Do You Need Safety — or Courage?

Listening to people in the Agile space, I’ve noticed that many use “courage” and “safety” interchangeably. Doing so may indicate a cultural problem that can impact performance.

The ideal is to have enough courage/safety in the organization such that team members take certain actions: speak up, offer suggestions, ask questions, admit mistakes, try things out, and challenge norms (assuming, of course, they behave respectfully and with good intentions). Otherwise, they’ll keep quiet and hold themselves back, which diminishes the organization’s results.

However, referring to courage and safety as if they’re the same is not helpful. Safety is a higher standard for organizations and their leadership, and of the two, the stronger enabler of agility and innovation:

Courage = willingness to take those actions despite fear of possible personal harm (physical, mental, social, etc.)
Safety = ability to take those actions, knowing for a fact that one won’t be harmed

Leaders and individual contributors who rely only on courage may allow a culture of silence and fear to persist.

Therefore, leaders would do better to make the environment safe than to leave it to their teams to muster courage. By extension, the leaders themselves should also feel safe to act as they serve the organization.

Now for the wrinkle: Perceived safety matters a lot more than actual safety and intended safety. As a leader, you might honestly believe you’ve created a safe environment — and your actions demonstrate that — while the people who operate within that environment feel otherwise. They might need to muster some courage to test the waters and discover the actual boundaries and consequences. But if you do your work right, there should be little need for that courage.

If you’d like to discuss solutions to your organization’s safety challenges, book a chat with me.