E136 – Psychological Safety

here we are again today with another episode of a world of work podcast. We're going to be doing a research episode. We've not done one of these for a while, but this is where Jane and I jump into a specific subject that we think is really interesting and helpful for the world of work, digest it and share back with you all the things that we think are key takeaways, which is super exciting. So Jane, what is it we're going to be speaking about today? Well, today we are talking all about Amy edmondson's work on psychological safety. Oh,

well, it's a phrase I think a lot of people have heard, and it's something that we're both quite passionate about. What is it that has led us to do this now? What is it that you've been doing that that's got you thinking so much about this subject recently?

Oh, that's a question. So I've been kind of hung up on this topic for a while, and I know you and I have had lots and lots of conversations about it. We've introduced it to some of our clients. We've talked about it. And I guess at its very heart, it started probably when I very first joined my MSc in Organizational Psychology, and I started looking at some of the research, and I started looking at some of the tools that we were using anyway, and how backed up they were with academic background, and sort of came across sort of the back catalog of work that had led up to what a lot of leadership and development people are talking about in terms of psychological Safety. At the same time, I think it's been quite in the press quite a lot, because there's been some quite high profile organizations advocating for it. So Edmondson done some work with Google there, and it was related, there was a lot of work done related to the Aristotle project. And also, I think it, I think, I think it's got a snappy title, and I like, I don't want to say that, but at the same time, I think it instantly, it's quite rare that you find a model that instantly reflects, if you think about it for just a moment, what it's trying to say. And I think psychological safety does that too. I feel psychologically safe in my team that kind of makes sense to me. So, um, so that's the reason I'm like you, and I talk about it a lot, I think. And then I think very specifically, lately, I've been doing some training. I'm getting some training from the Phillis organization, which is edmonton's sort of responsible for delivering edmonton's work, and I'm learning how to do psychological safety scans within teams, and so I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and I kind of thought it'd be a good time to come and talk to you about it. Yeah, it's brilliant.

I mean, like you said, it's something that we've spoken about for a long time, and I think our interest has been rejuvenated with you, I guess, jumping into it and learning a little bit more about it, and learning about the scans and all that kind of stuff. So it's great to be doing um before we get too much into it, though, I thought it would be worth sharing a couple definitions. I think a lot of people kind of know what it is, and like you say, it's one of those models that's so well labeled, it's got such a good name, but it's quite intuitive to extract from that name, something that we all individually connect with. But it's worth sharing a couple of definitions. I think one comes from Khan, and it predates Amy edmondson's work, and it just says, for psychological safety is the ability to show and employ oneself without fear of negative consequences or self image status or career. So that's a pretty early definition. And then more recently, Amy Edmondson starts to talk about a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. So again, that notion of interpersonality, and then you know, sharing who you are and take those risks comes out a lot there, and some people have kind of paraphrased that into a statement that you might hear quite a lot when people are talking about psychological safety. And that phrase that you'll probably hear is it's a shared belief held by members of a team that others on the team will not embarrass, reject or punish you for speaking up. So again, all of those definitions sort of speak to this ability to share in safety, to contribute in safety, and to bring yourself to that working environment in a good place without fear of any sort of reprisal or put down. Have you got anything you'd like to build on those definitions? James, that sum it up for you?

I, I don't want to build on those definitions because I I'm going to sound it's going to be really difficult to do this episode, because I'm going to sound like a fan girl at various points. And I apologize in advance. Months. But I think the definition that you read out second Amy Edmondson definition is a good one. And actually, I understand that the idea of interpersonal risk taking sounds a bit clunky at first, and you're like, Oh, but I would encourage people, if they are thinking about this stuff, to get comfortable and think about what that phrase means, rather than come up with their own definitions, because I think it's very accurate, but I do think it's helpful to think about what interpersonal risk taking means. And I guess, you know, when I'm talking to people about it informally, I often talk about, you know, am I scared to say something? And I don't mean scared like I'm gonna lose my job. I mean, am I nervous? Am I am I feeling a bit hesitant? And that is worth unpacking. When you're thinking about, are you truly psychologically safe?

Something that I hear sometimes that I just wanted to check up out and see what you think about is sometimes I hear people thinking that a psychologically safe environment is one which isn't challenging, or where maybe people aren't held to account so much, or where, you know, difficult conversations maybe aren't held so much because, you know, to achieve ultimate safety, there's, there's none of that sort of potential conflict in conversations. What do you think about that? How does that play in with your sense of

water? Psychological? I don't I absolutely come across that conversation, and I absolutely understand why people would think that, but it's a long, long way from from what I would see as psychological safety. I would say, in fact, some of the most comfortable teams, and let's use the word comfortable, because I think it's helpful, some of the most comfortable teams that I've worked with are some of the least psychologically safe that I've experienced working alongside and I mean by that, that they don't feel there are members of the team, significant number of members of the team who haven't felt confident about challenging the status quo. So everyone's in a big furry blanket, and no one wants to point out that there might be some bumps coming up in the road. And I at its simplest, if people are too comfortable and everyone is working to keep that comfort going, then by by logic, they are going to not necessarily be comfortable by making everyone uncomfortable. And I know that sounds like a lot of comfort, discomfort, uncomfortable, but I do. I think that's important, because I don't, I don't think we do our best work. And I know James, you and I know James, you and I have talked about this a lot, I don't think we do our best work when we're comfortable. I don't think we do our best work when we're scared to speak up, but I definitely don't think we do our best work where we're sitting back and being able to do it by numbers. Yeah,

