Psychological Safety and the Servant Leader

I constantly go back and forth in my head about deleting my Facebook account, occasionally I am rewarded with content that I genuinely enjoy (baby/puppy pictures) or something that reminds me why I do what I do.

I saw this today:

So clearly my comment is prescriptive without being instructive so I thought it might be a good idea to discuss how I go about creating psychological safety in my organization from the most junior employee to the most tenured.

Onboarding is critical. Every member of my organization globally gets onboarded by the company I am working for. In addition no matter the level of employee they are going to hear from me directly and I lay out the following tenets of leadership and guidelines for our team.

1. Care about our people. I worked in an extremely toxic environment with one of the most unfit leaders I’ve ever had the displeasure to experience. We were discussing a team outing and I suggested it needed to be inclusive. He suggested a golf simulator. I pressed him on the issue, gently suggesting while that would generally be nice for one aspect of the team, it didn’t fit the demographic representation of the entire team. This led to him yelling, “I care about people!” at me. LEADERSHIP NUGGET: If your senior executive screams ‘I care about people,’ EVER, he doesn’t. That being said, I tend to lean into this. I send wedding gifts. If invited, I attend birthday parties and on two occasions went to the hospital right after babies were born, and my leadership philosophy has a lot of love sewn into it. That doesn’t work for everyone and that’s ok, but if you can’t find a baseline of care for the people who entrust you with their careers, get out of leadership. You don’t belong there.
2. Mistakes happen. I explain in stark detail that perfection is unattainable and the pursuit of perfection is going to leave us all frustrated and disappointed. If someone breaks an egg, we all clean it up together and move on. They can feel safe if something goes wrong because the entire organization has their back. My leadership teams know this is sacrosanct and they make every effort to follow through on that promise knowing in the end, if something really goes bad, I will stand in front of everyone and take responsibility.
3. Mentoring. Every member of my organization is required to get a mentor from outside the organization. This doesn’t happen immediately, but after they achieve mastery in their position our leadership team begins to explore what the next steps are for that teammate. What do they want out of their career? What do they need from us to get there? Every member of our team globally knows within 90 days that we truly care about their career progression and when the time comes we will celebrate their graduation to their next position.
4. Freedom to have an idea. I was lucky enough to see the great Bill Strickland, author of Make the Impossible, Possible, speak live in 2017. He stood in front of a room of mostly white executives and scolded us passionately. “The problems OF your organization can be fixed by the people IN your organization.” I’ve written that on every white board I’ve had control of since I heard him say it. I actually detailed a story about Sherwin Williams failing itself right here. (You’ll notice the same Strickland quote in that article as well.) If your people feel safe, they will bring you ideas. Those ideas may not always be viable, but they will almost ALWAYS be good.
5. Freedom to live day to day life. Whether you believe in return to work or not, your teams will have day to day hassles that infiltrate their minds and bleed productivity. If someone needs to be home for the plumber, let them. If someone has a pet issue, give them the freedom to manage it as they see fit. Approach your teams with the same empathy, trust and freedom you expect as a leader. Don’t worry about anyone taking advantage. When they see you trust them and care about what they care about, their engagement will skyrocket.

Psychological safety is the responsibility of leadership and leadership alone. The above notes are only the beginning of the equation, but the end result of a psychologically safe environment is employee engagement and leadership trust well above the norm. Ensuring the psychological safety of teams leads to increased performance, decreased attrition and a true sense of belonging within your organization.