I’m grateful for the sidebar conversations that emerged after the last posts about how leadership can make the difference between good and not-so-good behaviors and how invisible power strands can influence people’s decisions and sensemaking in orgs. As a result, I wanted to take a minute to share another related example from Bob Sutton’s work in The No A**hole Rule.
He described a company that struggled with its safety culture and noted it was led by a CEO who apparently liked to peel out of the parking lot in his sports car.
That’s a great example of discursive effect: Here’s the dude with the most power in the organization behaving as though safety doesn’t matter.
Would members of that org directly link their observations of the CEO’s behavior to their own views on safety in the workplace? To their own decision-making and sensemaking? Probably not. But once he changed his behavior, the safety numbers improved.
That’s what makes power effects so slippery: They’re often at once invisible while also very influential.
Today, let’s talk about some other invisible and influential dynamics and how they affect team functioning, specifically on the matter of innovation.
You might have seen a recent offering from The Chronicle about a new position in higher ed, the Chief Innovation Officer. Let’s talk a bit about the conditions required to foster innovation in organizations by exploring some recent research.
I think people might like the resulting framework in this post because — on the face of it — it seems very simple and intuitive. It starts with the question, “Why are some teams able to innovate better than others?”
One idea that may speak to us intuitively is that on innovative teams, people feel they can be more honest with one another when the environment is characterized by psychological safety, what researcher Dr. Amy Edmondson describes as permission for candor.
In other words, when team members feel they can speak their minds without social, personal, or material penalty, the environment is psychologically safe.
Advancing our understanding of psychological safety as it relates to innovation, recently researchers led by Dr. Jeff Dyer suggest after their analysis of 60 tech startups that while psychological safety is important to innovation, it isn’t enough.
They suggest that psychological safety plus intellectual honesty matters to innovation, noting that psychological safety doesn’t automatically foster intellectual honesty.
We might think — intuitively — that an environment characterized by psychological safety will lead team members to engage in the kind of candor required to innovate, but Dyer and colleagues suggest otherwise.
Let me say already that if you raised an eyebrow at “60 tech startups,” yeah. Me too. I immediately want to know the specific composition of the participants in this study because that matters, and we’ll come back to it before the end of this post.
The researchers present their work in such an appealing way, which is why it may resonate for people. They describe and define four innovation cultures, present four principles that can create high-performing cultures, and share five rules to “fast-track” intellectual honesty.
It’s so neat1.
I will definitely complicate this neat little package in a minute, but for now, let’s talk about what’s in the box.
First, the four quadrants of innovative cultures, as described by the researchers:
We see that cultures low in both intellectual honesty and psychological safety are considered distressed: They aren’t a good learning organization due to high turnover, and they don’t share knowledge or engage forthrightly due to the potential for threat.
In a culture of high intellectual honesty but low psychological safety (Apple under Steve Jobs was a good example), we see an anxious culture that might experience good breakthrough innovation but high turnover because…..well, because of jerks.
A culture high in psychological safety but low in intellectual honesty may prioritize relationships and others’ well-being in the org but might not experience innovation because org members may not be challenged when presenting ideas. This culture may see conflict as inherently negative. The researchers call them a comfortable culture.
Finally, the high/high quadrant is what should provide us with the kind of innovation we seek: Holding one another accountable and voicing contrary opinions until we find the best solution without fear of retribution, the innovative culture.
That seems simple enough. But wait, there’s more!
Our authors suggest four principles for developing your innovative culture:
Foster emotional intelligence
Hire and develop proactive employees
Legitimize and encourage honesty
Subordinate egos to unifying goals
PLUS the five rules for fast-tracking intellectual honesty:
Focus on a common goal
Expect disagreement but require respect
Stick to facts and evidence
Acknowledge biases, priorities, and knowledge gaps
Ensure that everyone has a voice
The authors also provide a nice, neat 10-question survey to help leaders determine the level of intellectual honesty and psychological safety on the team. You can see that directly in the article, and if you don’t have access due to a paywall, your library probably will.
Okay, so….a nice neat little package for supporting innovation in organizations, but let’s complicate it a bit because it relates directly to our last conversation about discourse and the invisible strands of power within organizations.
One primary challenge for launching this plan is that we’re dealing with human beings, which means a wide continuum of operational definitions on matters like respect and even facts and evidence.
And because I have expertise in women’s leadership, for example, that’s the first place my mind goes:
What is generally considered respectful in male-driven environments (and hence my questions about the participant composition of this study) may be at odds with how individuals experience the environment.
What we know about such environments is that when women attempt to engage in “male” types of behavior and communication — things that are considered respectful and that would be acceptable when coming from men — they’re viewed as hostile or aggressive, especially when pushing back on power.
When they engage in behaviors that are more in line with the skills women often bring to the environment by virtue of our socialization in a gendered culture, those behaviors aren’t valued.