that makes perfect sense to me. I mean, I echo that and say that. I think really, to be psychologically safe, we probably need to be able to step into some of those more challenging conversations, more challenging interactions within our teams to help each other get the most out of what we're doing, to help achieve the best for our organizations, and then to step into those more difficult conversations knowing that it's safe to do that, that some of that conflict is actually a safe thing for us to go into and to try and drive things forward and make things better,

yeah, and I think I don't know, I just, I think there's a whole balance that goes on into running really good teams, and I think there is an artistry. And I know, I know Management Science is a science, but I think there is an artistry in balancing how comfortable versus uncomfortable your team and your team members are at any one time, and how you think about that. And I think understanding and being familiar with how they are experiencing psychological safety and if to what extent they feel safe, is unbelievably powerful as a leader, as long as you can be really clear of understanding what they might not be telling you, yeah, and there's always that, right? You can go around in circles,

right? How do you really know if they're every psychological safe? Because if they don't speak up and they don't feel safe, to tell you they don't feel safe, then you'll never get anywhere. But I would like to think that well well meaning leaders, and that's why you and I talk about self awareness so much, right? Because you need that to be able to to ask critical questions about, is this really the, you know, people being sharing candidly with me?

Yeah, well, let's, let's move on. I mean, we've talked a little bit about definitions and explore those, a little bit about what psychological safety is about, maybe what it isn't about, the fact that that it's, it's not just about having this, this, you know, fluffy blanket around us. It's about a lot more than that. And let's jump into the research side of it. So if I were to ask you what the building blocks of psychological safety were, I mean, it's founded on, I think, four quadrants, fundamentally, what would what would you say? Or whatever. Okay,

the way to think about psychological safety is to think about, are people in your team or in the team that you're considering experiencing an environment where they feel safe to learn, to. Challenge

to contribute, and do they feel included? So that's learning, safety, challenging, safety collaboration, safety and inclusion, right? And those are the kind of four areas that edmonton's work and works work of those working in the field of psychological safety, look at, yeah, that's really

helpful. And I guess if we think about things like learning, you know, so much of learning is about sometimes trying new things, taking a bit of risk, and then putting ourselves in a situation where we could be held up for ridicule or held up for not doing something perfectly right the first time. And likewise, with challenging we're putting ourselves out there, and some extent, taking a risk with another person in our team. So that point about interpersonal risk taking really blends through all four of these quadrants.

Yeah, I think so. And I think, I think you have to, in some senses, it helps to think about, like the scenarios and why people, why this might be an issue, or why this might not be obvious. Because obviously, when you read those out, it's like, oh, well, obviously those are good things. But if we, if we think about an individual within a group of people, and it's important to remember, psychological safety is a team level sort of concept, so we're thinking at team level, if you're an individual within a team, and you don't feel it's safe to acknowledge what you don't know, and therefore to learn new things, then you're in an environment where, ultimately, one or more people is not getting the best out of the information resources, opportunities around them, right? So that's that's not a good thing. I think if you've got someone who isn't feeling it's confident and safe to be able to collaborate with others. So particularly if you get, you know some, one of the common things I see is where people have joined the team later, or they're not a specialist within the team, or they don't have as much experience, or whatever it is, some of those things you're not getting the benefits of having someone new or different in your team. I think, I mean, you know, James, how I feel about the challenging safety element of it, because it terrifies me. It literally terrifies me, what teams would are like when people don't feel safe to challenge at its at its worst, in some of the jobs that involve safety and things like that, they've been hacking at this issue of, you know, feeling safe to challenge for a long time, you know, and Edmonton did huge amounts of work in healthcare, which is absolutely, you know, a perfect example of where you have to feel safe to challenge and speak up, No matter what your position in the team. And then finally, that idea of inclusion, and that feeling of, if you feel separate for the team, are you really going to put your effort and your time, and are you going to want and be motivated to work towards solutions and trying things that are going to benefit everyone, or are you going to just protect yourself and stay on the outskirts? And I think, I guess each of them, I have seen each of them, and a combination of each of them in pretty much every team I've ever worked with. And those you know great teams, teams that you know generally are really, really good. But there is, there is pretty much always an improvement. Room for improvement in one of those areas, is my experience. Yeah,

that's really helpful. Though, there's an awful lot in there that we could sort of delve into and unpack a little bit, I guess, if I asked it at a top level, I guess sort of two questions. One, what types of teams do you think benefit from becoming more psychologically safe? And then two, you talked about some of the benefits that exist in there, about that ability to challenge and particularly some of the risk behaviors around that space in risky organizations or risky professions, like a medical professional stuff. But more broadly, what are the benefits of psychological safety? How would you describe it? Yeah,

so I guess, I guess the biggest things, and I think it's important to remember that we're talking about pretty predominantly the work? Well, we're talking about teams that have some level of collaboration within their teams, right? So, so there are certain types of teams that you're more likely to sit in, but in terms of impact, the most, the most obvious and most get talked about, is increasing information sharing, so teams being better and more efficient at sharing information so that they can improve so that they understand what's going on. If you think about how many experiences we all have when working in teams, and we don't feel we have all the information that everyone else in the team has around their experiences. So information sharing satisfaction. So generally, the research shows that people experience better job satisfaction, which obviously is usually linked to reduced turnover intention, and then increase in learning behaviors. So you'll see people trying to learn more, and then, to a lesser extent, you'll also see improved performance and engagement. Yeah. And, I mean, those are still fairly you know, they're significant and of relevance. But I guess, you know, the big things, the big shifts you see around information, sharing, satisfaction and learning behaviors, yeah? And

they're all, you know, clearly, things that people want to achieve in teams, particularly in any type of team that's looking to change or improve or deliver a fulfilling experience for their individuals,

right? And that's and that's the thing, right? So absolutely, if someone said to me, can a team be functioning well without psychological safety, my personal opinion would be, yes, it could be in the short term, right? You could absolutely turn up, be really efficient, do your job. But is that team going to be thinking about the future, moving forward and making improvements, and identifying where they could make improvements and preventing, you know, errors and things like that, probably not so it's, you know, you might be able to do it for a little while, but pretty much, it's always going to come and bite you. I think, yeah.

