Successful leaders create a safe environment where it’s okay for people to come forward and voice uncomfortable opinions. Organizations with a fear-based culture have leaders who model behavior that indicates it’s not okay to bring forward unpopular ideas.
I was consulting for an organization once and noticed they were exposed to physical and psychological safety risks they weren’t seeing. When I brought them up, the executive in charge immediately launched into explaining why there was no issue. I was surprised by the response, especially considering they talked every day about how important safety was, whether physical or psychological.
The behavior they were demonstrating was the manifestation of their underlying beliefs. Although they weren’t using the words, they were communicating their rules that: 1) it wasn’t okay to bring unpopular observations forward; 2) it was not okay to disagree with someone in power; 3) anything less than perfection in their functional area would not be tolerated; and 4) it was okay to use psychological coercion to make issues go away. This behavior creates a culture of fear, regardless of the daily rhetoric. If I was seeing this, then certainly, that same behavior was being modeled to others, creating an unsafe environment and supporting my original observations that led me to speak up in the first place! So, I knew I was on the right track.
To contrast, if their response had been to get curious and ask questions about the observable examples I had provided, it would have communicated different intentions, like 1) it was safe to come forward with something that might be uncomfortable; 2) that progress, not perfection, was the goal; 3) that they were more concerned about the organization’s performance and safety than their own image as a leader; 4) that it was okay to take risks. These are the moments when leaders set the unwritten rules of an organization… the culture.
We can look at case studies like what Satya Nadella has done at Microsoft since taking the helm in 2014, Anglo American’s changes in their South African platinum mining operation, and Pixar’s braintrust to see the fruitful return on investment of effective leadership and setting productive rules of engagement. Unfortunately, we need only look to examples like the Boeing 737 Max disaster, the Challenger disaster, and the fact that the equivalent of a full 737 crashes every day in the United States due to preventable medical issues to see the results produced by unsafe organizational environments.
So, what can you do in those critical moments when someone is bringing up something with which you’re uncomfortable? Here are three things: 1) use active listening; 2) ask questions to gather more information; 3) ask them to share examples of what they’re observing that is leading them to speak up.
The next time someone brings forward something with which you’re uncomfortable, get curious. I guarantee that you’ll create a high-performance environment where your team feels safe to take risks and speak up. They’ll help you identify and manage more risk and get ahead of issues before they become costly to react to, both reputationally and financially.