The Power of Situational Humility: A Leader Who Can Enable Psychological Safety
MoreThanNow has been experimenting on ways to increase psychological safety in the workplace. There’s a wide array of studies showing this will enhance creativity, increase quality of team performance through their learning behaviour, and ultimately improve firms’ RETURN ON ASSETS.
In our latest experiment with Novartis (reported in MIT Sloan), we found that one-on-one meetings between managers and their team members is an effective platform to foster psychological safety in the workplace. When we tailored these meetings to the individuality of each member and their needs, we increased the feeling of psychological comfort. Now, we know that this medium of communication works. But what about the characteristics of the leaders who employees are working closely with? What kind of leader traits would signal the sense of psychological safety?
Looking into how organisations develop their leaders, a McKinsey Global Survey suggests that more organisations are putting an effort to promote psychological safety through leadership development programmes. They are focusing on open-dialogue skills and social relationships in teams. However, "situational humility”, one of the key components to enable psychological safety in “Leader’s Tool Kit for Building Psychological Safety” by Amy Edmondson, is one of the least commonly addressed topics across organisations.
What is situational humility and what does it mean to your organisation?
Amy Edmondson, one of our academic collaborators in the Psychological Safety Lab, has proposed the concept of situational humility to shape the fearless organisation. To create a safe and open environment for team members to share their ideas and contribute to discussions, it is important for leaders to adopt a mindset of humility. This can be done after setting expectations and clarifying goals, and by actively inviting participation from team members. By signalling a humble attitude, leaders can help employees feel at ease enough to fully engage and contribute their unique perspectives and ideas in a variety of situations.
Humility in leadership is associated with self-awareness, openness, and transcendence.
Self-awareness: Leaders need to be aware of their strengths and limitations and knowledge gaps.
Openness: Openness increases their willingness to learn and welcome new ideas and feedback from their teams to fill in knowledge gaps.
Transcendence: This means that leaders acknowledge something or someone greater than themselves.
These factors suggest that a leader who signals their humility can invite participation and encourage their team’s learning culture where each member has the space to contribute. As a result, these learning processes will encourage innovation through higher risk taking and trial and error while exploring new ideas.
Real-world studies across organisations have illustrated that leader humility is beneficial for organisations from many aspects as follows:
Humility and team performance: This experiment exploring the relationship between leader humility and team performance found that leader humility can increase team performance through collective humility within teams, team contribution, and individual performance.
Humility and collaboration: A study in a real-world context on humble CEOs across American small and medium IT firms found a positive relationship between leader humility and collaboration among top management teams. More importantly, the study also showed a lower pay gap between “humble” CEOs and their teams.
Humility and resilient organisation: Leader humility also supports companies’ long-term growth through resilience which is an essential factor to survive in a dynamic business landscape. This is because humility allows leaders to celebrate success and learn from failures instead of blaming other. In the time of crisis, they will be able to overcome it with what they have learned instead of avoiding the discussion about their past failures.
Humility and trust: Humble leaders can promote trust between them and their teammates, again creating a psychologically safe and resilient environment.
Humility and job satisfaction: A study on employees in a large US health services organisation reveals that leader humility increases job satisfaction and ultimately decreases voluntary turnover.
How can you encourage situational humility in leaders?
The first step is to understand the context. You and your organisation can simply reflect by using these questions, developed by Amy Edmondson:
Have I made sure that people know that I don’t think I have all the answers?
Have I emphasized that we can always learn more? Have I been clear that the situation we’re in requires everyone to be humble and curious about what’s going to happen next?
What would you do next if the answers to these questions suggest that you or your organisation should encourage a humbler mindset? You may consider another leadership training programme. However, traditional leadership training programmes are costly and you don’t know if it’s going to drive behaviour change effectively.
Just like you, we don't know how to improve situation humility, just like we didn't know the best way to run 121s before our Novartis experiment. We need to hypothesise ideas and test them in organisations.
A call to action
If your strategic goals are to improve team performance, collaboration, trust, and job satisfaction while building a more resilient organisation, we can only encourage you to experiment with simple and cost-effective solutions.
MoreThanNow is now working with large organisations to to find the best strategy to empower leaders with situational humility. Testing bespoke solutions relevant to each of our clients’ unique context, the true power of psychological safety can be unleashed.
Do you want to explore if leaders in your organisation demonstrate enough situational humility to create psychologically safe work environment? Do you want to encourage humility mindset through experiment? Do you want to see what kind of leaders express more humility?
Get in touch with us and we can set up the experiment within our Psychological Safety Lab to find solutions for your organisational challenges!