And fundamentally, you know, so many people derive value from the process of making things better, of learning, of challenging and doing all of that. So that whole fulfillment in work, that satisfaction is, to some extent, for many people, influenced by their ability to learn and to change. If I was going to go on and say, Okay, well, this sounds great, or are they sort of preconditions, I mean other things, but we need to get right in our teams, or that are important for having in place if we're going to really try and move to this place where we can be psychologically safe and have this learning safety and, you know, collaboration and challenge and inclusion and all those types of

things. Well, some of the research shows, shows various things, and when I say some of the research, there's a whole body of research. And there's a great book that happens written, as well as Google's Aristotle projects, lots of data from that, which was like 180 work teams. But there's some there's some basics, principles, right? And if you listen to a lot of our stuff, you might recognize that we bang on about some of these things, and this is why. So the first is role clarity, right? So teams that are really clear on whose job it is to do what the second is peer support, so a team that's already predisposed to support each other, and then to a lesser extent, but still, it's, it's teams that are highly interdependent, obviously, because it'll have a bigger impact, right? So where teams are interdependent, and then the psychological safety. Sharing, sharing information is going to become more and more important learning orientation. So it's built on teams that have learning orientation, and it will ramp up your learning behavior well. So what does that mean? Well, it means that where you've got people in your team who want to learn and they experience psychological safety, they will adopt learning behaviors. And then the other thing that comes up quite a lot is positive leader relations. So basically, a predisposition to at least like your leader or to feel positively. You don't even have to like them. You just have to feel positively about them. And I guess the way to think about that is the opposition of that, right? So if you feel negatively about your leader, then it's going to be harder. You're not you're going to struggle to breed the grounds that you need for psychological safety, but also it might lessen the impact.

Yeah, that's helpful. I think, I think that point about possibly the relations, it's interesting. It's something that we speak about, sometimes, about leaders who take a phrase like more human approach to leadership and things like that, which tends to equate with a little bit more of a personableness that can work for some teams. I think that comes comes through in some of this. Could you say a little bit more about what you mean by interdependence within a team? I don't know if that's something you could build a little bit what type of independence, absolutely.

So when we talk about interdependence, we're basically talking about how much what is there's two things really, how much we need to interact with other people to be able to do our job, right? So if I could draw a pencil line around all my tasks, and I didn't need to talk to anyone or do anything to do with them, then I'd have a low level of interdependence. And the easiest way I can, like the easiest example I think of when I think of independence is about people writing books, right? So if I'm writing my book and I haven't got anyone else helping me, then there's low interdependence. But I might have an editor involved. Editor involved at the end stages. If you and I and two of our colleagues decided to write a book and we decided to all write separate chapters, we'd probably need to talk a little bit to make sure we didn't overlap, and we'd probably need to rely on each other to draw information and share, to understand how we structure it and agree how each chapter is linked and all of that. If we were all going to write a textbook, we would probably have a really high level independency, because we're all going to need to come together and build the structure of it and at every level. And so really, when we talk about interdependence, it's like, on a simplistic basis, it's the level which we interact. Other people in order to get our job done within our team. And so unsurprisingly, we also see, like highly independent teams that aren't functioning brilliantly, tend to get really high levels of frustration. You can put up with a challenging team environment. Challenge is a bad word. Sorry. But you can put up with a negative or not positive team environment, if your work is relatively non independent, because you're more likely to be able to because it's going to be less irritating, right? But similarly, psychological safety should have, logically speaking, a bigger impact on interdependent teams, because the better you get at challenging, sharing, learning, the more the whole team benefits, because you've got that interaction constantly. Does that make sense? Yeah, that

makes perfect sense. And I think, I think for me, as I listen to you explain it, it goes a little bit back to that interpersonal risk taking, where there is interdependence. There is, by definition, almost certainly more interpersonal interaction and engagement, because we've got these relationships and these dependencies on each other, on each other. So the more we're able to to, you know, undertake risk taking activities in those relationships from a position of safety, the more effective will be. And it's that sort of virtuous cycle in there. So, you know, we talk about things like role clarity. We talked about peer support in their interdependent learning orientation, but positive set of leader relations as some of the foundations, the things that psychological safety is really built on. And we talk about those types of things quite a lot in some of our other podcasts and with our guests, and then some of the work that we did, if I were to step back and ask you, well, that's all great. We know what it's built on. We know what some of the impacts are. We know what some of the quadrants are. How do we actually work out if a team is psychologically safe? What does one do to assess or understand whether a team is safe?

