The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation

Timothy R. Clark

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781523087709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

This book is the first practical, hands-on guide that shows how leaders can build psychological safety in their organizations, creating an environment where employees feel included, fully engaged, and encouraged to contribute their best efforts and ideas. Fear has a profoundly negative impact on engagement, learning efficacy, productivity, and innovation, but until now there has been a lack of practical information on how to make employees feel safe about speaking up and contributing. Timothy Clark, a social scientist and an organizational consultant, provides a framework to move people through successive stages of psychological safety. The first stage is member safety-the team accepts you and grants you shared identity. Learner safety, the second stage, indicates that you feel safe to ask questions, experiment, and even make mistakes. Next is the third stage of contributor safety, where you feel comfortable participating as an active and full-fledged member of the team. Finally, the fourth stage of challenger safety allows you to take on the status quo without repercussion, reprisal, or the risk of tarnishing your personal standing and reputation. This is a blueprint for how any leader can build positive, supportive, and encouraging cultures in any setting.

STAGE 1
Inclusion Safety

Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.
—Mahatma Gandhi

Figure 5. Entering the path to inclusion and innovation

Diversity is a fact. Inclusion is a choice.
But not just any choice.

Key concept: The choice to include another human being activates our humanity.

As the first stage of psychological safety, inclusion safety is, in its purest sense, nothing more than species-based acceptance (figure 5, previous page). If you have flesh and blood, we accept you. Profoundly simple in concept, devilishly difficult in practice, we learn it in kindergarten and unlearn it later. A mere 36 percent of business professionals today believe their companies foster an inclusive culture.¹

I remember talking to my son, Ben, after his first day of kindergarten:

“How did you like your first day of kindergarten, Ben?” I asked.

“It was fun, Dad.”

“Are you excited to go to school tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I’m excited.”

“Is Mom going to take you to school again tomorrow?”

“No, I’m going to walk.”

“Do you have anyone to walk with?”

“No, Dad, I’ll just walk by myself, but if anyone wants to walk with me, they can.”

I’ll never forget that tender exchange. It’s a reflection of the un-corrupted, inclusive nature of children.

Key concept: We include naturally in childhood and exclude unnaturally in adulthood.

Out of our flaws and insecurities, we model and reinforce exclusion to those around us. But it doesn’t have to be that way. After living with the Navajo for a few years, my family moved to Los Angeles and then finally settled into a middle-class neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area. I remember feeling uprooted and lost as a boy. Bored, lonely, and battling a little resentment, I sat on the porch one day when a kid from the neighborhood rode up on his bike. He walked over and, without any hesitation, announced, “Hi, I’m Kenny.” In no time, we were riding our bikes together, eating kumquats, and catching alligator lizards. The young man who befriended me and extended inclusion safety so confidently at age ten is now Pastor Kenny Luck, the men’s pastor at the Camelback Church in Lake Forest, California.

Not everyone is born with Kenny’s confidence and sense of concern, but the basic decision to include or exclude is not about skill or personality, although those things can enhance your ability to include. It’s more about intent than technique. You can’t legislate it, regulate it, train it, measure it, or gimmick it into existence. It doesn’t answer to those forces. It’s an act of will that flows from the empire of the heart. If there’s no psychological safety, there’s no inclusion.

Key concept: Including another human being should be an act of prejudgment based on that person’s worth, not an act of judgment based on that person’s worthiness.

Our children memorized passages from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” in school. I can still hear them recite the line, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr made a similar observation when he said, “We are admonished in scripture to judge men by their fruits, not by their roots.”²

Before we judge others as less exalted, please note that the Reverend King and Pastor Niebuhr are talking about worthiness of character. My point is that worth comes first, worthiness comes second. Inclusion safety is not about worthiness. It’s about treating people like people. It’s the act of extending fellowship, membership, association, and connection—agnostic of rank, status, gender, race, appearance, intelligence, education, beliefs, values, politics, habits, traditions, language, customs, history, or any other defining characteristic. Inclusion marks passage into civilization. If we can’t do that as a starting point, we’re not being true to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” Withholding inclusion safety is a sign that we’re engaged in a fight with our own willful blindness. We’re self-medicating with enchanting tales about our distinctiveness and superiority. If it’s a mild case of snobbery, that may be easy to dismiss. But if it’s a more severe case of narcissistic supremacy, that’s a bigger problem. And then there’s everything in between.

In our social units, we should create an environment of inclusion before we begin to think about judgments at all. Worth precedes worthiness. There’s a time and a place to judge worthiness, but when you allow someone to cross the threshold of inclusion, there’s no litmus test. We’re not weighing your character in the balance to see if you’re found wanting. To be deserving of inclusion has nothing to do with your personality, virtues, or abilities; nothing to do with your gender, race, ethnicity, education or any other demographic variable that defines you. There are, at this level, no disqualifications, except one—the threat of harm.

The only reciprocation requirement in this unwritten social contract is the mutual exchange of respect and permission to belong. That exchange is unenforceable by law. There are, of course, laws against discrimination, but in a thousand ways we can still informally persecute each other.

Let me give you an example of A/B testing for inclusion safety. I have two cars. One is old and rusty, has 315,000 miles on the odometer, and a resale value of $375. The other is a black sports sedan. When I take in my sedan for service, the attendant is highly responsive. When I take my rust bucket, the attendant can be mildly disdainful. In both cases, the car is the lead indicator of my social status, and people grant or withhold inclusion safety based on my car, the artifact in which I sit. Some days I’m politely ignored, some days solicitously attended to. That’s how sensitive people are to these indicators because we scramble for status like apes for nuts.

