Your Team Might Be Scared of Your Eyebrows 😳

We’ve reached the pinnacle of Psychological Safety. The fourth stage. The big dog. The seat of all innovation. Challenger Safety.

If you want to revisit the journey here, the previous stages are:
Inclusion Safety
Learner Safety
Contributor Safety

This is the stage where you break through the status quo. If you want to retain vibrancy, enhance agility, and remain competitive, this is the stage to seek.

To refresh your mind on the different stages and see where Challenger Safety sits:

• In inclusion, you’re asking to be included.
• In learner, you’re asking to be encouraged.
• In contributor, you’re asking for autonomy.
• In challenger, you’re challenging the status quo.

Today I’ll share the main tradeoff in Challenger Safety, how to create and sustain the conditions for it, and even how to grant safety to yourself!

Summary of Challenger Safety

• Challenger Safety empowers innovation by making it safe to challenge norms.
• Leaders must protect individuals who risk speaking up.
• Innovation is risky but critical. Leaders who create safety see more ideas, more action, and faster growth.

The Core Tradeoff: Candor for Cover

Challenging the status quo is quite risky.

Everything in an organization is built to sustain the status quo; it’s safe, predictable, and less likely to fail. Innovation happens only when someone is brave enough to challenge how things are done today.

But innovation requires failure, and failure is risky! If you want the candor that supports innovation, then you have to offer protection. People will speak more openly and take risks if they know they won’t be punished, mocked, or shamed for failures.

If the protection isn’t there, a rational person wouldn’t try.

If I told you there’s a 90% chance your idea won’t succeed, and there’s a 100% chance you’ll be rebuked, ridiculed, and retaliated against if you’re wrong, would you try?

Probably not.

But what if you knew you’d be protected, supported, and encouraged to learn from failure? Now, challenging the status quo becomes rational, and innovation is possible.

“…with challenger safety, the social exchange has now gone to another level: The team is asking you to challenge the status quo. That’s a mighty ask! Thus, the only reasonable condition is that the organization protect you in the process. If the organization wants candor, you need cover—you need real and sustained air cover to be brave enough to take what is almost always a substantial personal risk.”

— Timothy R. Clark in “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety”

Giving Challenger Safety to Yourself

As I was researching this topic for today’s newsletter, I couldn’t help but reflect on last week’s newsletter on failure, and my experience at the HumanX conference. The experience felt qualitatively different (and better!) than the conference I attended in 2023, and I think it’s because I’m giving better psychological safety to myself.

My ego / self has been like a bad boss in the past. It has definitely ridiculed me for failures!

It makes me less likely to innovate and try something new if I’m opening myself up to ridicule…from myself.

I was listening to a really old Tim Ferriss podcast with Tara Brach this morning and Tim said something like, “You have to be comfortable being yourself before you can be comfortable changing.” 🤔

“Being comfortable changing” is like challenging the status quo, which is the definition of Challenger Safety.

You’ve got to love and accept yourself in order for your Ego to become a good boss. It quiets negative self talk, which grants yourself Challenger Safety, which helps you take the next step in your transformation.

Psychological Safety may typically be related to team dynamics, but don’t neglect the relationship you have with yourself.

(for reading, there’s “Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It,” and Tara Brach’s own “Radical Acceptance”)

“As I started to love myself, things inside me shifted. Fear strengthens the ego. Love softens it. I became more open, vulnerable. It was natural to be gentle with others, even when they weren’t loving toward me.”

— Kamal Ravikant in “Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It”

The Personal Risk of Innovation

Innovation happens when ideas have sex; when people ask questions and openly share their thoughts with each other.

Asking questions is the beginning of personal risk. It’s where an individual is faced with a choice. To intervene and risk rejection, or leave things as they are, which stalls innovation.

How many problems do you think exist in your company that people see, but don’t act on? They’re filtering their opinions because they don’t have Challenger Safety. They deem it more risky to speak up than to remain silent.

If you want to kick start the process of innovation, you need to first start with making it safe to ask questions and explore. Going back to the tradeoff of “Candor for Cover” from earlier, you need people to ask questions without fear of ridicule.

Ridicule often isn’t dramatic. It hides in subtle eye rolls, casual dismissals, or silence after someone takes a risk. These small actions can be enough to stop innovation cold.

Even a subtle reaction, like your boss raising an eyebrow or pausing awkwardly, can signal danger. When your paycheck, promotions, or reputation feel threatened, candor evaporates. People quickly learn it’s safer to stay quiet.

“Have you cultivated a culture of inquiry that is hospitable to tough, uncomfortable questions, and do people really feel that? If you want a surge of ideas, you first need a surge of questions. If you want a surge of questions, you need to nurture the highest level of psychological safety based on the respect and permission that you give people.”