Well, so probably the easiest thing to do is explain a little bit about what Edmondson herself and the organization that that she's part of do, and that's where I'm taking my training from. So I can, I can explain it a little bit, and so the work basically focuses on teams

filling out a survey and rating their responses to seven questions which, which sounds really small, right? Um, because seven questions is not what we're used to doing in terms of surveys and stuff like that. And I think it's really important to understand that their approach is not about having a perfect psychometric diagnostic. It's about a learning experience. So you do the questions. You can do them for free, by the way, on their website. So if you're interested in this stuff, then I would really encourage you to go and have a look at their website. It's called the Phyllis organization. I'll just check the website for you. There's a book as well that's written around it, but you can do that, as far as I know, certainly up until this week, when we're publishing, you could do those for free and have a go. And it's Phillis organization.com, and you answer seven, seven questions. But really what they say is, you know, and then it's about sitting down with your team and, you know, you can get trained facilitators to do this, who can run the program for you, but it's about sitting down with your team and starting to unpack as a team. Why those answers look like they do? And you know it. This is not about going into teams that are not psychologically safe and trying to fix them. This is about going into teams that are doing okay but are looking to do improvements, or at least from my perspective, it is because you need that basic assurance that they are likely to share candidly. It's done anonymously, but even so, and you ask, you know, you answer questions and you reflect on them, and then you have a conversation about what could be done to to address some of the challenges that are being experienced. And so they have questions like, they ask you to think about things like, if you make a mistake on this team, it's often held against you, or it is safe to take risks on my team or working with members of my team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized, things like that. And so there are seven of these questions. And yeah, that's their kind of approach to thinking about it. But as I say, you can do it free. If you're a leader or a manager, you want to look at it, check out the website, do your own scam free, buy the book, and you can do it yourself and have a conversation about it. I think for a lot of this stuff, I would say what I what you, and I say a lot, James, which is opening a conversation about the concept, would be massive for a lot of people, even as a leader, saying, I'm interested in this, in my team, and I'd be really interested to get your thoughts on it is, is in a team that's that's relatively okay, but maybe looking for ways to improve. I think it's, you know. It's a monumental very least buy more the book of Christmas or so. And I sound like I'm promoting the brick, and I'm really not like I am, but it's not getting anything out of it. I just think it's a useful concept.

Yeah, me too. And your point about just introducing the concept into your team being a powerful thing, I couldn't agree more, you know, with so many of these things, just opening that conversation and so many other things we speak about, just asking people what they think about things that are about things that are important, that define the way that you work together with others, is hugely powerful. And a lot of those questions are excellent. And I love what you said there about going on and not just doing that survey, but really getting then into a conversation with people and saying, Okay, well, so what about it? You know, and trying to delve into and explore some of the whys behind it, and then some of the How does it appear, and how does it affect us, and what might we do about it that can lead to some really, really great conversations. Question for you, it strikes me with all those questions, that you would have a better conversation about all those questions if you were a really psychologically safe team discuss well. So

this, this this was kind of the point I was, like, hovering around. So I, I really like this concept. I think, I mean, I do, right? I'm doing the training. That's how, that's how much I like it. I can, I literally can think of a sort of 20 teams off the top of my head that I know that would benefit, but, and here's a big but, and none of my surveys in small team scenarios aren't really anonymous, right, particularly if there's outliers, right? So if there's seven of you and one of you's got different opinions, chances are someone's going to be able to figure it out if it's skewed, and even if it's completely anonymous, the discomfort of saying your great team, isn't that great might be enough for someone not to admit it. And sometimes we don't even admit it to ourselves, and sometimes we think things are comfortable and great and they're not. So I think we need to be really conscious of that, and that's why, I guess that's why I said introducing the concept is really helpful. Because for me, I think, and you know, I guess, I'd urge listeners to go back some of our critical episodes, so critical perspectives with Mark Hughes and maybe the ROB Brener episode and help me. There was another one that I was thinking, Tom covered, Tom Calvert's critical perspectives and diversity. And there's a few others, right? And I would urge you to go back and listen to those as well, because I think it is a psycho description. Is absolutely, I think, a useful concept. But to be a really switched on leader, the scan is going to help you, the questions are going to help you, but it's about challenging yourself, to be brutally honest. So the example I would give is I work with a number of small organization CEOs, and they are good people. James, I want to be really clear about this. They are good leaders and good people, and they all would tell me that they have an open door policy, and their team can come to them, and pretty much all of them have come up through the ranks, right? And that was probably true before they were CEO, quite possibly true. But those lovely teams around them don't always come and take their problems to them. They filter right? And they filter sometimes not because people the leader is difficult or anything like that. Maybe they want to protect the leader from the trauma. Maybe they don't want to admit there's a problem. And so we have to be when we're managing and leading people, and we want them to feel psychologically safe. We have to be hard on ourselves, and I don't mean an aggressive sort of downtrodden way, but we do have to say to ourselves, come on. Now. They've all said they would challenge me, but when we're standing in a room in front of my board chairman and I say something wrong, are they really going to look me in the eye and correct me? Probably not, or probably, or maybe some, maybe not others. And that's, I mean, when, when the chips are down, those are the things that I'm imagining. I'm imagining a scenario where a leader says something wrong. And is it critical? No, but absolutely it needs to be corrected, because it's in a public forum. And And does your team know? Do your team truly believe that you will want them to correct you? Yeah.

