I can choose how I respond to situations. I can choose what activities I engage in. I can choose not to expect the world around me change (this is hard!).
I can meet the world that is.
All of the mental work above makes for a healthier relationship to the holiday season for me!
I’ve been enjoying our family’s advent calendar tradition, where we count down to Christmas by doing a different activity every day.
It might be reading a Christmas book 📕, doing a holiday-themed puzzle 🧩, or decorating the tree 🎄 with homemade hot chocolate 🍫. This weekend we did a Christmas light walk through a neighborhood with friends.
We often get behind! We inevitably run out of time in a day and can’t always do the thing we set out to do.
While that could cause stress, the whole family is pretty good with choosing to roll with things.
If we don't do the daily thing, we keep the physical paper with the name of the incomplete activity out in the open and just get to it when we can.
For example, we couldn’t get our tree the first night and had to wait almost a week before we could try again!
In another example, I forgot to buy the puzzle in time, and it didn’t get here until almost 10PM the night we were supposed to do it.
How are your holiday traditions going? Has the stress been manageable for you? Importantly, are you having fun? 😁
You must practice and develop your boldness. You will often find uses for it. The best place to begin is often the delicate world of negotiation, particularly those discussions in which you are asked to set your own price. How often we put ourselves down by asking for too little.
— Robert Greene in "The 48 Laws of Power"
Three Things
1 - 🥬 Tomorrow Fridge - Who wants some innovation in your fridge? I do! Especially since Tomorrow's goal is to reduce food waste; I’ve definitely thrown out way too much produce. Details are light, but the 90-second video helps convey their intent. This is a teaser to sign up to be the first to hear about it in the future. I’m interested!
3 - 🍽️ Leadership Lessons from Kitchen Nightmares - I’ve never seen a Gordon Ramsey show before, but the ever-prescient YouTube algorithm served me up an episode, and I was fascinated. Gordon can certainly be abrasive, but he’s also right most of the time. He operates with urgency, sees reality, and gets shit done. He can break people down, but he also shows appreciation and care. You’ll see a lot of drama triangle and ego present in the people he’s working with.
Deep Dive on Contributor Safety
Do you want to know why I first got interested in Psychological Safety?
I had an employee say they didn’t have any, and I didn’t know what it meant.
I mean, I know what the terms “psychological” and “safety” meant independently, but I had no real sense of what capital P and capital S Psychological Safety meant.
Because of that, I did not know what I was doing to negatively influence Psychological Safety, or what role I could play in increasing it.
What did I learn when I started reading? That when people use the term psychological safety, it isn’t usually the same as Psychological Safety!
I hate to say it, but when a person comments on a lack of psychological safety, what they often mean is: “I don’t like that there were consequences for something I did.”
Working in a psychologically safe environment does not mean that people always agree with one another for the sake of being nice. It also does not mean that people offer unequivocal praise or unconditional support for everything you have to say.
Psychological Safety has accountability and consequences! The existence of a consequence does not mean Psychological Safety is absent.
There’s nuance here, and neither the employee nor leader is to blame when someone expresses a lack of psychological safety; each party just needs to take 100% responsibility for their role.
Employees AND leaders both have responsibility in Psychological Safety!
If someone says they don’t have psychological safety, it’s just a clue to dive in and see what’s going on and help all parties see their contribution and what they can do to improve outcomes.
Let’s dive into the third stage of psychological safety - Contributor Safety - and learn what it is, how to foster it, and what everyone’s role is!
I covered Inclusion Safety and Learner Safety in prior newsletters. After today we’ll just have one more stage remaining!
Contributor Safety is “Getting in the Game”
Using a sports analogy for understanding the stages of psychological safety: - Inclusion safety is where the team accepts you. - Learner safety is when you’re practicing hard. - Contributor safety is where you get in the game.
She's ready to get in the game!
If you think about any professional sports team, getting on the field is not a right, it’s a privilege.
You sit on the bench until you demonstrate your ability to deliver value for the team. If you start under-performing, you go back on the bench.
The same is true for contributor safety. It’s an earned privilege that an employee earns by demonstrating performance. As a privilege, it can be taken away.
“Crossing over to contributor safety is the signal that it’s go time, that the team is trusting you to perform in the role it has given you. The organization is expecting you to carry your load and perform competently.”
We learned in Learner Safety that employees owe the act of learning and developing. In Contributor Safety they’ve got even more responsibility; consistent application of skill that demonstrates performance.
It’s not just a given skill that’s the pre-requisite for earning contributor safety. You must also be accountable.
“When you’re competent and willing to hold yourself accountable, you’re ready to receive contributor safety.”
Accountability is critical because it’s about closing the loop on work, and doing so yourself. Having someone chase you for your work isn’t consistent with the idea of performance. Reliability matters.
