutions as a series of learning problems rather than execution problems. Second, leaders should model vulnerability by acknowledging their own fallibility. Third, leaders should model curiosity by asking lots of questions. Let’s discuss each of the ways, one by one.

1.  Framing Work Evolutions as a Learning Problem

John Maxwell, leadership expert and author of “Failing Forward”, writes, “The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.” He goes on to say that “We overestimate the event and underestimate the process.” If a team presentation goes poorly, an honest post-mortem will almost certainly highlight shortcomings in the process of preparing for the event. In response to this, leaders can either seek to place blame, or they can endeavor to learn from the mistakes by identifying and correcting process shortcomings. Effective leaders take an iterative approach, and see the mistakes not as failures, but as opportunities to learn, grow, and improve their team’s performance.

2.  Demonstrating Vulnerability and Acknowledging Fallibility

The modern world is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, terms which are often represented by the acronym “VUCA.” As initiatives, opportunities, and transactions become more VUCA, leaders are less and less likely to be all-knowing and have the answer to every question. Being transparent about knowledge gaps takes vulnerability on the part of the leader; it also produces two desirable outcomes. First, your team recognizes your blind spots, and this gives them an awareness of where to be increasingly vigilant. Second, you will model for your team a behavior that increases transparency about their individual strengths and weaknesses. This transparency will allow process improvement to address shortfalls before they become problems.

3.  Model Curiosity

Hal Gergersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center and Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, says that the ability to ask the right questions is a distinguishing trait of the best executives. As a leader, the information you receive is often sanitized and packaged just for you. Gergersen suggests that leaders “get out” to see people and what they are working on as a means to validate information, seek out new ideas, and discover the insights that allow for better questions. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and Space-X, provides an exceptional role model of leadership curiosity. Prior to a recent test launch, he was quoted as saying, “With a test such as this, success is not measured by completion of specific objectives, but rather how much we can learn.”

As humans, we learn to crawl, walk, talk, read, ride a bicycle, and even parent through failure. As leaders, we owe it to our team members and our organizations to create an environment where it is safe to show up and be authentic, safe to be vulnerable, safe to connect, and safe to–in the words of John Maxwell–fail forward. Doing so enables our people to reach their highest potential, decreases employee turnover and the incidence of destructive behaviors, and optimizes the performance of our organizations.

Have you worked in an organization where there was psychological safety? Or where there wasn’t? What did you experience? Leave a comment below, send us an email, or find us on Twitter.

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