Healthy leaders create a climate of psychological safety in their organization

A climate of psychological safety is where it is safe to be vulnerable, speak up about issues that bother us, challenge a leader or strategy without fear of retribution, and ask for help when needed. Creating such a climate is one of a leader's most important responsibilities—and often one of the most neglected!

My guess is that everyone reading this can remember times in their career when they said or expressed something that a leader did not welcome. Many leaders' defensiveness makes candid conversation around essential issues unsafe. The net result is that staff cannot express themselves with candor, and the organization leaves great potential on the table.

It takes healthy emotional intelligence to permit, welcome, and invite open dialogue about issues that impact the organization. This only happens when there is a culture that embraces this. I call this a culture of robust dialogue, where any issue can be discussed with the exception of a hidden agenda or personal attack.

The senior leader is responsible for creating such a culture, which is then followed by other leaders throughout the organization. If I ask staff in any organization if there are subjects, topics, or areas where they know they cannot speak freely, and they say yes, they are acknowledging that there is not adequate psychological safety in the organization. And that goes to senior leaders and the culture they create. Healthy leaders insist on an open culture where it is safe to speak candidly. It is the only way to a healthy culture. If it is not safe to speak up, the culture is unhealthy!

Here is the thing. Organizations that ask the best questions become the best organizations. No organization gets better without the probing questions of good people who want the best for the organization. Yet, in many instances, the pride of the group or the leader shuts down the questions because they are irritating. Great questions are a means of getting to the truth and better practices.

Good questions should not be seen as threats but as a means of honing strategies, practices, and assumptions that may need reconsidering. This does not mean the current practices are ineffective, but that there may be more effective ways. You get there with questions. Good questions are disruptive to the organization in a significant way. Your culture will either celebrate great questions or shut them down. The result will either be a better organization or one that resists actual progress. Proud organizations and leaders with egos resist good questions and those who challenge the status quo. Humble organizations and humble leaders welcome them because it is not about them but the mission.

Nine internal threats to any organization

Every organization faces threats to its existence and future health. While leaders are often aware of external threats, such as changes in the environment, competition, or technological advances, they often spend less time considering the internal threats within their own organization. Internal threats are often equally or more dangerous than external threats. 

Lack of clarity 
Few threats are more dangerous than a lack of organizational clarity. Diffusion of focus means that different leaders within the organization will choose their own focus leading to multiple agendas and the resulting silos. This is a severe threat because it divides the organization from within. Many well-meaning but disparate agendas cannot substitute for a clearly articulated vision, mission, common guiding principles, and clearly delineated culture. Lack of clarity creates a dangerous diffusion of energy, focus, and strategy. 

Undefined DNA
Every organization has a culture, a DNA. Unfortunately, many have multiple cultures, which means they don't have a single, unified culture. This is not only confusing to staff, but differing cultures will bring with them division and conflict within the organization. Ironically, it is something that we can control and create if we choose to. Culture does not happen by accident. It must be intentionally designed to be meaningful. And it must be emphasized and lived out daily, with leaders setting the tone and the pace. 

Overlooked behaviors
In many business and ministry settings, we overlook behaviors toxic to the organization's health. We don't want to lose the person (despite their behavior), don't want to deal with it (conflict avoidance), or just become used to destructive behaviors to others and the organization, but this corrodes trust, hurts others, and creates cynicism. When we overlook unhealthy behaviors, we allow those behaviors to sabotage the organization, and we send a message that such behaviors are OK. Overlooked behaviors undermine a healthy culture. 

Lack of a leadership bench
This one is hazardous. The test of outstanding leadership is not what happens when we are leading but when we leave because it reveals what we did or did not leave behind. The most important thing we can gift the organization is the next generation of leaders. Not only is it dangerous to ignore the development of future leaders, but it is selfish because someone will inherit what we leave behind.

