How can leaders build genuine organizational safety for disagreement and dissent?

Kaz Nejatian · published Aug 14, 2024

The most important cultural property of a company is that people are jointly searching for truth and are not offended by being told they're wrong.

At Shopify people genuinely disagree with each other — his most common phrase to Toby over a thirty-day Slack window was 'I disagree' — and the job is to find the truth.

14:13 Joint truth seeking culture not being offended by being wrong is the key cultural property

David Lieb · published Sep 21, 2022

A leader's authenticity is the best tool for making everyone in the room feel able to say what they think

People are most guarded when they think everyone around them is smarter and more important than they are, which is dangerous for products; if the leader is visibly the same normal person they'd be on a Saturday morning at home, the room stops feeling like a room of important people

43:03 Leader visibly being a normal person invites others to speak freely

Gustav Söderström · published Oct 12, 2022

The way to create safety for disagreement is for leaders to visibly model it — having heated disagreements with your own boss and with your direct reports in front of their reports, and demonstrably not firing anyone

When people see that disagreeing with the CEO or with their boss carries no punishment, they learn it is allowed; and if the rest of the room says what they actually think, others follow

35:27 Leaders visibly disagreeing with their own bosses teaches the org that dissent is safe

Shishir Mehrotra · published Sep 25, 2020

Creating open debate requires first building trust so that the 'implied sentence' behind comments isn't a personal attack, and then building an environment where ideas aren't labeled too early, because great ideas take time to grow.

It removes groupthink dynamics where, once the group has a stated position, dissenting requires being more aggressive and curt than you'd like, which strips out implied sentences and gets ideas squashed early

22:31 Build trust first then avoid labeling ideas too early to enable open debate

Harry Stebbings · published Jul 29, 2021

One of the most important jobs of a leader is to create an environment of safety where everyone can bring their best selves.

People are a large part of what determines that environment.

26:23 Psychological safety is a core leadership job so people bring their best selves