Speaking Up at Work

Psychological Safety: Speaking Up at Work

Imagine an objectively psychologically safe workplace environment. People are praised, rewarded, and incentivised to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes. The whole culture is geared towards an environment that isn’t just safe to speak up, it’s actually rewarded, praised, and expected.

Sounds great. Now, imagine that the particular method for speaking up in this culture is that you are expected to do without hesitation or repetition, with no “um’s” or “ah’s”. You’re also expected to stand on stage whilst doing so, in order that everyone can see and hear you clearly. You must also be completely naked.

Not only are you being asked to do something incredibly difficult, maybe near-impossible for most people, but in a way that is so far out of your comfort zone that you’d rather do almost anything else besides it.

In some team environments, this is exactly what it can feel like for some group members. We may have an objectively psychologically safe environment, but for some people on the team, speaking up in the way that the team deems “normal” might be as scary and as far outside their comfort zone as we would feel getting up on stage without any clothes on. 

We all have different preferences for how we communicate and speak up. We may prefer (or need) to speak in a different language to the majority language for the group. We may prefer written formats that we can edit and refine before giving them to others to read. We may use sign language, or we may um, ah, stutter or tic. And we have our own accents, vernacular, and cultural language too. It’s one thing to believe that it is safe to speak up and another thing to possess the capability and the tools to do so that are deemed “normal” by the group.

Speaking up in the workplace

Let’s make sure that we’re not asking people to get up on stage naked. For some people, that might be simply talking aloud in a meeting. We should make it safe to not simply speak up, but speak up in the way that feels right for each person: make it safe to stutter, um and ah, use different languages, vernaculars, and formats. This may be particularly true for neurodiverse folks and minoritised groups, and the conversations that facilitate this communication will make it better for everyone. 

Of course, we can’t disregard the needs of the recipients. It’s no good writing an email to someone who can’t read, or speaking English to someone who won’t understand it. We must work together to find common, agreed, and workable communication practices that work for everyone. For example, if our personal communication style feels terribly abrupt and harsh to the recipient, we should do what we can to soften it, so that it’s received in the way it’s intended. It’s great to make some effort to communicate in an appropriate way for the recipient; it’s not great to expect people to change who they are for the comfort of others.

Verbally speaking up at work

Establishing communication norms requires constant work, because our needs change over time as well. A good starting point is to begin working on personal user manuals and team charters, which help us have conversations about each group member’s needs and preferences, and agree as a group that we’ll never ask someone to get naked on stage.

Stephen Shedletzky’s book “Speak-Up Culture: When Leaders Truly Listen, People Step Up” is out in October this year, but you can place pre-orders now and be one of the first to get your hands on it! 
 

Psychological safety at work:

This is a fantastic piece by Amanda Draeger in “Cyber”, the magazine of the Military Cyber Professionals Association, called “The Autopilot Problem“. Amanda highlights that if we learn to use automated systems, we risk problems occurring when those systems fail or are not available, hence why the United States Naval Academy reintroduced celestial navigation as part of its curriculum.

In this piece, Amanda shows the impact of the 737 MAX MCAS system, which failed and caused two disasters though having “too much” control. This is in contrast to the TCAS (collision avoidance system) which, after a number of disasters, is now actually deemed to take precedence even over instructions from Air Traffic Controllers. 

In a world where technology is making decisions, workers need to have not only the psychological safety to speak up against their coworkers, but also to speak up against their technology. They need the ability to choose whether or not they will accept the decision a computer makes. In the famous words of a 1979 IBM slide, “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision”.


Psychological Safety is in the FT again! This time in a letter from Joe Faith, titled “What links Raab, Google and British Special Forces?“
 

Here’s a great piece in The Guardian, where Emma Beddington ponders whether “owning rejection is easier in the US, where there is at least a partial sense that failure is OK“, in the context of “rejection parties” where high school students celebrate with ice cream, college rejection letters. Thanks Amy Edmondson for signposting to it.

Here’s a powerful piece by Nate Shelev on LinkedIn about the impact that current events are having on trans people and their families, and how we cannot ignore it in the workplace: “These people, your teammates, cannot give 100% at work because 100% of their minds are focused on how they can exist.”

This is a good study by Adam Tasker, Julia Jones, and Simon Brake, looking at how effectively a Just Culture has been adopted in an NHS hospital trust in the Midlands, UK. The report shows evidence of a fair incident management process within the Trust; however, there was no agreed vision of a Just Culture and the majority of the staff were unfamiliar with the term. Negative perspectives relating to clinical incidents and their management persist among staff with many having insecurities regarding being the subject of an investigation and doubts about whether they drive improvement.
 

Psychological safety workshops:

Yesterday, I flew back from Seville and straight into delivering psychological safety workshops for a client in London. As usual, I had a great time, and all the attendees were awesome 🙂

We always end workshops with a retrospective exercise to examine what we learned, what we’ll do next, what we’d like to know more about, and what we’d improve. Here’s one of yesterday’s retros.

If you’re interested in workshops for your organisation, and learning about associated tools and practices, get in touch!
 

This week’s poem:

“A Fairy Song” by William Shakespeare, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough brier,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire!

I do wander everywhere,

Swifter than the moon’s sphere;

And I serve the Fairy Queen,

To dew her orbs upon the green;

The cowslips tall her pensioners be;

In their gold coats spots you see;

Those be rubies, fairy favours;

In those freckles live their savours;

I must go seek some dewdrops here,

And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.