Enhance your organizational culture with best practices from industry leaders: Psychological safety, leadership & DE&I
Last week, we discussed best practices for the organizational from industry leaders, specifically focusing on decision-making, values, and rituals & traditions. In this article, we show how some of the biggest companies improve their organizational culture, through psychological safety, leadership, and DEI.
Google: How Google's Project Aristotle Revealed the Power of Psychological Safety
Google's Project Aristotle was a study conducted to identify the key factors that make a successful team. After analyzing vast amounts of data, the researchers discovered that psychological safety was the most important factor for team success. I will not dive deep into what psychological safety is, as I already wrote about this in a previous article, but I will dive deeper into how Google now deals with it.
Building on Project Aristotle, Google fosters psychological safety by encouraging open communication and leaders modeling vulnerability. They promote constructive feedback and celebrate risk-taking by learning from failures. Emphasizing inclusivity and diversity, they ensure all voices are heard. They also provide mental health support and promote work-life balance, creating a culture where psychological safety thrives.
Amazon: making leadership principles part of the cultural identification
CEOs often implement a set of principles that define their company’s culture, values, and how they will achieve the business’s long-term objectives. But to be truly effective in promoting innovation, these sets of principles cannot just be stated—they need to be used. Amazon truly believes in this and has managed to employ their leadership principles in everyday business.
At Amazon, everyone holds each other accountable for demonstrating 16 Leadership Principles in the daily actions. Their 16 Leadership Principles have a few accompanying sentences that not only describe what each means, but how they should be practically applied. It is not just what the Leadership Principles say, but how we utilize them — every day, in myriad ways — that make them an integral part of the fabric of Amazon’s culture. This is an important lesson for every culture specialist: just having values is not enough, they need to be implemented as well.
Mastercard: a culture of diversity and inclusion
Mastercard’s goal is to create a workplace where everyone has equal access to reach their full potential. Therefore, they put a lot of emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion in their workplace, at all levels. Managers in Mastercard have reported that this focus on DEI has made the company more adaptable, innovative, and creative.
One important aspect of this is reliability and follow-up. Mastercard has DEI KPI’s for representation of gender and people of color, for recruitment, for career development and for pay equity. They have especially been successful on the last topic; being one of the only companies where every female employee earns $1.00 for every $1.00 male employee makes globally. The same goes for people of color; in the US, employees of color have equal income to their white counterparts.
Feeling inclusive and represented is an important part of the culture, which is why it is important that companies such as Mastercard are continuously working on their DEI targets.
