Safety, Trust, Intimacy

In my capacity as a Leadership Coach at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, I work regularly with groups of MBA students whose purpose is to help the members learn, become more self-aware (and more aware of others), and change their behavior in order to achieve their goals more effectively.

But I'd argue that every group in every organization serves one or more of these purposes in addition to the group's explicitly stated function.  Intentionally or not, each group in which we participate serves as a de facto learning laboratory, within which we come to understand how our interactions with others support or undermine our efforts to accomplish the tasks noted above.

It's clear that some groups are more effective than others at helping the members learn, increase their awareness and change their behavior, and I believe that the group's levels of safety, trust and intimacy are the key factors in determining its effectiveness in this regard.

1) Every group's experience is rooted in a set of initial conditions: How and why were we assembled?  What will our first meeting be like?  What will we discuss there?  These initial conditions form the foundation for all subsequent "layers" of the group dynamic.

2) The foundational qualities that define every group are the levels of safety, trust and intimacy: Safety =  A belief that we won't get hurt.  Trust = We mean what we say and we say what we mean.  Intimacy = A willingness to make the private public.

3) When safety, trust and intimacy are established, these qualities support the actions that lead to greater success as a group: experimentation, risk-taking and a willingness to be vulnerable.

4) When we feel able to experiment, take risks and make ourselves vulnerable, our ability to learn, to increase our self-awareness (and our awareness of others) and to change our behavior in order to achieve our goals more effectively increases dramatically.

5) The process of building one layer upon another occurs in a unique context—so in addition to asking whether learning and change are taking place, we also need to assess how the group's context supports (or inhibits) the development of the underlying layers in the group dynamic.

As we learn, become more aware (of ourselves and others), and change our behavior to achieve our goals more effectively...

• Learning, awareness and change become self-reinforcing norms in the group.
• Group members become more willing to experiment, take risks, and express more vulnerability.
• We value the importance of safety, trust and intimacy and act to enhance these qualities in the group.
• And we identify and seek to replicate initial conditions that support the development of these qualities in future groups.

So we need to ask...

• How will the group's initial conditions support or inhibit the establishment of safety, trust and intimacy?
• At each step of the group's subsequent development, are we increasing or decreasing the levels of these qualities?
• What behaviors in the the group dynamic support the development of these qualities?  And what behaviors inhibit these qualities?

A final point regarding feedback: While excessive delicacy and indirectness inhibit learning, awareness and change, the degree of candor and directness in a group must be calibrated to the group’s current levels of safety, trust and intimacy.  Feedback attuned to these qualities can increase their presence in the group by stretching the group’s capacity for candid and direct discussion.  But feedback that fails to take these qualities into account can actually lead to less safety, trust and intimacy than before and undermine the group’s ability to learn and change.

(Here's a 10-slide PowerPoint version [268 KB] of this post.)

Comments

[Becky Cummings]

Hi Ed, This is Becky from Cleveland, Ohio. You were so kind to speak to me about Stanford last spring. I agree with your model and as a teacher I try to create a context in the classroom where safety, intimacy and trust are a part of the culture. I do this by mixing up outdoor ed, improv and art exercises, mixing up symbolic domains for people to express themselves. This leads to connection and then group work that goes really well. How would you help shape or coach someone in business. I have never worked in corporate America. How do you shape experience for "professional" cultures?

[Ed Batista]

Hi, Becky--good to hear from you. I can see that using a range of "symbolic domains" (what a great term--I've never heard it before) allows people to express themselves in the ways that are most meaningful and important to them, which can be an important step in creating an effective group.

The specific means by which we create safety, trust and intimacy is a bigger topic I should probably address at greater length in another post, but three quick thoughts come to mind:

First, these qualities are relative, so I find it useful to ask whether a given interaction made the group more or less safe, trusting and intimate.

Second, these qualities are subjective, so the most meaningful metric is simply whether we feel safe, trusting (and trusted), intimate.

Finally, these qualities are intricately intertwined with our emotions, so the they're more likely to be established in a group where talking about our emotions is an acceptable norm.

To your last question, I've worked in a number of different professional settings, and while organizational cultures vary widely (and have a significant impact on the issues I discuss here), I think generalizations about types of organizations tend to exaggerate similarities and can miss important differences. Some companies are very "touchy-feely" places, and some nonprofits are very buttoned-down.

[Dan]

Beautiful model, Ed. I'm struck by how many ways there are into the mode of connection and support. How many and how few, I guess. Your model reminds me of work by Amy Edmondson at Harvard on safety and learning.

[Ed Batista]

Thanks, Dan--I appreciate the kind words and the link to Amy's work. I'm not familiar with her, but I'm eager to learn more.

I'm struck by your phrase, "ways into the mode of connection and support," which touches on Becky's question above about just how to go about creating safety, trust and intimacy in a group. You remind me that there are so many different ways to connect with others and to provide (and request) support. While we can identify some general guidelines around steps that tend to create more (or less) safety, trust and intimacy in a group, it's important to remember that there's no template, and the subjective nature of these qualities makes it essential to ask (and make overt) whether we feel more (or less) safe, trusting, intimate.

Of course, I'm also reminded (regularly) of how difficult all this can be, particularly when we're not starting from scratch with a new group, but, rather, looking to overcome a loss of safety, trust and intimacy in an existing group that's struggling or has suffered some trauma. It's easy to theorize, hard to put into practice.