Psychological safety is a term that’s popular right now in discussions about workplace culture.
According to the Center for Creative Leadership’s website, “Psychological safety is the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.” In this post, we will examine one facet of this.
When looking at high stress environments like emergency communications, the idea of not being punished for mistakes seems unlikely.
Thus, the nature of the work itself reduces psychological safety.
Even if our command structure were tolerant of mistakes, we aren’t.
Your co-workers on both sides of the radio depend on your accuracy on every call, every day.
And, you make mistakes all the time.
People on the front line of emergency communications are prone to beating themselves up over errors.
The weight of the responsibility that the job carries sits on your shoulder like a sentinel, guarding against danger at all times.
You know that your slip up can be one error in someone’s injury or death.
There’s a saying:
“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost, And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”
We live that every day. We try to keep a good supply of horseshoe nails, good, sharp, and strong horseshoe nails. Because the kingdom depends on that nail.
There are two things to address here.
One is the supervisor’s role in psychological safety.
Given the tendency to emphasize excellence as a buffer against critical errors, we need to be more accepting of minor slip-ups. We need to learn to trust that our people will have the sense they need when it gets tough. We can hold a high standard and not be punitive.
This is tricky. Because there is such high turnover, and people are always in training, we have low trust in their skills.
We must find a way to help our less seasoned personnel find their excellence.
We do that with celebration of getting it right. Focus on what people get right every day. Every day! What we focus on grows.
The other is perspective.
Your work is important. And, it is one piece in a long chain of events that occur. There are about a thousand different factors in every situation. Your little screw up is never THE REASON that things go badly. It is one factor.
Do not let anyone, not even you, put the full weight of an incident on you.
Our powerlessness in the face of evil creates deep fear in us. That fear makes us hyper-vigilant over any mistakes we might make.
We cannot allow ourselves to continually berate our work. It will destroy us.
Allow yourself to be human. Forgive yourself. Strategize how to prevent the error next time. Move on.
Grant yourself some psychological safety.
