The 4 Stages Of Psychological Safety Book Review
Psychological safety has become a popular term within organisations that claim they are all about change and creating a positive culture. It can be touted in L&D programmes and training initiatives as a mechanism for providing that change, only for it never to go beyond being a buzzword or marketing rhetoric, so a company can be perceived to be doing good.
As a concept, psychological safety has been at the centre of the human experience for thousands of years. Timothy R Clark, author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, has called it “as old as the first human interaction…no more a human need than food or shelter….in the hierarchy of needs, psychological safety straddles fulfillment, belonging, and security needs…once the basic physical needs of food and shelter are met, psychological safety becomes a priority.”
Clark’s book is a vital resource for any organisation or L&D professional serious about implementing true psychological safety. Here’s why.
A roadmap for true psychological safety
Clark’s four steps are defined as:
Inclusion safety: The basic first step of respecting and an individual’s identity as a fellow human being and giving that individual permission to interact with you as a human being.
Learner safety: The second step of respecting an individual’s innate need to learn and grow, and giving permission for the individual to engage with all sides of the learning process so they can succeed and fail.
Contributor safety: The third step of respecting an individual’s ability to create value and granting permission for the individual to work with independence and their own judgment.
Challenger safety: The highest form of psychological safety is respecting an individual’s ability to innovate and permitting them to challenge the status quo without fear of reprisal.
Throughout the book, Clark breaks down these four steps in simple ways and debunks misconceptions about how each step should be implemented and applied within organisations. For example, in his explanation of inclusion safety, Clark highlights the damaging impact that theories of superiority have on our ability to create genuine inclusion safety:
“When I began my service as a plant manager at Geneva Steel, I conducted a series of tours throughout the plant. I travelled from facility to facility, holding town hall meetings, greeting the managers and production and maintenance workers. I started at the coke plant, and then moved to the blast furnaces, steel-making operations, casting, rolling mills, finishing units, shipping and transportation, and central maintenance.
In the coke plant, two production workers cornered me. They removed their hard hats and safety goggles, revealing faces caked in sweat and soot. “Mr Clark,” they said deferentially, “thank you for coming to visit our department. We know you’re new to your position as plant manager. We know you’re going to visit all the departments but we wanted you to know our department is a little different than the others…
That scene repeated itself in every department…After my weeklong tour, I was illuminated with the revelation that every department was just a little more important than the others, occupied by a special class of people doing what no one else could do. They all gently shunted their brothers and sisters in order to distinguish themselves. I suppose we have all made, or been tempted to make, a similar claim and fallen prey to the grand illusion of superiority.”
Elsewhere, Clark points out that real challenger safety promotes a healthy amount of friction between teams. They are allowed to disagree with each other and the boss, which helps to create innovation. Otherwise, an organisation is stuck between two extremes of paternalism and exploitation. He explains:
“You’re not looking for compliance or consensus. In fact, you’re looking for the opposite. You want to create and bring out differences…How do you do that? First, create differences in composition. That means assembling a diverse team. Diversity in composition can lead to diversity in thought. Because diversity creates dissent, diverse teams are less susceptible to groupthink…
You’re trying to reduce social friction, but not intellectual friction. If you have too much social friction, sand becomes the lubricant and the gears of innovation grind to a halt. If you have too little, you develop homogenous thinking and insulate yourself, losing your ability to adapt to a changing environment. You need to nurture differences and create a theatre of conflict that carries natural pressure and stress, but not fear.”
Clark admits that for leaders to implement the four steps of psychological safety correctly, there is a delicate balancing act to make, and it’s never down to just one person to implement.
To help frame a collaborative culture where large teams and individuals can work towards the wider goal of psychological safety, he provides prompt questions to answer and here are some that I find the most provocative and discussion-worthy:
Is the moral principle of inclusion a convenient or inconvenient truth for you?
What individual or group are you having a hard time including, even if they are doing you no real harm? Why?
Do your team punish failure? Do you punish failure?
How can you lower the barrier of learner anxiety to the point that the most inhibited and fearful member of the team will come forward and engage?
Have you ever granted contributor safety too fast when the person either didn’t have the skills or wasn’t willing to assume responsibility for the results?
Do you respect only high achievers and the highly educated, or do you recognise that insight and answers can come from some of the most unlikely people?
Can you think of a change you started but didn’t finish, where you snapped back to your original behaviour?
How do you protect your team against the dangers of groupthink?