From Adam Grant’s “Think Again”
What is Psychological Safety?
- It’s fostering a climate of respect, trust, and openness in which people can raise concerns and suggestions without fear of reprisal. It’s the foundation of a learning culture.” (p. 209)
- “When I was involved in a study at Google to identify the factors that distinguish teams with high performance and well-being, the most important differentiator wasn’t who was on the team or even how meaningful their work was. What mattered most was psychological safety.” (p. 209)
Why Are People Afraid to Speak up to their Boss?
- “They fear their expertise will be questioned in a way that’s embarrassing to them. It’s that basic fear of looking like a fool, asking questions that people just dismiss, or being told you don’t know what you’re talking about.” (p. 210)
- “In performance cultures, the emphasis on results often undermines psychological safety. When we see people get punished for failures and mistakes, we become worried about proving our competence and protecting our careers.” (p. 209)
- “We learn to engage in self-limiting behavior, biting our tongues rather than voicing questions and concerns. Sometimes that’s due to power distance: we’re afraid of challenging the big boss at the top. The pressure to conform to authority is real, and those who dare to deviate run the risk of backlash.” (p. 209)
- “A lack of psychological safety was a persistent problem at NASA. Before the Challenger launch, some engineers did raise red flags but were silenced by managers; others were ignored and ended up silencing themselves.” (p. 210)
How Can You Build Psychological Safety?
- “The standard advice for managers on building psychological safety is to model openness and inclusiveness. Ask for feedback on how you can improve, and people will feel safe to take risks.” (p. 212)
- “Instead of asking them to seek feedback, we had randomly assigned those managers to share their past experiences with receiving feedback and their future development goals. We advised them to tell their teams about a time when they benefited from constructive criticism and to identify the areas that they were working to improve now. By admitting some of their imperfections out loud, managers demonstrated that they could take it—and made a public commitment to remain open to feedback.” (p. 213)
- “At the Gates Foundation, I wanted to go a step further. Instead of just having managers open up with their own teams about how they had previously been criticized, I wondered what would happen if senior leaders shared their experiences across the entire organization.” (p. 214)
- To help get students to open up, Adam Grant created a “Mean Tweets” for Professors. “Our version was Mean Reviews, where faculty members read harsh comments from student course evaluations.” (p. 214)
- Melinda Gates – “she challenged the entire executive leadership team to participate and volunteered to be the first to take the hot seat. Her team compiled criticisms from staff surveys, printed them on note cards, and had her react in real time in front of a camera. She read one employee’s complaint that she was like Mary F***ing Poppins—the first time anyone could remember hearing Melinda curse—and explained how she was working on making her imperfections more visible.” (p. 214)
- “”It takes confident humility to admit that we’re a work in progress. It shows that we care more about improving ourselves than proving ourselves.” (p. 215)
What Questions Should You Ask?
- “What leads you to that assumption?”
- “Why do you think it is correct?”
- “What might happen if it’s wrong?”
- “What are the uncertainties in your analysis?”
- “I understand the advantages of your recommendation. What are the disadvantages?” (p. 211)
- “How do you know? It’s a question we need to ask more often, both of ourselves and of others. The power lies in its frankness. It’s nonjudgmental—a straightforward expression of doubt and curiosity that doesn’t put people on the defensive.” (p. 211)
Teams Need to Have Process Accountability.
- “we can create process accountability by evaluating how carefully different options are considered as people make decisions.” (p. 217)
- “A bad decision process is based on shallow thinking. A good process is grounded in deep thinking and rethinking, enabling people to form and express independent opinions.” (p.217)
- “Research shows that when we have to explain the procedures behind our decisions in real time, we think more critically and process the possibilities more thoroughly.” (p. 217)
- “One of the most effective steps toward process accountability that I’ve seen is at Amazon, where important decisions aren’t made based on simple PowerPoint presentations. They’re informed by a six-page memo that lays out a problem, the different approaches that have been considered in the past, and how the proposed solutions serve the customer. Long before the results of the decision are known, the quality of the process can be evaluated based on the rigor and creativity of the author’s thinking in the memo and in the thoroughness of the discussion that ensues in the meeting.” (p. 218)
- “Even if the outcome of a decision is positive, it doesn’t necessarily qualify as a success. If the process was shallow, you were lucky. If the decision process was deep, you can count it as an improvement: you’ve discovered a better practice. If the outcome is negative, it’s a failure only if the decision process was shallow.” (p. 219)