What I Talk About When I Talk About Psychological Safety
(Does this title sound familiar? It’s a play on my favorite short story writer Raymond Carver’s collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Murakami’s play on the same title, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Both are phenomenal books and are favorites of mine — check them out.)
About 14 years ago, my father had a psychotic break.
Prior to this immense life-changing event my dad would have been described by many as a fairly successful man in middle-class America. He had worked at IBM for a multitude of years, then moved to some smaller organizations and sold computer hardware to massive organizations like Best Buy and Target. He was really, really good at what he did. And he loved it — at least he did when things were going well.
It was always incredibly obvious to me when things weren’t good at work. He’d eat his powdered donuts early in the morning in silence hunched over a newspaper, and would be out the door and off to work without any verbal acknowledgement to anyone. After work he’d come home either grinning ear to ear with pride or he’d shuffle through the doorway, wearing the shame and stress I’d seen draped over him earlier that morning.
When I was 15 I got my first job as a summer intern with his company, and car rides together were often silent and intense. No music, no talking. We were close, so I’d try to gently pry and ask him what was wrong, but all I got was a cold brush-off. He’d tell me he was focusing on the day.
I think for a long time I misinterpreted these behaviors as moodiness, or simply the expected aggressive up-and-down nature of someone who’s living that intense sales-driven life. I didn’t really think about how his experience was as an employee.
I’ve spent the better part of my career in technology, working with folks in different industries, across different mediums while I’ve sunk my hands and brain into a myriad of diverse roles. I went from project manager to people manager to coach. Within each experience I observed all of us working so hard to balance “doing things well” with being a human and all that comes with it, and we’re packed to the brim with emotions and vulnerabilities and fears.
There’s a weird duality there, right? We aren’t robots who should be expected to flip a switch between “work self” and “real self.” It doesn’t work that way.
So, what if we were actually honest about being complex?
Since I’m a coach and forever curious, my dad and I talk a lot about how work culture has changed over time — what was once a baseline expectation of simply getting work done is now a much bigger conversation. My dad told me that for him the message was always very clear: you don’t sell, you don’t eat. While that was meant to sound over the top, eventually people believed it. You had a family to feed and a reputation to uphold, so suck it up and do it. And that’s what he told himself every day while he was out killing it in the sales field. And eventually, it almost killed him.
We are humans who will always feel and experience complex things. We also want to do good work. Why do those things have to be mutually exclusive?
They don’t have to be. In fact, we’re more innovative when they aren’t separate things, and we can safely take the mask off and be ourselves. And when we do it collectively with our teams we take more risks and have more support to back them up, knowing we’re all in it together.
And that’s what psychological safety is at its core. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School has pioneered this term, educating individuals, teams and businesses about both what it means and how we can get there.
So, What IS Psychological Safety?
In Amy’s own words:
“Psychological safety is about mutual respect and support, giving and getting genuine feedback without fear of judgment, having collaborative support and freedom to take risks, and, above all else, learning what can be done better the next time around. Psychological safety inspires and motivates without using fear or humiliation as a driving force.” — Amy Edmondson
My dad certainly didn’t experience this at his job. Had he been able to take risks and question approaches, that could have opened up a whole new world of opportunity for him — both personally and professionally. I can also pinpoint many jobs in my own career where psychological safety wasn’t ever a factor considered. You kept your head down and worked on the task at hand without asking hard questions — and the teams suffered for it.
The funny thing about psychological safety is it goes much deeper than simply not feeling “safe” in the environment you’re in — the word “safety” implies much more than simply feeling content. In fact, as Edmondson has points out, it’s a feeling adjacent to comfort. It’s also about being empowered and encouraged to take risks — thoughtful, well-intended ones — and in doing so, creating great opportunities while at the same time empowering individuals to find their voice. A voice they won’t be punished for, but rather expected by the team collectively to come up with new ideas.
Project Aristotle was an experiment run by Google where they studied 180 teams across disciplines like technology and sales. The outcome they were striving for was to find what truly made an effective team. They discovered that while many different factors come into play, effective teams only work when they’re built with a foundation of psychological safety.
If we are free to experiment, what is possible? The answer is we won’t know until we start to try.
Where does one start with psychological safety?
Like many things, it all starts with us as individuals.
- Get honest and vulnerable with yourself. What are your sensitivities? Your triggers? Get to know them as you build relationships where you will likely discover more.
- Next, start really paying attention to language and behavior inside your team. What helps folks succeed? What is harmful to them? And finally, make psychological safety a priority on a cultural level.
The cultural piece is last and perhaps the most crucial. To be successful, this has to be an organizational effort.
It’s also worth noting that it’s not going to be easy. It takes work, it takes resilience, and it takes people who care. And that takes time, patience, humility and fortitude. It takes learning tools to help build that safety, like active listening, giving and receiving feedback and maybe having open forum town halls to promote less hierarchal conversations, to name just a few. We must be inclusive, and we must be intentional .Above all else, psychological safety takes a collaborative and shared effort amongst everyone. People who want to make their world a better, healthier, more innovative culture.
So, what happens if you’re in a place that doesn’t feel psychologically safe and you want to help change things for the greater good?
First, as the diagram above suggests, start with yourself! Pinpoint some patterns and behaviors that don’t feel helpful and look within for what you need to be successful. Start talking to your peers and creating a dialog about how to start working towards a greater good. This can be done as a grassroots effort on smaller teams that will grow over time when people are invested in change. Google’s experimental project and data shows us that psychological safety is hardly a fluffy feelgood thing — it’s the groundwork for innovation and the happiness of talented people.
I wish my dad had experienced more of this, and he’s really glad to know it exists today for others to strive for and attain. “These are different times, honey,” he’s told me. “You’re all steering your own ships and the world is your oyster.”
Do I think work was the only reason my dad experienced what he did? Probably not, no. But I know that stress impacted him greatly. Many of us spend so much of our lives at work — it’s going to affect us in one way or another.
If we can create ecosystems today where we’re all encouraged to be honest, discuss failures, experiments and successes in the name of learning and innovation, then there’s no need for “work self.” We’re being present, flaws and all — and that’s when the biggest discoveries happen.
Further helpful reading/listening:
Google’s Project Aristotle: https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/
Creating Psychological Safety at Work with Amy Edmondson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkFohYhIaSQ
Why Psychological Safety is the Key to High Performing Teams: https://peakon.com/us/blog/workplace-culture/psychological-safety/
