Creating safe spaces at work.
Changes to legislation mean leaders can no longer turn away from
the business of emotions.
A leader I worked with, let’s call her Kate, prided herself on leading by example. “If I show people what I expect by how I work, they will follow suit”. A reasonable but flawed assumption.
Flawed, not because Kate’s people didn’t care or want to perform at their best, but because they didn’t necessarily or intrinsically value Kate’s approach to work.
Some valued quality over deadlines.
Some valued harmony over conflict.
Some valued collaboration over instruction.
In my two decades as a coach, I’ve never come across anyone who actively wanted to miss a deadline and let their entire team down, or deliberately omitted important details that created rounds of re-work.
Most people have good intentions.
So if people innately want to do good work, but teams of those same people can’t find a way forward together, whose responsibility is it to build an environment where everyone feels included and safe to learn, contribute, grow, fail and succeed?
Most would say it’s the organisation’s or the leader’s responsibility or both, legislation now confirms this. And I would wholeheartedly agree.
But not exclusively so.
Research tells us that when trust is high, sales and profit increase, stress and burnout decrease.
Trust carries quite a leverage.
When trust is present, we want to give more, we’ll back ourselves, try new things and make more decisions because we know we’re fully supported. When trust is present we can be real, say what’s challenging us, we can challenge others, and explore how to improve without fear of judgment, exclusion or repercussion.
Sounds great, but how does trust get built?
We’d all like to think we’re open to change and growth, but if you’ve ever spoken words like “I’m not the only one he/she is impacting”, in that moment you are not growing.
The greatest challenge to building trust is that most people believe for trust to grow or be restored, someone else needs to change, improve or leave.
Most of this goes unsaid as some behave politely, putting their head down and soldiering on. Others become more dominant attempting to assert their control. The result is an emotionally unsafe environment where people don’t feel heard, seen, valued and respected.
People become siloed in their thinking and behaviour and form gossip clicks to survive. The truth isn’t spoken, feelings are feared, and ‘busy’ becomes the standard response to “How are you?”
As Kate dove more into the detail of the work to show her people how it ‘should’ be done, her team relinquished more and more of their autonomy.
The downward spiral of micro-management gathered momentum.
Trust disappeared and performance declined.
Kate felt frustrated revisiting the same issues with the same people, feeling overloaded from filling all the performance gaps.
Her people felt like they were failing, not trusted to do what they were employed to do, lacking the right support to learn and grow.
Kate, without any ill intent, had dug herself and her team into a painful pit before realising she needed to learn to lead in a very different way.
Creating and sustaining environments where everyone thrives is now a legal responsibility. New legislation means that employers have a greater responsibility to manage mentally and emotionally healthy work places and eliminate any risk associated with a psychosocial hazard.
New psychological health regulations for Victorian employers were expected to commence late 2022, however are still in review. New requirements are already in place for NSW and other states relating to organisations required to manage psychosocial risks.
If you’re a leader of people (with or without a formal title), creating mentally and emotionally safe environments is one of the most difficult challenges you will face.
Continually developing and advancing your emotional capacity and coaching skills like deep listening, reframing, recreating, pacing, asking questions and more needs to be a critical part of your toolkit.
A key challenge in creating emotionally safe spaces will be avoiding the risk of growing a polite culture, where no-one feels safe to say anything should it offend.
If you are exploring how you can create or maintain an emotionally safe and trusted environment in your workplace, I recommend you:
· Update yourself on your legal responsibilities (see helpful resources below)
· Invest in developing and advancing your coaching and leadership skills
· Learn how to have #BraveChats with your team, colleagues, peers and leaders about what people need to feel safe, supported, trusted, and to trust.
For your personal practice, here what I recommend as a way to contribute to building safe spaces at work:
Focus on understanding you, practice radical personal leadership
Become more aware of your triggers and reactions, what causes them, how you impact others when you’re triggered, and work to catch them sooner, lead by example
Know and communicate your needs honestly without minimising or projecting
Focus on what you can control – changing another person’s behaviour is outside our control and when we get stuck wishing they would change, or convincing them they should, it drains our energy leaving us less in the tank to do good work
Value yourself, honour and communicate your values, be clear about what builds trust for you, discover what builds trust for others, communicate your expectations and if they are not being met, consider all of your options.
Creating emotionally and mentally safe work spaces is a highly nuanced skill that requires real-time practice every day.
My team and I are constantly practicing this work, building our self-awareness, owning our triggers, looking for learnings, leaning into Brave Chats with each other, even when we want to flee the moment. It requires courage, consistency and meaningful communication. The results are deep trust, limitless empowerment, giving more to each other, freedom to be ourselves and a place where we love to work.
If you’d like to educate and empower your people and leaders in how to build emotionally safe spaces in their teams and across your organisation, we can help. Our programs are designed specifically to achieve this.
You can contact me directly karen@karenwilliams.com to start a conversation.
Be Brave! Be Bold!
Karen.
Helpful resources regarding the new legislation.
1. http://www.elementsuk.com/libraryofarticles/definitionsofemotionalandpsychologicalsafety.pdf
2. https://insync.com.au/insights/ohs-psychological-health-regulations/