A Fine, Productive Line Between Uncomfortable and Unsafe
One of my favorite leadership paradoxes is summed up in these two popular statements about professional growth that are almost always taken as gospel, are almost never defined, and best of all, which contradict each other:
We’re told that we have to be uncomfortable to grow and perform, but it’s never clear where the line is between productively uncomfortable and damagingly unsafe. Further, the Harvard Business Review recently proposed that too much psychological safety can actually be a bad thing. As a leader, how am I supposed to craft an environment for my team that ensures psychological safety while also having the correct degree of productive discomfort?
I propose that there are four types of workplace cultures and that they are determined by leadership’s ability to provide four critical resources (more on that later).
Safety & Comfort in the Workplace:
Here’s how I define each of those quadrants…
Uncomfortable & Unsafe - The Toxic Arena
A few years ago I was hired to reorganize and rebuild a manufacturing firm. The previous CEO’s office was opulent, huge, full of art and it directly overlooked the entire manufacturing floor where employees struggled in a difficult and sometimes dangerous work environment that was not climate controlled. The boss could always see everyone and the comfort of his position was a constant reminder of who had power and who did not. The toxic environment in that company played out not only in the operations, but in the physical design of the office space.
It was a classic example of the Toxic Arena where there are few resources, little support and terrible consequences if you don’t succeed anyway.
In turning that organization around, one of the easiest decisions I made was to convert the CEO’s office into a lunch room for everyone at the organization and to sell his art to address some of the company’s debts.
Comfortable & Unsafe - The Sleepwalking Zombie
I worked with an organization whose claim to fame was that 25 years earlier they had invented the term “Wi-fi”. And good for them, a generation later they were still cashing checks on the assertion. But over and over again I saw them lose deals to innovative firms smart enough to be looking forward (not back) and as a result they were forced to compete on price rather than on quality. That’s a race to the bottom that has very few winners in the end.
And this company is not alone! The Sleepwalking Zombie is an organization on cruise control that doesn’t see that the road ahead is closed and the bridge is out. It’s so comfortable that it doesn’t realize that it is deeply unsafe. There are many famous case studies of companies that made comfortable choices that turned out to be unsafe in the long run. For a classical example think of Kodak failing to pivot to digital photography when they had that technology in-house. In the present moment, I’d say that if you haven’t figured out how AI is going to disrupt your business, you might be a Sleepwalking Zombie.
Comfortable & Safe - The Playground
I once saw a startup with an expensive office in Union Square. They had every ping pong table/video game console you could imagine, a soaring mission statement… and no product. It attracted top talent and was super fun for the employees while it lasted, but within a year it burned $30 million in VC and laid off its entire staff with 24hrs notice.
Being comfortable and safe feels great and there’s a ton of good science on the intellectual value of play. Every good workplace should encourage the pursuit of some time dedicated to the simple joy of messing around because some of the best innovations come from what started out as meaningless play. But life is about dosage and sometimes we can go too far in pursuit of a good thing. The Playground Zone is lots of fun and some great ideas will emerge form this environment, but without the clarity of purpose that comes from the presence of real world consequences, actual progress and enduring success is a deeply unlikely proposition.
Uncomfortable & Safe - The Goldilocks Zone
Both times that I’ve been an Interim CEO, I came into an organization face to face with its greatest fears and finally willing to do what it would take to succeed over the long haul. Everyone in these scenarios understood the consequences of failure and my job as a leader was to map a path to success and to resource the team, both practically and emotionally, to succeed on that journey. Put another way, my job was to create the physiological safety to succeed in an inherently uncomfortable environment.
And when an organization gets it just right, periods of changes are also crucibles for innovation. Individuals are challenged to stretch beyond their limits but are not overextended. Consequences and opportunities are shared. There is healthy communication and clear boundaries and as such, everyone knows their responsibilities and are equipped with the tools for the job.
Four Critical Resources That Determine The Fine Line
Being in the “Goldilocks Zone” with just the right amount of discomfort sounds nice, but in the real-world how can we make practical decisions around subjective terms like “comfort” and “safety”? I’ve learned that leading your team on the tightrope between productively uncomfortable and damagingly unsafe hinges on the presence of the following key resources:
Tools: Has leadership ensured that there are adequate tools and resources to do the job? “Tools and resources” doesn’t have to be money. Resourcefulness itself, one of the most important tools for any organization, is free. Build a culture that is “More MacGuyver and less Batman” (Love that quote by Anthony Vicino).
Clarity of Purpose: Does everyone understand what needs to be done, when it needs to be accomplished, how the goal is meant to be reached and why the organization cares in the first place?
Support From Peers: Is there a culture of mutual support on the teams executing the tasks? Has leadership modeled this culture for the organization?
Feedback & Flow of Information: Has leadership indicated an acceptable level of risk-taking and failure in pursuit of innovation and what are the bottom-line non-negotiables in terms of output?
The flow of information, the tools for the job, support from peers and clarity of purpose - in my view, the simplest definition of leadership is to provide these four resources to a team. The more ambitious your goals as a leader, the more of these resources must be provided and if there is weakness in one area, the remaining areas must be that much stronger to ensure success.
Enriched with these four resources, even a difficult period of change can become a uniquely valuable period for innovation, and taken together, they constitute the very fine line between productively uncomfortable and damagingly unsafe.
