Sharing Your Drafts

I wrote last time about how I think “psychological safety” can sometimes be an unhelpful concept.

I think a better goal is to focus more on leadership development.

I think this is better for organisations, but I also think it’s better for people. We live happier and more impactful lives when we have access to more of our own leadership. And leadership helps us navigate situations without others having to make us safe.¹

I also think when we focus too much on safety, it becomes an obstacle to good relationships.

If we become alert to ways in which others might not be making us feel safe, this is an obstacle to us having a rewarding relationship with them (which will tend to increase our subjective sense of safety). I am tremendously old-fashioned in that I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt - assuming that others are acting in good faith, until proved otherwise.²

But in spite of my reservations, I think there is something very important to think about here - to think about, and to grapple with as leaders.

I’ve written before about why I think inclusion is best framed as “supporting co-creation”. Success in organisations comes from being able to work together effectively. Part of that is about learning how to contribute in ways that encourage others to contribute too. New ideas come from the novel combination of old ideas, and so the more people we hear from, the bigger the pool of ideas we are working with, the more creative collisions and re-combinations we can work with.

Within that framing, I think the most important test of psychological safety, and the way it makes itself most useful, is:

Are people comfortable sharing their drafts with their colleagues?

I’ve worked in organisations where there is practically a culture of secrecy around works-in-progress. People living in a state of fear that someone might look over their shoulder at what they’re doing. This is not good. Not good for them, certainly. But also not good for the organisation. Because what happens as a result is that, instead of putting stuff in shared file storage - where people might see it - a parallel information infrastructure opens up. And since repeated behaviours tend to evolve into habits, before you know it all the output of a whole team is stored insecurely, outside the perimeter of backups and so on. So many kinds of mess.

But I’ve also worked in organisations where we were encouraged to display their half finished work. Yes, it could a little bit uncomfortable - but that default to transparency was incredibly valuable.

When you share your drafts, other people are informed about what’s happening³, and can contribute to making it better.

Encouraging and supporting that kind of openness leads to better collaboration, but it also feeds into a wider increase in transparency, which has other benefits. I want to make two more observations about that:

1 ) On stage vs off stage.

I think we have all got tired of hearing “bring your whole self to work”. It’s a phrase whose time has been and gone. Anything good in it has long since been extrated. So instead let me offer you this:

Distinguish between on stage and off stage contexts.⁴

When we are on stage, we are with our clients. A certain level of performance is required of us. It’s part of what they are paying for: “Service with a smile”.

But when we are just among colleagues, this is our private, backstage space. We can drop the act - or at least, the one we put on for clients. We are of course still on stage in a sense (the social performance we put on for our colleagues, where our off stage area is away from work). But my point is, the performance we put on for colleagues can legitimately be less polished than the performance we put on for clients. We can be bit more rough and ready, act in a way that’s a bit more of a reflection of how we’re genuinely feeling.

I don’t mean that as a demand. I mean that as an option. If you want to keep things private, you’re welcome to. But don’t feel that you have to use effort pretending to be someone or something you’re not when you could put that into getting real, value-adding work done for your customers.⁵

I find that this sense of being able to be “less polished” back stage applies to us, and our social performance, and also to our work, to sharing our drafts.

We humans love congruence. So it’s good when company culture has this kind of consistency in two domains. They reinforce each other, as well as both being useful.

2) Transparency forces principled leadership

I talked earlier about having worked in organisations where people seemed perpetually afraid that someone might look over their shoulder. Of course, in most cases, people are not looking over your shoulder, not matter how much you fear it. Most people are too busy thinking about themselves and their own work to ever pay much attention to what someone else is doing! But still, this is the fear we need to overcome. It’s good to get comfortable with the idea that somebody might look, and that this is OK.

There is another kind of congruence at play here. If you encourage project staff to put their works in progress onto shared drives, you as a senior team should also make as much information as possible open to access. Not that anyone will probably ever look at, say, the minutes of your meeting about the management accounts - but they might. And that sense that someone might forces you to act in a more ethical and principled way.

If you don’t do that, someone might well point out it!

I remember a very uncomfortable conversation where a colleague had asked to speak to me privately, and said they had looked at our financial planning spreadsheet and seen we had offered a new joiner in a role equivalent to theirs a higher salary than them. They were pretty pissed off, and challenged me: was that really the way we wanted them to find out? I immediately knew that I’d made a mistake. Of course it wasn’t fair. It was the right call to have offered this new person slightly above the advertised range to secure them at a time when we needed them, but if we raised their salary, we should have raised the whole salary band.⁶ My colleague’s intervention led me to act in a way that was more in accordance with my own values, and they were only able to do that because they had access to the information.

So, what I’ve argued in this post is that, rather than focus on the wide, vague and sometimes unhelpful goal of “psychological safety”, instead focus on the “sharing your drafts” test.

Doing this helps people work better together. It also feeds into a wider commitment to transparency, which opens up space for people to be themselves - to waste less effort on hiding who they are and how they feel - as well as encouraging more ethical and principled leadership decisions.

Sharing drafts can feel uncomfortable. What can you do to make it easier?

I will have some suggestions on that next time!

1. I hope it will be taken as read through this series of posts that I’m obviously not talking about workplaces where people are being bullied. I have no time at all for deliberately demeaning behaviour. I’m only ever talking about the kind of safe/unsafe feelings that come from ordinary rudeness that comes from ineptness, lack of care, distraction, stress, busyness etc.

2. This is what Nicky Case calls the “copy kitten” strategy. Their excellent online simulator The Evolution of Trust will take you through an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma to see how effective this is as a way of improving outcomes in situations where people can choose to be more or less co-operative.

3. I have a theory that the three most heard things in all organisations everywhere are: (1) we have too many meetings (2) Our work is too siloed (3) We do not take accountability. This at least goes some ways to dealing with the second point.

4. This is straight out of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman studied people in various professions, and observed that they invariably had a ‘backstage’ space where they could take off their mask.

5. ““In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for...Most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.” - An Everyone Culture by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

6. I am increasingly in favour of sign-on bonuses as a mechanism for dealing with this. They provide some wiggle room for negotiation at the final stages of a job offer, without breaking your salary model.