Feeling safe to speak up

Whether in public service or business, we keep hearing of absolute travesties of justice, that could have been prevented if problems had been dealt with swiftly. Unfortunately, all too frequently when problems occur, they may be ignored or, worse, denied.

A working environment where problems are swiftly dealt with is described as having ‘psychological safety’. This term was first used by US psychologist Carl Rogers in 1954, and introduced into management studies in the 1960s. It took until 1999 for Professor Amy Edmonson to define the term as people believing that they would not be punished for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns – or mistakes.

Unfortunately, we see denials all the time in public life, whether during pandemics, criminal activity, political arenas, and so on. How many public inquiries have we seen set up, sometimes years after a wrong has happened?

Even in healthcare, where lives are at stake, we see denials or hush-ups, including threats to medical professionals who report problems.

With quality professionals striving to deliver excellent quality, this is a major challenge.

You see, it ceases to matter if performance measures are being monitored and recorded, if there is no timely action, especially when it is directly related to customers, consumers or service users – they will be affected.

So let us take a moment to ask a direct question: how safe is it in your organisation for someone to say there’s a problem?

Creating a culture of safety

In too many businesses, employees feel it is not psychologically safe to acknowledge there’s a problem – refusing to accept the truth is endemic.

All the short-term targets, incentives and accountability in the world won’t help when problems arise if they are not acknowledged and dealt with quickly.

Reading a piece on the Lean Enterprise Institute website, I was reminded how it can be to react quickly to “go and see” immediately, a concept that originated in the ethos and culture of Toyota.

According to Jeffrey K Liker in The Toyota Way 2nd Edition, Toyota became the largest motor manufacturer in the world through its a guiding philosophy shown in its Toyota Way 2001 house graphic.

While the two main pillars of this house are ‘continuous improvement’ and ‘respect for people’, these are supported by the foundations of ‘challenge’, ‘Kaizen’ (improvement), ‘Go and See to Learn’, ‘teamwork and accountability’ and ‘respect and develop people’.

"A quality professional can have a role in facilitating their organisation’s move towards greater psychological safety."

Alan Clark CQP FCQI, quality management trainer and coach

All five foundations are important, but it seems to me that both ‘go and see to learn’ and ‘respect and develop people’ are key to creating a psychologically safe environment that encourages people to tackle issues at the earliest moment and implement improvement.

Improve constantly and forever

This is supported by quality guru Dr W. Edwards Deming, in Point 5 of his famous 14 Points for Management, from his 1982 book, Out of the Crisis: “Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.”

You don’t have to just look at Toyota. Having grown up poor on a farm, Deming knew all about hard work being necessary to put food on the table, a perspective not appreciated – or done – by too many in the managerial classes, then and to this day.

And then there’s Deming’s Point 8: “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.”

Fundamentally, this urges us to adopt what we can now call psychological safety. Deming also said: “Where there is fear, there will be wrong figures.” By implication, he is saying it is critical for people to feel able to be honest about their work and any mistakes they make.

When leaders listen and make it safe for people to suggest improvements, the work will be carried out more effectively.

This links directly to Deming’s Point 7: Institute leadership. “The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.”

Applying the thinking

To apply Deming’s thinking, managers at every level need to regard themselves as coaches, developing people and processes while, at the same time, staying close to the work to ensure they truly understand it.

Talk of leadership takes us back to Toyota where, Liker says, they are natural long-term systems thinkers all the way to the top. In its early days, Toyota had the distinct advantage of systems thinking being akin to the natural holistic perspective of its founder Sakichi Toyoda’s Buddhist faith.

Removing the drive for ‘instant pudding’ is essential for creating a psychologically safe working environment in which people can work on improvement to the system and learn from mistakes. The latter are inevitable because the real world is what is now called VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Systems thinking helps you appreciate that.

Moving towards psychological safety

A quality professional can have a role in facilitating their organisation’s move towards greater psychological safety. They understand that to deliver greater customer satisfaction, and hence profitability, continuous improvement is essential. They can advocate that for continuous improvement to be effective, it must be done by using systems thinking.

Using greater customer satisfaction and profitability as the drivers, the quality professional can – slowly(!) – influence the organisation by creating the context of, or making the case for, supporting continual improvement and reducing waste from poor yielding processes.

In summary, as a quality professional, business owner, director or manager, strive to develop the following in your organisation:

• Drive out fear, create psychological safety.
• Long-term systems thinking view.
• Continually improve.
• Leadership through coaching at all levels.

Development in all these areas are critical factors for enduring success.