— Timothy R. Clark in “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety”

Earn Your Right to Challenge

This is such a critical point, and one that I see commonly ignored in discussions of Psychological Safety: Not everyone is granted Challenger Safety.

Just like in earlier stages of Psychological Safety (except inclusion, which everyone gets), this is an earned right. You’re granted Challenger Safety based on a track record of successful performance in the past.

You can’t change industries, walk into a new company on your first day, declare that everything they’re doing is wrong, and expect to be listened to.

That’s an extreme example, but the principle applies inside your existing team: Are you believable? Are you often correct? It doesn’t mean everything you do works (innovation requires failure), but your approaches are sound.

So if you feel like you don’t have Challenger Safety, it’s worthwhile to inquire into yourself. How is your track record of performance? How did you do with the autonomy granted in Contributor Safety?

Why it’s Hard

Challenger Safety is rewarding for all involved, but it’s difficult to achieve. If you don’t think it’s hard, how many companies are stuck doing things roughly the same way they’ve done it for years?

I see these main contributors to the difficulty:

It’s an Unnatural State
As we learned in metacognition, our brains are lazy, energy-conserving objects. While brains can adapt, they default to their current state. Teams are the same way; they can change, but it’s significantly easier to keep things the same.

Your People Have Been Hurt Before
I’d be willing to bet that everyone reading this, and all of your employees, have been subject to ridicule for trying something new. That scar tissue exists and causes them to filter themselves in new situations. You may be a baller boss, someone doing all the right things, but anyone who’s been burned before is going to be cautious.

It Requires High EQ in the Leader
Each of your employees is different, so as a leader you can’t just have one way of speaking, one way of being, and assume it’ll work for everyone. You’ll have to monitor each person and each team for their sensation of safety, and know to incrementally build it up. You’ve got to be a student of people.

Stairs Up, Elevator Down
Challenger Safety is built up in increments, brick by brick, but it is lost in an instant. You can do everything right as a leader, but then one day you scoff, or tease, or otherwise remove safety, and you’ve set yourself back a year.

Other People are a Factor
You don’t exist in a vacuum. Companies are made up of many people. And while you might have the largest impact on safety as a leader, other people are a factor as well. If the person’s peers ridicule, or there’s a mean comment on a public page, those events detract from a person’s sense of Challenger Safety.

Just because Challenger Safety is hard, doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing! We just need to focus on what we can control.

How Leaders Build Challenger Safety

What can you as a leader do to encourage Challenger Safety on your team?

Embrace Humility
If you need to own every idea, scrutinize everyone, then you won’t create Challenger Safety. If you’re spending the majority of meeting time doing all the talking, then you won’t be getting the best of others. You want good ideas to flourish, not your ideas to flourish. Embrace being wrong at times and let your team explore.

“You must be humble and open, and you must listen, and if you don’t, the people around you will eventually have nothing to say.”

— Timothy R. Clark in “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety”

Create a Team, not Silo’d Individuals
According to “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety,” “Innovation is the process of connected people connecting things.” A team is a group of connected people. A group of silo’d individuals are by definition not connected and will therefore not provide the company with innovation.

Assign Dissent
One of the strongest things you can do as a leader is encourage dissent. You can do this explicitly by defining it as a role. In a meeting, tell one person their job is to challenge the thinking. You can also assign a “red team” or “tiger team” to probe for areas of weakness in the company. You’re creating a culture in which dissent isn’t an accidental thing; it’s core to how you operate.

Reduce Ridicule
This starts with you. No ridicule allowed. From there, you need to establish that ridicule is not culturally appropriate anywhere on the team. No demeaning jokes or retribution for people. After that, ensure you’re creating an environment of peer accountability so it doesn’t require you to be present in every interaction.

Stop Looking for Certainty
Innovation doesn’t operate on a schedule. It’s non-linear and messy. The more you push for certainty, the more you’re going to squash the natural process of innovation. Allow for meandering.

“Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries—the “nonlinear” ones—are highly likely to require wandering.”

— Jeff Bezos in “Invent and Wander”

Call to Action

Challenger Safety is essential to break out of the status quo.

Your action this week is to ask someone on your team: “What do you suggest we change to improve things around here?”

Their response will give you clues! Do they say, “Uh, no, Boss, everything is great around here! You’re amazing!” You might be awesome, but that’s likely a clue that they don’t feel safe 😁

If, however, they share ideas with ease, that’s a good sign. Be mindful of your reaction! Be curious. Be supportive. Be interested.

I’d love to hear what you discover. Hit reply and share your experience!

Kevin

PS - If you’re feeling brave, also look inward. Is your ego being a good boss, or is there any personal ridicule or negativity you’re subject to? Give yourself a little love this week You deserve it. ❤️