Creating a Growth Environment

Excellence is a journey, not a destiny. As such, there will always be room for improvement. The good becomes better. The better becomes the best. The best becomes the best of the best.

That is our trajectory: to be the best version of ourselves. That is our highest and deepest need or calling, if you want. However, along with that trajectory are other needs. According to Abraham Maslow these include physiological needs, safety, love and belonging, and esteem needs.

And these needs are hierarchically ordered. One cannot be the best teacher or doctor if he is living in extreme poverty or in an environment of incessant conflict or abuse. This is true in organizations. Where employees are underpaid that they cannot meet their basic needs or where they are treated abusively like they do not belong, they are not keen to learn or contribute their best. They give the minimum to get by.

When everyone is the best version of themselves and contributes their best, the entire organization improves. If everyone improves from 70 percent of their best selves to 90 percent, the average for the organization to be the best version of itself increases.

An environment conducive to personal growth is thus conducive to organizational growth. An organization with self-actualizing employees trumps an organization with “self-diminishing” employees any time.

Psychological safety is imperative. There is psychological safety when people can show up to be themselves, when honest mistakes are seen as opportunities for improvement and not “crimes” that appear in one’s record, written or unwritten. There is psychological safety when people feel safe to take interpersonal risks by speaking up and sharing their concerns and ideas.

Psychological safety starts with us. When we are composed and self-assured, secure, empathetic, and open-minded we tend to be more considerate and trusting others. We are more likely to believe in failing forward than seeing failure as the end.

Because they carry the biggest “hammers”, bosses have a lot to do with creating psychological safety. They set the tone. Insecure and incompetent bosses with autocratic leadership style do not create psychological safety. Instead, they drive people to wear masks to be someone other than themselves. Meetings and gatherings become masquerade balls or costume parties. Problems are kept buried below the “well-polished” tip of the iceberg until they become disasters that cannot be hidden. People would rather be midgets than giants to avoid being cut down.

Psychological safety is everyone’s responsibility. We can help create it by helping make it an explicit priority and helping create norms for handling failures. We can be facilitators of everyone speaking up and creating spaces for new ideas, even wild ones. We can help nurture a default mindset that looks at failure not as an end, but opportunities for learning and improvement. As was said by Thomas Edison about failure, “ I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that will not work.” Rather than avoiding conflicts, we can embrace productive conflicts that separate the real gold from fake ones.

Psychological safety creates pathways of excellence. Without psychological safety, people would not even want to take the journey. They would rather hide in their cubbyholes, contorting their values and abilities to fit in. Soon, they will not even recognize excellence staring them at their faces.