Key questions: Do you treat people that you consider of lower status differently than those of higher status? If so, why?

What should it take to qualify for inclusion safety? Two things: Be human and be harmless. If you meet both criteria, you qualify. If you meet only one, you don’t. The great African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass made the definitive statement about inclusion safety when he said, “I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.” That statement can apply to any characteristic. When we extend inclusion safety to each other, we subordinate our differences to invoke a more important binding characteristic—our common humanity.

Table 1 defines respect and permission in the first stage of psychological safety. The definition of respect in this stage is simply respect for the individual’s humanity. Permission in this stage is the permission you give another to enter your personal society and interact with you as a human being. Finally, the social exchange is one in which we trade inclusion for human status, provided we don’t threaten each other with harm.

Table 1 Stage 1 Inclusion Safety

Despite knowing we should extend inclusion safety to everyone, we have become very skilled at chasing each other to the margins and patrolling the boundaries. We splinter, segment, and stratify the human family. Sometimes, we extend partial or conditional inclusion safety. Sometimes we revoke or withhold it.

Key concept: Instead of granting inclusion safety based on human status, we tend to judge another person’s worthiness based on indicators like appearance, social status, or material possessions, when those indicators have nothing to do with worth.

Kimchi and Our Common Humanity

When I was in graduate school, I had the opportunity to do research at the Seoul National University in Korea as a Fulbright scholar. The university offered me a place at its Social Science Research Center. The day I arrived, Professor Ahn Chung Si greeted me warmly and took me around the center to meet the staff and other researchers. My initial apprehension was replaced with a sense of inclusion when two Korean graduate students asked me to go to lunch. I was the different one, the stranger, the alien, the one that didn’t fit in. But I was not the odd person out. Holding my bowl of rice dumpling soup, I sat down at one of the tables in the cafeteria and was soon greeting other students and faculty. With some hesitation, a student sitting next to me handed me a bowl of kimchi. That was the beginning of an extraordinary experience with inclusion safety.

True, I was a novelty, but I hasten to say that inclusion safety is not simply the expression of hospitality. You can be polite and not mean it. That kind of surface acting is a disingenuous way of abiding by common rules of decency and decorum. But these students were not only kind and helpful on my first day, which is easy to do. They were also kind and helpful on my thirtieth day and my sixtieth day and so on. I was clearly outside their social group and overstayed the normal expiration date for standard-protocol, obligatory, respectful treatment. But after weeks and weeks of long days at the center, they never revoked the inclusion safety they first extended. It was real.

Key questions: In the arc of every life are times when inclusion safety makes all the difference, when someone reaches out to include you at a vulnerable time. When did this happen to you? What impact did it have on your life? Are you paying it forward?

Let’s put this in historical context. South Korea is considered the world’s most neo-Confucian society, historically embracing status hierarchy, inequality, and inherent discrimination as values. Human rights have a short history, but have in recent years been acknowledged as a matter of political expediency, not through some religious or philosophical sense of natural law, inalienability, or God-invested entitlement. In this society, rights are more instrumental than moral, more negotiated than inviolate, more legislated than guaranteed or absolute. Confucianism lacks rational, legal, or moral grounds for inclusion, but rather emphasizes loyalty, devotion, allegiance, and compliance to authority in the promotion of group harmony and stability.

What does all of that mean? It means I’m an outsider. There’s no natural place for me in Korean society or hierarchy. And yet my Korean friends included me in a way that superseded their neo-Confucian tradition. They suspended the normal terms of engagement, giving precedence to a higher principle of humanity. Rather than focus on differences, they emphasized common fellowship.³ Was I now Korean? Did they grant me full social and cultural membership? No. They extended inclusion safety, but on what basis? Was it religious, ethnic, socioeconomic, geographic, cultural, political, legal? None of the above. It was based on a supernal, primordial human connection that overcame our separatism and penetrated to membership in a universal family.

Key question: To create inclusion safety, it helps to understand cultural differences, but you don’t need to be an expert in those differences, just sensitive to and appreciative of them. How do you acknowledge and show sensitivity and appreciation for the cultural differences that exist on your team?

Hardening the Concept of Equality

The philosopher John Rawls reminds us of this fundamental truth: “Institutions are just when no arbitrary distinctions are made between persons in the assigning of basic rights and duties.”⁵ To exclude a member of a social unit based on conscious or unconscious bias is exactly that, an arbitrary distinction. These must be removed, as Rawls says, to “build an enduring system of mutual cooperation.”⁶

There will always be differences, but there mustn’t be barriers. There will always be majorities and minorities, but we should never attempt to deracinate each other until we melt into a homogenous lot. Our differences define us.

Some would object on grounds that we don’t know each other. So how can we accept, include, tolerate, and connect with strangers? And in fact, research shows that the key drivers of psychological safety include familiarity among team members and the quality of those relationships based on prior interactions.⁷ To extend inclusion safety is not to extend mature, developed feelings of affection. Your feelings can only be expectant and assumptive, but they can still be real. Xenophobic arguments are born of ignorance, fear, jealousy, or a dishonest desire for superiority.

Key concept: God may have made us of different clay, but there are no grounds to say that your clay is better than mine.

Inclusion safety is not earned but owed. Every human has title to it as a nonnegotiable right. In fact, we can’t sustain civilization without it.⁸ We hunger for and deserve dignity and esteem from each other and unavoidably practice morality when we extend or withhold inclusion safety. If there’s no threat of harm, we should give it without a value judgment. As the basic glue of human society, inclusion safety offers the comforting assurance that you matter. If you’re a leader and want your people to perform, you must internalize the universal truth that people want, need, and deserve validation. Inclusion safety requires that w...