Build Safety

WIT Updates The Culture Code: Snippet #2 - Build Safety

SICAS March Update

There is a lot of talk about safety these days, and rightly so. According to Daniel Coyle in The Culture Code book, safety among teams is the first of the three big skills that create successful groups. The three big skills are:

1. Build Safety
2. Share Vulnerability, and
3. Establish Purpose

And he calls them skills because they can be learned and implemented. They are not innate characteristics. That's good news for all of us.

In chapter 1, p10-11, Coyle lays out the concepts of belonging cues, based on research conducted by Oren Lederman at MIT. His research supposes that before oral language, humans used other signals to cue each other into a sense of cohesion and safety as we evolved and formed our societies, that these cues are still in use by our unconscious brains, and that they can be seen in cohesive groups today. They can also be missing in groups that are not cohesive and where some people are not feeling safe. The research draws on group observations and on experiments to see how changes in belonging cues impact the group feel and the group outcomes. As Coyle summarizes " Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, body language, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group. Like any language, belonging cues can't be reduced to an isolated moment, but rather consist of a steady pulse of interactions within a social relationship."

Wow...and didn't COVID throw a wrench into all of that? Haven't we all been trying to build back our student populations and their feelings of belonging? And aren't we all finding our way through this new world of remote/hybrid/on-campus work teams? I am confident we can take this information from The Culture Code and use it to be more intentional about how we signal belonging to the diverse teams that IT needs in order to carry us into the future. Think about these belonging cues in your next [meeting/interview/office social gathering/casual office chat/zoom or teams meeting or work session]. Take note of who is making eye contact with who, who is talking, how carefully are speakers being listened to, what kinds of energy are being projected into the group and how is that being received? How are ideas presented and who gets to present ideas? How safe does that meeting feel to you? How safe do you think it is for everyone else? What, if anything, could be changed for the better? Observe a few group events and then ask yourself whether there are some updates needed.

As we work to update the culture code to replace outdated behaviors with ones that work better for everyone, creating a culture of group safety will be the first step. Coincidently, I had gathered a few resources on creating psychological safety back in December for the SUNY WIT list, and you can locate that now on the SUNY WIT Blog