And you know, so much of that goes back to another theme that we talk about so much in our work, which is about the essential connection between personal development and leadership and management development. Because to really kind of be that leader that creates that psychologically safe environment, you don't just have to say that you want people to challenge you, you need to get to that situation where you genuinely do want those types of things to take place, and you derive benefit from them, and you know your organization does as well. So some of this work that's involved in creating a psychologically safe team starts with work for each of us as individuals and as leaders in shaping what we want, who we are, how we behave, in such a way that we perhaps embody or role model or demonstrate the things and the behaviors that are important, that really reciprocate in the right way when people do some of these behaviors. So let's go on and talk a little bit. More about some of the things that we can do, right? So if I remember correctly in a lot of her work, Amy Edmondson talks about different things that we can do, or different stages that we go through when we are trying to create psychologically safe teams. What are the headline stages that she talks

this is where we will start to sound like fan girls and FANBOYS. So one of the reasons I really like this piece of work and this function right is that the team that that are working on it have really worked hard at making it practically implementable, right? And so therefore it kind of stands a little bit differently to a lot of the work we see coming out of organizational science and workplace psychology and stuff like that. And so effectively, there are three stages, right? So to create psychological safety, or to support the development of psychological safety, leaders should set the stage, and that's framing the work and emphasizing purpose. And that is the reason we do that, is it creates a shared expectation and meaning of the work amongst the team, right? So here is what I expect from you, and here's what you can expect from me, and it's reciprocal, right? So leaders sometimes forget, particularly when they've been in charge for a little while. They sometimes forget they need to completely consistently emphasize that they are going to meet these conditions as well. It's not just about the other members of the team. The second stage is inviting participation. And so in that sense, we're talking about something called demonstrating situational humility. I don't know everything, practicing good, practice inquiry. So fine, asking questions and things like that, and setting up the structures and processes, which is, without a shadow of doubt, the one that I see least creativity in in my my industry, in my line of work. So we invite participation, and that really that's giving people the confidence that their voice is welcome, right? So, so it's really great thing to think about, right? Does every single member of my team approach a situation thinking my voice is welcome in this conversation? Because most of the team meetings I go to are not balanced voice, right? Although I would say there's something interesting going on about online meetings, because I do think it's changed it a little bit. And then the third stage is responding productively. And there's, oh, man, there's so much self regulation work that could go on for leaders in this bit. So responding productively is, Have I expressed, you know, is there an Express, expression of appreciation for the input, whether I'd agree with it or not? Have I de stigmatized failure, and have i sanctioned clear violations and responding productively is about creating orientation towards continuous learning, right? And I I don't know how I feel about that explanation, but I want to be really clear so many of the models that you and I have explored, James only look at either the positives or the negative behavior. How do you encourage positive behavior, or how do you you know, decrease negative behavior? And the inclusion of sanctioning clear violations in this, I think, is really, really important, because what it's saying is my job as a leader is to let the team know through my actions that when someone does something that is not a part of what we have agreed in setting the stage, then I will take action, because we know from certainly some of the organization we've worked with James that that things creep in, right? People let things go. They don't they don't acknowledge it's it's breaking the rules or breaking the agreement the team have, and then suddenly everyone's doing it, or worse, a couple of people are doing it and everyone else is seriously hacked off. So I guess that's just another reason why I quite like this approach. Yeah, brilliant.

I'm just going to just play them back to you again, just to make sure I kind of understand it. So we've got these three big stages, right that Amy and others talk about. So stage one, we kind of explain the ground rules and demonstrate why what we're doing is really important, so that it's almost worth taking interpersonal risks in relation to, sort of like, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing what we're doing, what we're trying to achieve. This is a really worthy thing. So by all means, we should take some risks to make sure we do a good job. That feels to me like sort of setting the stage. Then once we sort of set the stage and explain some of the ways we expect behavior to be, then we can go on and do that, actual inviting participation and say, Okay, well, we've set the stage. We've talked about why it matters. Now you guys do it. Come in and do it. Challenge, say, contribute, speak up, invent, create, try new things, do all of that. And as a leader, I opened the door to that at each one of our interactions, or whenever it seems appropriate. And then, then, you know, having invited you to step into this room and do these things, when you do it, I'm like, Yes, you know, that is the right thing to have done. Let me demonstrate and respond accordingly. And, you know, reinforce that positive action on your part by the way that I respond to it in a way that's helpful and supportive of you and and supports you into. More about, provided that you're behaving in the ways that are helpful, and then sanctioning you if you don't, does that sort of encapsulate, yeah, absolutely, yeah, brilliant. Okay, so I think that's really interesting. I've got a little bit of a drilling question to this, and I'm not sure if it's something that you've looked at. We talk a little bit here about, you know, this invitation of participation and then responding productively. Some of it that I think some people experience in teams is maybe they feel like they contribute. You know, they're invited to contribute, and they say something, or they make an offering, or they, you know, constructively challenge and all these things. Now we can't all have our contributions acted upon, right? We can't all be speaking up with different opinions, sharing different ideas, and then all ultimately get to be that winning voice in that conversation. How do we manage this with people in our team, so that we can appreciate their contribution and what they're doing without necessarily acting on it? And is there some sort of burnout of contribution. If that happens all the time, how do we how do we separate the acting on a contribution from recognizing the contribution is a good thing in and of itself? That's a really interesting question. I'm gonna deviate. Sorry. I said I've just totally sprung this on you as well. So apologies. No, that's fine, because I

