Psychological safety

Yesterday I too a couple of online classes related to job skills. In a sense it was silly of me to waste the time, because I'm retired—why should I need to improve my job skills now? But they were offered for free and I hated to waste them. Anyway, one of the classes was about how to develop your employees, and it made what should have been a commonplace observation: your employees need to feel psychologically safe before you can talk about developing their skills or their careers. Otherwise they won't take the risk.

Psychologically safe??

And right away I thought about this post here, plus any number of other times at work that the same topic came up (but I didn't write about it).

Looking back with the perspective of ... gosh, it looks like seven years by now! ... I think I was too harsh in my assessment of what was going on. You can go read the post itself for the Grand Narrative that I spun at the time, but I think the simpler explanation is that I didn't feel psychologically safe. And this was for a couple of reasons.

One is that I really felt our Human Resources department (by that time) was dangerous, or even predatory. Years before, when we had our own local HR staff, I had a good relationship with them. But by the time all this went down, HR was located elsewhere and I felt a distinct sense of menace from most of them.

Another is that I was working in a discipline that I had learned entirely on-the-job, and there were huge parts of it I didn't know. I had established a good position for myself over the years, but I knew that there were large provinces of my own field that I knew nothing about, and I didn't even know what the possibilities were in the profession. So I had no idea where to start a conversation.

Finally, I could never really bring myself to care about making any serious, long-term contributions to the business. I talk about this phenomenon here.

All in all, I think the lack of psychological safety I felt at work was largely just an extension of my status as the Consummate Outsider. (And see also the story about Aristotle that I tell in this post I already referenced.)

Is that a good thing? No, I guess not. But it's not as discreditable as the Grand Narrative I came up with seven years ago.