A Leader’s Guide to Cultivating Psychological Safety
RADIUS GUEST BLOG: Radius is pleased to present to you this guest blog by our partner, Julie Rosenzweig, PhD, LCSW. Julie is an insightful clinical consultant, specialist in traumatic stress, and engaging workshop leader. She brings an emotional intelligent, relational perspective to her work with individuals, non-profits, and large companies. Julie has an uncanny ability to translate neuroscience into everyday applications. She renovates constraining narratives to wisdom-centered story lines and writes about work-life integration and psychological trauma. Here, she shares with us the importance of prioritizing psychological safety in the time of coronavirus and civil unrest.
What are your fears today?
When do you feel safe?
Where does fear and safety live in your body?
Months into the complete societal disruption by COVID-19, we have almost as many questions now as we did when it first began to impact the world. After the near-global shut-down of business and society, life that we knew prior to the pandemic continues to look very different. Best estimates from medical professionals place preventative vaccines and effective treatments for the novel coronavirus months or possibly years away.
Meanwhile, we are advised to stay safe by wearing masks, washing our hands, and social distancing. We are working from home indefinitely if we are working at all. We have no idea when schools or places of employment will reopen. We’re stuck inside for months on end longing to resume our predictable and comforting routines like going to the gym, being outdoors, and safely connecting in-person with friends and family. Add to this fertile ground of disruption a national and global uprising for social justice after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd and countless other Black Americans. Individuals, families, and communities are experiencing extraordinary grief, exhaustion and a sense of helplessness.
Our entire world has been turned inside-out and upside down. We are caught in a tsunami of fear and uncertainty, struggling to come up for air. Much of our fear is reasonable and informative—and the result of feeling overwhelmed and out of control. How well any of us are coping with these realities varies daily, sometimes hourly. What we have in common is an innate need for feeling a sense of safety while we navigate the unknown.
Creating Safety
In the early days of the coronavirus, many business leaders moved quickly to address the physical safety needs of employees, typically through work-from-home directives and video conferencing strategies. Work-home boundaries virtually disappeared overnight. Carefully crafted routines of our preferred ways of sharing space with others fell apart. Ensuring physical safety has, unnervingly, exposed us in new and different ways, personally and professionally, emotionally and psychologically.
Everyone has a different experience of these challenges and individualized coping strategies. Some may gravitate to maintaining an appearance of life as usual, setting up home offices, working typical hours, exercising regularly, and eating well. Others may feel paralyzed with fear and anxiety, unable to think clearly or make decisions. For many of us, an okay day means we are somewhere in between. Our common goal? Seeking safety.
Threat and Safety is Physical and Psychological
The need for both physical and psychological safety is neurobiologically hard-wired into our survival system. When our physical survival is threatened (hello pandemic) our brain and body coordinate a response, called the defense cascade, which prioritizes staying alive over all else.
Neuro-networks that support non-survival-based activities are turned on low, and all physiological resources are automatically redirected to where they are most needed—survival strategies. Our focus narrows to understand the threat and short-term solutions to neutralize it. Our bodies instinctively take actions to increase our survival through fight and flight or through shutdown behaviors until the danger (or perception of) has passed. Until that time, cortisol, a stress hormone, stays afloat in our system, keeping us ready to respond.
Our innate survival instincts are also embedded in our intrinsic need for interpersonal connections and a sense of belongingness with others. After all, we are social beings. Our individual psychological safety is dependent upon the behaviors of others. A sense of who we are in the world is formed through our early attachments to significant others and further defined in relation to membership in groups. Knowing that we are not alone protects our physical health and promotes psychological security. When our sense of belongingness is threatened (hello quarantines and shelter in place mandates), our neurobiology responds as if there is potential physical harm lurking in our surroundings. The nervous system registers threats to accessing our cherished connections with others, or the security of our place in social networks, as if it were physical pain. Just ask an adolescent.
Knowing that we are not alone protects our physical health and promotes psychological security.
Multiple dangers associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have not passed. Even if we tell ourselves that we are safe, our minds and bodies know differently. We embody powerful emotions at a cellular level. These recordings become part of our implicit memories, informing future decisions for a long time to come. While in this state of survival-based functioning we have disrupted thinking, sleeping, and digesting. We feel on edge and irritable. We feel lonely and sad.
Psychological Safety in Workspaces
Prior to the novel coronavirus pandemic, workplace conversations about psychological safety had been increasing in volume. Organizational research was narrating the relationship between feeling psychologically safe at work and key job behaviors such as engagement, commitment, information exchange (speaking up and voicing), creativity, innovation, and team performance. Leaders, managers and team members were taking notice and realizing that something different was required of them.
Not surprisingly, organizations continue to shift away from leader-centric models of success and towards team-based models. Teams have the potential to leverage our innate psychological longing for connection, belonging, safety, contribution, recognition, learning, and growth. For organizations wanting to remain agile in complex, constantly changing, unpredictable environments the sweet spot to inhabit is the three-way intersection of scholarship on interpersonal neurobiology (people need people), emotional intelligence (EI), and research on high-performing teams. A felt-sense of psychological safety is the common denominator.
