Global DE&I and culture strategist and founder of UNSILOED. I help leading-edge organizations Work Better Together.
getty
There are three things I’ve learned about psychological safety in my work with leaders and teams on inclusion and culture change. Psychological safety is
1. wanted by leaders and employees alike, but many don’t know how exactly to accomplish it.
2. critical for productivity and innovation in diverse teams, but the work to create it is often underestimated.
3. not passive; neither can it be invoked by mere declaration—it must be modeled and practiced.
Thankfully, we have some great examples of real-life applications of psychological safety in workplaces with creative teams that we can learn from. Disney’s Pixar’s Braintrust, which I’ve previously discussed, presents an example of how this can be realized. Team synergy and safety cannot be simply invoked. There is necessary “pre-work” to actually integrating psychological safety into your processes for long-term success.
Put it into action (the real assignment).
Your real assignment? Get your audience on board in how they meaningfully engage. You can’t ask people to be vulnerable if they aren’t keyed into what it means to reward or punish vulnerability. Particularly as a leader, how you speak, behave and respond matters.
Some practices you can implement:
Balance the transactional with the relational.
Ground everyone in shared principles and philosophies about how you will engage together. Sharing feedback is not merely a transactional process; it’s about a shared understanding that we are all working together in the same kind of way, with the same goal. In the case of the Braintrust, participants are all career creatives invested in the power of storytelling. They have empathy for the creative process, including the critical role of feedback.
Leverage peer-to-peer power.
People who are coming into this collaborative space know that they have a problem to solve, and they are making this problem vulnerable to the audience. As peers, you must remember that you have a vested interest in each other’s success. The Braintrust uses a practice of giving and taking honest, non-demanding and timely “notes” that say what is wrong, missing or unclear. Everyone participates in improving the product for the better.
Productively engage power.
At Pixar, they purposely keep power out of the room. The point of their meetings is solely to generate ideas and feedback, and they hold no ultimate authority. Nobody can override the director (remove the power structure from the room). This keeps leaders’ agency while also boosting the power of collective reflection—quite a challenge to the norms of how we typically perceive workplace power structures!
Invite vulnerability with a co-responsibility of positive response.
When asking questions or giving feedback, people should not experience themselves as being attacked on stage. If you say, “This is open for feedback,” then the way you respond to that feedback as a leader sets the tone. Otherwise, people will leave the space experiencing negative exclusionary behaviors that disincentivize them and others to show up vulnerably in the future.
Model and practice vulnerability.
No process is perfect, even the Braintrust. The leader must recognize that because this is a human experience, there are times when things might go off the rails. “You have to go through some screwups together and some failures and still be there for each other,” wrote Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull. The role of the leader in those instances is to thoughtfully get things back on track and then trustfully step back again and allow the group to learn from that mistake and grow.
What's possible with impact and outcome?
When you prepare for and implement feedback-sharing processes according to principles of psychological safety and candor, you impact your team and its innovative outcomes.
Remove/reduce social friction; reward intellectual friction.
Research argues that teams with more psychological safety can actually have more conflict. The difference is that it’s intellectual, not social. Psychologically safe teams have respectful engagement across differences that are about the work itself (intellectual friction) and not about personal/social dynamics (social dynamics). “[The Braintrust] would have these intense discussions, but it never got personal,” said Catmull. Reduce social friction by weeding out behaviors that signal bias, microaggressions and incivility, especially to people who have been historically marginalized.
Use power productively.
For the Braintrust, the outcome was not about authority, so that the people coming in did not enter with a defensive posture. Leaders got the chance to share and get feedback while maintaining agency. Psychological safety expert Tim Clark calls this the balance between advocacy and discovery. As a leader, you want to help your team develop its potential. You can’t do that if you’re using up too much airspace (over-advocacy) or not giving your team enough time to contribute. Use your power to productively seek discovery with supportive, but not suppressive, advocacy.
Try innovation.
Research indicates that the “innovation threshold” sits at the intersection of people feeling safe to contribute and people feeling safe to challenge. With candor and reduced ego in the room, you cross that threshold, and ideas begin to spark! For example, while Pixar was developing Inside Out, the initial script followed Joy and Fear stuck in the mind of the story's protagonist. The Braintrust suggested changing Fear to Sadness to craft a more powerful and poignant story. This feedback created a turning point for the movie's narrative—which was a blockbuster success.
Be resilient through change.
Psychologically safe teams have increased resilience. When failure is seen as an opportunity to grow rather than as a danger, teams become more adaptable to change. A group like the Braintrust won’t come together overnight, nor will it stay the same. The dynamics within a group evolve over time, especially when trying to achieve conditions of consistent psychological safety. The group has to be willing to hang in there to find their rhythm by improving it.
Integrate the principles into your practices.
Psychological safety requires intentional action and nurturing by leaders and team members. Our inclination may be to replicate the "best practices" of other organizations like the Braintrust. The truth is, your process of understanding team dynamics, preconditions of values and principles and doing the necessary work of moving through each piece of your goal are critical to realizing the culture you seek to create.
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
