Create Psychological Safety for Innovation

Domain: Managing Others - Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Do you want more creative problem solving from your team? What about more innovation?

Of course. We all do.

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just telling them to be more creative, more innovative, or bigger risk-takers.

If we truly want these things, we as managers need to take-on the responsibility of creating a culture that encourages, supports and celebrates these values.

Enter, psychological safety.

The concept of psychological safety is based on the fact that people are generally more effective when they feel safe and secure. This is not about making sure everyone is comfortable and catered to. It's about creating an environment where people trust that they can innovate and take reasonable risks without the fear of hyper-reactionary consequence.

The result? Increased transparency, honest feedback, personal accountability and a shift towards a more prominent growth mindset.

Here are just a few ways that you can start building such a culture…

Admit your own mistakes

As with many things, it helps to lead by example here. Start by admitting your own mistakes, missteps and failures.

Occasionally highlighting your own mistakes is a way for managers to acknowledge that we're all human and none of us is above getting things wrong from time to time. The key here is to share this acknowledgement with what you learned and how you grew from the experience.

Start demonstrating the behavior you expect. You're going to have a hard time building this culture if you are not willing to be a participant in it.

Thank people for brining problems

Another way you can normalize the idea of learning from mistakes is by recognizing people who come to you with issues and challenges.

Thank people any time they bring you problems or challenges. This works for issues large and small. As an added benefit, it can help you keep a calm composure towards the situation so you don't over-react.

Call-out this transparent behavior in performance reviews as well. Recognize those who are self-aware enough to know where they've had opportunities and who have taken the steps to address them.

These behaviors show that you're more interested in solving problems than appointing blame. This doesn't mean you solve the problem for them. It means you support them in acknowledging and addressing their own missteps. This is the manager we all want and that we should strive to be.

Reframe failures as learning opportunities

I've touched on this a little but it's worthy of its own section. A key to psychological safety is that we have the room to operate with autonomy, make mistakes an recover from them.

This means that missteps are expected and part of the process. The alternative is that we stay defensive, avoid mistakes, play small and fail to realize meaningful results/progress.

The truth is that most of these mistakes are not going to be life-threatening or world ending. So instead of responding punitively, lets agree that each mistake comes with lessons from which we can learn. There is still plenty of room for professional accountability without needing a negative consequence for everything that didn't go well.

Give second chances. And thirds.

This all sounds great. But how do you actually react when something goes wrong? It's not enough to frame it as a learning opportunity, we need to give people chances to bounce back and get it right.

Let's say one of your employees didn't deliver on a big project. Let them figure out why things didn't go well, what can be learned and then assign them the next one to apply those learnings.

If they make the same mistakes over and over, then you have a performance issue. However, chances are they'll learn from past experiences and have a whole new level of trust towards you for having faith that they would bounce back.

Thank you for reading. My hope is always that you've found something helpful and easy to implement.