Safety, Trust, Intimacy (Ed Batista)

Safety, Trust, Intimacy

I've led, facilitated and advised countless groups over the course of my career. (And although this post focuses on groups, the same dynamics apply to our 1:1 relationships as well.) Many of these groups, such as T-groups at Stanford [1] or workshops for founders, were specifically organized to help members learn, become more self-aware, and change their behavior in order to achieve their goals more effectively.

But all of the others, from executive teams to entire startups, implicitly served these purposes in addition to their formal function. We often fail to recognize that every group of which we're a member is a potential laboratory in which we can craft and test hypotheses around learning, self-awareness, and behavior change. [2] But some groups are more effective than others in this regard, and the group's levels of safety, trust and intimacy are the key factors. The graphic above offers a simple way of assessing a group's capabilities:

Initial Conditions: Every group is rooted in a set of initial conditions that form the foundation for all subsequent aspects of the group experience. How and why were we gathered together? What will our first meeting be like? What will we discuss there?
Essential Qualities: The bedrock characteristics that define the group's subsequent evolution are the levels of safety, trust and intimacy that members experience with each other:
- Safety = A belief that we won't get hurt. [3]
- Trust = We mean what we say and say what we mean. [4]
- Intimacy = A willingness to make the private public. [5]
Next Steps: When sufficient levels of 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. [6]
Ultimate Ends: When we're able to experiment, take risks and make ourselves vulnerable, our ability to learn, to increase our self-awareness, and to change our behavior in order to achieve our goals increases dramatically.
Context: This process of building one layer upon another occurs in a unique context for each group, 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 right conditions, this can establish a virtuous cycle. As we learn more, become more self-aware, and change our behavior to achieve our goals, a series of cascading effects can result:

Learning, awareness and change become group norms.
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 enhance conditions that support the development of these qualities in this group and future groups.

So whenever a group gets together, we should ask ourselves:

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 support the development of these qualities? What behaviors inhibit these qualities?

Note that 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. [7]

Footnotes

[1] A Brief History of T-Groups

[2] Experiential Learning Revisited

[3] For more on psychological safety, see the work of Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson: