Psychological safety in leadership development
5 steps to ensure you are doing it right
It is a huge privilege to be able to engage in deep-level approaches to leadership development, but it is first and foremost a responsibility. When individuals are open to making a commitment to their personal and professional development, trusting you to explore their deeply-held beliefs and values, it is of paramount importance that they feel safe in that context. With over 25 years experience of leadership development, working all over the world with grassroots leaders all the way up to executive level, through our work with The Centre for the Arts and Global Leadership and Scheherazade Initiatives, here are 5 key points we embed into our own process.
1) Preparation, preparation, preparation. Trust is built, it isn’t a given. It’s therefore imperative that, before you do any deep-level work with clients, you ‘prepare’ the ground. What does this mean? It means doing games and exercises, having conversations, and building frameworks that allow you to develop trust within the group. It’s also key that you develop some of the skills and ways of thinking that are going to enable you to work together in better ways — such as understanding how to listen better, the importance of ‘giving and receiving’, and imagination exercises to stretch our capacity to think of new possibilities. We put huge emphasis in ensuring sufficient time is spent on making everyone feels safe and building the level of trust and safety within a group, BEFORE any deeper-level work is done.
2) Facilitate, don’t ‘teach’. Our job as leadership development experts is not to tell people what to think. On the contrary, it’s to allow natural leadership to emerge from those who understand their own contexts far better than an external consultant ever could. If we truly believe in our ability to empower leadership, we need to create contexts where leadership emerges, it is not ‘forced’ or dictated from on high. This is crucial in ensuring that any changes that need to be made are deeply embedded and ‘owned’ by all levels of a company. All of our leadership development programmes are about creating the right environment for people to make their own connections and makes longer-lasting changes. To that point, we also never use Powerpoint in our work, for the simple reason that we don’t want people to look towards yet another screen or be ‘passive’ consumers of information. We want them to be active learners and doers. We believe leadership is a practice, not a theory, and that leadership learning should reflect that in getting participants to think for themselves.
3) Working at ‘one step’ removed to ensure psychological safety. The beauty of using a theatre or arts-based approach to learning is that you can use character and story as a metaphor to explore complex and sensitive ideas. In our work with refugees, for example, we often use character creation as a way to explore the challenges a refugee faces in their lives but, critically, not using the actual stories of those in the room. Rather, the creation of a new character, that allows participants to project their own experiences onto this fictional experience, creates a ‘one step removed’ layer that protects their psychological safety in not making their own story open to discussion and debate. Similarly, in our corporate work, story as metaphor allows us to explore the relationships between stakeholders, empathetically understanding the impact of our organisation on the wider world, and even opening up ideas around ‘role behaviours’ that could better inform our own leadership styles.
4) The participant is always the one who chooses what they share. Building on the above point, we believe it is the choice of the participant themselves with the degree to which they share their own personal experiences and are never invasive in questioning or forcing their own story to emerge. Indeed, this is not our goal. We seek always for the idea of healing and believe that happens at a very deep level that a facilitator cannot, nor should not, touch. Our job is to move people towards the light, but stepping over the threshold is their own choice, and that they are much more likely to do this when it is compelled deeply from within.
5) Processing. Whenever we have experienced deep shifts in our thinking, or taken part in an activity that invites new ways of thinking about our work, it’s important that we are given the space and time to process the learning. In our own work, we do this in a number of ways. First, through a thoughtful questioning process that creates space for participants to make their own connections to the exercise or activity that we have just done. Critical to this, is the acknowledgement of feelings that emerged, not just intellectual insights. Feelings can never be wrong. They are individual and subjective, and it’s important to honour the validity of those feelings and perceptions. Secondly, we use our connection to nature, especially leadership development work that happens at our impact space, Clos de Gaye in south west France, to give people time and space for deep-level, introspective work, such as journaling, to allow links to be made at the personal level too.
We believe there are huge ethical challenges with the current trend in leadership development to excavate stories from an individual’s past within a corporate setting. Whilst it’s important for us to learn to be authentic and free to be our best selves in the workplace, we need to be mindful that we are still in professional settings and our responsibilities in not opening up a Pandora’s box on deeply personal traumas. Whilst a leadership development experience might open the door to thinking about deep-level changes that need to be made within an individual, choosing an approach that allows that healing to happen deep within is far more powerful than those that ‘bring the inside out’ in exploitative and voyeuristic ways.
In our work, we actually see ourselves as going beyond psychological approaches to leadership development anyway, towards methodologies that focus less on dredging up the past or a more ’Freudian’ approach to the excavation of one’s deep emotions, with a drive towards the future for more regenerative and spiritually-based approaches. Leaders often come from highly intellectually-based frameworks, their high-level of education frequently an impediment to truly deep thinking. It’s important that we don’t stay in the realm of ‘the brain’ and can speak to something larger and more profound that already lies within. That drive to something more substantial than an over-intellectualism of a process and a focus on the problem, but instead always focusing on solutions, is the drive to much more sustainable and long-lasting change. And, critically, it also creates opportunities to be open to inspiration at a much deeper level.
What are some of the other frameworks that you use to create psychological safety in your work and ensure you are driving towards a deeper level of impact?
Caroline Watson is the founder of The Centre for the Arts and Global Leadership and The Scheherazade Initiatives, using theatre and arts-based approaches to leadership development. She is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and a disruptive thinker, speaker and writer on topics of global governance and leadership development.
