It’s no good having a great culture if you’ve gone out of business.

Psychological safety is the foundational factor in ensuring teams and organisations are as high performing as possible. It’s also ethically the right thing to do. People deserve a psychologically safe culture and to be treated with dignity and respect at work. 

But psychological safety, or a “good” culture alone is not enough on its own to automatically result in organisational success. 

We also have to remember that organisations face real threats to their very existence. If you’re in a commercial organisation, then increased competition, economic pressures, and changing customer demands can quickly turn a successful organisation into a cautionary tale. If you’re in a public or third sector organisation, then regulatory, policy or governmental changes and economic shocks can have equally devastating impact if you’re not prepared for them.

Success is not a dirty word.

Your culture serves the organisation. Having a fantastic, psychologically safe culture helps you get stuff done, it helps retain people, it mitigates risk, it endows a competitive advantage and helps you make good collective decisions. It’s the right thing to do. But culture is not why the organisation exists. The mission is why the organisation exists. And if we fail at our mission, there won’t be an organisation to have a good culture in. 

So what do we need in order to achieve our mission? If mission is what we’re aiming to do, strategy is the approach we intend to take to achieve it. Strategy is how we decide what to do, when, and how. The mission is the goal and the strategy keeps us heading in the right direction – so it’s important to maintain and communicate a clear and effective strategy. While a great culture might allow us to go fast, it’s no good going fast in the wrong direction. 

In a high performing organisation, everyone should know, near-instinctively, what the most important thing is at any time – and if they don’t, then they should know how to find out quickly. If everyone’s actions align with the strategy of the organisation, and the strategy is good, you’re lined up well for success.

When toxic cultures succeed

Sometimes an organisation’s business model – their mission and strategy – is so good that it means they can be successful even when their culture is really poor. I’ve worked with a number of businesses where this was the case. Bullying bosses, micromanagement, and poor execution were all real problems, but as the business model was so good, they were successful despite the poor culture, not because of it.

I’ve never, as yet, found a business that was successful the other way around – i.e. with a great culture but poor business model and fuzzy strategy. Maybe these businesses exist, but I don’t think they do for very long. As Charity Majors says, “If people want to work at your company more than they want to use your product, that’s a bad sign.” 

One of the most challenging things about this is that organisations with toxic cultures succeed all the time. Lots of organisations with toxic cultures enjoy short term success. There are countless tech startups with terrible cultures who hit on a successful business model, receive lots of funding, and enjoy business growth and success. Their CEOs may even believe that their approach to culture is actually one of the reasons for that success. 

Success hides failure, and in general, leaders of these dysfunctional but successful organisations believe that they’re successful because of how they’re leading, rather than despite it. The organisation would undoubtedly perform better in the long term if they had a better, safer, more inclusive and psychologically safe culture, but often it’s only the short term results that get attention by owners, shareholders and investors. More than that, we may not even get to see the long term results due to acquisitions and mergers. Short term success pays the bills, but it’s long term success that endures – and success in the long term absolutely requires psychological safety. People can only endure a toxic culture for so long.

If you want psychological safety, accountability is part of the deal.

We can’t afford to make bad business decisions simply because we want to keep everyone happy. Some decisions and actions that we must take in organisations will suck. We may have to let go of people, can projects, or even lose whole teams and departments. These things will not feel good. But psychological safety and accountability, high standards of professionalism and expertise, and a strong desire to succeed all go hand in hand. Indeed, for psychological safety to be truly high, we also require the people around us to possess a high level of commitment and a desire to do amazing things. We must hold ourselves, and each other, accountable for maintaining high standards of work, behaviour and decision making.

A great culture includes psychological safety. It also means being able to make hard decisions, and it means that when faced with those hard decisions, people in the organisation will make a decision that’s best for the organisation – not necessarily the one that feels nice or easy. 

It’s not culture or success.

It might sound like I’m saying that psychological safety and culture doesn’t matter – that we can get results quickly without it, so why bother? But what I’m saying is that it matters more than ever. We can achieve even better short term results with psychological safety than without it, and it’s the only way to truly succeed in the long term. Psychological safety is also a moral imperative.

Culture and execution is not either/or. Too many leaders discard efforts to build a positive culture as soon as the going gets tough or a crisis hits, and organisational values can sometimes go out of the window when it’s time to make hard decisions. But that’s exactly when we need to double down our efforts and our commitment to having a great culture, because that’s when people will be feeling most under threat and when the pressures on a great culture and practice become most intense. 