Thus, it’s a double-bind that isn’t easy to navigate, and when our authors provide guidance for leaders, they may underestimate the amount of time, skill, nuance, and trust required to foster and maintain an environment of intellectual honesty and psychological safety when the environment includes diverse perspectives and experiences.
(Again, my question about the participants in this survey. Were the teams in this study diverse? I mentioned only gender here, but you can imagine how positionality and intersectionality inform this conversation.)
An attempt to overlay this framework without deep and sustained attention to the dynamics that support the outcomes will be problematic. We can’t grow fruit without ongoing and careful attention to the soil and the growing conditions.
From Gündemir et al:
How differences in opinion, perspectives, and inputs influence decision-making outcomes is inherently tied with power and politics. Members of underrepresented groups, such as women and racial minorities, are at a disadvantage because their inputs may often go unnoticed, be overlooked, or be undervalued. Achieving a more equitable workplace requires a critical understanding of these intersections between diversity and power.
(Readers who want a practical example of this information in motion, specifically around the idea that often some kinds evidence is prioritized over other kinds of evidence can jump to 9:40 in the recording.)
It’s a very difficult thing for leaders to accomplish, and I’ve been thinking lately about my own role in my organization and how delightful it is to be someone with responsibility but not authority.
In other words, I have zero control over other people’s material lives, and therefore, it hasn’t been difficult to establish the kind of environment where we can speak freely and honestly. There’s no risk, really.
Because like it or not, power shows up. And if you’re someone with positional power, it might be very difficult to create an environment of both psychological safety and intellectual honesty.
In jobs where I’ve had more positional power, I found success with defaulting to my standard mode of operation in literally any setting:
Here’s what I think based on my reading of this situation. Tell me why I’m wrong.
I do that as a parent, a spouse, a faculty member, a leader. I am deeply aware of my biases and walk in the world knowing that I am only ever partly right about anything; I rely on other people to fill in the gaps and inform my thinking from their vantage points.
Taking that approach helps in establishing psychological safety AND intellectual honesty.
Leader behavior is central to creating the right kind of dynamic, and I’m convinced that only a leader who can publicly say (for example), “I was wrong” and who consistently demonstrates that they are not only willing to hear but also craving contrary opinions is capable of sustaining the type of environment required for innovation.
When leaders hold their ideas like possessions instead of evolving, fluid, and malleable organisms subject to interrogation and revision, the water temperature will absolutely not support psychological safety or intellectual honesty. We will not develop an innovative culture.
So what are people to do, then, if they want to leverage this nice, neat framework?
Let me lay out a bias here: I am not a fan of consultants, quite honestly, but I do think we have a role to play in this kind of situation in light of the difficulty in operationalizing things like “respect” and “egos” and “biases.”
Even facts and evidence are subject to interpretation; data aren’t ever neutral.
I’m not at all convinced that organizations can do this on their own, in part because the entire process can easily become a replication of certain kinds of thinking and certain ways of being in the world. The rules we establish for respect, for example, will replicate existing systemic problems, I guarantee it.
We’ll see the existing power dynamics show up.
Therefore, the first step is engaging someone who can untangle the existing dynamics and lead groups through a process of establishing clear operational definitions (not just what it is but also how it looks and how it functions).
That’s hard work. We can start with the 10-question survey shared in the article, enhanced to include demographic data, and from there, we’d need individual conversations with team members to better understand their experiences in the organization2, locate some of the invisible power strands, and interpret the survey results.
I like observing teams in action (as evidenced by our last discussion!) because so many dynamics reveal themselves in daily interactions. After some of that kind of work, we’d have a good sense of the existing level of both psychological safety and intellectual honesty.
But if I had to share one piece of advice for leaders who can’t or won’t hire a consultant, it would be to make sure that the people who offer contrary opinions aren’t punished.
Orgs are strange places and many have expansive memories in light of long-term employees (hello, higher ed). When people who offer contradictory opinions are perceived as punished in some fashion — whether related to their expression of such opinions or not and whether now or later — a strand of power is rendered visible to others in the org.
The message to the organization is that expressing contrary opinions can lead to negative consequences, which — as you can imagine — will not enable a culture of innovation to thrive.
Y’all, I have so much in the tank that I want to share with you, and I hope that I’ll get to this one in our next discussion: Why don’t teaching innovations work? Check out this article from The Chronicle, and I’ll be back with some perspectives on it (I hope).
In the meantime, my best wishes if you’re wrapping up a semester right now!
And I need to take a lesson in my own writing because I am overly concerned with conveying the complexity of dynamics that I can never distill something down into a neat, marketable package. I will always be the person who says, “Well….it depends,” and guess what? That definitely does not sell, even though it’s probably true!
Periodic reminder that everyone experiences an organization differently.
Psychological Safety + Intellectual Honesty = Innovation