Building Challenger Safety in Organizations

Today's episode is the final part of our four-part series on the change management principle, behave until you believe. This is our final episode in the series, and it's on challenger safety in practice. Tim and Junior will discuss why innovation requires deviation, why an environment of high challenger safety is not the default, and they'll give you practical behaviors for you to put challenger safety into practice. If you like this episode, go ahead and listen to the rest of the series. As always, this episode's show notes can be found at leaderfactor.com/podcast.

(04:51) Creating a more innovative culture doesn't come from pushing behavior through compliance. Punishment-based accountability does not seem to get the job done over the long haul. There's a cost to compliance if it's punishment-based. The accountability mechanism is important because it depends on what else you want. If you just want pure compliance, great, press people into compliance, that's fine, but what are you losing? You're losing innovation.

(09:44) What's at stake when you challenge the status quo, what do people worry about? They worry about social status, political status, their career advancement and their upward mobility. You're risking your job. You might be risking your career in some cases. It may be that you do something that could be seen as this black mark that follows you around forever. These categories of personal risk illustrate the nature of vulnerability associated with stage four challenger safety. If you're asking people to challenge the status quo, you have to keep these risks in mind.

(20:23) Less than 10% of teams have challenger safety. To achieve and maintain stage four challenger safety is the supreme test of a leader. To create an atmosphere where people feel free and able to challenge the status quo without fear of retaliation or repercussions.

(25:50) Weigh in last. If you have an authority position in a room and you weigh in first on whatever the issue is, you anchor your team with bias. You are softly censoring your team and the presumption is that the discussion is over because you possess positional power and you've registered your point of view. Next time, weigh in last. Mirror the team and summarize the discussion to that point the way that you would if you're talking one-on-one. When you can do this right, you're acknowledging everyone's opinion, but you're also consolidating the information so that it's actionable and you can continue the conversation in a productive way.

(32:20) Respond constructively to dissent and bad news. If you respond poorly to dissent and bad news, you inject fear and you break the feedback loop. One of the best things that you can do in a crisis is to ratchet up the transparency and confront the truth head on. Don't try to dismiss things. Don't try to spin things. Don't try to hide things. Just confront it. Square up to the truth and deal with it.

(42:48) Reward shots on goal. "If you're not taking shots, you're not going to score. It's simple math." - Lionel Messi. Become good at identifying what your shots on goal are. A shot on goal might be just a comment or an idea. If it's in the right direction, it's on goal, reward that. If you want something to happen more, reward it.

Important Links
The 4 Stages Behavioral Guide