Safety Doesn't Scale Itself
Most teams don't realize psychological safety has a scaling problem… until they're already in it.
I was recently working with a relatively young and small leadership team and quickly discovered that the original members—those who’d been there from the beginning—felt mostly safe with each other. But as new members were hired, that safety seemed less available to everyone, old guard and newcomers alike.
Normally, this kind of thing gets attributed to the leader, but this felt more like a matter of the organization outgrowing itself.
What worked well for the young startup team no longer seemed to work. The easy thing to do would say the new hires just weren’t a “good fit”. But what if the real culprit was a lack of a well designed, intentional onboarding—something that would have allowed everyone to feel the same sense of safety the original team had built over time?
I’ve seen this before. For more than a decade, my team at Stoked led innovation efforts at some of the world’s top companies. It didn’t take long to learn that no matter how good our methodology was, if there was no psychological safety on these newly formed teams, big new ideas (innovation) were hard to come by. We had to start dedicating real time to establishing and cultivating that safety before we could do anything else. Cultural work became the foundation, not an afterthought.
This is partly why I’ve stopped assuming that a lack of psychological safety is always the result of what Stanford professor Bob Sutton calls a “Bosshole.” More often than not, I think it’s systemic—a cultural gap rather than an obnoxious leader.
Google came to a similar conclusion. Their Project Aristotle research, aimed at identifying what separates highly effective teams from the rest, found that the single most foundational condition was psychological safety: the degree to which team members feel safe taking risks and being vulnerable with one another.
So in the case of my client, there was no one to blame. What was needed was a system—something designed to help the leadership team grow and evolve intentionally. Most of us assume that if a new hire is a “good fit,” the rest takes care of itself and that formal onboarding only adds complexity. But no matter how strong the cultural fit, new team members still need to be taught the language, the shorthand, the unspoken ways of being and doing that the original team developed on autopilot—often without even realizing it.
If psychological safety is the foundational condition for a highly effective team, it’s worth every bit of design, effort, and patience we can give it. Growing a leadership team isn’t just a hiring problem. It’s an inclusion problem—and solving it requires being as intentional about how people join the culture as we are about who we bring in.
We tend to spend a majority of our time finding the right person. Someone smart and capable and a good cultural fit. But where we tend to skimp, especially if this is a newer, smaller team, is immersing them in the way we work. Giving them access to everything and making sure they know their way around, culturally speaking. Then there should be a grace period for letting them find their sea legs.
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