think it's good. I like it. Oh, I like a good spring, James, so I'm going to deviate from the research at this stage and just give you my opinion, because I don't know, but I do see this a lot, and I think there's probably two things to pick up on here. One is, I, in my opinion, psychological safety is not the same as being motivated to do it, right? So this is about being safe to do these things and feeling like they're safe to do them. I do think you can have an environment where people feel totally safe but don't speak up because nothing ever happens. I'm not sure that would fall under the conditions of this, nor would it be identified by psychological safety. I think that's an inaction of leadership if they haven't demonstrated how those ideas have been considered so and I think the separate thing is, how do you deal with it when one person's right more often right? So one of one of the scenarios that I've seen consistently is someone who's a much higher performer in terms of problem solving and particularly problem identification, than anyone else, and they tend to be more right in those sorts of conversations. And they tend to be speaking up a lot more because they support loads more, because that is their natural, you know, one of their natural talents. Or maybe it's not natural, maybe it's been developed, and therefore that can create friction, right? And it can, it can either make people feel less confident about speaking up, rather than less safe, or it might even an extreme Second, make them feel so less safe and safe from speaking up, because they feel like they may perceive that there will be a judgment on them, even if there isn't. So those are two slightly separate things. I think what I would say to both of them is, I don't want to over drill decision making process and innovation and process, but at the same time, it would be really remitted, me not to talk about it, because you and I have talked about this a lot. When your team have transparency about how decisions are made, solutions are chosen, about how you're collecting information, about how you're inviting participation. So not just experiencing invitation, participation, invitation, but actually seeing how everyone's been engaged and then how you've processed that information, and how you've got to where you are, you end up in a different place, right? You end up in a much healthier place. And and it gives people, I think, a lot more security, right? So I don't know that it increases psychological safety, because I don't, I don't think that makes logical sense, but I do believe it increases motivation. If psychological safety is there, does that make Does that make sense? It absolutely

does make sense. And I think that's really helpful and and that point about the separation of action, away from just appearing as a black box, to really understanding that process can give people some comfort over this, and that's a really powerful thing. Yeah,

and I think, I think, you know, I have had scenarios where people have presented me solutions, and we've been working towards a place where everyone feels really confident, and they've been, they've just not been the right solutions in any way, shape or form, or even worse, they're pointing out problems that I don't even agree are problems. Now, I'd like to say I don't disagree with people always, but occasionally I disagree with all the team, right? And as a leader, that's my duty, my obligation. And there's two things that I need to do in order to have that permission from them to disagree and effectively override the rest of the team. Right? One is I need to be able to articulate my job as a leader or manager really well. And James, you and I talk about this all the time. Do my team understand what my job is and how my job is, ultimately, to own the decisions made in that team. And two, do we have an agreement, and I guess this, this is in setting the scene a little bit as a whole team working practice. Do my team and I all agree and accept the way decisions are made in our in our team, and do they have transparency on how that happens? I. And I feel like when you again, going back to your question at the beginning, is everyone comfortable? No one's going to be happy about that. No one, in my experience, is happy when a leader overrules their entire team. But it shouldn't happen very often, because if your team's good, it'll be a rare thing, and they don't need to be happy about it. They need to accept it and be comfortable about it. You know, I go back to things like I always think about governing by consent and regulation by consent, and policing by consent. And in some senses, I feel like that about leadership, right? Your team have to consent to you being their leader for it to be effective. And one of the ways that you can do that is by being transparent with them, then I think you're in a place where, even if you've got psychological safety and you've got consent, then you're in a really healthy place. Probably, yeah,

that's that's helpful. I've got two little bits popped into my mind while while you were chatting, that I was just going to reflect back on briefly. One is, I'd go a little bit further and build on one of the things that you said, and I'd say, you know, if you're a leader and you're always the one with the right answers, I think you've probably surrounded yourself with the wrong people. Maybe that's a bit harsh, but I don't think the leader should always be the one that comes up with right answers. You won't achieve the best for yourself and your team and your organization if you always know the right right solution, I sort of challenge that in terms of,

can I get one further? Okay, go for it. Well, if you subscribe to the world, that view that you and I have and our worldview doesn't perfectly overlap, but it does. In some places, there isn't a right answer right so the fact that you as a leader, think there's a right answer, there's a best fit answer for now, and quite often, leaders might choose that over their team because they know something the team doesn't, right? Yeah, so it's quite common that leaders might know something about where a strategy is going, where a team might not be at the stage where it's they're allowed to share that yet for whatever reason, but, but then you start getting into the trust piece, right, which we know sits really closely with psychological safety. So I just wanted to throw that out. I don't if you think there's a right answer to everything, you're probably in the wrong job and you shouldn't be doing leadership, because I just don't think there is. And I think it's a funny thing, right? And the joy of your team creating choice for you in your solutions, even if you end up going with one you had originally. Occasionally, it's still a beautiful thing when the people around you can give you really good alternative options.

Yeah, absolutely. The next little point I was going to bring in is something that I'm quite passionate about as well, when it comes to sort of responding productively, even if you don't go with the suggestions that people make, I think it's possible to adopt a bit of a coaching approach in this situation, and not only sort of rely on the process of decision making, or whatever it happens to be, rely on those processes to help people understand the rationale behind things, but if we adopt a little bit more of this coaching process, where we listen, we inquire, we help people grow and develop, we get out of their way where possible. I think all of those things, those sort of coaching behaviors, can contribute well to responding productively and demonstrating that we value for risk taking of people around us and going back on that in such a way that it doesn't inhibit them or damage them or lead them to do less of it in the future, we can, we can be rewarding and help them turn that contribution of something in a risk taking environment into a positive outcome for them through their learning and the attention that we give them, even if we don't end up implementing what they suggest and things like that. Yeah, that I think that's, I think those are wise

