Why Challenger Safety Is Necessary For Company Innovation

While it’s the last of the four stages of psychological safety in the workplace, challenger safety certainly isn’t the “least”. Because, challenger safety provides you the opportunity as a leader to “back your team” and allow it to innovate.

Video Transcript 

0:01  

Hey everybody, this is Corey Colton, how are you today, I'm back in my favorite place on the Greenway overlooking the river. And as you can tell, the weather has changed, it's gotten colder, I'm wearing a jacket, and the leaves have changed and fallen. And we're going through the turn of seasons again. 

Here's what I'm thinking about today, I wanted to continue our conversation about psychological safety so that we could finish out the four stages. Remember, we've already talked about inclusion safety, which is owed to anyone on the team. We've talked about learner safety, which needs to be supported. We've talked about contributor safety, which is earned rather than owed. And we are now going to talk about challenger safety. 

And here's the thing about challenger safety. Challenger safety is really necessary for any corporation that wants to innovate. It's where innovation starts. And as we know, companies that stopped innovating start to die. So challenger safety is really necessary for any leader to enable in their team. 

My lesson with challenger safety came more recently in my career, let me give you the background. So I was leading a large team of learning professionals across an organization. And we had spent the previous few years spending political capital and leading a lot of change across the organization. And through that, we were able to centralize all of the learning teams across the organization, we were able to sunset old programs and launch new programs, new leadership development programs, we were able to stand up some new learning groups to support some new major platforms that were rolled out. 

And as part of that, we also were able to revamp and redesign our safety and compliance training was, which was necessary from a regulatory perspective for everybody to take this training, not only on hire, but every year. And in part of that redesign, we had reduced the number of modules from 17, to about eight, we had reduced the time it took for everybody to take those modules from about three hours to about 75 to 90 minutes apiece. And we had already reduced what we call unproductive time to return hundreds of 1000s of hours to the organization and reduce training costs by over a million dollars. And what I wanted at this point in time, was just to have some stability, I wanted some peace and quiet, I wanted us to sort of get our operational act together and have some smooth sailing waters

 And it was at that point that one of my training managers who had safety and compliance training came to me and said, I figured out a new way to redesign the training that'll take additional time out and return time to the organization. And I sort of responded to her and said, the last three years have been so busy. It would just be good to take some time. Is it possible we can do this next year? And she turned to me and she said, you know, you told me and you taught me that anytime we have the opportunity to to make things better that we should. And because of you I've been working on this new model, and I really think it's the right thing to do.

So I asked you how can you push back on that when somebody takes your own philosophy and hands it back to you, and wants to continue to improve things and make things better? So we had to move forward. And we had to do some things to prepare. Now when you think of Challenger safety, the social exchange for challenger safety is air cover in exchange for candor. So my training manager was giving me candor, she was challenging the status quo. And so my job in this was to provide air cover. 

So we decided to move forward. And my job was to meet with all of the content owners and the subject matter experts and the executives, to let them know about our plans to build buy-in to get them to agree that it was the right thing to do before we moved forward. Ultimately, we did revamp the training, we actually took it down farther so that it only took existing employees 40 to 45 minutes to complete, returned another couple $100,000 of productive hours to the organization and reduced training costs even further by another half million dollars. So you see, she was able to innovate, because she was able to convince me to give her air cover and to enable challenger safety and this is really crazy.

4:58  

For any company that wants to move forward in the future, I hope this series has been helpful for you. If you're at an inflection point about wanting to enable challenge or safety, wanting to innovate, or to ensure that you and your teams have psychological safety, please reach out to me. I'm happy to help.

My email address iscory@inflectionpointcoaching.net Or you can go through my website, www.inflectionpointcoaching.net. And I'd be happy to have a consult call with you and talk through what you'd like to accomplish. Anyway, I hope you're enjoying your fall. The weather here is beautiful. I hope it's beautiful where you are. And I thank you for listening to my videos. Reach out and let's talk. Thanks. Bye

Challenger Safety Provides Cover for Your Team to Innovate 

When you provide the “air cover” for your team members to challenge the status quo at your organization, you’re choosing to lead a team that’s not afraid to innovate.

If you’d like more guidance on how you can instill challenger safety (or any of the other three psychological safety stages in your workplace, schedule a free strategy session with me.