Understand why they are not telling it like it is.

I worked in a progressive organisation that cared enough to ask employees every year how they felt. The engagement survey included the question ‘is it safe to speak up in this company?’. Over a four-year period the numbers declined, indicating psychological safety was under threat.

Like the majority of my colleagues I was guilty of sitting at the boardroom table guessing and hypothesising about the causes of the decline. The discussion threw up a multitude of reasons ranging from Covid-19 and remote working, to leadership and structural changes. The result, actions that missed the mark and a lower score the following year.

It wasn’t that the people I worked with didn’t care. They did. But it was all too easy to jump straight to solutions because we felt under pressure (often from ourselves!) to the have the answers at our fingertips.

In my experience, many corporate environments favour extroverted thinking, fast decisions and take solace in so-called “quick wins” and having an action plan as quickly as possible.

The organisation I worked for was enlightened enough to sponsor me doing my own research, into what was eroding colleagues’ ability and willingness to speak up.

Two qualitative research groups and six in-depth interviews later, with the support of Graham Booth, an awesome research moderator, we got under the iceberg of why psychological safety was in decline by tapping into the lived experience of the people working there. No rocket science involved!

Importantly, the leadership team made time to listen, reflect, understand and address the barriers to speaking up by looking at the matrix of dynamics at play including; how colleagues exited the business; under-utilisation of specialist teams skills and experience; and why there was a greater sense of safety within core teams than within cross-functional teams.

When I look back, I kick myself for guessing at the dynamics at play. And the irony of leaders asking their teams why they do ‘not feel safe to speak up’ resulting in us not getting the full picture, is no longer lost on me.

This experience led me to develop my own diagnostic tool based on a generation of empirical evidence and my own academic research at Henley Business School. Answered anonymously with a simple scale, it almost instantly (under three minutes) illustrates for leaders, and the team, what is driving and eroding their team’s ability or willingness to speak up. It means leaders do not have to guess or risk colleagues pulling their punches when asked.

This is a diagnostic tool only for progressive leaders who want to know how to give their team a voice. Why? Because the benefits of creating psychological safety are so significant in terms of greater inclusion and diversity of thought, generating more creativity and innovation, and creating stronger engagement and better performance.