Why Contributor Safety Is Earned Not Owed
Once you feel included and like it’s safe to learn from your mistakes in a new role in your workplace, you’ll feel like you want to contribute to your team...To share what you’ve learned to move the team forward. Which is essentially what contributor safety allows you to do.
In today’s short video, I’ll share what you, as a leader, can do to reward your team players with the contributor safety that they’ve earned.
Video Transcript
0:02
Hi, everybody, happy Friday.
0:05
I'm in Highland Park in Roanoke, at the Alexander Gish house, which is from 1838, one of the oldest houses in Roanoke, in the oldest park in Roanoke, the weather's changing, it's now fall, it's cool outside. I'm wearing long sleeves. The leaves are changing.
0:26
I'm Corey Colton, from inflection point coaching. And here's what I'm thinking about today.
0:32
I want to continue our conversation about psychological safety.
0:37
And this time, focusing specifically on contributor safety. And if you remember, contributor safety is the third stage of psychological safety after inclusion, safety and learner safety.
0:48
And for contributor safety. The key is that once someone feels included, and once someone feels safe to learn and learn from mistakes, they want to take that learning, and they want to contribute to make things better.
1:03
But here's the twist. For contributor safety.
1:09
Contributor safety is earned not owed. Remember, when we talked about inclusion safety, and we said inclusion safety is owed.
1:18
This is the opposite. So in order to have contributor safety, one has to be able to deliver the goods to have the credibility.
1:28
And I got my lesson in contributor safety. Earlier in my career, I was working for a financial services firm with 400,000 employees. And we were attempting to get the entire company to move to one single learning platform from about six legacy platforms and hundreds and hundreds of Excel spreadsheets.
1:50
And I had just moved from a business line that was a customer of learning management platforms that I managed into the global project team. And as part of the global project team, I was given two major business lines to migrate to the new learning management system.
One of them was the lead tam region with about 70,000 users. And they were very eager to migrate because they had no central platform. But I was also given a difficult customer, the corporate investment bank.
2:23
And there were a couple strikes against me with the corporate investment bank automatically because they owned one of the large legacy platforms. So they didn't really have any kind of impetus to move, they could do things on their own time.
2:39
So in my new role, a former colleague in a business line became my customer. And we had a great relationship. And so I expected the project to go really well. But one day, he took me out to lunch. And the lunch was going fairly well until he told me that their group did not want to migrate, they weren't forced to migrate.
And one of the reasons that they didn't want to migrate is because they didn't think I had the skills to help them get there without customer disruption.
3:10
And I won't lie, I was pretty hurt because I had a good relationship with this person.
3:15
And probably he might have been right, because I was in a new role that needed new skills, and I hadn't yet delivered the goods.
3:24
So I figured out a way to fix it. Because when someone gives me a challenge I generally charge in. And I decided that I was going to manage their project plan. Now to be clear, that was not my job, that was his.
But in order to create the credibility and the safety for them, I took over the job of managing their project plan, which included cleaning their data, designing their activities in the new platform, making sure that everything was working the way they needed it to work up to the point of even doing a couple of test runs to make sure there'd be no customer disruption.
And this went on for about four or five months.
And then finally I decided it was time for me to have the conversation. And so I went back to them. And I said, I've done this now for four or five months, I've done the project management job for you. I think it's time for us to set a date to move forward.
And there was still resistance.
So I went to the managing director of the group. And he asked me, how's the data cleaning going? Well.
4:32
How are the activity designs going? Well.
Does the system do what we need it to do? Yes, there are a few exceptions, but we can work around them.
Have we done some test runs? Yes.
4:44
He said, Okay. I think you've proven that we can do this and he signed off.
The point for me was, is that until I could prove that I could deliver the goods contributor safety was not in my cards. But once someone has proven that they have the credibility in the knowledge and that they can deliver solutions. As a leader, it's your job to make sure that they have contributor safety.
5:09
If you are looking to get support with issues of psychological safety or to understand more about contributor safety, please reach out at cory@inflectionpointcoaching.net or contact me through my website, www.inflectionpointcoaching.net. And I hope you have a great day and enjoy the fall. Thanks.
Contributor Safety Is About Recognizing Proven Problem Solvers On Your Team
Once your team player proves they’re competent and capable of solving problems, afford them contributor safety. This allows your coworker to share their value within your team and throughout the company.
For help recognizing team players who’ve earned contributor safety, reach out and schedule a free strategy session with me. I’m happy to help guide you.