Are Altruism & Innovation key to creating psychologically safe teams?

Attuned’s definition of Altruism as an intrinsic motivator is grounded in the desire to help, support and maintain the wellbeing of others, not necessarily expecting any reciprocity but rather behaving with the desire to create a positive, kinder atmosphere.

Key factors for people with Altruism as a top motivator:

• Ensuring a positive group atmosphere

• Mentoring newcomers

• Sharing knowledge and information

• Supporting each other to solve problems

• The importance of group values

Looking at Attuned’s data, we can see that Altruism occurs pretty frequently in the natural course of things, being the 4th most common top motivator overall and the highest-scoring motivator for 1 in 9 people. Among managers, 31% score in the ‘Need to have’ range (70-100) for Altruism.

Managers with high Altruism needs will want to help, mentor and support their team. However, this can sometimes be to the detriment of their own required tasks—i.e., they might say “yes” too often and take on too much—making strong time-management skills a real necessity.

As defined by influential academic and Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School Amy Edmondson, Psychological Safety is the belief that one can take the interpersonal risks of speaking up with questions, concerns, mistakes, or dissenting views without fear of censure or scorn. To put it another way, it’s about creating a sense of mutual trust within a team. The benefits of a psychologically safe environment, meanwhile, are manifold, from improved employee engagement and wellbeing to increased innovation and lower staff turnover.

Managers with high Altruism needs generally behave in a way that seeks to ensure a positive group atmosphere, while placing a strong focus on mentoring newcomers and sharing knowledge. These are trust-building behaviors that, if sustained, will very likely lead to a culture of Psychological Safety within the team. Instinctively, this makes sense: if you want to help and support others, it follows that you will want to create a psychologically safe environment.

Using the Psychological Safety outcome of innovation, we could visualize the sequence as:

In a market downturn, or in times of crisis and uncertainty, the benefits of Psychological Safety to organizations are more important than ever, and if teams are to survive and thrive, they need managers that are able to create the right conditions for such a culture of trust to flourish. And, from the (admittedly still imperfect) data available to us, as well as the anecdotal evidence we’ve seen, it appears that managers who are strongly motivated by Altruism have a higher likelihood of doing exactly this.

As one of our team members with high Altruism needs so succinctly put it in an article from our Motivators Personified series, Altruism is “always key in the longer battles.”

To be motivated by Innovation means to be drawn to creative and novel environments and tasks in all areas of life.

Key factors for people with Innovation as a top motivator:

• Creativity

• Novel approaches, tasks and solutions

• Establishing or creating something new

• Examining several viewpoints at once

• Self-expression

People who are motivated by Innovation also tend to be early in the curve to adopt new ideas, and new technologies:

Although the aforementioned Dr Edmondson coined the term Psychological Safety all the way back in 1999, it took a few years for the concept to diffuse. And while it has grown steadily in popularity ever since (see chart below), it is still a concept that most people don’t fully understand, never mind knowing how to implement it or measure it.

Most people who are exposed to the concept agree that Psychological Safety is important, but we are still in the very early days of being able to systematically implement it and measure it, and nowhere near being able to consciously create it at scale, except in the rarest of cases.

Given the newness of the concept, it follows that leaders who are highly motivated by Innovation tend to gravitate towards Psychological Safety in greater numbers (as part of the 2.5% Innovator / 13.5% Early Adopter cohort) than those with low Innovation needs. In short, their desire to embrace novel approaches and solutions translates into a desire to explore, understand and ultimately implement Psychological Safety in their teams.

The implementation of Psychological Safety is currently achieved mainly through training sessions and building awareness, but increasingly it will be done through technology (like Attuned). Managers with high Innovation needs will doubtless drive this adoption, and will consequently create teams with Psychological Safety at a likely higher rate than those predominantly driven by nine of Attuned’s other 11 Intrinsic Motivators (Altruism being the exception).

After all, to be innovative you need to explore, you need to make mistakes, you need to be open, and you need to be truthful with feedback—all behaviors that help to create Psychological Safety.

It’s accepted in Psychological Safety research that one outcome of having high Psychological Safety is greater innovation. The pathway has typically been “high Psychological Safety -> Innovation”, but I posit that a high-probability pathway to get that final outcome of increased innovation is greatly helped by having Innovation present at the start of the sequence in the form of the manager having it as a top motivator. So, instead, the pathway would be:

If this is true, then a reasonably significant portion of the populace would be able to positively affect this Psychological-Safety-creation pathway. Looking at the Attuned data, Innovation is a top motivator for 1 in 13 people, while 12% of managers have it as their highest-scoring motivator. However, as a motivational building block that could help create Psychological Safety in teams, its occurrence—and hence impact—is much lower than that of Altruism.

From a lay point of view, it makes sense that Innovation would be a key ingredient in creating Psychological Safety. “Self-expression” and “examine several viewpoints” are behaviors that are needed, and present, in psychologically safe teams. In order to be creative, you also need to be open to different ideas and different perspectives—and also to the possibility (or even the likelihood) of failure. Again, this checks many of the boxes needed for a team to operate with Psychological Safety.

The logic is there. We have seen this in the champions and managers of the companies we work with at Attuned. And the qualitative data we’ve experienced working with teams and managers, while anecdotal, indicates that this hypothesis holds true.

Which leads us on to the next step…

We will soon be releasing a Psychological Safety Assessment fully developed by Attuned, which is currently undergoing late-stage testing. Incorporating all of the thinking around Psychological Safety, this unique and comprehensive assessment will not only help to “score” your team for Psychological Safety, but will also let you know where to make the necessary interventions. When this goes live, we will begin to be able to see Psychological Safety data on thousands of teams around the world.

Over the coming years, we will also be able to run analysis to see if the instances and levels of Psychological Safety are higher in teams led by managers who are motivated by Altruism and/or Innovation. This won’t prove causation of course, but if my hunch is correct, I believe we will see very clear data showing correlation. Proving causation will be much trickier and take much more time, but knowing the strong correlation to a manager’s motivators and the likelihood of Psychological Safety will be a new, incredibly helpful insight to organizations.

What do you think? Does this resonate with what you see and feel within your own organization? And if/when this is proven to be true, how should organizations use this knowledge? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please reply in the comments below, or drop me a note at casey.wahl at attuned.ai.