Inadequate focus on actual results
All organizations are busy with a great deal of activity. The question, though, is not whether we have activity but whether we have results based on our clarity (see above). Most organizations, especially in the not-for-profit space, assume the results are good but need a realistic mechanism to ensure they are. Remember, activity does not equal results. It may just equal activity. Accountability for results must be built into the rhythm of every staff member and team.

Poor staff development
Every organization says its people are its most important asset, but many do little in coaching, mentoring, and developing their staff. To not place significant and intentional emphasis on what truly is your most important asset is to rob your staff of becoming all they could become and to shortchange your organization's impact. Organizations are only as good as the people they have, and the key to better organizations is the ongoing development of staff. When this is not a priority, it speaks poorly to the culture and the organization's future.

Lack of focus on healthy teams
Organizations are made up of groups, and those groups are either healthy teams or dysfunctional teams. Aligned, results-oriented, healthy teams working synergistically together under good leadership are the building blocks of a healthy and productive organization. There will only be health at the organizational level if there is health at the team level. 

A closed rather than an open culture

Closed cultures resist open, candid dialogue. I define robust dialogue as a culture where any issue can be put on the table, with the exception of a hidden agenda or personal attack. The best organizations are open because it is in open dialogue that better ways are found. Closed systems require people to simply accept what they are told. This is a threat to the organization and inhibits better ideas. It also creates cynicism.

Poor EQ of leader(s)

No truth is more pertinent than the fact that the EQ of a leader directly impacts the health of an organization's culture. The responsibility of leaders is to be in an EQ growth mode all the  time. The responsibility of boards is to ensure that leaders create a healthy culture because they are themselves healthy. If not, they need to mandate growth in necessary areas. Organizations rarely rise above the EQ of their leader's health.

The good news about internal threats to our success is that we can do something significant about them. We cannot control external threats, but we can contain internal threats. 

Three meaningful gifts every leader can give away to their staff

Leaders come bearing gifts to their staff. They set the culture of the organization in positive and sometimes negative ways. The best leaders create a culture of clarity, development and optimism that we can accomplish our mission. All three of these are positive gifts to the staff they lead.

The gift of clarity is helping everyone be crystal clear as to what we are about and what our focus needs to be. The more sharply we can articulate our direction and focus, the more our staff can in turn focus their work! Focused clarity within organizations is not as common as one might think because it requires an enormous effort  by leadership to clarify their mission and an equally enormous effort to keep the organization focused on that mission. However, that clarity is a great gift to staff as they know what the goal is and where their energies need to be focused.

The gift of staff development is an indication of whether leaders are generous in seeking to help staff grow and develop or selfish in simply using staff for their own purposes. Think about the various work roles you have had over the years and ask the question, "did I leave that role with greater skill and success because someone intentionally developed me or was I simply left to my own devices?" Leaders have a stewardship responsibility to help staff grow, flourish and to give them opportunity to use their gifts fully. This is a truly significant gift and staff never forget the gift.

The gift of optimism is an attitude that together we can get our job done and accomplish our mission. A leader's optimism with their staff is critical in today's uncertain and competitive marketplaces. Optimism creates momentum while pessimism creates discouragement. Optimism married to a culture of teamwork and cooperation allows organizations to see results that no one could accomplish on their own. Regardless of whether a leader feels optimistic on any certain day, they give a gift to their staff when they choose to convey a positive attitude.

Every leader can give these three gifts to their staff - if they value their staff enough to do it.

How the internal quality of our organization impacts it bottom line results

I have had the opportunity on two occasions recently to interview the senior staff of business organizations. They were unusual in that they both had amazingly healthy cultures. Staff had collegial and cooperative relationships, they were focused on their mission, were innovative and were delivering results and serving customers in competitive markets. I gave them high marks for the engagement of their staff, their culture of results and the quality of their strategies. In both cases, the businesses were growing and their potential for the future was bright.

So why was I there? Because in both organizations there was a recognition that as well as they were doing, there were internal issues that if resolved could allow them to go to the next level of growth. These leaders recognized that the internal quality of their organizations had a direct impact on their bottom line results.

