“Do you pay your employees to spend their days protecting themselves from each other?”
Anytime an employee feels emotionally unsafe, you’ve just cut their value by 75%. A timid person is an inefficient person.
One employee may feel unsafe under conditions that are, by anyone else’s standards, perfectly safe. Just like there’s no accounting for taste, there’s no specific list of situations that make people feel safe or unsafe. Safety is extremely subjective.
Understanding the Team Dynamic
Google spent a lot of time and money trying to understand teams and team dynamics. They got caught up in the biggest mistake you can make when dealing with human capital. Google was looking at people as though they could be fully defined by their resume of skills and abilities. As Google discovered, a person's skills and abilities say nothing about whether they will get along with others on the team. Instead, Google found that the most important factor in team efficiency was a feeling of psychological safety.
When employees don’t feel safe, they don’t:
- Speak up in meetings
- Take risks
- Support others fully
Instead, an employee who doesn’t feel safe spends the majority of their energy on self-protective acts. Do you want to pay your employees to spend their days protecting themselves from each other?
Fostering Emotional Safety
Here’s the challenge. There’s no short list of things you can do to make your employees feel safe because each person's need for safety will be triggered by a unique circumstance or set of circumstances. There’s simply no one size fits all approach here.
Except maybe this....
You can encourage your employees become experts at emotional intelligence. People with deep self-awareness are able to identify when they feel unsafe and they can navigate the situation to get to a place of safety quickly. Each person will have to learn how to do this for themselves.
You can hire a coach who specializes in team dynamics and emotional intelligence to help teach the skills your employees need. It’s possible to learn these skills quickly and permanently with the right training.
An Example - Executive Manager Inhibits Communication and Ideas
Roger is an executive with a small team devoted to R&D. His teammates began to fear talking to him about technical differences. The employees on his team were all brilliant scientists in their own right and everyone had a different perspective on the technical challenges they faced.
Roger had a tendency to get angry and demand that his team act respectfully toward him. This happened when the scientists on his team questioned his technical approach. Instead of having a lively technical discussion that hashed out the best approach possible, the team was succumbing to the boss’ way each time. No one felt comfortable fighting their boss.
Eventually, the CEO got involved. A few teammates had asked for guidance in dealing with Roger’s anger over technical differences. Emotional safety was a major issue in this situation. No one felt safe. Roger didn’t feel safe hearing his team’s counter opinions and the team didn’t feel safe sharing them.
Getting to the Heart of the Problem
A coach specializing in emotional intelligence was invited into the office and talked with Roger about the times that he didn’t feel safe. Each time his team questioned his technical approach he took it to mean that they were questioning his authority and his value as a leader. Roger was close to resigning. He felt like he was leading a bunch of insubordinate young rebels. He felt like a failure.
The coach helped Roger think back to other situations he experienced that reminding him of this current problem. Roger remembered his graduate school days. His PhD advisor had been very hard on him and his fellow students when they challenged the advisor's thinking. Roger went as far as calling his advisor an "aggressive egocentric." In spite of his advisor’s aggressive behavior, Roger admired him and his ability to do science.
The mystery was solved! Roger recognized that he learned that a “good leader” is one who aggressively demands that the team follow the leader's technical guidance. When Roger’s team challenged him, he began to fear that he was falling short in his leadership duties. After coaching, Roger saw the parallels between his behavior in the current situation and his advisor’s behavior years ago.
Changing Values
The coach asked Roger if he could see any downside to his advisor’s approach to leadership. Roger quickly volunteered that as a student he had some good ideas that went untested because his advisor wasn’t open to hearing them. He also talked about being afraid that his advisor would belittle him in public. Aha! The pathway to solving Roger’s problem became clear. Roger wanted to be a good leader, but he had learned that good leadership was about aggression and demands.
To help Roger be more open to his team’s ideas, the coach asked Roger to make a choice. Would he rather be known as an aggressive egocentric, or would he rather allow good ideas to be tested to find the best technical approach?
Roger thought for a moment and agreed that his job was to make sure that the team was using the best technical approach. He quickly realized where he’d gone wrong. He had latched onto using his advisor’s predominant trait of aggressiveness because he wanted to emulate his role model’s scientific success. He hadn’t realized that trait would have the opposite effect, basically limiting his employees’ willingness to take technical risks.
Expert Coaching + EI Training
A good EI coach will uncover the emotional hazards that exist. Initial conversations are most useful when the employees involved are willing to get upset and be forthcoming with their frustrations. Roger wasn’t holding back, but the rest of the team was hesitant to admit they were struggling. When the team approached the CEO with their concerns, they were able to unravel the problem using their professional EI coach as a guide.
Roger was able to make a conscious choice about how he wanted to lead. The coach was careful to help Roger make a connection between Roger’s emotional experience of fear, more specifically being worried he wasn’t a good leader, and his logical decision to allow for open communication on the team. Each time Roger worried about being a good leader, he could rest easy knowing that he was encouraging open communication on his team. A good coach will be able to foster a commitment to a new behavior so that the new behaviors are performed immediately without concern for a relapse into old behaviors.