In my experience, the opportunity to be myself at work has coincided with when I've been happiest and most productive. It hasn't happened in all of my roles, of course, but in almost every organization where I've worked, I've had that experience on certain projects or with certain people. I can describe the feeling for myself as being most similar to that of being in a state of flow.
When I was with Synectics, we used to use the graph above to describe the relationship between the amount of mental energy available to someone to either apply towards their work or towards their keeping themselves safe. While this framework was more directional than scientifically accurate, I've seen this relationship play out along these lines everywhere I've worked.
We used this framework to diagnose what we called the "Climate" of a group, with punishing climates requiring people to put almost all of their energy toward keeping themselves safe, and collaborative climates allowing people to put almost all of their mental energy towards the business. Today, this framework would more likely be discussed as Psychological Safety.
Psychological safety became widely known in 2015 when Google published the results of their Project Aristotle research into what were the keys to a successful Google team.
According to the New York Times, it is, "a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a 'shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.' Psychological safety is 'a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,' Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. 'It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.'"
It should not be a surprise at this point that psychological safety was determined by Google to be by far the most important of the pillars of a successful team, even being the underpinning of the other four, which were Dependability, Structure & Clarity, Meaning and Impact. It is such an important factor that Google found, "Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives."
I believe that creating a climate in which all team members feel a high degree of psychological safety is table stakes. I honestly don't understand it when someone tells me they don't think psychological safety is an important consideration in leading a team.
I also believe that a lot of us too easily forget that being part of a team that is "characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves." is the least that we should expect from the workplace, where we spend so many hours of our day. Ultimately, if you don't feel comfortable being yourself at work, you are probably being someone else, contorting yourself in a way to just "fit in". And no doubt that version of you is not nearly as authentic, interesting and talented as the real you is.
This post originally appeaered on LinkedIn