5 Ways to Cultivate Psychological Safety on a Church Staff
Now that we’ve established psychological safety as a crucial construct for healthy workplaces, including churches, it’s time to dive into ways to actually cultivate it on a church staff. It can be easy for leaders to assume all is well and good within their teams when they’re looking down from above. But until a leader has assessed the true lay of the land, from every angle and from every teammate’s vantage point, they can’t fully know how healthy their teams actually are. When you’re taking inventory of whether or not the dynamics of psychological safety are at play within your organization, it’s a good idea to start by simply asking, “When is the last time I heard feedback or was made aware of mistakes?” If it’s been a while, you may have some digging to do. At JSS, we equip leaders with ideas AND tools, so today we’re sharing 4 ways to ensure psychological safety is being cultivated on your church staff, so that hopefully, surprises become less and less.
As a refresher, Amy Edmondson defines true psychological safety as the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Interpersonal risk taking. Read that again. For a church staff to truly possess psychological safety, employees must feel comfortable enough speaking up to leadership at the expense of risking their reputation/status/relationship(s)/friendship(s)/job title. The risk is worth it to begin with because they know they will feel heard, seen, and validated. And more importantly, not punished. If it wasn’t going to be worth the effort, they would keep quiet, talk amongst themselves (i.e. let gossip run rampant), or worse, seek outside employment. Church staffs that continue to operate out of environments where no one feels safe speaking up only lead to resentment, bitterness, and toxicity. (And yes, even in faith-based organizations, this happens.)
Practice conflict management in a professional way and leave your pastor hat at the door. This may sound harsh, but it means exactly what it says. Do not get into the habit of pastoring your way through a problem. Your employees are looking to you as their leader, their boss, the person who signs their checks. When issues arise, the last thing you need to do is deliver a sermon in an effort to move past it. Treat your employees with respect, and professionalism. There is a time and place for prayer and referencing scripture, but do not use it as a crutch when you are confronting (or avoiding) a conflict. Your Biblical prowess should never be used to better your position in an argument or disagreement, or, make anyone feel like their feelings aren’t real.
Think outside the box: invite input and feedback from every level (department) willingly and without question. Not every decision needs to be made with the opinions of the entire staff, but it is good practice to regularly hold interdepartmental meetings where a wide range of employees can participate in brainstorming, creative ideation, and debriefing. When this becomes the norm, employees feel like they’re contributing. At the end of the day, you want all of your staff members to feel like their ideas and opinions matter. So, create regular opportunities for them to contribute…to play devil’s advocate, to lean into opposing views or ideas. Your job as a leader of the church is to foster an environment where everyone feels comfortable bringing ideas to the table in order to take God’s message even further. Remember, a psychologically safe environment comes with the expectation that, “there are no stupid questions or dumb ideas.”
Ensure your leaders lead and managers manage. Know the difference. Not every leader excels at managing. What are the specific strengths of your leaders? Who are the potential managers among your staff? Structure your teams thoughtfully and acknowledge any pushback. Remember, key leaders don’t necessarily have to manage people directly from an HR standpoint; this frees them to focus on major decisions. Set up your people for success rather than simply filling roles in your org chart. When leaders are simply in the wrong position to lead, the effects can be devastating to morale and productivity. If your organization is psychologically safe, your staff will be operating from a much happier place because managers (who are gifted at managing people) will know how to better care for their teams, accept feedback, work through mistakes, and foster new ideas, and leaders (who are gifted at big-picture-leading) will be free to speak into vision casting and directing internal ministries or other initiatives.
Encourage shared responsibility when mistakes happen. Limit (squash, repel, resist) the blame game or finger pointing. Don’t tolerate teammates being “thrown under the bus.” When your employees are scared to make a mistake for fear of being made the scapegoat, you miss out on employees willing to take risks, try new things, and be creative in ways you cannot even imagine. Encourage your managers to build teams where when mistakes happen, the manager is humble enough to take shared responsibility and help their team grow from it.
Respect boundaries. Hard and fast. A sure sign of a workplace that lacks psychological safety is one where if “the boss” calls after work hours, an employee feels like they have to answer, regardless of what time it is. “Our team is like family!” is not really an ideal we buy into. My family is my family. My family boundaries are different from my professional team boundaries and yours should be too. When employees feel as if the line between work family and real family gets blurred, it’s a difficult place to come back from. Employees are more likely to feel burnt out, frustrated, and any sense of work-life balance they think they have, starts to deteriorate. Instead, a psychologically safe workplace is one where when “the boss” calls after work hours, an employee doesn’t think twice about not answering, or at the very least sending a friendly text response to the tune of, “I’m with my family right now, is this something we can discuss in the morning?”
To wrap it up, the elements of psychological safety are complicated, but pretty simple once broken down. So much of “The Golden Rule” goes into psychological safety when you start applying it to the faith-based community. As the leader of your organization, how would you want to be led? What type of boss would you want?
In a couple of weeks, we are going to interview Kevin Keeley, PhD. to get a broader perspective of psychological safety in the religious workplace. We are really eager to hear his perspective on his dissertation work on this very topic, how it is informing his current work, and what he would encourage all of us to look for over the horizon in healthy workplace culture.
