One Simple Way To Unleash Your Team’s Potential: Leave Your Mask At The Door
Civil Wars Suck.
I grew up in Sri Lanka in the 1970s and 80s, in the midst of a civil war between the Sinhala and Tamil communities. I didn’t belong to either side because I had a Tamil dad and a Sinhala mom, so in the South of the country, I had the wrong last name, and in the North of the country, I spoke the wrong language. I went to a school where the language of instruction was Sinhala so most of the friends I grew up with were from the Sinhala community, and on the surface, I was as Sinhala as they were. My friends of course knew I was of mixed ethnicity, and they didn’t care. We were on the swim team and track team and rugby team together, and as elementary schoolers, our identity as a team was more important to us than a social construct like ethnicity.
I lived in a cocoon with my family and friends, mostly oblivious to the tensions building up around me as the nation careened towards civil war. From time to time, that cocoon would be pierced, a throw away comment disparaging Tamils overheard on a bus ride, an awkward look from a teacher reading my Tamil name on the first day of school. I just pretended to be my best Sinhala self and hoped no one would discover my true identity.
Then in 1983, civil riots broke out across the country, including in Colombo where my family lived. I was 11 at the time. Civilian mobs of Sinhala people roamed the streets beating up Tamil people, and in some cases, burning them alive. It was brutal. Our house became a temporary shelter, where Tamil friends and relatives sought refuge to escape the murderous mobs, and Sinhala friends and relatives did everything they could to keep everyone safe. I vaguely remember one of my parents’ Sinhala friends going out into the chaos of the streets, with his helmet and a wig. Later I found out that he went to rescue a Tamil uncle who was trapped in his house. The wig was meant to disguise my uncle as the wife of the Sinhala motorcycle rider. My uncle made it out alive that day, but so many others didn’t.
Cut The Sh!t
I started working in the mid 1990s, when the notion that one could “bring your true self to work” was gaining acceptance. At the time, it sounded to me like giving an entitled brat the license to be a jerk, so “cut the sh!t and do your job” would be my unspoken response. Clearly, I had some unresolved issues about being my true self, which I think I’ve mostly resolved by now.
In today’s business lexicon, bringing your true self to work has been replaced with creating psychological safety, a term coined by Prof. Amy Edmundson at Harvard Business School two decades ago that has recently been gaining in popularity. If you’d like a primer, this interview with Prof. Edmundson provides a decent overview of the concept (and if you want to geek out, this study investigates the connection between psychological safety and “employee voice”, i.e. generating ideas, opinions and solutions in order to improve their work outcomes).
Prof. Edmundson notes that as the concept has gained in popularity, its interpretation has strayed from its origins and needs some course correction.
Psychological safety is not about being nice and getting along or pretending everything is going well when it’s not. In fact, it’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other, all of which are essential attributes of any organization hoping to survive and thrive in the modern economy.
No Masks Required
Many of us have felt unsafe to behave naturally or speak freely at work, and some of us have a work-self that masks parts of our true self. Some level of controlling one’s behavior, i.e what we do, is of course necessary to be able to work productively as part of any team. There really is no excuse for being disrespectful or destructive, so if undermining others and gossiping behind their backs, or defending your mistakes instead of learning from them, or complaining repeatedly without presenting a solution are your true-self, definitely don’t bring it to work. But not feeling safe to behave naturally or speak freely can kill innovation, and any environment that creates the need to cloak one’s biology, i.e. who we are, can undermine performance.
At Ultranauts, a quality engineering startup powered by a distributed and diverse team — with colleagues working in 20 states across the U.S., 45% of whom are women and 75% of whom are on the autism spectrum — creating an environment where colleagues feel safe to leave their masks at the door is mission critical. It’s not an excuse for tolerating bad behavior, but rather a precursor for enabling peak performance. If one of us feels the need to hide a part of ourselves, the team might be missing out on our best self. If one of us is afraid to speak up and disagree, the team might be missing out on our best ideas.
Creating an environment where every colleague feels safe enough to be honest is easier said than done and isn’t going to happen overnight. Most of us have been taught from an early age to be polite, agreeable, and appropriate, and some of us come to our jobs with the lived experience of being punished for simply being who we are.
But it can start with one person on the team choosing to share a fear, or vulnerability, or a side of themselves they’ve been hiding. Today that person is me, sharing a painful part of my own history that I haven’t shared with most of my colleagues. Tomorrow, it could be you.
