The VUCA world presents specific leadership challenges by dint of the fact that at a deep level, humans are unsettled by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity — the precise environmental conditions that arouse the ancestral radar for personal threat. Predictability is much preferred, offering as it does the potential for safer control.

Staying competitive inside complex global markets, means achieving innovation and finding ways to achieve more with the same or fewer resources — and there is the dilemma. For employees to bring their full selves to work, communicate openly, experiment with new ideas (where success is not guaranteed) and challenge established ways of achieving goals, they need to feel confident that there will be no negative personal consequences by doing so. They need to feel psychologically safe to be themselves, and to share their insights and perspectives openly without the fear of reprisal. They also need to feel safe enough to speak up and ask for help when pressure turns to stress and overwhelm looms. All this requires specific cultural and environmental conditions, many of which may be missing in their workplace.

Psychological safety (or the lack of it) goes to the heart of how employees collaborate, why they sometimes fail to communicate and why they don’t say soon enough when they are struggling.

Every person has a fundamental need to feel appreciated and accepted by their “band.” As a result, every workplace interaction carries a degree of what Amy Edmondson, Ph.D., professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, refers to as “interpersonal risk.” Constant “impression management” means that most team members will be carefully presenting a view of themselves to leadership and to their colleagues that is congruent with what they believe is expected and which shows them in a good light. This may not be identical to what they are really thinking and feeling. If psychological safety has not been nurtured by leadership in their team, valuable ideas, insights and challenges are unlikely to see the light of day.

Fear of personal harm is the absolute enemy of openness and creativity and is the reason why so many leaders are unknowingly operating inside an echo chamber. It should be easy to see why the level of psychological safety is now understood to be the key variable in sustainable high performance. Happily, whilst the inbuilt requirement for safety is a fixed human trait, the behaviours involved in enhancing psychological safety are intuitive and psychological safety grows organically when these learnable behaviours accumulate.

Leaders can improve psychological safety in their team when there is commitment to so and by modelling five key behaviors (the 5 C’s) themselves, whilst also supporting their adoption by others.

Curiosity

Humans are naturally curious, but often the pressure of day to day living and working dampens that curiosity, often to the point where opportunities for exploring alternative perspectives or seeking important context are closed off. Ritualized curiosity enables leaders and team members to ask themselves: What is beyond this? What are the reasons behind why this is happening? What might I have missed? This avoids blame — the all too frequent workplace response to errors and missteps that degrades psychological safety the fastest.

Change Perspective

Human beings have a fondness for the status quo and as a result tend to be resistant to change. This makes creative problem-solving much less effective. However, leaders who intentionally challenge their own perspective, actively seeking lenses other than their own and who see alternative viewpoints as opportunities grow faster, also create psychological safety for those around them. By actively inviting dissonance, leaders not only enable themselves to fold the unique insights of others into their own thinking but also, in doing so, they simultaneously demonstrate the value they place on those insights and the people who share them. It’s a bit of win-win.

Communicate: Human to Human

The fundamental human need to feel appreciated and accepted means that it is essential to talk to the person and not the task. Relentless pressure and the rapid pace of work, coupled with fewer opportunities to collaborate in person with colleagues, means that the person doing the work is often obscured by the urgent need for the work.

Leaders and teams who make it a ritual to “see” and interact with the person as a person, not merely as agent for the job to be done, generate feelings of appreciation and value in their colleagues that massively dial up trust and connection.

Collaboration

People don’t generally work in isolation — cooperation and collaboration are essential features of all organizations, but collaboration isn’t simply a reciprocal relationship of “If you do this for me, I will do this for you.” Instead, it’s the ability to cooperate with others to produce something that hopefully will be better than the result you would get by working alone — the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts because the collaborative process creates an interplay of perspectives, experience and knowledge.

When people can communicate and connect on a human-to-human level, rather than on a task-to-task basis, collaborations are more effective, and people learn that their input is valuable and valued by others. This drives more safety and with it comes more openness, fuelling faster and more creative problem-solving now that all opinions are available for consideration.

Confidence

Confidence can be defined as an internal feeling of security attained when a team member and their capabilities are realistically validated. Leaders and team members play a key part developing confidence. It is built through trust: trusting each other to do a good job, to have each other’s backs, to speak up when there is a problem, to praise when something goes well and to not make you feel stupid when it doesn’t. Leaders develop team confidence by consistently validating and recognising the specifics of everyone’s contribution to success, helping all team members to see their colleagues as valuable and important.

Everyone is both an agent for improvement as well as a beneficiary of the effects, but building the level of trust needed to support confidence in openness takes time.

Leaders should create dedicated space and time to develop a shared team understanding of psych safety as well as the wellbeing and performance benefits of improvement.

Start with a formal or informal assessment of starting point in relation to key factors that influence psychological safety (e.g., how much trust they have in each other; whether they feel they have a voice; whether they feel openness and honesty is really wanted; what they believe the personal consequences of failure to be). These are all good starting points. Getting an open conversation going about how safe they feel around each other now will help them, importantly, to notice and celebrate what is working well for them as a team, as well as build commitment to identify areas they might be able to work on.

In terms of well-being and performance, it will be well worth the time invested.