Leaders who care about psychological safety, dignity, respect, inclusion and equity have a responsibility to succeed in practice. We need to prove to the world that psychological safety works in practice. The world is changed by our example, not our opinion.

Further reading

Google’s Project Aristotle
Benefits of Psychological Safety
Can a team be “too psychologically safe”?
Paul O’Neill: A Psychological Safety Success Story
OODA Loops
Westrum’s Organisational Culture
Bad Management
Power and Mary Parker Follett
Chernobyl: Safety Cultures and Secrecy
Resilience Engineering

Practical Psychological Safety in Education

As well as Delivering Effective Feedback and our core workshops focussed on psychological safety, we have two new online workshops on psychological safety in education available to book now!

Psychological safety is fundamental in creating healthy, inclusive and successful learning environments for students, teachers, educators and leaders alike. In these workshops, we delve into the practices and activities that foster psychological safety in the classroom and staffroom. Full of practical tools, strategies and approaches, you’ll leave with lots of ideas about what to try next to establish and build psychological safety in your educational spaces. 

You can attend only the workshop that is most relevant to your context, or book both. Each is designed to be accessible as a standalone workshop, but they do complement and build on each other. By booking both workshops, you will receive a 10% discount. 

These Psychological Safety in Education workshops are relevant to those working with students of all ages and stages, from pre-school to Higher Education, work and training. Find out more at psychsafety.com

All attendees receive a Credly Badge, a certificate of completion to confirm attendance, further reading, materials and resources used in the session, a copy of the Psychological Safety Action Pack and a licence to use it in your organisation, access to a private alumni group, and some swag! Book here!

Psychological Safety in Practice

James Earl Jones

The incredible James Earl Jones died this week at the age of 93. Given that he was known for his incredible voice (of Darth Vader, Mufasa and others), many might find it surprising that he had a stutter, and was mute for much of his childhood. Poetry enabled Jones to overcome his stutter, when he found (like so many stutterers. including me) that rhythm helps us smooth out our speech so that we can avoid the staccato hurdles of hard phonemes. The slow, stentorian, imposing voice Jones is so famous for is due to, not in spite of, his struggles with stuttering.

Job titles and power gradients

Dixons Academies Trust (a not-for-profit company that runs 17 UK schools) has dispensed with senior job titles such as CEO, in order to “avoid top-down control”, instead using terms such as “school and college trust leaders”. They also recently got rid of appraisals, and introduced a nine-day fortnight working pattern for teachers. Power gradients are one of the most harmful factors in reducing psychological safety, and I think this approach to reducing the power gradient in organisations has great potential. Certain domains (healthcare and academia are two notable examples) suffer significant issues in culture, communication, and psychological safety that are exacerbated by job titles that unnecessarily increase the perceived power distance between people.

Taming Prometheus

This is a bit of a modern classic in safety culture papers: Susan Silbey’s “Taming Prometheus”.  Silbey compares our efforts to manage or reduce the risks that come with advanced technologies and processes, whilst leveraging the advantages and efficiencies that they can provide, to the myth of Prometheus. Prometheus stole fire from the gods – an act that represents both the advancement of knowledge and the potential dangers that progress brings.

The paper addresses the complexity of what is generally termed “safety culture” and reflects on a number of key points, in particular the three main views of culture in this context: (1) as a causal attitude, (2) as an engineered organisational structure, and (3) as an emergent and indeterminate phenomenon. Specifically, Silbey describes culture as

“an indissoluble dialectic of system and practice, as both the product and context of social action.”

Silbey examines our tendency to attribute the cause of accidents to individual behaviours and errors, ignoring the issues inherent in the system in which those individuals work. She highlights the problem of defining safety as an individual responsibility and builds on Diane Vaughan’s concept of the “dark side of organisations”, alongside the importance of power, group interests, conflict and inequality. She also critiques the way in which organisations are oriented by financial goals rather than human interests.

Absolutely essential reading for anyone diving into a topic as complex as culture and safety in organisations!

Freddie Flintoff crash

Chris Harris, who stars in UK TV show “Top Gear” has claimed that he warned BBC bosses about safety failings on the show ahead of Freddie Flintoff’s crash in 2022. As we’ve seen all too often, factors such as production pressure and (what appears to be a) normalisation of deviance in respect to safety protocols, led ultimately to a preventable accident.