Contributor Safety: Vulnerability, Trust and Accountability
Amy Edmonson, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of “The Fearless Organization” says that an organization that wishes to have a high-performance standard should cultivate high psychological safety.
In her book, she describes that a team works in a learning zone when an organization has a high level of psychological safety and accountability. This zone nurtures a high level of collaboration and learning. However, if performance standards are high, but psychological safety is low, then the organization gets into an anxiety zone. In this zone, a person may have good ideas but prefers not to present them.
Dr. Timothy Clark has a different way to describe psychological safety. He formulates different levels of maturity. He says that psychological safety is like the lubricating oil of human interaction in any social setting — to unleash the potential of individuals and organizations. It is a process of nurturing a climate to help people feel safe to express and make mistakes without being embarrassed, ridiculed, or punished in some way.
In his book, psychological safety has 4 stages: Inclusion safety, learner safety, contributor safety and challenger safety.
I wrote about achieving inclusion and learner safety environment. This will be a continuation on how to achieve contributor safety environment. Before delving deeper, I would like to revisit the red flags to observe when an organization is challenged by lack of psychological safety:
- reluctance to speak up,
- tiptoeing,
- reluctance to disagree,
- manager silenced dissent
- employee says different things behind managers’ backs than to their faces
- employee hide their mistakes to protect themselves
- employee bite their tongues and let their ideas fly
Awareness of these signs will help leaders to take a step to map the plan of achieving psychological safety in workplace.
Contributor safety is giving someone an authority to contribute. After knowing peoples’ interest and tested their capability, the person is now ready to take responsibilities. Autonomy with guidance in exchange for results, this is how Dr. Clark describes contributor safety. It is also a process of offering a mutual respect and understanding of the vulnerability of each member of the team. Trust — the ultimate currency in building a team, the lack of it is the base criteria of having a dysfunctional team, according to Patrick Lencioni.
“If you get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.” — Patrick Lencioni
Don’t assume that your team will offer help or contribute to the team automatically. To cultivate contributor safety, leaders may:
- create periodic touchpoints for people to give and listen to feedback
- explicitly, repeatedly ask them to bring to raise concerns in their assignments.
- taking the old-fashioned idea of a suggestion box or creating a channel where people can flag the threats and what’s broken.
- encourage people to bring bad news
Leaders must be very cautious in their reactions. People scan faces, voices, and micro emotions to know if it’s safe to contribute. Knowing how people will react is one of the key in building trust. Because you can’t trust someone whose behavior you cannot predict. When someone has that knowledge and has a trusting environment, they can foster a helping environment.
This doesn’t mean that leaders should sensor disappointments and frustrations in times of crisis. In fact, a manageable crisis can bind a team. It is an opportunity to be vulnerable together and cooperate. When a team can go through challenges together, they start to become more aware of how individual members reacts in stressful circumstances. It helps them identify the individual emotional triggers, thus they’re able to position themselves in a strategic manner when to avoid or push each other’s buttons.
You do not build trust in order to be vulnerable. When you’re vulnerable, it builds trust. Being vulnerable together builds closeness and creates it. — Dan Coyle
Psychological safety has to be coupled with accountability. Giving someone accountability means trusting them, it requires time and effort. Gradual accumulation of trust requires different levels of accountability. Dr. Clark describes these as:
- Level 1: Task
- Level 2: Process
- Level 3: Outcome
These levels define the allowable risk the management can give to a person. If he consistently manifests a good performance at a certain level, then the management can advance them to the next.
For example, when an employee demonstrated the capability to learn and do task-level assignments with acceptable results, then one can move to the next level. When that employee is willing to perform extra effort and can work with low supervision, then he can be qualified to be at the process-level assignments and eventually graduated to outcome-level accountability when he feels confident.
In the outcome-level accountability, the “how” he accomplished the problem don’t matter so much because it’s the outcome that counts. This is the transition from individual contributor to managerial role.
The best way to earn trust is to demonstrate trust. We need to be vulnerable; the higher the risk, the higher the return. The combination of vulnerability and accountability creates a culture where people take intelligent risks and nurtures high commitment to the common goal.
