Giving Compass' Take:

• Gali Cooks, president & CEO of Leading Edge, discusses how her positive workplace culture threatened the psychological safety of her employees and hindered innovation, development, and space for new ideas. 

• How can NGOs ensure that all employees are showing up to work feeling safe about their opinions and critiques? In what ways can the philanthropic sector better promote psychological safety?

• Understand more about nonprofit well-being trends.

Each year, the organization I lead administers an employee experience survey to hundreds of Jewish nonprofit organizations. Last year, Leading Edge was finally big enough to receive results from our own survey, as we had grown to a team of six FTEs. The team was excited to fill out the survey that we had designed for our partner organizations. Finally, we could taste our own cooking!

Once all responses were in, I logged onto the platform and excitedly waited for the survey results to load. But as the numbers populated, I grew concerned and then, eventually, discouraged. We performed well on most of the factors that contribute to a great workplace culture—passion for our mission, pride in working at our organization, effective internal communications, and even a high net promoter score—but there was one glaring exception: Nearly half of our staff reported that they felt a lack of psychological safety at work. These employees shared that they did not feel comfortable “providing job-related feedback to [their] colleagues” nor did they feel comfortable “sharing potentially unpopular opinions” at work. In short, some of our team members did not feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work.

Psychological safety is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,” Edmondson wrote in the study. “It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.” Edmondson’s research has been validated in a variety of settings. When Google, for example, ran a big-data project to understand what drove their most high-performing teams, they found that, more than anything else, psychological safety was critical to making a team work.

Read the full article about psychological safety by Gali Cooks at Stanford Social Innovation Review.