A few years ago, I was speaking with a senior leader in a conference room at Starbucks (like, Starbucks headquarters, not the coffee shop). We talked about his team and some of the struggles he faced around unleashing their creativity.
About halfway through the meeting, I noticed a plaque on the wall behind him, inscribed with the current version of Starbucks’ values. There was one (I’ll paraphrase it here) that read:
Have the courage to speak up.
“Huh,” I said, pointing to the plaque. “I think that’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s actually not about having the courage to speak up. It’s about leaders having the courage to listen up.”
Amy Edmondson, a pioneering researcher and scholar I feel lucky to count as a friend, once told me that she wished she’d named her groundbreaking research around “psychological safety” differently.
Psychological safety is all about creating a culture of creativity, sharing, and speaking up. Teams with a high degree of psychological safety learn faster and perform better.
So what did she wish she called her research?
A felt sense of candor.
That framing resonates with me so much.
In the modern world, the leaders I work with are awash in complex challenges, competing commitments, deadlines, and back-to-back meetings.
Even the best of them are daunted.
This is exactly why they need a cohesive and empowered team around them.
The strongest leaders know that seniority does not guarantee correctness. They try to cultivate a culture of challenge, especially toward them, in their teams.
The strongest leaders learn that their job isn’t to know the answer, it’s to create the conditions for answers to emerge and be acted on.
They know that knowledge and skills are distributed and everyone has unique value to add.
They seek to work flat to unleash the creativity to solve their challenges, seeking ideas and input regardless of where in the hierarchy they come from.
For all these reasons, wise leaders establish a norm of speaking up in their teams.
A norm of speaking up is about people sharing their views. That’s psychological safety — the felt sense of candor your team shares enables them to contribute authentically, without fear of humiliation or harm.
It’s easy to place this burden on others, as Starbucks did — to imagine that our team members or peers need to find the inner courage to speak up.
That’s a mistake because it focuses on a behavior. The thing that we need to focus on is the underlying emotional need: the felt sense of candor.
And that starts with us as leaders.
The intention to listen is what creates the space for others to speak at all.
As leaders, creating psychological safety is about creating a culture where people are willing to listen deeply to others’ wisdom.
We need a “listen up,” rather than a “speak up” culture.
Listening more is a simple prescription, but not an easy one.
That’s why I created The C.L.E.A.R. Path to Executive
Leadership, a program crafted after in-depth research and work with hundreds of leaders at global organizations.
(Spoiler alert: the “L” in C.L.E.A.R. is listening!)
The C.L.E.A.R. Path to Executive Leadership is a 12-week-long journey designed specifically for busy leaders and emphasizes reflection, practice, and tools.
After this program, you will listen better, lead more confidently, empower others (while holding them accountable), and create cohesive and empowered teams with a unified vision so you can drive results.
I’m opening the program up to the first cohort right now.
Curious? Book a complimentary 30-minute call. We’ll spend the first part of the call reflecting on your approach to leadership and wrap up by seeing whether this program might be a good fit for you.
Book here: https://calendly.com/chris-clearfield/30-minutes-with-chris?month=2023-10