Can psychological safety be created, or does it only emerge in the right environment under the right conditions?

A resultant phenomenon is one that we can replicate relatively easily. If you assemble the parts of a car properly, the result is an automobile that functions as designed every single time. Could you assemble a team of tools, people, and materials, and ensure that psychological safety develops every time?

No.

There is no formula for creating psychological safety. It emerges within a team when the conditions are right. It’s a leader’s job to create the conditions that allow psychological safety to emerge. I’ve spent a good deal of this year studying psychological safety and seeking ways to help leaders increase their chances of creating the conditions necessary for psychological safety to emerge.

Unfortunately, in behavioral science, we will never be exact because we’re dealing with human beings. And we have no idea why certain human beings do the things they do. Given such unpredictability, you cannot guarantee psychological safety, but you can increase the likelihood that it emerges.

Still, I’ve identified six principles that have helped leaders in the past generate results, motivate their people, and foster a sense of psychological safety. You might be able to use one or all of them to help you create better conditions for your employees!

The first thing you have to do is give trust freely from the start.

When it came time to appoint yet another General to lead the Union Army in 1864, Abraham Lincoln turned to General Grant. Lincoln wasn’t a war strategist, he wasn’t a general, and he didn’t want to be intimately involved in the details of troop movements. He wanted a leader he could trust to execute on his vision. In Grant’s memoirs, he wrote:

“All he [Lincoln] wanted or had ever wanted was someone who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all of the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance. Assuring him that I would do the best I could with the means at hand and avoid annoying him or the War Department, our first interview ended.”

The conditions for Grant’s success were established through his relationship with Lincoln. Lincoln placed trust in Grant from the outset; he allowed him to make decisions on the battlefield. It’s hard to make life-or-death decisions on the battlefield when you’re worried about how your boss will react. Lincoln knew that wasn’t the right environment for a general to operate in, so he placed trust in his subordinate leaders and allowed them to act independently.

As Grant alluded to, Lincoln promised his support when needed, and providing support is the second way to create better conditions. One of the best examples of how providing support can radically enhance your workers’ attitudes and outputs is from the late 1800s, when George and Richard Cadbury decided to move their factory to a healthier environment, where they provided “heated dressing rooms, kitchens to provide hot food, gardens, sports fields and even a swimming pool.” (Workers’ Rights).

They doubled down in the early 1900s and established affordable housing, medical services, and even a pension fund. The success was clear when Cadbury overtook Fry’s as the biggest UK manufacturer in 1910. A major reason for this was the presence of Bournville Village, which improved conditions and increased employee well-being (Organisational Behaviour and Influences Case Study: Cadburys).

You have to start with the first two principles: give trust freely & provide support. These two are the basic conditions that will allow you to model the other four principles through your actions every day. Daily tasks are where leaders model behaviors, uphold standards, encourage candor, and demonstrate empathy. Modeling behaviors is exactly how Alan Mulally orchestrated one of the greatest business turnarounds of the 21st century.

Alan Mulally assumed leadership of Ford at a time when the company was projected to lose more than $12 billion. In just a few years, he turned the company around, posting $6.6 billion in profit in 2010. A key contributing factor to this success was aligning everyone and ensuring consistent behavior. In an interview with McKinsey, he described distributing business cards with a plan on one side and expected behaviors on the other. He also described how he expected leaders to articulate and model the expected behaviors. Every leader modeling the behaviors reinforces their value and allows leaders to hold their employees accountable to the same standards.

Vince Lombardi chose fundamentals as the standard. He held everyone accountable to the basics. He focused on repetition & consistency to ensure top-notch execution. In fact, George Halas, Hall of Fame coach for the Chicago Bears, said, “You might reduce Lombardi's coaching philosophy to a single sentence: In any game, you do the things you do best, and you do them over and over and over.” (Vince Lombardi).

Leaders ensure their people are focused on what matters. Providing standards and expectations shows your employees what they should value. A leader’s job is to uphold those standards, providing clarity so everyone knows what they should be doing. This alignment between the work your employees do and the work they should be doing creates an environment where they see their value and can see a stronger connection to the shared mission.

Leaders need to harness the collective power of their entire team. In order to do this, you have to model and encourage candor to the point that everyone is willing to speak up and share their ideas. Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, exemplified this mindset perfectly when he discussed how he looks at getting people to generate the most creative work possible. He believed the success of Pixar was due to the people they had in the room and the environment that encouraged people to tell the truth and share ideas with each other.

In an HBR article, Ed describes what he believes management should focus on: “Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth.” Leaders must create an environment that encourages and rewards speaking up.

Ensuring people feel safe to speak up is propelled by your ability to demonstrate empathy with your employees. A Microsoft employee had this to say about CEO Satya Nadella: “I’ve never talked with Satya in person. But he fosters this culture of learning and of respectfully questioning each other, to try to understand the other perspectives. The whole emphasis on empathy is really shining through in situations where there’s a dire need to innovate and create something individuals need and want.” (Empathy and innovation.)

Nadella wants everyone to achieve their greatest potential, and he believes empathy is the leadership tactic to get the most out of people. Empathy allows you to understand others, learn from them, and develop better solutions that focus on the customer, not the producer.

While there may be no recipe for creating psychological safety, a leader can make a big impact on the likelihood of psychological safety emerging on their team. Implementing even one of these six principles will help you create better conditions for your employees. You can’t guarantee psychological safety will emerge, but you can greatly increase the odds it does.

Until next time,

Rick