Welcome to Safe Enough to Soar

We need safety in our interactions now more than ever.

Organizations need people to speak up about issues that get in the way of their ability to perform at their best. Greater interdependency among organizational units requires more collaborative interactions to innovate, solve problems, and make decisions organizations need to achieve their goals.

We would like to report that most organizations recognize the importance of creating greater levels of interaction safety in their workplaces, but our experience suggests otherwise:

Some organizations pay a great deal of attention to ensuring the physical safety of their team members. We believe it is vital to add interaction safety to the way people in organizations think about the work environment. This creates an environment in which people feel safe enough to be their best selves and

   don’t feel as though they must walk on eggshells, stay within narrow boundaries, or worry about being judged

   freely share their ideas and engage with others

   feel valued, respected, and able to do their best work

   challenge each other’s point of view

   express their differences and similarities

   to be brave

. . . a workplace where individuals can feel fully included and soar.

In other words, adding interaction safety creates a winning, growing, inspiring, and self-sustaining environment in which people achieve more together than they would alone. It opens doors to accelerating trust, inclusion, and collaboration in the workplace.

Please don’t misunderstand. What we are describing as interaction safety is not la-la land. It does not require forgetting about organizational goals or creating a “feel-good” environment. It is not about doing away with conflict, disagreement, or challenge. It is not about coddling people or accepting poor performance—rather, it is raising the bar on everyone and reaching the higher level of interaction needed for greater performance.

For over four decades, we have been fortunate to work with good organizations that want to be better. We have experienced the power of inclusion breakthroughs to create workplaces where people are unleashed and enabled to grow and become their biggest selves, to see their colleagues and partners as big, and to create teams in which each person and the team are bigger together and soar.

Our work has enabled organizations to develop more productive, effective, inclusive work environments by focusing on the most critical factor affecting performance: interactions between people.

Our last book, Opening Doors to Teamwork and Collaboration, described 4 Keys for enhancing those interactions:

   Lean into Discomfort: Encourage yourself and others to speak up and be BIG.

   Listen as an Ally: Work to understand and build on others’ ideas instead of judging them.

   State Your Intent and Intensity: Let people know how committed you are to your ideas and what you need from them.

   Share Your Street Corners: Actively seek out others’ perspectives to see all sides of the situation.

This book is about creating an environment in which people feel safe enough to apply those critical behaviors.

We have seen firsthand the power and effectiveness of the 4 Keys for improving interactions between individuals and teams. We have watched organizations blossom before our eyes as people have applied those behaviors and moved away from judging behaviors and toward joining interactions.

Using the 4 Keys has resulted in optimized interactions across levels, divisions, disciplines, and identity groups, as well as measurable improvements in productivity, quality, customer service, staff satisfaction, and bottom-line performance.

Time and again, people have told us about the positive changes they were leading and witnessing, expressing relief that their initial fears that the intervention was just another “flavor of the month” were unfounded. They were thrilled to have finally found a sustainable path for continuous improvement.

What accelerates this process—the foundation of these breakthroughs and behaviors—is the ability to create an environment of interaction safety.

Interaction safety is critical to the ability to join, connect, collaborate, innovate, and do our best work. It enables us to soar higher than any one of us could alone and to achieve more together than any of us could individually.

Organizations need everyone’s best thinking, but few create environments to enable that. All too often, people hold back, testing whether their managers and team members will encourage them, listen to their ideas, and value their contributions—and, too often, people are failing the test.

Many organizations talk about the need for engagement and for people to stand up and speak out, but the trust needed for that level of interaction is often broken or missing.

This book provides the building blocks for creating a culture of interaction safety—the safety to soar. It is written for anyone who wants to contribute, from the shop floor to the C-suite. It is for every member of the organization—all have a role to play in creating interaction safety for themselves and their team members.

Our goal is to give you a clear path for making every one-on-one interaction, every group and team meeting, and your entire organization safe enough for people to engage fully and be willing and able to work collectively to address and solve the problems of today and the challenges of the future.

In this book, we focus on what the organization, its leaders, and every individual needs to do to create the environment and momentum that will produce a culture of interaction safety.

Interaction safety is a developmental process that consists of four levels. For each level, we identify common barriers to interaction safety and offer suggestions for how to move to the next level.

We hope organizations and their members aspire to achieve Level Four, in which interaction safety is a Way of Life. At Level Four, the organization’s values, expectations, leadership practices, and human resource policies all align to create and support an environment of interaction safety

where people are unleashed, where they don’t hesitate to take risks, identify problems, join others in common purpose, and bring their best and boldest thinking.

How quickly an organization can achieve Level Four will depend on how much time, energy, and support its leaders and members are willing to commit. No one creates interaction safety alone. This is a journey in which people need to let go of some old mind-sets and be willing to co-create a new environment.

We hope the tools and insights in this book enable you and your colleagues to create the kind of work-place that will accelerate the trust, inclusion, and collaboration that are so vital to individual and collective success. Are you ready to start creating interaction safety?

It’s time to make your organization safe enough to soar!

Fred and Judith

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