How Challenger Safety Sparks Innovation
Challenger safety satisfies the basic human need for people to use what they’ve learned, contribute ideas, and make things better.
As the final state in the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™, once challenger safety is realized, you become a company that inevitably unleashes innovation.
Although inclusion safety is the requisite baseline, as a leader you must shepherd your team through each level of psychological safety in the proper order to develop an innovative team.
Learner safety and then contributor safety are woven in after inclusion before finally addressing challenger safety. This is the natural building order to have a fully expressed psychologically safe workplace.
Establishing each level is a necessary condition to reach the next.
According to Dr. Timothy Clark, social scientist, researcher, and author, “challenger safety satisfies the basic human need to make things better.
You feel safe to speak up and challenge the status quo when you think there’s a need or opportunity to improve.”
Leaders Must Model Challenger Safety
When it comes to psychological safety, and especially challenger safety, it is the leader’s job to model the way forward. You create a safe haven for team members to challenge the status quo.
The leader must create air cover in exchange for the challenging ideas—this is the social exchange.
In other words, in exchange for the team member offering a challenge to established processes and procedures, the leader must provide an environment of reward and political protection from potential fallout.
In establishing challenger safety, the leader is either modeling the way or obstructing the way.
My Experience With A Challenge To The Status Quo
One of my managers, I’ll call her Tina, led the team responsible for specialized training. The training included subjects like employee safety, compliance, privacy, and information security.
While they’re not the sexiest topics in a learning department, these subjects were required by law or policy to be completed upon hire and yearly thereafter.
Tina came to me with an idea for redesigning the training that she felt would significantly improve the learner experience.
Her suggested improvements would also save the company a lot of money by a reduction in time to train our 25,000 employees.
For context, over the previous few years our team had overcome a lot of friction and spent political capital making necessary but disruptive change. We had centralized the learning resources from those administrative areas, while simultaneously redesigning and improving the actual learning experience.
This process was difficult and fraught with political friction. We pushed continuous improvements in the learner experience and streamlined the amount of content in the training, upending years of sacred cows.
Challenging Myself To Get Out Of The Way
After the previous few years of improvements and conflict with the content owners, stability was the new status quo I was aiming for.
We already reduced the necessary training from three hours to 75 minutes per learner, saving the company over $1 million and drawing rave reviews from employees.
I resisted the idea, but Tina persisted, “We can always do better, and you are the one who taught me that…”
Realizing I was stifling creativity that I enabled, I relented.
Providing “Air Cover”
I asked Tina to gather a group of her colleagues to test the new idea and find out if there were negative impacts we weren’t considering.
This provided her permission for disagreement and increased purposeful friction and conflict while reducing the potential for personal friction and conflict.
It was my job as the leader to provide the air cover for yet another challenge to our status quo.
I informed the executives, and I scheduled meetings with the senior leaders of those functional areas to socialize our idea, explain the benefits, and reduce concerns.
Tina also created a proof of concept to present to the content experts to allay their fears and build buy-in.
The Success Of Challenger Safety
In the end Tina brought everyone on board to the new concept, and for those that had reservations, she at least obtained skeptical consent.
The new concept changed the training format from presenting course content and then quizzing the learner, to one of adaptive learning. This allowed employees to answer quiz questions and to be shown the correct answer if they selected the wrong one.
This process helped reinforce their retention of the proper information in the moment instead of in post-test review sessions.
The adaptive format maintained the levels of critical learning while reducing the time of training for each learner by another 30 minutes.
Feedback from the learners was stellar and the new format saved the company another $750,000.
How To Enable Challenger Safety
Sometimes it’s difficult to support change and improvement as a leader, especially in an ever-evolving business climate. But enabling the ability to challenge the status quo is critical for innovation. You need to either lead the way or get out of the way!
Here are some things you can do to enable challenger safety and innovation:
Reduce fear—fear triggers a self-censoring instinct and causes people to retreat into silence to reduce personal risk.
Assign disagreement—if you give permission for team members or colleagues to disagree or point out flaws in an idea, you increase bravery and intellectual conflict which always creates better outcomes.
Tee up challenge questions—ask your team a challenge-the-status-quo question in meetings, with the expectation to discuss their answers in your next meeting. This gives them permission to review existing processes and patterns to determine what the team can do better.
Challenge your own ideas—A leader’s job is to model the way and show vulnerability. If you can challenge your own ideas and share the results, this gives permission for others to do the same.
Outcomes From The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™
If you want to lead your team to innovation and unleash creativity, the journey through the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™ is key. When you do, you’ll notice the following outcomes:
Inclusion Safety is the baseline and ensures that everyone feels included and valued, just for who they are.
Learner Safety is the second stage, encouraging team members to learn, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes.
Contributor Safety allows team members to bring what they have learned back to the team and contribute valuable and interesting ideas toward success.
Challenger Safety encourages team members to challenge the sacred ways of doing things and allows them to help make things better.
If you would like to learn more about the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™ and explore what you can do as a leader to challenge your own ideas, schedule a free strategy session with me.