Strengthen with Safety
People can't own their mistakes until it's safe to.
We are not thinking creatures who feel, we are feeling creatures who think.Chapter 17, The Big Bold Mindset
High performance. Great results. A toxic culture.
The CEO of a 10,000-person company told me: "We have a high-performance culture. Our team are driven go-getters. We get great results. But we have a culture that is toxic."
Nobody wanted to be the person who failed. People hid problems. Issues that should have been raised never were. My brief was to speak to their top 120 performers and start the shift from purely numbers-driven to reflective, accountable and adaptive.
Every behaviour is a form of communication. That culture was saying one thing: it isn't safe to own a mistake here.
How safe is it to be honest in your team?
How comfortable are you raising a concern or admitting a mistake at work? Score it from 1 to 100.
Is your score different at home or with friends? What makes the difference?
When someone on your team makes a mistake, what happens next?
Safe to speak up. Safe to get it wrong.
Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School coined "psychological safety": a shared belief that it's safe to take interpersonal risks, like speaking up, sharing ideas and asking questions.
What low safety looks like, and what changes when it's high
Fear of speaking up
People hold back ideas and concerns, so leaders never hear the truth.
Blame culture
Mistakes are met with finger-pointing instead of learning, so people stop taking risks.
Resistance to change
The status quo wins. Teams with high safety are the ones that embrace new ideas and adapt.
Satya Nadella: from cutthroat to curious
Nadella led with empathy and vulnerability. He shared stories of his own failures and what he learnt, and encouraged everyone to do the same.
Mistakes became chances to grow, not reasons for punishment. The culture shift helped Microsoft innovate, adapt and attract top talent.
If you plant seeds today and expect an oak tree tomorrow, the only person being deluded is you.Think like a farmer
The journey to safer
Safety starts with leaders going first, consistently, over time. These are experiments to run in your own team.
Lead from the front
Share a time you were challenged and how you found a way through.
Model what you want
Model the behaviours you want, and praise them when you see them in others.
Encourage open conversations
Ask for feedback, listen properly, and build trust by acting on what you hear.
Think like a farmer
Plant the seeds, add sunshine and water, and don't expect change overnight.
Share one mistake
In your next team meeting, share a mistake you made recently and what you learnt from it. Then notice who speaks up afterwards, and thank them.
Run a team safety check
Make the invisible visible. You can't improve what nobody is willing to say out loud.
Want Caspar to take your team through this? casparcraven.com