Creating a winning culture through ally-rich, psychologically safe actions and narratives

Creating and maintaining healthy, high performance cultures have never been more difficult. Here are three things I have learnt in the last few years and especially in 2020:

• Actions and words count. Organisations and people are not rational, they are emotional and these emotions affect performance and effort. Organisations and people make meaning of things. A culture is made up of daily conversations (narratives) and stories – these conversations and stories can be positive or negative, they can be open or hidden. People can have shared meaning or they can be confused by a lack of Say-Do alignment from leaders. What is going on in your organisation?
• Inclusion and allyship is critical to ensure all people feel they belong and it is not expensive to be themselves or to challenge the status quo. When belonging is low, people are not engaged and we lose the benefits of diversity. Do all employees feel they belong and that they will be safe guarded by others should they encounter diversity challenges?
• Psychological safety is the bedrock of inclusion and innovation. Dr. Tim Clarke’s research found that there are 4 levels of Psychological safety and each level follows on the other. The first is inclusion safety where all feel valued for who they are, the second is learner safety where it is safe to ask questions and learn from mistakes. Then only can collaborator safety (mutual access to others, engagement with others without constraints) and challenger safety (challenging the status quo without retribution and speaking up) be developed. These levels of psychological safety are built on increasing respect and permission. What are the levels of psychological safety in your teams?
• What can leaders do to better create and maintain winning cultures? Awareness is not enough, you have to move to action. 

First, leaders have to change the core narratives and stories in the organisation to align it consistently with the values and to guide thinking, decisions and actions. They have to identify polarities and paradoxes and make sense of it for people. They have to tell positive values stories and illustrate ways of acting. They have to track positive and negative stories, told and untold stories. If there are more negative than positive stories, and many unspokens, leaders have to act. Employees should also be encouraged to share stories. Behaviour becomes contagious when it is described in a clear story. 

Second, leaders have to go much further than diversity and inclusion and embed allyship as a way of being in the organisation. Allies build a culture of belonging. Dr. Victoria Mattingly provides us with this definition: “Allyship is an ongoing relationship between an ally and their partner, working together toward the shared goal of fairness, equity, and social justice.” “An ally,” says Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, Chief Diversity Officer at Microsoft, “is somebody who intentionally engages with empathy and care to support someone else in the way in which they would want to be supported.” It is about listening and learning and using your power and privilege for good. It is also abut intentionally de-biasing your actions. Allyship consists of showing up and speaking up for all groups in the organisation consistently. Inclusive leaders create a culture of inclusion. Leaders need to be curious and courageous. They need to provide both 1-1 support as well as advocate for inclusion. Dr. Victoria Mattingly runs an excellent Ally Up course on Udemy. 

Finally, assess and develop psychological safety in every team in the organisation. When people sense a threat to their safety, they either have a performance response or a survival response. A survival response activates the pain centres of the brain and puts people in defensive mode, reducing their effort and performance. Dr. Tim Clark has developed an assessment tool for leaders to measure the level of psychological safety in teams and use it as a continuous pulse check to understand how to nudge the team in the right direction. As he says:”When vulnerability is punished, identity, social interaction and performance become expensive.” 

If you want to learn more about how you can create this culture in your organisation, contact me on [email protected].