Research conducted by Harvard professor, and author of Fearless Organizations, Amy Edmondson, found that psychological safety was the currency exchanged among coworkers who engaged in dynamic collaboration she calls teaming. Almost a decade later results from Google’s Project Aristotle put psychological safety in the spotlight, touting it as the secret sauce of high performing teams.
Cultivating psychological safety means that you get really good at authentic deep listening and expressing empathy with each team member. It means that you invite vulnerability into the conversations through sharing your own. It means prioritizing diversity and inclusion to ensure a strong sense of team belongingness.
In essence, psychological safety is present when employees/team members share a common belief that they can take interpersonal risks through giving voice to ideas and concerns, without fear of ridicule, embarrassment, ridicule, or ostracization Information exchange is fluid and unabashed.
When psychological safety, including a sense of belonging, is absent employees intentionally lean into self-protection strategies to feel psychologically safe. To keep their most vulnerable selves out of harm’s way, they minimally share their different ideas, viewpoints, or thoughts about potential problems. In a fast-paced knowledge driven economy, businesses can’t afford for their talent to remain strategically silent if they hope to innovate and remain competitive.
Employees have always required a climate of psychological safety in the workplace to excel. And now, during the global crisis, when they need it more than ever, it may be harder to come by. Productivity overall is compromised by the ongoing fear of contagion to self and others, disruptions in daily life, financial insecurity, and for many, grieving the deaths of family and friends due to COVID-19.
The pandemic effects are universal in many aspects, however, the impact is disproportionately experienced. Psychological safety may be particularly elusive for certain employees, including those with membership in historically underrepresented groups, family caregivers, and individuals with mental health and health challenges. For these reasons and many others, it is incumbent upon leaders to prioritize the psychological safety of their organizations’ members.
Leading with Psychological Safety During the Pandemic Threat
How are you showing up to your team?
How are you expressing empathy to team members?
Do you know who is disproportionately affected by the crisis?
Cultivating psychological safety is a core leadership skill that is even more essential during a crisis. This doesn’t mean that you need to have your act together, or possess all the answers. It doesn’t mean making false promises. It doesn’t mean coddling, or holding a pep rally. It doesn’t mean that you know what others are feeling or what they need from you.
It does mean that you can feel anxious and lead calmly at the same time. Cultivating psychological safety means that you get really good at authentic deep listening and expressing empathy with each team member. It means that you invite vulnerability into the conversations through sharing your own. It means prioritizing diversity and inclusion to ensure a strong sense of team belongingness.
So, how do you do all that?
Check-in With Yourself
Self-awareness is prerequisite to cultivating psychological safety with your team. Knowing what emotions you are experiencing at any one moment, as well as, your physical sensations and thoughts associated with those emotions are key drivers of your behaviors. Only when you are clear about your emotional state can you achieve clarity on your thoughts and resultant actions. Continued practice of self-awareness leads to greater emotional regulation with abundant physical and psychological benefits.
Pause, breathe and reflect throughout the day on what you are feeling in the moment
Strengthen your EI
Notice your emotions (and there are many)
Name it to tame it. Naming emotions bridges the gap between thoughts and feelings
Identify where you feel each emotion in your body
Broaden your focus (remember, fear and anxiety narrow focus)
Ask yourself: When I look back on this crisis, how do I want to see myself? What will be the narrative about who and how I helped?
Practice self-compassion and self-care
What are you doing to care for your mind and body?
What is a statement of self-compassion that is helpful?
What shifts when you say this statement aloud?
Check-in With Your Team
Strengthening psychological safety with your team, especially during this crisis, is a fragile process that unfolds and grows over time. Right now persistent threat is a powerful influencer holding us captive. Shoring up psychological safety can become a useful buffer to the intrusiveness of the threat or, at the very least, a competing influencer.
Let go of outcome.
Frame the current situation as unknown, unpredictable, and with many effects: psychological, emotional, relational, financial, etc.
Review purpose, meaning, and relevancy of the work within the context of the pandemic. Be curious about what has become blurry and what has become clear. Invite input.
Acknowledge that productivity, ability to focus, clear thinking, memory, and creativity is compromised because of persistent threat. Invite input.
Apologize. You know…for when you engaged in fuckery. Perhaps when you were inaccessible, cut-off someone who was speaking, played favorites, or uttered a ‘my way or the highway comment’.
Role model vulnerability by candid sharing of your own fears and anxieties.
Invite conversations about anxiety, fears, and safety. Listen deeply. Express empathy.
Ask good questions that invite sharing of stories (not answers). For example, What helps you feel safe?
Ask: What can I do that would be helpful? This is asking for feedback. You are taking a necessary risk here. Receive these suggestions with appreciation and compassion.
Practice humility.
In other words, cultivating psychological safety during crisis should be the baseline of leadership. Doing the necessary work in order to lead with safety will improve the lives of everyone in your organization.
ABOUT JULIE:
Dr. Julie is an executive coach and facilitator with Radius. Her popular workshops include Mindfulness for Managers, The Art & (Neuro)Science of Feedback, and training on change management, trauma, and understanding your brain.
For additional workshops and professional development, check out Radius services here.