Psychologically safe leader organizational action planning

Organizations can support all leaders to develop and refine strategies that ensure a psychologically safe work environment. This can have a positive impact on both the bottom line and the organization’s reputation. 

This is a self-assessment and leaders could potentially mark themselves perfect on each strategy. Let leaders know their employees will later give feedback on the same strategies. For this reason, results will be most helpful if leaders are honest about which strategies they do only some of the time. This will flag potential opportunities for improvement before the employee feedback is collected.

The assessment is just the first step. Resources that support continual improvement are key to making sustainable change.

After completing the assessment, review the results. Then focus on developing action plans to improve identified strategies. Consider whether you’ll work with leaders as a group or individually.

Small changes added within existing leadership responsibilities can be more effective and sustainable. Start with those that will be easy for leaders to embed or those that may have the greatest positive impact and are worth the added effort.

Identify strategies  

Compare leadership assessment results. Then consider leadership strategies the organization would like to embed for all leaders.

Each of the strategies in the Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment (PSLA) can contribute to a psychologically healthy and safe work environment. Leaders may not currently be implementing them for any of the following reasons:

• Unaware of the strategy
• Never instructed to do it
• Lack of time or resources
• Lack of ability or skill
• Lack of actual or perceived authority
• Ineffective approach to implementation
• Uncomfortable with the approach

There may be cases where leaders are applying a strategy, but employee feedback doesn’t confirm or recognize this. The reasons for this discrepancy might include:

• A work incident like violence or harassment
• Changes in team dynamic
• Current conflict
• Current organizational changes that are difficult for employees
• Personal health or family issues that impact judgment or observations
• A previous leader who wasn’t psychologically safe
• Work overload
• Lack of clarity about demands 
• Fear or anxiety about job retention
• Lack of awareness about what the leader does in confidence

This isn’t a personality or character assessment. It focuses on the extent strategies known to support psychologically safe work are being implemented.

The employee feedback is meant to capture staff perceptions. This can create an open dialogue about effective leadership strategies. Often, the dialogue alone supports improved psychological safety.

Create leader action plans

Have the leaders complete their report. Have them bring their results to a workshop where you’ll help them create an action plan.

You’ll be asking about the resources, time, expenses, skills or training they need to adopt psychologically safer strategies. The following questions create an accountability process. This supports reasonable and sustainable leadership development. Capture the answers anonymously. Share them with decision makers to help them consider organization-wide changes.

1. What are the most important strategies you currently use to positively support the psychological health and safety (PHS) of your employees?
   
   • Facilitator note: Continue to ask, “And what else?” to expand on the initial answers. Capture these answers without attribution so they can be referred to during the next question. Reinforce that it’s important to continue doing things they know already work.
2. What are the most challenging parts of using these strategies in your current role?
   • Facilitator note: Be mindful to avoid dismissing or questioning any challenges shared. This may silence useful responses. Take a stance of open curiosity and record all the answers without comment. This helps you ensure the leaders feel supported to begin taking positive action. You may want to share the challenges with those who have the authority to address them. Don’t disclose who shared which challenges. Look for patterns in challenges among your leaders. Include those that are most common or most distressing in your organization-wide strategies.
3. Which leadership strategies identified in your assessment will be most beneficial for you to adopt now and why? Choose one to three strategies for now. Make sure it's reasonable to embed them into your existing responsibilities.
   
   • Facilitator note: Each strategy listed in the assessment contributes to PHS. This is based on the research cited in the National Standard. Most are easily integrated into unique, busy and demanding workloads. Improvement is more achievable and sustainable when you work with one to three strategies at a time. 
4. What supports, resources, time, expenses, skills or training might you need to successfully adopt these new strategies?
   • Facilitator note: Whatever’s offered here should be considered from a broader perspective. Are there resources, time, expenses, skills or training that all leaders might need? Are there ideas that should become a regular part of leadership development? Be honest if you can't provide what’s requested. Work with the leaders to consider alternative ways to achieve similar results.
5. How and when will you measure positive change or improvement within your team?
   • Facilitator note: Record the ways the leaders would identify improvements. Use these measures to reinforce positive change before the organization’s formal evaluation. Recognizing efforts and outcomes is important to keep motivation high.
6. When will you reassess and create a new action plan?
   • Facilitator note: The organization can evaluate change by re-administering the employee feedback version of the PSLA. Be sure to give leaders new to this process at least 6 months to integrate the strategies before seeking employee feedback for the first time. After that, you may want to get employee feedback every other year or so. Make sure the leaders know well in advance when this will be done. The intent is to support the leaders’ success rather than make them feel judged.  

Address any organizational barriers

Make use of the information gathered from leaders about challenges to leading in a psychologically safe way. Work with decision makers by using this information to create change. The On the agenda creating change workshop series can help you do this for each psychosocial factor. You can also approach it from a broader policy perspective.

Psychological health and safety policy recommendations shares a framework to help you consider which policies might need changes. Create a committee to compare your existing approaches to those recommended. Choose members of the committee that represent all levels of employees and different departments. Their perspective can help prevent negative consequences from planned changes.

You can do this work as a single project or over time in shorter meeting increments. The goal is to have those familiar with your organization compare the recommended approaches with what’s practical and optimal for your setting. The group’s final recommendations would be passed on to senior leadership for approval or refinement.

Support leaders to implement action plans

Schedule one-to-one meetings with each leader to follow up after your initial workshop. This supports application of their action plan and any specific training or development needs. This could include:

• Communication
• Inter-personal skills
• Conflict resolution
• Team building skills

The action planning worksheet | PDF can help you identify leader needs and provides strategy-specific resources. 

• Click relevant domains that include the strategies the leader wishes to apply. Choose the relevant strategy statement. You’ll be directed to information or given a link to a free resource that can help leaders develop their action plan.
• Establish concrete timelines and follow-up plans for leaders. This helps them develop realistic and attainable action plans.
• You could also share or set up a working group of leaders to go through each of the ideas in Strengthening leaderships skills.

Monitor outcomes and reassess

If the leader’s plan was successful, recognize both the effort and the outcome. If it wasn’t successful, help determine why not. This could be due to factors such as staff shortages, downsizing, technology changes or budget constraints. Refine the plan while considering if there are additional skills or training needed.  

Once a strategy has been successfully added to the leader’s approach, you can reassess using the PSLA and repeat for continual improvement. For most leaders, this shouldn’t be more than once a year to keep the process manageable.