Psychological safety

I talked to a potential client recently about inclusion:

We’re a campaigning organisation, and we work hard to attract a diverse workforce, in terms of class and sexuality in particular. But how can we make sure we’re somewhere that people want to stay, and where they feel welcome?

This led me on to the topic of psychological safety.

That’s a term that’s been around since the 1950s, but in the last ten years or so has shot to prominence in the world of work. It really had a moment after Google’s Project Aristotle concluded it was one of the characteristics of the company’s best performing teams.

I confess that I have always felt ambiguous about it. I’m equally inclined to argue against it as I am for it. In this post I want to talk about my reservations, and in the following post I’ll say what I find useful here.

My reservations are partly a reaction to the name. Is “safety” the right thing to optimise for, psychologically?

The world is unavoidably full of risk and danger, and the evidence from research into phobias suggests that the more we try and avoid the objects we fear, the more terrifying they become. The drive to seek safety can become a drive to withdraw from the world, which is itself a form of danger. That’s how we end up depressed and unable to face the world. It’s not a good route to go down.

We are better functioning human beings when we are able to live with danger and uncertainty, when we can take more of it our stride.

Developing people is one of the first duties of an organisation - and so shouldn’t the organisation help people become more psychologically robust, rather than more psychologically safe?

Once we put the goal of “safety” into the air, we potentially make people preoccupied with looking for signs that they are not safe. And since danger is everywhere - unavoidably, as a normal part of life - it’s almost always possible to find some. Which then become a source of discontent and discomfort.

Of course it depends on what dangers we’re talking about.

In the case of “psychological safety”, in the way the term is commonly used, the dangers are all to do with social emotions.

As social mammals, emotions relating to our place in the group are a big and important part of our lives. We tend to feel warm and cosy when our connection with other people is close and secure, and burning with pain when we are rejected, ostracised or have our status reduced.

These emotions are among the most vivid and powerful that we experience. Indeed, I remember a podcast episode where (I think) Paul Bloom¹ said words to the effect of:

“Given the choice between physical pain and social pain, most people will chose physical pain - and the ones that chose the social pain just haven’t thought about it hard enough”.

So, to loop back to the opening question about inclusion, “how can we make people feel welcome” is somewhat equivalent to asking “how can we prevent people from feeling negatively valenced social emotions (like rejection and shame)”.

And my answer to that is: we cannot.

We cannot live lives free from interpersonal drama.

As I have written about before on this blog, when we are at work we are people whether we like it or not, and as people we have feelings about other people and their behaviour, and we have feelings about their feelings about us. This is who we are. If we eliminated this entirely, we would be dead.

We can learn to become more mature, and more measured in our response to these emotions. But they will always be there.

I write this all as someone who, even as I approach (he says, optimistically...) middle age, still experiences subtle cues of rejection in social settings as daggers through the heart. Yes, as I have got older, I find it easier to take those feelings in my stride, and remind myself that this is mostly a “me” thing. I recognise my own over-reaction more easily, and I can hold those feelings a bit more lightly, and press on more easily with the interactions I need to have. That’s the leadership I aspire to bring at work. But... the feelings are still there. They do not go away.

My point is this: we cannot stop people from scanning for cues of rejection, even where they are unintended. Some of us will always find ourselves feeling “unsafe” (in this particular sense) in social situations.

But we can support people, through their work, to develop their natural leadership capacity. We help them become more robust in the face of these social dangers, and more able to enter any situation and change it for the better.

So the skeptical side of me thinks that this is a much more important goal to serve than “psychological safety”. But… that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can usefully do, as an organisation, to get the best out of everyone, and to help everyone have a better experience of their time at work.

More on that next time!

1. Almost certainly an episode of Very Bad Wizards. If this quote rings a bell, DM me!