Neil Baker Consulting and Coaching
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog

Normalize Human Messiness                                                     to Enhance Psychological Safety on Teams

3/22/2017

 
Video (5 min. 38 sec.)
Picture
References
  1. Edmondson, Amy C. Teaming Jossey-Bass 2012
  2. Salazar, Marco J Barzallo et al Influence of surgeon behavior on trainee willingness to speak up: a randomized controlled trial J Am Coll Surg 219: 1001 – 1009, 2014

Additional resources
  • Are you leading from reactivity or creativity?--four steps to see your blind spots
               Provides more details about indicators of "reactivity"--another term for "messiness."
  • A Key Barrier to Making Our Leadership Transformational
               Explains a method to reflect on personal behavior to identify our own messiness.
  • An Easily Missed Ingredient for High Team Performance
               Explains why team norms are so important and why it is so easy not to set them. 

Download pdf
(includes text of video)

Subscribe for free monthly articles and videos and links to tools for subscribers only. 
Subscribe for free

Text of video (4 - 5 min. reading time)
​Imagine someone has video-recorded you during every minute of your work the last week and you are now watching it. What are the odds that you will wince in some parts because of mistakes in the way you behaved or communicated?
If you guessed that the odds of seeing mistakes would be close to 100% then that puts you squarely within the range of normalcy for very successful leaders. I know I would cringe at parts of a video of me from last week. For example, I asked a coaching client a question and within seconds started answering it at length myself instead of carefully listening. I got caught up in my “great” ideas while my client went silent.  

I really don’t like such messiness in myself but there is no way around it--messiness is inevitable. Our brains are just hard-wired that way. Messy behaviors range from withdrawal into silence on one extreme to pushing our ideas on other people, judgment, or blame at the other extreme. While there are innumerable variations, all forms of messy behavior can diminish psychological safety on teams. 

Even small degrees of messiness may impact psychological safety
The presence of psychological safety means that people are able to speak up about uncertainty, concerns, disagreement, new ideas, and mistakes without being thought of badly. Psychological safety enhances creativity and quality of decision making because teams are able to elicit and explore a wide range of ideas and concerns without defensiveness. 

Even small degrees of messy communication can have a negative impact on psychological safety. This may be surprising especially for highly trained professionals. But, skills and experience do not eliminate our sensitivity to others. One example is that coaching client of mine, an experienced executive, who did not speak up when I started dominating the meeting. 

Another example is from members of a senior leadership team I worked with who had fear of bringing up concerns and risks about decisions being made. No one was ever overtly rebuked but alternative views were usually not invited and were not actively welcomed when someone did speak up.  

Research has similarly indicated that even minor differences in degrees of encouragement can inhibit speaking up. For example, indirectly or directly giving the message to “just do your job” versus explicitly welcoming input may lead to problems with innovation efforts and, in healthcare, unsafe conditions for patients. (1, 2) 
​
Five methods to normalize and stay vigilant about human messiness
All of this messy humanness holds teams back from reaching their full potential. Successful management of messiness involves normalizing it and staying vigilant for it. Here are five approaches. 
  1. Normalize human messiness with others by explicitly providing education about its inevitability and lack of correlation with bad intentions or poor skills. 
  2. Learn about your own human messiness by reflecting on your behavior each week. Regularly seeing and accepting it as normal will enhance empathy and compassion for yourself and others.
  3. Create team norms to make sure all viewpoints are welcomed and heard and to assure concerns and alternative views are always set on the table with decision making.
  4. Promote frequent feedback about how things are going relative to norms by shifting its purpose from “evaluation” or “correcting” to “helping everyone be at their best.”
  5. Take leadership by being the first to be vulnerable. Identify with others when you have fallen into human messiness. In particular, leaders with positional authority have an important and powerful impact by acknowledging their own mistakes. 

Enable everyone to be just human
With that coaching client I mentioned earlier, I was able to quickly recognize that I had been pushing my own ideas and apologized. We were able to backtrack and have him answer the question I had asked while I listened this time. This was far more helpful. While it does not happen very often with this client, when I do talk too much now we both can joke about it. 

Also, my openness about my own messiness has helped my client to be more forthcoming about his own mistakes at work. This has made coaching more productive. We have made it normal for each of us to be just human. 

Comments are closed.
    Blog
    Subscribe
    Subscribe to receive periodic free articles and tools for subscribers only. 

    Categories

    All
    Brain Science
    Decision Making
    Dialogue
    Engagement And Motivation
    Feedback
    Meetings
    Positive Psychology
    Power
    Practice Of Leadership
    Reactivity And Reflection
    Teams
    Tools
    Vision

    Archives

    March 2020
    February 2020
    November 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    October 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    October 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    March 2016
    November 2015
    August 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014


    Contact Neil

Copyright Neil Baker M.D., 2021 all rights reserved
Neil Baker Consulting and Coaching
State of Washington,
Photos used under Creative Commons from blondinrikard, bertknot, ymturner, jurvetson, HikingArtist.com