Psychological safety as an essential enabler for innovation

By Soraya Bahde

In 2017, after three years as Alelo’s People Director, I was invited to take on a new challenge: running our Innovation department. A newly created nucleus with the mission of bringing experimentation and reinvention to the company, creating connections, accelerating ideas, anticipating trends, testing prototypes with clients and making quick mistakes in order to get it right and develop with speed.

Startups and design thinking were “in vogue”, but we didn’t enter this journey to join a market movement. We had a genuine need to build the longevity of the business through solutions that generate value, solving our clients’ day-to-day problems, while making work more creative and the environment in which it takes place increasingly interesting.

We started studying new working methods, co-creation tools and trends that would inspire relevant innovations in our segments. We shared this knowledge with the entire organization, because fostering this competence across the board was one of our objectives. We continuously promoted intrapreneurship, but we were often questioned as to why innovation was being led by the company’s People department. After all, isn’t innovation technology? Or is it business? Is innovation also a culture or a skill?

There was a significant challenge in our journey regarding how to deliver these innovations to the customer. We didn’t have a dedicated team, so in the beginning we had to mobilize people from different areas of the company to work part of the time in these teams that would do the proofs of concept, design work or the like.

And after 18 months of trying to evolve deliveries in this model, we’ve come to some interesting conclusions. Yes, innovation is technology and it’s business. That’s what we initially focused on to deliver our missions. But in the financial services sector, both factors are now commoditized. So what makes the difference? The team!

We then noticed that people who were temporarily collaborating, with low commitment to that purpose, without established relationships or working agreements, were not really acting as a team. We began to study what could hinder or increase the performance of these teams seeking to build innovations. It was at this point that we came across the concept of psychological safety – defined as an environment that encourages, recognizes and rewards individuals for their contributions and ideas, making them feel safe when taking interpersonal risks.

Dr. Amy Edmondson, Novartis professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, and author of the best-seller The Fearless Organization, discovered in her research that employees are more likely to take risks and share their ideas when they feel safe in their organizations.

While researching teams, she surprisingly found that the best performing teams seemed to make more mistakes than the worst. When she continued her research, however, she discovered that the top-performing teams didn’t make more mistakes, they just spoke more openly and transparently, aiming to grow from these situations. This was because there was psychological safety.

To be able to navigate in a world of so many uncertainties, related to the volume of rapid changes we have had in technologies, consumer behavior and the competitive environment, we need, as humans, to feel safe. And the people who give us this safety net to question truths, make uncomfortable provocations and share ideas that seem unlikely at first glance are the team and the environment it creates to actually work together.

Gartner, a consulting and research company in the field of technology and people management, indicates that promoting psychological safety has the key benefits of improving teamwork, fostering the sharing of mistakes, learnings and innovations, encouraging employee authenticity and improving the organization’s results in general.

In the article Promoting Psychological Safety to Further Innovation, published in July 2019 and updated a year later, Gartner explores that innovation requires professionals to talk more about their ideas in general and feel comfortable sharing failures specifically.

Here at Alelo, we stopped to reflect deeply on the role of HR and leadership in this cultural evolution, because this context is the opposite of the one historically consolidated by most Brazilian companies, the infamous “command and control”.

We have changed our model of cultural artifacts to make it clear what we believe in and where we want to go. It currently has three main links, two of which correlate closely with the concepts of psychological safety applied: “Err, correct and surprise” and “Freedom to be who I am” – because people need to feel comfortable putting themselves forward without fear of being blamed, punished or pre-judged.

Respect and acceptance should take their place, creating a virtuous circle in which people seek feedback, debate ideas, raise concerns, try out different ways of doing things and fail in these experiments. Why not? The essential thing is that the team is united in the purpose of doing the best for the client and always evolving.

From this new scenario of desired culture, we rethought HR’s performance and concluded that we could accelerate change by acting on several levers.

We reviewed our performance evaluation cycles, moving away from a context of looking at individual contribution to a vision of continuous development, less punitive, and with the evolution of the team’s deliveries as the main objective. We also stopped having variable remuneration differentiated by performance, because the team’s results became more important than how much each person contributed to the whole.

According to Gartner’s 2017 Workforce Culture survey, employees who feel psychologically safe go beyond their responsibilities and look for ways to perform their role more effectively in up to 24% of cases, positively impacting overall performance.

In addition, we increasingly looked at team learning rather than individual learning and began to promote psychological safety by facilitating rituals in which we strengthened this new culture, which brought us very close to agile methods. We learned how to use their rituals and tools to promote such interactions on a recurring basis and put this type of practice at the heart of the company’s culture. Like a new muscle, we began to work until we gained proficiency, transforming this networked learning, based on psychological safety, into a pillar of innovation.

Considering the countless benefits of psychological safety, I hope that organizations in general will expand their knowledge on the subject, seeking to use it as a lever to build innovative, prosperous businesses that generate real value for society – while employing happier professionals.

Soraya Bahde – HR executive, mother and passionate about the evolution of organizations as a possible way of developing and fulfilling the potential of the people who are part of them.

Article written and published for issue 106 (March 2022) of Coaching Brasil Magazine, curated by IISP

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