Written by Duane McClure, DM-OL, Executive Consultant
Duane McClure, DM-OL
In today’s workplace, leaders are expected to have stronger productivity, oversee a greater number of deliverables, and organize a growing number of team responsibilities to achieve business goals. Everything that leaders are required to balance while remaining innovative —cross-functional teams, hybrid/remote work, developing and sustaining an inclusive workplace—lends to a highly complex working environment and one that is ripe with opportunities to connect.
This article is about connecting to the self and others through the lens of psychological safety, extending beyond the transactional and into the transformational elements of relationships. Leaders are charged with navigating team complexity, which requires consideration of our lived experiences, the context of others, and the problems of the day.
Why? Because leaders exist to create environments where they can inspire, lead, and take initiative within their scope of leadership to perform purposeful work. Relationships are important in all stages of life. As preverbal infants, surviving and thriving are directly correlated to their ability to connect and have their safety needs met through caregivers. This need to connect continues into adulthood. People have a need to think, behave, and make decisions in ways that achieve safety and allow them to build connections with others and experience belonging.
Coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, psychological safety in the workplace refers to the belief that teammates will not be punished for speaking up, taking risks, or making mistakes. This makes it safe for teammates to engage in interpersonal risk-taking (Edmondson et al., 2007; Edmondson and Lei, 2014; Newman et al., 2017), knowing that colleagues will not reject someone for being themselves or sharing their opinions. In a team with psychological safety, teammates respect each other’s competence, express interest in each other as people, assume positive intent, and feel safe to engage in constructive conflict (Edmondson, 1999). Schein and Bennis (1965) suggested that psychological safety is essential for allowing leaders to feel secure and worry less about interpersonal risk when dealing with organizational uncertainty and change.
In workplace communication, the leader’s objective remains the same, which is to increase innovation, enhance collaboration, improve learning and growth, and encourage higher teammate engagement. When leaders are considering how to communicate updates best, it is critical to assess how teammates may receive the updates and the range of perspectives among different teammates. This all requires self-awareness. A leader can cultivate psychological safety by using their self-awareness to trust the intentions of others, creating a culture of continuous improvement, and promoting engaged and committed teammates.
We are likely to gain more self-awareness by better understanding our lived experiences, perceptions, and beliefs about ourselves and others. Personalities reflect many pivotal life experiences—from our caretakers, communities, cultures, diversity, the era in which we were born, and more—therefore, informing how leaders learn to survive and thrive from childhood to adulthood. Leaders’ personalities and these experiences are ultimately on display.
W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) coined the term double consciousness, or twoness, which he referred to as a peculiar experience of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others and measuring oneself by those metrics. Twoness emphasizes the many identities that are important to us, but we can get stuck in a loop and become fixated on whether others view some of those identities in a negative light.
To overcome that fixation in a productive way, Du Bois also offered the term sensation. Sensation is a leader’s ability to recognize when their thoughts, emotions, and perceptions are helping them connect to others. It’s important to know that our lived experiences reflect our mental models and how we perceive reality, which can support or limit psychological safety, and ultimately who we want to be as a leader.
Using sensation as a tool of self-awareness helps us be more present in the here-and-now—displacing some of the negative memories we might have about how others regarded us in the past, so we can recognize the alternative, more positive ways that our current work team might perceive our diverse identities. This opens us up to feeling more psychologically safe as a leader—so we can share more of ourselves and our perspectives, build deeper relationships with our team, and ultimately model how our teammates can experience and create a psychologically safe environment for each other (Mitterer & Mitterer, 2023; Omadeke, 2022). Overall, this lends to a dynamic working environment where all team members can connect and be innovative (Edmondson, 2018).
In short, self-awareness, twoness, and sensation are tools leaders can use to explore the dynamic of always looking at oneself through the lens of others. They help leaders create psychological safety by increasing their insight and appreciation of their own sociocultural and historical context and helping them explore the experiences of others. Psychological safety is an essential aspect of leadership, which requires risk-taking, advocating, respecting teammates, and contributing to the type of environment that inspires others do to the same. Google’s Project Aristotle speaks to this. After collecting different types of data on team behaviors and segmenting it several different ways, the strongest result was for teams consisting of members who all felt safe to speak up and share were also the best-performing teams (Duhigg, 2016).
By fostering an environment where teammates feel safe to offer insight to others, contribute to a shared culture, and learn from failures, leaders can learn to hold developmental space for themselves and others. By exploring the strategies and concepts mentioned above, teammates and teams can create a culture that values psychological safety, ultimately leading to enhanced employee engagement, improved performance, and a path to success (Frazier et al., 2017).
We encourage leaders to learn more about The Weight of Emotional Intelligence and How to Reframe Leadership Authenticity.