Safety to Learn

In late 2021 DMA hired an outside facilitator to work on culture. The sessions were not only for our own staff. Most of DMA’s delivery ran through a partner company, so the sessions covered both organisations. Before a joint workshop in March 2022, I asked for both companies’ org charts to be sent to the facilitator, so she could check which of the partner’s people had not shown up.

In March 2022 the groups produced a set of company values, under a line that read “digital growth through trust and transparency.” There were five:

• Trust: “Our word is our bond.”
• Transparency: honesty and openness, “to create a productive environment where we can learn, share innovative ideas and get the best results.”
• Collaboration: working together for a common purpose.
• Commitment: good relationships with clients and the highest quality of service.
• Passion.

They are ordinary values, and writing them down proved nothing on its own. A value on a page is the standard a company is trying to set, not evidence that it meets it. What follows is what happened when we tried to turn two of them, trust and transparency, into something people actually did.

The facilitator described the values as the result of the team’s “collective thinking.” She then proposed starting the next stage with leadership, to work out how the values would show up in metrics, communication and feedback. Her question to me was how I wanted to be involved. My answer:

However, you think we ought to proceed with me. You are the expert.

The survey that said people did not feel safe

In May 2022 she came back with an idea. An earlier survey of the team had found that “safety to learn was relatively low.” Her proposal was to recognise two things each month: the person most appreciated for trust and transparency, and the best idea that had been tried and had failed. She added that it would only work if I was on board, “cause leadership is crucial in generating this safety.”

My first reply was a question:

Can you give me an example for #2?

Her example was the one the whole programme turned on: reward “the best ideas you have seen tried this month but didnt work,” someone who took a risk, put in the time, and learned something even though the idea failed. Four minutes later:

Got it and okay with it.

That August, in a session on goals and feedback, the team’s own suggestions included “Set realistic goals and openness to talk about this,” “Honesty with boss” and “be a teacher of truth.” Nobody asked for lower targets. They asked to be able to say when a target was unrealistic, and to be told the truth in return.

The standards did not move

None of this was a relaxation of anything. In October, when the facilitator asked for another session with my team, I said yes, with one condition:

I would request that the timeline of the meeting remains 60 minutes and that the call ends on time as we have another company-wide meeting right after and we need to maintain the schedule.

The year before, I had written to the partner company that we expected only high-end resources on our client work, and that “any commitments made to a potential client should be lived up to.” Safety to learn and a high bar for delivery were never in tension. A failed idea someone tried in good faith is information. A missed commitment to a client is a missed commitment.

How it ended

In January 2023, with the business under pressure, I moved the sessions to once a month. The facilitator wrote back that one hour a month was “small amount of time to create culture,” that culture “needs to translate into actions within the organization with leadership support,” and that a lot of the initiatives raised needed to be evaluated to see whether they were working.

She was asking for more leadership time at the point I had just cut it. In February I asked the team whether they wanted to continue the culture calls:

I asked the team today if they wanted to continue culture calls; and the consensus is not to continue those for now. Please send me the invoice so that we can at least pay you for all the work you have done for us.

What the record shows

Reading the emails back, three things are plain.

People were not asking for comfort. When they described what would make them feel safe, it was honesty about goals, honesty with their manager and the freedom to say a target was unrealistic.

Rewarding a failed experiment and holding the line on delivery fit together. One is about how you treat a good-faith attempt. The other is about what you owe a client.

And the facilitator was right that it needed leadership attention to stick. The programme ended when the time it needed from the top was no longer there. The team chose to stop, and I let it.

Related: Not Needed for Everything, When the Work Happens in Another Company and Systems and People.