What made you want to look at psychological safety within BCG? Why was a change needed?
Just to give some background on BCG, we’re a strategy and management consultancy. Our clients are major corporations and the work we do is challenging, fast-paced, and at times stressful. We do all our work in project teams, typically made up of four or five people who usually haven’t worked together before. When you regularly form these high-performance and pressured teams, it’s vital that they can communicate with each other effectively.
When I was on the Forward Institute Fellowship Programme, I became interested in psychological safety and began to wonder if there was something in it for us at BCG. Psychological safety is the idea that teams that are comfortable speaking up with each other – taking interpersonal risk on any topic – perform better.
It’s a bit of a strange name, and sometimes people think it has to do with mental health, or people think it's about being nice all the time. But fundamentally, it comes down to whether people in a team feel comfortable and safe to say something, whether nice or not. Given the nature of our work, I started to think that psychological safety could make a big difference.
I also had a personal reason for trying to learn about creating psychological safety. Around that time, I got feedback that I could make some people feel nervous about speaking up in front of me. I consider myself a nice and friendly team leader but there was something I was doing that was reducing psychological safety in some contexts. A bit selfishly, this made me even more interested in exploring psychological safety as my change challenge.
How was the issue of wellbeing showing up within the workplace?
The first thing I did was to evaluate whether the topic of psychological safety resonated at BCG. Did people feel we had any issues? Was there an appetite to improve? The culture at BCG is quite congenial, so we were probably a reasonably safe organisation, but I wanted to test my assumptions.
I organised some ‘focus groups’. I got people together from across BCG – roping in some other Forward Institute Fellows – and a mix of different seniority levels. In the focus groups, people deeply resonated with the topic and felt there were certain contexts and situations where it was difficult to speak up in teams.
For example, in our high-performance culture, we can have issues with work-life balance and people told us that they often struggled to be open with their teams, that they were working too hard. Similarly, there was a lot of hesitation in admitting mistakes or not knowing something as people felt it would reflect badly on their performance.
After the focus groups, we did more data gathering. We undertook surveys of teams to quantify their degree of psychological safety and assess the degree to which teams were interested in addressing it. This data confirmed the challenge and level of interest in the topic, which I took to our local leadership team to ask for investment to run pilots and help address the issue.
From there, we picked four client-facing project teams as pilots and invested in an external expert to help us to design the pilots. The pilots really helped us to develop our framework and narrative of why psychological safety is important for BCG.
We identified four dimensions where psychological safety can help us with our work. Most importantly, it gave us a toolkit that teams could use to measure and improve psychological safety. These include ‘rituals’ that teams can use in the course of normal team meetings to build greater psychological safety.
The pilots got great feedback from teams, and survey measurement afterwards showed not only that people felt more comfortable to speak in their teams but also that it led to better communication around sustainable working, more learning on the team and greater output for our clients.
Working on the psychological safety muscle enabled teams to be more direct with one another, challenge thinking in a productive way, commit to learning as a team and build greater rapport. This translated into teams having a better experience and more impact.
With this initial success, we wanted to roll it out further and get people interested in it beyond the pilots. So, we began an awareness campaign, sending emails and inviting a speaker to the office. Serendipitously, as this was growing through the London office, there was a global push across BCG looking at how to improve how teams work together, and specifically how to improve work-life balance.
The global team were looking for things that could be rolled out quickly, and so I raised the idea that psychological safety could be one of those things. Thankfully, it really resonated and we worked with them to develop a toolkit to be rolled out globally. Psychological safety is now being discussed and worked on across our workforce of nearly 30,000 globally. I've been impressed with how many people put time and energy into it and there are now passionate people driving it all around the world at BCG.
What have been your main learnings from leading this change?
Number one learning is that the change challenge can work! I went into it sceptical that I could make this kind of impact without having direct responsibility for this area. Second learning is that changing cultures is hard. You can’t just roll out a programme and say we've done it. It’s going to take a long time and lots of effort and support from around the organisation.
Cutting through to get onto the agenda was a particular challenge. Making it real in the context of BCG made a huge difference. Finally, I learned some practical things that have improved my own impact on psychological safety. It’s a muscle that I have to keep exercising but it’s had a positive impact on me and my teams.
What were the main challenges you found leading the change?
Education was a critical issue. It wasn’t a well-known term or topic when I started and there was a lot of misunderstanding or scepticism. Many people said they recognised it, but that it wasn’t an issue for them personally. Luckily, one of the people I worked with on this was great at building our comms plan to get the word out.
Another challenge was having evidence. We needed to show that it really meant something and that it worked. I’ve also been frustrated that I haven't always been able to get resources to back it, but I managed to get people who volunteered their time as champions, and they bring a lot of energy to it.
What recommendations would you give to other organisations looking at improving their psychological safety?
You need to make it matter to your organisation and prove that a psychologically safe environment is intrinsically linked to the impact that your organisation wants to have in the world.
From there, you need to ensure its tangible. You can’t just talk about it; you must create actual initiatives. Then you need to make it last. It continuously needs work. Make it known, communicate, educate. It's not a straightforward topic but there are a lot of resources out there.
Next, make it happen, try pilots, test things. If I thought I had to change all of BCG, I would’ve stopped because it's overwhelming and too difficult. You have to start with something that’s within your remit. Your ambition should be bigger, of course, but start with something that feels more achievable. For me, that was thinking: I can do a focus group and then from the focus group I can do a couple of pilots. I never would’ve thought this’ll get rolled out globally.
You need to make it matter to your organisation and prove that a psychologically safe environment is intrinsically linked to the impact that your organisation wants to have in the world.
We found there’ll be specific situations where naturally there isn't a lot of psychological safety, for example when hierarchy’s involved, so focus some of the easier areas to build a toolkit and muscle and get people familiar with the concept, and then it'll be easier for you to go after the trickier areas. For example, what are the repeat moments that you have on a regular basis, such as team meetings, the individual one-on-one? What could be added to those sessions to start to increase safety?
Some things are so simple. For example, when you have a meeting on a Monday, everyone always asks “how was your weekend?”, and through our toolkit we’d encourage everyone to nudge themselves how much they divulge. You may normally share “I watched the football’ but just reframing and sharing more emotion works well: “my son did this and it was really exciting for me”.
When I get the chance to tell people about psychological safety, I tell them that it’s the foundation for all the other people initiatives that organisations are working on. If people can speak out, then you can have all sorts of other conversations about diversity and inclusion or about growth mindset. Underpinning all of that is the ability for people to feel that they can contribute.
Most organisations have leadership training. If you can show that your initiative around psychological safety is working and it's important to senior leadership, you may be able to work with your HR teams to build it into training. We did training sessions for our partners globally, which provided to get buy-in at a very senior level.
How does psychological safety relate to responsible leadership?
At BCG, we’ve started to get into leader interventions. We’ve learned there are specific leadership traits and actions that can be important for creating safe conditions. Usually for leaders, it’s about showing vulnerability. Showing a human side matters a lot, but also showing those moments when you're not sure on the next step, or admitting you made a mistake.
That can be really tricky for leaders because they want to appear they have everything under control. For me, whenever I start a project team, I'll have 30-minute coffee with each team member individually where we don't talk about work. It seems so obvious, but it just shrinks the gap between us.
Leaders are vital to creating psychological safety in teams. Given that psychological safety can underpin so many other important efforts in creating responsible organisations, I’d say that psychological safety is at the heart of responsible leadership.