Discomfort Needs Safety

Growth requires discomfort. Whether that's growing pains as a child, or uncomfortable conversations and feedback, we have to confront and address an existing, comfortable reality, and explore something beyond it. By definition, going out of our comfort zone is, well, uncomfortable. So if you want growth, you need discomfort.

And if you want discomfort, you need safety.

Safety—particularly psychological safety in workplaces—is what lets us step out of our comfort zone and grow, instead of step out and feel fear. When we feel fear, our higher brain functions are preempted by survival instincts—neurologically, we funnel information from our senses more directly to our amygdala, skipping the analytical, slow road through the prefrontal cortex. Learning and growth require us to take that slower road.

For leaders, whether managers or senior ICs, that means that creating an environment of psychological safety is not just a nice thing to do: it is a necessary prerequisite for supporting your teams' growth.

The BICEPS framework from Paloma Medina is a good starting point for creating a safe environment. It focuses on 6 major areas:

• Belonging
• Improvement
• Choice
• Equity/Fairness
• Predictability
• Significance

All of which means that a lot of those "nice to have" things on teams aren't really nice-to-have, they are the work of leadership. Beyond the core of taking care of each other—prioritizing those life things, helping each other when in need—and being fair, we need to be deliberate about:

• Delegating effectively, ensuring people on our teams have the direction and autonomy to make significant choices commensurate to their skill level.
• Tying team goals back to company goals to show how our work improves the business and has a significant outcome.
• Delivering, and celebrating the work to learn, eliminate risks, and other ways of delivering increments of value to make predictable and significant progress.
• Maintaining equanimity so that even uncomfortable conversations, which are necessary for improving as individuals and a team, are predictable and safe.
• Being blameless about incidents and errors, so that people are treated fairly and they become opportunities to improve.
• Keeping the team in the loop equitably so that new projects and changes in priority are, as much as possible, predictable and significant, not surprises, and the team has choice in how to approach them.

None of these are easy at best. Different environments may make some of them even more challenging. If your company doesn't articulate clear goals, it is harder to show how your team supports them. If your manager doesn't delegate effectively or share information, you may not be able to do so in turn. Delegating well is, itself, the subject of reams of advice and coaching.

The work of leadership isn't easy because these things aren't easy, and these are just some of the things we need to do. Creating psychological safety is a baseline, the floor on which you can build high-performing teams and help individuals achieve their potentials.