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March 7 - March 8, 2022
psychological safety is the foundation of inclusion and team performance and the key to creating an innovative culture.
Key questions: Have you ever been in a position of power? Have you ever been in a position of no power? Did having power or not having power change your behavior?
innovation is almost always a collaborative process and almost never a lightbulb moment of lone genius.
“What is easy to understand may have not been easy to think of.”3 Innovation is never easy to think of. It requires creative abrasion and constructive dissent—processes that rely on high intellectual friction and low social friction.4
Key Concept: The leader’s task is to simultaneously increase intellectual friction and decrease social friction.
the absence of psychological safety can inflict devastating emotional wounds, neutralize performance, paralyze potential, and crater an individual’s sense of self-worth.
fear is the enemy. It freezes initiative, ties up creativity, yields compliance instead of commitment, and represses what would otherwise be an explosion of innovation.
If you can banish fear, install true performance-based accountability, and create a nurturing environment that allows people to be vulnerable as they learn and grow, they will perform beyond your expectations and theirs.
psychological safety follows a progression based on the natural sequence of human needs. (figure 2) First, human beings want to be included. Second, they want to learn. Third, they want to contribute. And finally, they want to challenge the status quo when they believe things need to change.
Key concept: Psychological safety is a condition in which you feel (1) included, (2) safe to learn, (3) safe to contribute, and (4) safe to challenge the status quo—all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way.
“We are,” as the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said, “healed by relation, not isolation.”10
As humans, we look for loyalties to attach to. Out of our attachments emerge our differences. Out of our differences emerge our divisions. Out of our divisions emerge our classes, ranks, and stations.
Key concept: When you compare and compete, you lose the ability to connect.
The real frontier of modernity is not artificial intelligence; it’s emotional and social intelligence.
William Kahn first coined it in 1990.
In fact, you could argue that psychological safety is simply the manifestation of the need for self-preservation in a social and emotional sense. Or you might call it industrialized love.
Clearly, how we feel influences what we think and do.
But it’s not a binary proposition—psychological safety is not something you either have or don’t.
high psychological safety drives performance and innovation, while low psychological safety incurs the disabling costs of low productivity and high attrition.
Google’s Project Aristotle proved that IQ points and money don’t necessarily produce results. After studying 180 of its teams, Google found that smarts and resources can’t compensate for what a team may lack in psychological safety. In fact, the company landed on psychological safety as the single most important factor in explaining high performance.8
To respect someone is to value and appreciate them.
By permission, I mean the permission given to others to participate as members of a social unit, the degree to which we allow them to influence us and participate in what we are doing.
Key concept: The need to be accepted precedes the need to be heard.
Key concept: When human beings can’t gain acceptance or approval from each other, they often seek attention as a replacement, even if that attention is destructive.
Learner safety indicates that you feel safe to engage in the discovery process, ask questions, experiment, and even make mistakes—not if, but when, you make them.
Key concept: When the environment belittles, demeans, or harshly corrects people in the learning process, learner safety is destroyed.
Contributor safety is an invitation and an expectation to perform work in an assigned role with appropriate boundaries, on the assumption that you can perform competently in your role.
Contributor safety emerges when the individual performs well, but the leader and team must do their part to provide encouragement and appropriate autonomy.
challenge the status quo without retribution, reprisal, or the risk of damaging your personal standing or reputation.
Key concept: Where there is no tolerance for candor, there is no constructive dissent. Where there is no constructive dissent, there is no innovation.
A leader’s most important job—above that of creating a vision and setting strategy—is to act in the role of social architect and nourish a context in which people are given the respect and permission to (1) feel included, (2) learn, (3) contribute, and (4) innovate. It’s the culminating stage of both leadership development and organizational culture to create and sustain this kind of environment.
Key concept: Organizations don’t outperform their leaders, they reflect them.
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization. —Mahatma Gandhi
If there’s no psychological safety, there’s no inclusion.
Key concept: Including another human being should be an act of prejudgment based on that person’s worth, not an act of judgment based on that person’s worthiness.
Inclusion safety is not about worthiness. It’s about treating people like people. It’s the act of extending fellowship, membership, association, and connection—agnostic of rank, status, gender, race, appearance, intelligence, education, beliefs, values, politics, habits, traditions, language, customs, history, or any other defining characteristic.
Withholding inclusion safety is a sign that we’re engaged in a fight with our own willful blindness.
Worth precedes worthiness.
What should it take to qualify for inclusion safety? Two things: Be human and be harmless.
Key concept: Instead of granting inclusion safety based on human status, we tend to judge another person’s worthiness based on indicators like appearance, social status, or material possessions, when those indicators have nothing to do with worth.
Key questions: In the arc of every life are times when inclusion safety makes all the difference, when someone reaches out to include you at a vulnerable time. When did this happen to you? What impact did it have on your life? Are you paying it forward?
To extend inclusion safety is not to extend mature, developed feelings of affection.
Inclusion safety is not earned but owed.
As the basic glue of human society, inclusion safety offers the comforting assurance that you matter.
Inclusion safety requires that we condemn negative bias, arbitrary distinction, or destructive prejudice that refuses to acknowledge our equal worth and the obligation of equal treatment.
More contact and context tend to create more empathy.
inclusion safety, once built, is fragile, delicate, and impermanent.
The psychologist Carol Dweck has said, “Your failures and misfortunes don’t threaten other people. It’s your assets and your successes that are problems for people who derive their self-esteem from being superior.”20
Key concept: Excluding a person is more often the result of personal unmet needs and insecurities than a genuine dislike of the person.
But in a coequal partnership, in which both spouses participate and permit the other equal power and participation rights, the relationship is likely to produce sustainable, high levels of inclusion safety and a deeply fulfilling experience for both.
