From Beyond AmazingLeadership coaching & consulting

A Toolkit note

Standards alongside safety

Not a framework, and not on the shelf. This is how I would go about it.

Psychological safety is what lets people say the work is not good enough. It is not permission for the work to be not good enough.

The misreading goes like this: we want people to speak up, so we must not come down on anyone, so the standard quietly drops, and the thing we wanted them to speak up about becomes the thing nobody mentions. I watched it happen in my own firm. The business was growing, I was still deep in client work, and both suffered a little because I was spreading myself too thinly. I had probably noticed before anyone else, but it was not long before someone in the team said so to my face. I agreed with them, which was the easy part, and then handed the technical work over in phases. I stayed on as the team's technical resource when they needed one, and the rest of my week went on running the company.

The way through is to be explicit about both at once. Write the standard down, plainly, in a form people can hold each other to: what a finished piece of work looks like, what "on time" means, what happens when it is missed. Then make it safe to say the standard has been missed, by you first. The first time someone tells you your own work fell short and you thank them for it, in front of the others, you have built more safety than any workshop.

Safety is the freedom to say the uncomfortable thing. Standards are what make the uncomfortable thing worth saying. A team with the first and not the second is pleasant, and it drifts.

Peter Gladdish·About Peter

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