3 Ways To Build Psychological Safety For Innovation & Culture
By Helen Wada with Dan Strode
For the latest episode of Human Wise, I sat down with Dan Strode, Group Director of Culture and Strategy, Global Human Resources, for Santander Madrid. Dan is also author of The Culture Advantage, which explores how we can empower people to drive innovation.
Dan is truly the voice of reason when it comes to how we can build a strategy that doesn’t forget about the human side of business, emphasising how important it is to “merge your business strategy and your people agenda.”
This article will explore how Psychological Safety and personal responsibility are two key ingredients for fostering innovative human cultures at work.
A global study conducted by McKinsey during the pandemic found that 72 per cent of employees reported that “leadership behaviours rooted in psychological safety encouraged a positive team climate.”
Even more interestingly, it was also found that 74 per cent of leaders were “unaware of this evolving need in the workplace.”
The truth is when we are able to come to work and be our authentic selves, everyone is happier. Our team is learning and innovating, creating more value for customers – and ultimately more value for the business.
Creating Psychological Safety
Psychological safety has become a big topic in recent years – and for good reason. Put simply, the more employees know that their opinions matter, their contributions are valued, and there is room for disagreement without penalty, the more likely they are to be engaged, motivated and committed to the shared success of the business.
Dan and I explored three main ways leaders can encourage psychological safety in the workplace – let’s dig deeper into what they are.
How to create psychological safety
1 – Be willing to share your own truth and have courageous conversations
Leaders cannot expect to create a culture of psychological safety if they are ignoring the human side of business.
Dan: “It’s not you telling your team what flavour topping of pizza you had last night, but it is saying, ‘actually, my child is in hospital for this reason, I need to run to pick them up, I'm not available to be contacted at this time because I have this appointment’, whatever that is, just tell the truth and have courageous conversations without fear, and you have to be the role model.”
In March of 2022, Gartner, Inc. surveyed more than 230 HR leaders. The survey found that 90 per cent of respondents believe that “to succeed in today’s work environment, leaders must focus on the human aspects of leadership.”
Interestingly, a second study by Gartner, this time surveying nearly 3,400 employees, found that just 29 per cent reported that their leader was a “human leader.”
The outcome of these studies was three components that Gartner identified as essential to human leadership:
Authenticity
Empathy
Adaptability
Caitlin Duffy, director of research at Gartner, said, “Organisations that are able to develop more human leaders will find that these leaders’ teams have less turnover, higher engagement scores and better wellbeing. These qualities may have been important for good leadership in the past – today they are non-negotiable”.
2 – Do not rush to give advice
Dan: “You need to not rush to give advice. And that’s very difficult for many leaders because the old leadership model was always that an employee knocks on your door with a problem and you give them the answer and solution. But that doesn’t create safety for the employee. You’re a safety net rather than creating safety. The safety is when you don’t give advice and you let people go and find out what they need to do, or propose a solution themselves.”
Great leaders allow their employees to make mistakes – and, crucially, promote a culture of understanding that errors are an opportunity for learning, growth and development. This type of leader approaches failure as a chance to ask questions, and to put measures in place to ensure the same mistake isn’t repeated.
We’ve all heard the saying “failure is the only way to learn”, but further than this, failure creates ownership, promotes accountability, and leads to innovation.
3 – Set clear expectations and boundaries
Dan: “The final thing… that I find really, really important when building psychological safety is that leaders should make very clear their expectations up front… You have the ability to tell your team it’s OK to fail, it’s OK to take risks, it’s OK to try new things, as long as you follow these conditions… If you set rules and conditions that people can work to, they start to feel safe.”
Clear expectations and boundaries are important not only in increasing employee engagement and trust between teams and their leaders, but in reducing uncertainty. Stress is often created or emphasised by uncertainty – what is expected of me? How do my actions affect the business? What happens if I make a mistake?
Employees who know what their leaders expect of them, and the boundaries within which they work, are likely to feel connected, purpose-driven and inspired to take initiative – because they feel safe.
Make room for innovation
There are certainly things that businesses can do in order to foster innovation. Take for example Google with their ‘20-percent time’ rule, about which founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote, “We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20 per cent of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. This empowers them to be more creative and innovative. Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner.”
In fact, in a 2007 ad campaign, Google claimed that Gmail – arguably its most popular offering – was created during this ‘20-percent time’. Giving employees room to be human – that is, to be creative and collaborate – is how innovation, agility, and psychological safety is built into a company.
(Dan also talks about this in his brilliant book The Culture Advantage, along with other stories of how innovation has been used to drive a thriving culture at work).
The Importance of Personal Responsibility
Today more so than at any other time in history, we have opportunity at our fingertips: some of us may even have seven or eight different careers in our lives. The modern world is changing – there is no right or wrong when it comes to stages of life and where you are in your career. The choice is personal.
The point is, we need to take a much more individual approach to culture – this cannot rest solely on the shoulders of the business.
However, we must all take individual responsibility for where we find ourselves. One person can make a big difference, even if pushing against a traditional system – but we must recognise that change doesn’t happen overnight. A great example of this is Obama’s “Fired Up And Ready To Go!” speech which Dan recommends we view, to show just how much difference one person can make.
Own being more human at work
One final reflection from Dan, which summed up our conversation perfectly, was what he said about the role of authenticity in creating psychological safety:
Dan: “I truly, truly believe that the world is human. Nobody sets out to do a bad job. Nobody sets out to create stress. And actually, if everybody owns it in a way that's authentic to themselves, maybe we can work towards a more human working world.