Someone shares an idea in a meeting. People nod. The manager says thanks. Then nothing happens.
Those people felt safe to speak. They still had no say.
Through my PhD research at the University of Leicester, I call this sociological safety. Someone is psychologically safe to speak yet not sociologically safe to participate.
Take a municipal team piloting an AI scheduling tool. A crew supervisor with 15 years on the job warns the tool ignores winter road conditions. Her manager thanks her. The vendor and IT team keep meeting without her. The tool goes live with the same flaw.
Nobody punished her for speaking up. But her knowledge had no path into the room where decisions got made.
Three questions to ask about your team:
- Whose ideas get heard, and whose get overlooked?
- Who has access to the conversations where decisions get made?
- When people offer input, do they find out what happened to their idea?
Try this before Friday. Pick one idea someone gave you last month. Tell them what happened to it.
If you have no answer, you’ve found where to start.