words, Wise. I've not been called wise for a while. I call you wise all the time, James. I love it. Okay, so let's start to move on a little bit. So that's really, I guess, the core bit of our research round up. So we've talked to you a little bit about what tech safety is. We've done some definitions, we've talked about the quadrant, the benefits of it, we've talked about some preconditions, a little bit about how we measure it, and then we've talked about these three core things that leaders should try and do in setting the stage for it and inviting participation for people in the team, and then responding productively. Where we're going to go on and do now is just do a little bit of a look with our list of a week at some questions that leaders can ask themselves some things that leaders can reflect on to get a bit of a sense of how they've done activating this. So I'm just going to going to share a couple questions and see what we've got here. So some questions you can ask yourself for as follows, if we think about that, setting the stage, stage of creating psychological safety, if we talk about framing the work well, you might ask yourself, have I spoken of failures in the right way, given the nature of the work that we do, right? So have I demonstrated that failures are, you know, to be celebrated and rewarded because we work in a type of industry where that's okay? Or have I talked about failures in an appropriate way if we are really a high risk organization? So that's about. We can ask, if we talk about the emphasis on purpose, you know, emphasizing purpose setting a stage, you can ask yourself, have I articulated clearly why our work matters, why it makes a difference for whom? And again, the purpose of that question is to say this stuff matters, right? So it's worth taking an interpersonal risk, because we we benefit from getting the outcome right for this sense of protest. So let's jump on. If we look at then that invitation, invite to participation stage, if we think about the situational humility piece that that demonstrating that we're not right all the time and that it's okay for others to contribute, because we know we are fallible to some extent, we can ask ourselves, as leaders, have I made sure that people know that I don't think I have all the answers, assuming you don't, and if you think you do, probably change role. Next question we could ask ourselves is, Have I emphasized that we can always learn more? All of us can always learn more, and that we need to be and remain humble and curious to some extent, because that's where our best learning takes place. If we think about proactive inquiry. As a leader, you can ask yourself, How often do I ask good questions rather than rhetorical ones? Now, how much of a time are we asking questions because we want to know the answers, not because we're leading somewhere, or because we're trying to create a way to shoehorn in our own answer and solution to something? If you think about systems and structures, we can ask, have I created structures to systematically elicit ideas and concerns? Have I have I brought in meeting processes? Have I brought in ways of working? Have I brought in structures around how we do things that make it easy for people to contribute their ideas, to raise concerns? Have I broken down those bureaucratic barriers and ways of working, barriers to prevent then, in this last of this cryptic here, when we're talking about responding productively, if we're talking about expressing appreciation, though, you can ask yourself, have I listened thoughtfully, signaling that what I am hearing matters? So if I fed back to people and then demonstrated through my attention and my response that I care and value and that what people are saying really matters. Have I done that? If I have and I'm contributing to the safe environment that we aspire to, if I'm not, maybe I could do better. Last couple interview, again, still in this section here, if we're looking at my contribution to destigmatizing failure as a leader, I can ask myself, when someone comes to me with bad news, how do I make sure it's a positive experience for them? And again, that can be going back to some of that coaching, and it can be just reflecting on on how we work. And then lastly, this is a really hard one, this piece around sanctioning clear violations when it comes to responding productively. So a couple of questions you can ask yourself here. One, have I clarified boundaries? Boundaries are always a challenge, right? Have I clarified boundaries? Do people know what constitutes a blame worthy act in our organization, or is it all just kind of blurred and people don't really know? Have you created that clarity? Now ask yourself that question, and then reflect on it seriously, because we don't always do that. And then last question from this list of week is, do I respond to clear violations in an appropriately tough manner so as to influence future behavior, or do I just put my head in my sand and pretend it didn't happen? Because that's a bit easier at the moment, right? So we can ask ourselves these questions. So what was that list of a week? It wasn't numbered. Hopefully you managed to keep keep side of it. But they're all really good questions to to bear in mind and reflect on as a leader when you're thinking about psychological safety in your team and your contribution to it through the things that always contribute to sort of ways of working and culture shaping, like our you know, our leadership attention and our behaviors and things with role model and so on. So hopefully that's helpful. As we start to wrap up, we always like to share a couple stories from for real world, you know, either from organizations we've worked with or teams that we've been in. So Jane, have you got any tales from from your world, tells from the keyboard that you want to share about safety?

is it a tough it's an experience that I would, I would, I would like to share my learning from when I was in my first three or four years of my career.

because I wasn't worried about, well, I don't know why, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna hypothesize, because I wasn't worried about mortgages and my pension and my network, not because I worry about them consciously now, but because they just didn't even occur to me, and because I was a little bit self righteous. And I do think there is something about, I don't think it's about I don't think it's about age, but I do think it's about when you're early in a career. And I think this is probably still true to some extent of people who transition when they come into early there is a there is a level of, and I'm going to call it naivety, and I'm going to use it about myself, but there is a level of of morality and naive, naivety that my experience. Is, and I think, I think I speak up pretty well, right? But I would say there are, there are times when I've chosen not to, particularly when it's not affected someone else, when it's just been like affected me, or I've picked my people call it picking your battles. People call it being tactical, all of those things. But quite often it's been under those guise of those things. Now, when I was when I was in my first three or four, I couldn't shut up with speaking up when things were wrong. And it makes me when I manage people and lead people look for people like that, or people who are at that stage in their life because they are more and and to encourage it. Because if you encourage that person, then others see that you encourage that person, and if you shut that person down, anyone who has previously not had a preference for doing it certainly isn't going to do it, because if Jane, the loud mouth gets shut down, then then how am I who don't have the confidence to do that and do have things to worry about going to get shut down? And also I, and I guess so for mine, it was calling out something that I was unhappy about in front of my team, and I would wouldn't have chosen to do it that way, but it was, it was a situation where we had limited amount of time, someone else had made a mistake in another team, and it was about to mess around with a number of my team who were having a really tough time and going through A major change project, project that was affecting their jobs. And, you know, I've said this before,

