You cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs. Things will go wrong, people will make mistakes and plans will need to be adjusted. Companies can choose how to deal with this. At the one far end of the spectrum are organisations that regard mistakes and missed targets as failing. They will hold people accountable for what happened (‘who did it’). Let’s call that the Fear Factory. At the other far end we see organisations that are focused on learning and improving the business as a whole (‘what happened’): the Learning League.
In the Fear Factory, people are primarily focused on themselves and their personal KPIs. They will want to make sure to not attract negative attention and thus avoid expressing deviating ideas, asking ‘stupid questions’, or questioning the status quo. They will play it safe and, if things do go wrong, they will try to keep this to themselves, to avoid adverse consequences. Fear, a dominant factor in this working atmosphere, stands in the way of creativity, innovation and the general well-being of people.
A prerequisite for the Learning League is psychological safety. Amy Edmondson, renowned for her important work in this area, defined this as the absence of interpersonal fear. When embedded in a high performance culture, an environment like this will always come out on top. Why? The people working there will, as a collective, keep their eye on the prize: the best outcome for the business, where the overall results outweigh the achievements and reputation of individuals. To do this, people will focus on identifying, sharing and learning from mistakes, inefficiencies and other imperfections. The reason is that the Learning League embraces the fact that there will always be suboptimal situations and circumstances and that these affect the outcome of the business. As a result, to stay ahead, these should be brought to the surface, alongside constructive criticism, alternative routes and all other ideas and initiatives that can help the business develop. Psychological safety allows people to make this happen.
Imperfections also include unwanted, unfitting and inappropriate behaviour. Not calling out such behaviour, when and where it is displayed, can undermine the results and reputation of the business and harm its people. Correcting this behaviour at the outset, prevents it from corroding the collective sense of psychological safety and developing into a toxic culture and fear with disastrous consequences (and liabilities) as a result.