“Does anyone else have anything to add?”
“If you have any ideas for new products, please let us know!”
“We welcome critical feedback and encourage you to share your thoughts.”
At companies that prioritize psychological safety in the workplace, these requests for feedback and new ideas are not always greeted with blank stares and silence. While it may sound complex, psychological safety boils down to feeling comfortable sharing thoughts, ideas and opinions with colleagues and leaders. Although easy to define, creating an environment where people can speak candidly — and sometimes critically — is much more difficult.
E-commerce API company Violet approaches this challenge by weaving psychological safety into all facets of its operations. Founder and CEO Brandon Schulz told Built In Seattle that it’s less about “mentioning the topic” and more about leadership modeling behaviors of a psychologically safe workplace and providing coaching to employees.
“This means leaders using language, facilitating discussion and correcting individuals on their teams when the safety part has not been appropriately prioritized,” Schulz said. “The best companies embrace this process and don’t shy away from addressing breaches of psychological safety, because if it’s not a priority the breach will fester and we all won’t be able to do our best work.”
While Violet may not be flooded with employee feedback or new product ideas every day, Schulz and his leadership team are working intentionally to ensure employees feel comfortable speaking their minds when they have something to say. Continue reading to learn more about the work required to create such an environment.
Violet’s API is designed to make it easier for merchants to sell across multiple platforms by connecting their store to a wide variety of online retailers. The Violet API pulls product catalogs and inventories directly from the seller’s site and manages the checkout process and orders across all platforms.
How do you make psychological safety an explicit priority in the workplace?
For us, making psychological safety an explicit priority comes not in mentioning the topic but in leading all employees in everyday actions to meet the standard of psychological safety. This means leaders using language, facilitating discussion and correcting individuals on their teams when the safety part has not been appropriately prioritized in any of those three categories. Not every person is going to get it right all the time. A fast-moving, growing exciting business carries with it competing priorities and human beings have blind spots, which means we have to have hard conversations and resolve harms done. The best companies embrace this process and don’t shy away from addressing breaches of psychological safety, because if it’s not a priority the breach will fester and we all won’t be able to do our best work.
‘Someone’ doesn’t fail when innovating; a particular strategy, assumption, execution step, detail or component of the work might fail, but not the person.”
What is your favorite tip for facilitating meetings in which every voice is heard?
When facilitating large meetings, we’ll often identify a way to cycle through the thoughts from everyone on the call. We do this by having the host look at their Zoom screen and call on each name successively to chime in on the topic. Some are eager to share, some don’t have anything to add or are more introverted. For the latter individuals, we provide written or other more anonymous forms of input as an option, should their input pertain to something more sensitive.
Innovation doesn’t happen without risk-taking, and risk-taking can lead to failure. How do you create space for risk-taking?
“Someone” doesn’t fail when innovating; a particular strategy, assumption, execution step, detail or component of the work might fail, but not the person. More often than not, we will fail. When that happens, our focus turns to finding where one of the dials wasn’t quite right. I often say to the team, “I don’t care if you’re wrong. I care how long you stay wrong.” The real work is in developing the pace and quality of self-reflection, learning and change as our core skills.