Think about this. In a flat world, everyone has essentially the same access to information. But that does not mean that all can deliver the same results. To the extent that we allow internal processes or culture to get in the way of what we do we compromise our effectiveness. So paying attention to the internal culture, relationships, processes and the inherent disconnects within the organization becomes a key component of ongoing success.

In my experience, there are three key factors that ought to be paid close attention to.

One: Relationships that are askew. When relationships between staff are strained cooperation, communication and innovation suffers. Solving relational disconnects impacts the whole organization as well as the ability to be all that the organization can be.

Two: Processes that could be more efficient. In the competitive environments we all work in this is a huge factor. Ironically, it is often in our times of success and growth that we ignore this factor because we don't have the time to focus internally with the work we are doing externally. Yet, focusing on our internal processes is the key to future growth and effectiveness. The goal of efficient processes is to drive wasted time, energy and money from the system and foster cooperation and efficiencies that will give us a competitive edge.

Three: The quality of our services or products. In a recent conversation, I discovered that service calls needed to be done on about one third of installations from a well known and successful home product supplier. Driving down such time consuming service calls would obviously make a difference to the bottom line as well as to customer satisfaction.

The key to all of this is developing a system for ongoing analysis of the internal culture, relationships and processes of an organization whether they be in the for profit or non-profit sectors. This presupposes that there is as much attention paid to the internal quality of our organizations as there is to the services we provide to external customers. The first directly impacts the second.

Five EQ skills that can transform a team or organization

The average level of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) within an organization or team has a direct impact on the success of that group. The higher the EQ skills of a team, the better they relate, the more candid they are, the less conflict they have, and the health of relationships is stronger. All of these contribute to greater cooperation, more innovative thinking, cooperation, and a lack of infighting and politics. This also applies to boards and in the church world to congregations.

There are five EQ skills that can literally transform a team or organization if leadership focuses on them, trains their staff, and communicates these skills regularly. These five skills can be learned, but we must also unlearn some unhelpful habits to get to a place of health.

The first skill is that of self-definition. Self-defined individuals think for themselves rather than simply taking the party line, verbalize their views even when it may be lonely, and do not worry what others might think of them. They are secure in who they are and what they believe. Innovation experts say that this skill, along with a culture that invites it is one of the most significant keys to innovation.

The second skill follows from the first. It is the ability of a team to engage in robust dialogue where any issue can be put on the table, with the exception of personal attacks or hidden agendas. Where this does not happen, it is almost exclusively the fault of leaders who are threatened by direct dialogue that might rock the boat. The ability to engage in robust dialogue invites ideas, observations, and innovation, while the inability kills both ideas and innovation.

A third skill is essential to the first two, and that is a non-defensive attitude on the part of all team members. It is an attitude of "nothing to prove and nothing to lose" where we do not have to be right and where we approach our work with open rather than closed minds. Defensiveness shuts down conversation, whereas non-defensiveness invites conversation, ideas, dreams, innovation, and the ability to look at situations with new eyes.

The fourth skill comes into play when we don't do the first three as well as we could: conflict resolution: the ability to quickly address conflict, de-escalate the issue, look for a win-win solution, and normalize the relationship. Conflict is not bad. Unaddressed conflict, however, is toxic. Think of the mental and emotional energy that is spent in unresolved conflict. People can be taught how to resolve conflict and to think of it in three steps: address it, look for a win/win solution, and normalize the relationship.

The fifth EQ skill that can transform a team or organization is the simple agreement to ban gossip. Gossip is the transmission of second or third-hand information to others that is prejudicial or first-hand information that is harmful and which need not be shared. All gossip is toxic to relationships, teams, and organizations so a concerted effort should be made to eradicate it.

Take a moment and think about what your team or organization would look like with these five skills being lived out by all members. They can be taught and practiced, and over time, they will transform your team or organization.