I have never regretted that day. In fact, it's one of the few moments of my life that I am truly hand on heart, confident I did the right thing and I did it the right way. And there's not many of them. So I guess my lesson or learning from the keyboard is whatever you're worried about. Yes, those are absolutely sensible things to be worried about. But the power of feeling proud of doing something and challenging and then seeing it being taken on and changed, and it doesn't always happen like that, but, but if you you know, is a really pretty amazing thing, and it's, it's shaped me. So I guess that's my my lesson is that, you know, if you do feel like that, do it, and if you're a leader, and you've got people who do seem to speak up, don't shut them down, maybe suggest they don't do it every single meeting, and find ways to do it. That's, that's productive for everybody else, but yeah, encourage you,

yeah, that's a powerful story. I'm going to share maybe a story from the other side, and it's, you know, back from the time that I used to work with a range of different teams looking at things like performance and engagement and and I'm not going to go into details in any way, but, but I've worked with a team that's got itself into a situation through leadership behaviors where fatim was increasingly un psychologically safe and sort of moving in that direction. And what was fascinating for me to watch with this team was a sort of acceleration or spiral that happened as this happened. So, you know, there's a change of leadership, and things change a little bit. They became a little bit more regimented. There was very much more of a right way to do it. It should be my way. I have the answers. This is a structure. It became much more in that space, and then sort of reduced bits of the autonomy and ability to speak up and contribute voice and all those types of things and and watching the impact of that was interesting, because as people in the team started to feel that change in what was acceptable in those behaviors, they they withdrew. So they tried less and less to challenge. They became less and less creative. It became less and less innovative. And here's the road right. So as as they felt less able to do these things and did less of it, the leaders involved felt that they needed to become even more sort of directive and imposing in this space. And again, that sort of circled back to individuals, until we got to the stage where it was almost a almost a work to rule type of thing, right? You know, I will only really do explicitly what you've told me, and no more and no less, because I'm unable to take any of these risks. And when you get into this, this sort of cycle downwards, it, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy in which nobody ends up being fulfilled in their roles. And it's really quite a hard place to be so trying to break down from there and change and claw your way back up. Once you're on that downward spiral, it's really, really hard, and it takes personal change and personal reflection as a leader and an ability to open up and to face into some of these challenges. So I guess I just wanted to reflect there on the fact that this is a sort of a dynamic situation that can act upon itself. So that's it for me. I guess that's kind of my kind of my reflection. You know, it's possible to get out of those places, but, but it can be hard. So, you know, leaders really do have a role to play and staying aware of all that kind of stuff. Okay, I think that's probably it for today. James, there anything else you wanted to share and jump in on?

Well, I'm gonna, I'll do my, my final. Or maybe you'll do your final thought and we can wrap up. And I guess my final thought would be my favorite phrase in all of this, as you know, and you have heard many a time James is situational humility. It's lovely, right? It's that catchy little number in it. And I love it because I think, I think when I've seen it done well, it's epic. So when leaders are able, in every situation to demonstrate they don't know everything in a quick sentence or a or a self deprecating remark, not not like really beat themselves up, but just a little self deprecating remark or a little acknowledgement of who the expert in the room is that's not them or in something the room, just you get it instantly. Sorry, I'm stacking my fingers because fingers because it's like, it's just a thing. I've seen the whole rooms transformed by because there was most senior person in the room has walked in and just thrown off that shroud of expertise instantly. And so, yeah, situational humility. That's my that's my final thought. Brilliant.

And that looks so well. Back to one of the points we talked about earlier, which was around certainty. Right? Certainty, such a funny thing. It's great to be confident, but certainty can be, can be a really, really difficult, difficult thing to have as a leader in some ways, in some instances as well. So lovely. The bit that I was going to jump in on is something that I'm really passionate about, which links to some of the coaching stuff that we've spoken about. So we've spoken about, which is this ability to proactively inquire. You know, I'm such a believer in the power of conversation, and if we can go into conversations with people as a leader, ask some questions and just listen. You know, we can learn so much through opening that door into a conversation, by giving people space, and by just listening, you know, you ask a question, you never know what's going to come out. And if we approach those moments of conversation with that real desire to to hear what people say, as opposed to just wait to speak ourselves, then we can get so much out of those moments. And you know what? It doesn't even really need to be about work, right? We can ask them about themselves. We can ask them about what they think about things, and we can ask them about work. But in each one of those interactions where we really going in to conversations with people with an intention of of listening and valuing what they contribute, we can draw out some, some really, really brilliant things. So ask more questions. Be more curious. I think that's my my final thought, I knew. I knew there was something good about being nosy.

Yeah, that's right, ask those questions. Great. Okay, well, that is it for today. I think we've really enjoyed doing that. I certainly have. It's been a while since we've had one of these conversations. Just before we go shout out. You can learn more about us at our website, www, dot, World of work.io. We've got a load of great stuff up there on various things that we're delivering, leadership development programs, workshops, seminars, coaching, all that great stuff. And you can check out the rest of our podcast there as well. So Jen,

yeah, and if you go to our website and search psychological safety, you will find a little bit of information about the work that I've been doing recently, and a little bit more about my understanding of it, and also, if you just want to read a bit more about it, just a reminder of the website that we were talking about, where the source is. The book's called the Phyllis organization by Amy Edmondson, and the website is, Phyllis organization.com,