In my previous article Conquering the Fear of the Unknown, I explored the importance and tools of effective risk management—not just as a defensive measure, but as a crucial tool for transforming uncertainty into success. This article serves as a direct rallying cry for people leaders: it is time to step up, champion a risk-aware culture, and empower your teams to take bold, calculated strides.

If risk management is important in ensuring success and is simple enough for everyone to practice, everyone should practice it. As people leaders, you play vital role in promoting it to members of  your team. You can tell, encourage, and more importantly, model risk management. As Confucius said, “Tell me and I will forget, show me and I will remember; involve me and I will understand.”

There are actions that you can take to promote risk management. Giving information is the start but it is not enough. You have to advocate. Messaging for information educates and clarifies whereas messaging for advocacy persuades and mobilizes actions. The former focuses on facts, data, and explanation whereas the latter focuses on issues and calls to action. The tone for messaging for information is objective and clear whereas the tone for the messaging for advocacy is persuasive and enthusiastic.

Advocacy is not one-off or occasional actions. It is persistent. In advocating you can do the following:

  1. Know your audience

  2. Engage the heart in addition to the head

  3. Be clear on what actions you want the audience to take

  4. Follow the golden rules of advocacy of being polite, prepared, and persistent

You can set the tone. Leaders influence workplace culture, attitude, and how things are done in the workplace. They shape team culture far more by their actions than by their words. Team members watch how leaders behave towards uncertainty, not just what they preach. They are more ready to walk with leaders who walk the talk.

In plan, policy, and project discussions, for example, leaders can ask if and what risks are considered. They can share risk information and training and recognize and encourage others to do the same.

You can have two minutes or so in standard team meetings devoted to risk discussion. You can ask team members what new vulnerabilities they see in their daily workflows.

You can create psychological safety. Psychological safety is the shared belief among team members that it is safe to raise concerns, voice out ideas, ask questions, and admit errors or mistakes without fear of being punished, humiliated, or rejected. Because negative risks sound like "bad news," employees often refrain from raising them to avoid social retaliation, ridicule, and damage to job security. Or they provide selective information to mask real problems.

Without psychological safety, people fall for omission bias or selective omission where they spin or cherry-pick information or data to support favorable view to avoid backlash, even if the risk is actually worse. Psychological safety along with ethics are foundational cornerstones of risk management. It does not only facilitate the identification and management of risks, but it encourages people to embrace it.

You can integrate risk consideration in strategic planning and reporting templates. Planning is the crucial first step in organizational action or operation. Poor planning makes everything else risky. Do not leave risk management in planning to hunches. Baking in risks consideration in planning helps eliminate or reduce risks to downstream actions, e.g., resource allocation and implementation.

You can include risk consideration in planning and reporting templates to prod staff to give risks a closer look. If your team is ready for it, you can actually embed a risk register or risk matrix to lead staff to be more than just intuitive but more analytical, consistent with accepted standards, in their approach to risks. Including risks in reporting template, e.g., progress report or project closure or completion reports, encourages the tracking of risks and the effectiveness of mitigation measures over time, and “harvest” lessons for future undertakings.

You can clarify risk ownership and roles and responsibilities. Without clear ownership and defined roles and responsibilities, the so-called “Hot Potato” Effect dominates. Tasks that are uncomfortable or “hot”-the hot potato-are ignored or left out for others to take care of. Blame-shifting is resorted to when things go wrong.

Start with simple foundational roles and responsibilities. This lowers the barrier to risk management participation. This approach avoids staff being overwhelmed, builds natural confidence, and allows staff to embrace and internalize risk ownership without feeling overwhelmed as if their core jobs are being supplanted when, in fact, they are being enhanced. As staff increasingly embrace risk management, more specific and detailed roles, and responsibilities  as well as standards may be introduced.

You can prioritize risks. Risk prioritization promotes risk management to staff by preventing “initiative fatigue.” By prioritizing risks, staff are able to focus on risks that matter and thus enable them to appreciate the risks’ significance while receiving easy-to-digest guidance. Staff can also learn to prioritize and address risks that matter themselves, saving time, effort, and resources from risks that really do not matter. Not all risks are of equal significance to achieving goals.

You can conduct regular risk reviews and discussions. Regular risk reviews and discussions promote risk management because they encourage staff to identify, follow up, and report risks without fear. You can do this by asking staff which aspects of their work have the greatest risks and collaboratively decide what should be done about them. You can use sticky notes for this exercise, but you do not have to do it if this is perceived as unnecessary additional work. Read the room. The idea is to build risk-conscious work thought processes.

Through them, risk management is initially integrated into discussions, then in policy, planning, work processes, and eventually in thought processes. By treating it as a core thought process, risk management saves time, prevents rework by identifying problems and proactively addressing them.

You can build risk competence. Basic training is the foundation of organizational risk management culture. It bridges the gap between risk management policies and a thriving culture. People are turned off by things and tasks they do not understand no matter how important they are. That is just how people are. The human brain naturally interprets complexity and unfamiliarity as potential threats. When people are faced with tasks they do not understand, their nervous system switches to “protection mode,” making them feel overwhelmed, anxious, or instantly turned off by the idea. They also do it in order to protect their self-esteem.

Risk management info-sharing and advocacy are outcome-limited if the people they are aimed at are not ready to receive and embrace them. Telling people to practice risk management and talking about probabilities and interdependencies cause many people’s nervous systems to default to “protection mode.” They can hear, but they are not listening.

Basic risk management is a strategic way to bring down the default “protection mode” in people and turn their nervous system to connection mode. It lowers the barriers to learning, allowing people to open up to understand and develop and grown their risk management skills. As a people leader, you can prepare the “ground” for basic risk management training by spending time in meetings with your team to talk about risk management-what is it and why it is important in the simplest terms that meet your listeners at their level of readiness. Soon, those talks lead to appetite and hunger for more on risk management knowledge.

Risk management as the missing key to success is not a slogan or untested proposition. According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), 83 percent of high-performing organizations report frequent use of risk management practices. In contrast, only 49 percent of low-performing organizations practice some form of risk management.

That risk management is important to succeed is evidenced by the most successful and groundbreaking people talking about it. People like Mark Zuckerberg, Albert Einstein, Warren Buffet, and Peter Drucker talked about it.

By encouraging and supporting your team to practice risk management you increase the likelihood of your team’s and everyone’s success. As often said, a rising tide lifts all boats!