Vertical and horizontal psychological safety

Psychological safety means feeling safe (note: not necessarily comfortable) to take interpersonal risks. To foster it, we need to consider the dynamics of both the transmission and reception of information – whether that’s an idea, a mistake, a problem to address, or an opportunity for collective learning.

And if psychological safety pertains to the flow of information, it can be useful to describe the direction of that flow. When information moves between peers in a group, we can think of it as horizontal psychological safety. When it moves up or down a hierarchy,  for example between a team member and their manager, we can think of it as vertical psychological safety.

In a typical modern, corporate, Western organisation, the organisational chart is usually constructed with the senior leadership at the top and people at the front line (or the sharp end) towards the bottom. Most of the time when we’re thinking about how psychologically safe people feel, we’re regarding either interactions between peers, where the information flow is horizontal, or those between a team member and their manager, in which case the information flow is vertical. Of course information may flow in infinite other directions too, but for now, let’s see what use this distinction lends us. 

The majority of psychological safety discourse and research regards horizontal psychological safety: the flow of information between members of a neat, well-defined team. Hence why most “diagnostic” tools ask primarily about the safety of the team(s) that one works in. But information also flows upward and downward in an organisation, via management reporting paths and command lines, and this is what we at psychsafety.com refer to as “vertical” psychological safety. After all, most organisational dysfunction occurs not within teams, but between them.

This simplistic binary framing of a complex phenomenon will no doubt rankle some – it bothers me too – but it is useful because the dynamics of vertical and horizontal information flow are very different. Generally, when communicating with our teammates, there isn’t such a pronounced power gradient. However, when we’re communicating upwards in an organisation, perhaps sharing a concern with our manager, we are addressing someone with greater formal and hierarchical status-based power than we possess, and therefore we’re having to speak up against a power gradient.

And when information needs to flow between multiple layers of an organisational hierarchy, it’s having to traverse a power gradient every time it’s passed on. Few of us enjoy giving our boss bad news, and often we’ll mitigate or soften our language when we do so, even unconsciously. We might try to downplay a problem slightly, couch it with caveats, or sandwich it with good news. This is true at any and all layers of an organisation, and every time it happens, we lose some of the integrity of the message. The steeper the power gradients, the more layers the information has to pass through, and the lower the vertical psychological safety, the more that message is attenuated during its journey.

Greenwashing and The Watermelon Effect

So as information traverses an organisational hierarchy, particularly a steep and/or many layered one, it gets diluted and distorted. The classic example of this is “greenwashing”, sometimes called the “watermelon effect,” because what appears green on the outside is actually red on the inside. 

If you’re familiar with RAG charts used in project and programme management, you may have experienced it yourself. In RAG project reports, deliverables that are safely complete, or expected to be, are coloured in green, those at risk are amber, and those already failing, overdue or over budget, are coloured red. Sometimes these are called traffic light charts.

When these charts are created at a ground level, they’re largely correct (well, -ish). But each time they pass through a management layer – perhaps shared initially with the team lead, then they share it with the project manager, who passes it to the programme manager, then the director and so on – the colours may well be tweaked in order to avoid the judging, disappointed visage of our boss. An amber gets turned green because we believe we can get in front of it next week. And a red is turned to an amber because we’re sure we can fix it. When this happens over just a few layers, before we know it, a RAG chart that was awfully red at the sharp end, looks rather more green by the time it gets to senior leadership at the blunt end.

And with or without actual colour-changing RAG charts, there are many examples of this phenomenon in reality, where bad news at the sharp end is gradually softened and diluted as it travels upwards, until it reaches the most senior leaders and doesn’t look so bad after all.  

For example, when engineers at NASA raised concerns about the safety of the Challenger’s O-rings, their warnings were diluted and filtered through layers of management until decision-makers believed the risk was acceptable. Similarly, during the Volkswagen emissions scandal, technical teams knew that diesel tests were being manipulated, but information was suppressed and reframed as it travelled upward through the hierarchy. There are suggestions that by the time it reached senior executives, the full scale of the issue was obscured behind layers of attenuated reporting and fear-based silence.

Sometimes the effect isn’t about a scandal or disaster, but can still have consequences on business performance. At Ford, before Alan Mulally’s leadership, managers often hesitated to report problems for fear of being blamed or judged. When Mulally became CEO in 2006, in their update meetings, every chart was colored green, a curious thing for a business losing $17 billion. He created weekly “Business Plan Review” meetings where leaders were encouraged to flag red items without fear of punishment. When Mark Fields finally showed a red, Mulally thanked him and asked how the team could help. That began shifting Ford’s culture toward openness and candour, which is credited as central to Ford’s turnaround and survival during the 2008 financial crisis.

So what can we do about it? 

There are two primary mitigations for this loss of truth as information travels upwards:

1. We can work on improving the degree of psychological safety felt by middle managers when communicating “up the chain”. Make it clear that we’d rather hear the challenging truth than a comforting work of fiction.
2. We can reduce the number of layers that information must traverse in order to reach senior leadership. Simplifying reporting chains or creating more direct communication channels from frontline staff to senior leaders can help improve the flow of information.

Fundamentally, we should remember that horizontal and vertical psychological safety are different dynamics, and require different interventions. It’s no good creating loads of high performing bubbles of teams in an organisation if news can’t effectively travel “upwards”. Adopting either, and ideally both, of these vertical strategies will improve the clarity and accuracy of information reaching senior leadership. 

Further reading:

• The First Org Chart: https://psychsafety.com/the-first-organisational-chart/
• Reducing Power Gradients: https://psychsafety.com/reducing-power-gradients/
• Organisational Fabric: https://psychsafety.com/the-organisational-fabric-of-psychological-safety/
• Lunenburg, F.C., 2012. Organizational structure: Mintzberg’s framework. International journal of scholarly, academic, intellectual diversity, 14(1), pp.1-8.
• Keeling, R.P., Underhile, R. and Wall, A.F., 2007. Horizontal and vertical structures: The dynamics of organization in higher education. Liberal Education, 93(4), pp.22-31.
• Edmondson and Roloff, 2015. Leveraging Diversity Through Psychological Safety. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/afriberg/files/leveraging_diversity_through_psychological_safety_hbs_article.pdf 
• Edmondson, Amy C. Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy. Jossey-Bass, 2012. 
• Kim, S., Lee, H. and Connerton, T.P., 2020. How psychological safety affects team performance: mediating role of efficacy and learning behavior. Frontiers in psychology, 11, p.1581.
• https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01581/full