Contributor Safety Is Earned Not Owed!

Remember inclusion safety, also known as Stage 1 of Psychological Safety, is owed to all team members. Stage 3, Contributor Safety, is not...In fact, it’s earned.

As a leader who enables innovation in your company, however, allowing for Contributor Safety is critical. 

Contributor Safety for a team member satisfies a basic human need to make things better. In that place of safety, you feel able to use your skills and knowledge to make meaningful contributions. Which, in turn builds confidence and self-esteem.

But the twist is this...Team members are not entitled to  Contributor Safety. The price of entry is not only your knowledge and skill set, but also depends on your ability to deliver results.

An Example of Earned Contributor Safety

Contributor Safety fulfills a basic human need for people to use what they’ have learned to make things better.  Whenever you learn something new and valuable, you’ll naturally want to use that knowledge to make a meaningful contribution. 

Let’s use an example of a job such as sales,

The best salespeople not only need to know how to make a sale, as well as to understand the product, the value proposition, and the customers they serve.

The best sales people receive a large amount of autonomy and freedom based upon the results they achieve. 

And when the company needs someone to train or mentor new sales people, they turn to the ones who are most experienced.

The more skilled earn the most ability to contribute to the company by training the new recruits, while the lesser skilled earn that right the least. This exemplifies how Contributor Safety is earned not owed.

My First Lesson in Contributor Safety

I experienced my lesson with Contributor Safety early in my corporate career while acting as the learning manager in a global financial services company with 400,000 employees. 

My ability to operationalize complex projects across business lines got me noticed.  Soon enough, I was asked to join a global project team responsible for deploying a single learning platform across the company in 103 countries. 

My new role was as a senior technical analyst. I was assigned to help a global region along with a major business division migrate to the new system.

Latin America was my region, and my business line was the Corporate Investment Bank—at the time, a revenue powerhouse. That relationship had a bit of a rocky start since they  owned and managed one of the major legacy platforms. They had absolutely no desire to migrate to the new system.

Even though I had a history of results in my previous role, as a technical analyst, I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to deliver on any results. So, knowing this division’s hesitance to migrate caused some mixed feelings on my part on whether I was up for the challenge. 

The News at Lunch

The Corporate Investment Bank business partner who was responsible  for migrating the division from their side to the new platform invited me to lunch soon after my appointment. We knew  each other for years, having partnered  in my previous role to provide needed development to their leaders. And, the lunch began pleasantly enough.

About halfway through the lunch, he bluntly reported  that his leadership did not want to migrate to the new platform. Not only were they satisfied with their legacy platform, but they didn’t  believe I had the experience or skills to help them do the job. 

They thought that my lack of experience would cause their employees to experience disruption and would result in a loss of  critical learning records from the system. 

Frankly, I was stunned! 

The Deal We Brokered

Clearly I hadn’t “proven” myself as a worthy contributor.

So, after he broke the news to me, we made a deal. He agreed that if I managed their migration project plan for a period of time, we could reevaluate their decision to migrate to the new system. After proving capable with that, we would decide on a date for the migration.

To be clear, managing their migration project plan was his job, not mine. But knowing that the organization would want forward movement on their migration date, it gave me a narrow path to tread to make it so.

I am still not sure whether I agreed because I thought it was a good opportunity to demonstrate my skills or because I was too stunned to push back.

Demonstrating Results

For eight months I managed the project plan for the Investment Bank in addition to fulfilling my own job responsibilities. I partnered with their team members, the technical teams, the data teams, and the communications team to ensure that their migration would be flawless.

During that time several of my Latin American countries had migrated successfully, without issue, and we had launched four critical company-wide learning initiatives across the globe.

At the end of the eight months, my partner still refused to agree to a migration date. They still were not confident.

My boss and I happened to be in a meeting the next week with the Managing Director of the Investment Bank, and we cornered him to apprise him of the situation.

When he heard all the work we had done to ensure a successful migration, and progress that I and my partner businesses had made, he was impressed.

He said, “You have delivered the goods, I can sign the agreement and we are ready to go.”

Contributor Safety Takeaways 

That period of my career was a busy and challenging one, but a time when key learning took place for me too.

First, I understood how critical it is for an internal consultant to understand their partner businesses in detail. While it was not fun to manage the details of their project plan, it helped me understand how learning supported their business success.

Second, I internalized that you must have strong relationships built on trust and transparency to achieve mutual goals.

Finally, I realized no matter my previous performance, knowledge, or experience, it is imperative to deliver results in a new role to earn the opportunity to contribute meaningfully.

Essentially, I now understand why Contributor Safety is earned not owed.

Perhaps there are a few lessons for your team in my experience. If you’d like to discuss how to better instill any of the stages of psychological safety in your workplace, schedule a free strategy session with me.