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Thursday, October 26, 2017

How a Leader can build Psychological Safety
by Rita Gunther McGrath


Innovation team members must feel comfortable sharing doubts, mistakes and contrarian views, says WSJ Leadership Expert Rita Gunther McGrath, an associate professor at Columbia Business School and author of “The End of Competitive Advantage: How to KeepYour Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business”.

The classic image of an effective leader of teams is as a commander—taking charge, setting priorities, driving for results and imposing penalties when people don’t deliver.

In other words, just the kind of leadership style that you don’t want if you’re trying to create innovative new products or services. The reason is that casting blame, singling people out for praise or punishment and accentuating power differences are all factors that damage the psychological safety people feel within a team.

As Amy Edmondson and Jeff Polzer observe, “psychological safety describes a climate where people recognize their ability and responsibility to overcome fear and reluctance to speak up with potentially controversial ideas or questions.” If this sense of safety is missing, then concerns, critical information and ideas that diverge from the rest of the team don’t become part of the conversation. Subordinates may not articulate what they don’t know, which—in an innovation project arena—can do a lot of damage.

If people on your team are reluctant to confess ignorance, voice doubts or challenge a boss’s perspective, the whole process of learning is stunted. What you have to work with is just consensus information that everyone feels comfortable sharing, and will result in a mediocre product.

For example, I spoke with a team member who was involved in making a choice regarding a mobile-based application aimed at providing financial information to millennials. A huge debate among the team members was whether the app’s interface should use slang, emojis and have a very casual feel, or whether it should be more serious and grown-up in its communication style. Rather than take sides or offer his own opinion, the team leader suggested that they do an experiment. So the team mocked up an inexpensive prototype of the user interface and tested it with a group representative of the target market for the service. What they found surprised them—by far, users preferred the more serious-sounding interface. An initial assumption that young people would be comfortable with a casual tone because that’s how they interact socially was disproved when it came to something as important as their money.

In many such cases, a decisive boss — the kind of boss who is portrayed as having the ideal characteristics of a leader — would have seen it as his or her responsibility to make the call, shutting down the debate. Had the company then gone to market with the casual interface they would have conceivably bombed or been forced to redo the interface at enormous expense.

So how can companies offer the psychological safety that is so crucial? Here are some suggestions:
  • Collect people’s opinions on important decisions in writing before you meet to discuss them. This will give them the chance to offer a perspective before they know which way the group is going, and potentially provide you with a richer pool of information than might come up in a typical meeting.
  • Don’t—even nonverbally—reveal which ideas you support until everyone has had a chance to make their perspective known.
  • When there are plausible arguments for multiple choices, try to do an experiment to find out which one works better.
  • Discourage people from working out their differences in pairs or in small groups. If the group is having a disagreement, be open to hearing about it and having the group work through the resolution together.
  • Personally model the tolerant behavior you are trying to encourage.
  • Publicly appreciate when your views are challenged.
  • Make a point of seeking out and respecting the voices of people who have less power or are otherwise different from the bulk of the team.
  • Actively seek dissenting views and encourage your team members to do so too. Beware of shutting people down. Any hint of that kind of behavior on your part and people are likely to retreat to cautious behavior.
  • Create a “no interruption” rule to limit the ability of the loudest or most confident members from dominating the quieter voices.
  • Finally, don’t be afraid to show your own vulnerability and willingness to be open. You might talk about a time you missed something important and failed. You might tell a story about how you took advice from someone far lower down in the hierarchy than yourself, to a good outcome.
Psychological safety is not just a nice-to-have part of your corporate culture. It’s essential for innovative projects to work.

Fuente: The Wall Street Journal

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