Earning contributor safety can - and often should - be given in stages, not as a binary. You wouldn’t want your airplane pilot to be someone who just finished school yesterday! You want them to have gotten experience in simulators, smaller planes, as a copilot, etc., before taking your family across the country.
"Wait, which one of these turns on the engine?"
In business you can give contributor safety in increasing levels from tasks, to processes, and finally to outcomes.
“Tasks” is being in charge of a single thing.
“Processes” is being in charge of a collection of inter-connected things.
“Outcomes” is the freedom to drive toward a stated outcome.
Outcome is where you get the ultimate freedom. How you achieve the outcome is now for you to decide.
As employees demonstrate capability at one level, Contributor Safety can be granted at the next level. If the capability isn’t sustained, the employee might go back down to Learner Safety where they further practice the relevant skills before being sent into the game again.
One last note here: As a leader you might be reading this and be thinking of your team, but don’t forget that you’re an employee, too! Your boss is assessing your continued ability to deliver value as well. They are granting you contributor safety based on consistent demonstration of skill that adds value to the organization.
Connection to External Enemy
In “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety” they introduce the concepts of Defensive Innovation and Offensive Innovation.
Defensive innovation is the reactive kind. A competitor does something and now your team has to respond.
At the Contributor Safety level, employees don’t yet have the safety to proactively go on the offensive to innovate. In a sense the external enemy gives a little bit of “cover” for employees to challenge how things are done.
It requires less vulnerability to respond to an external enemy than it does to challenge the status quo when things seem to be going fine.
Given this, there are two implications: 1 - It’s important to have an external enemy because it galvanizes the team. 2 - If you don’t have contributor safety, your team cannot respond well to external challenges. You don’t get innovation without safety.
Artist's rendering of your competition outside the gates.
Leader’s Role
Alright leaders, you’re not off the hook here. You have a lot of responsibility in Contributor Safety!
Know when to put someone in the game If a coach of a sports team put a group under-performers out on the field, how do you think it would go if they said, “We lost because the players sucked”?
They’d be lambasted. “You’re the one who put them on the field!” is what people would say.
The same is true in business. Leaders are assessed on the performance of the people reporting to them. If you put someone in the game and they don’t perform, that’s on you.
You can’t play it safe by keeping everyone off the field. There’s still work to do! You’ll become a bottleneck. Nothing will get done. High-performers will leave.
This is your incentive to get good at people assessments and adjustments. Learn from every experience and get good at knowing when to put someone in the game.
Don’t lead by fear A central principle of psychological safety is to increase intellectual friction and decrease social friction. Fear is a social emotion, so if you’re leading by fear, you won’t get any safety.
Fear will shut down innovation. From there it’s a matter of when, not if, things go to zero.
A toxic environment shuts down performance because people worry about psychological safety before they worry about performance.
Learn emotional intelligence If you have low emotional intelligence, you’ll have a very hard time with this. Your ego will be at the forefront, and you’ll feel so threatened that you’ll revoke Contributor Safety for all the wrong reasons!
It’ll be because of your arrogance, bias, insecurity, insensitivity, and lack of empathy - not because your employees lacked consistent demonstration of skill.
“If your style is heavy-handed, your communication didactic, and your ego fragile, you will scorch any seedling of contributor safety that’s beginning to shoot up.”
Understand your team Like snowflakes, every human is built differently. What feels safe for one person might feel unsafe for another. You can’t pick one way to be and assume it’ll work for everyone.
Leaders are in the people business, so you have to get to know and understand your team. Build your awareness of others. What do they need? What doesn’t work well?
Get good at the dance Psychological Safety isn’t a certification that you earn, hang on the wall, and never have to worry about again.
You encourage it it or detract from it in every interaction. Make sure you stay on top of all the normal things - eat well, get sleep, exercise - and then come to work ready to learn the nuance of how to keep driving safety up.
Building safety isn’t the kind of skill you can learn in a robotic, paint-by-numbers sort of way. It’s a fluid, improvisational skill—sort of like learning to pass a soccer ball to a teammate during a game. It requires you to recognize patterns, react quickly, and deliver the right signal at the right time. And like any skill, it comes with a learning curve.
Bad news, lady! That psychological safety cert doesn't mean you're done.
As we get to the higher levels of Psychological Safety, it requires greater and greater skill on the leader. And we’re not done yet; we still have Challenger Safety to go explore!
Thankfully, that’s what makes this fun. 😁 There’s a lifetime of learning in being an effective leader, and greater outcomes available to you as you master them.
Call to Action
Do an assessment at work this week. Are people in the game? Are they skilled enough to be in the game? Are you leading with fear? How well do you understand your team?
Once you have an assessment you’ll know what gaps exist. From there you can devise strategies to address them. It all starts with you!
If you’ve got an interesting or nuanced case and want someone to talk about it with, just let me know. Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz and let me know what you’re dealing with.
