Safety at Work, Outer and Inner
Safety is on everyone’s mind these days but it is a concept with many sides to it, the most obvious of which is: I hope that you and your loved ones are safe. As we all know, many are not. Some of you are on the front lines of caring for those afflicted. You’re particularly in my thoughts, and so are those of you that are working, directly or indirectly, on new diagnostics and therapeutics for this new disease.
Safety also has an inner meaning. The recent death of Paul O’Neill has brought this again to mind. He is an icon to the patient safety movement and more generally to anyone who takes seriously the need to make work better - and safer is the foundation of better.
But looking over the many recollections of O’Neill’s life and career brought into sharper focus just how much he connected the outer - physical safety - to the inner: psychological safety, which O’Neill understood to be the basis of creating motivated, engaged teams in any undertaking. These brief remarks draw a straight line from his leadership on workplace safety as CEO of Alcoa to the work of Professor Amy Edmundson on the foundational importance of psychological safety for team performance, and to the wisdom of the late Professor Clayton Christensen, who wrote:
The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.
Christensen, Clayton M.. How Will You Measure Your Life? (pp. 40-41). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
We live in a country where nurses and EMT’s are treating COVID patients without adequate PPE, and Amazon workers are raising money on the internet to buy themselves sickleave. I know what Paul O’Neill would think. We’re flooded with advice about how to be productive - and keep our teams productive - under lockdown. Isn’t it a good time for all of us to ask: how are we keeping our teams safe, inside and out?