S10: E3 Why should leaders care if they have a psychologically safe workplace?

Hi there folks and welcome back to another

edition of giant talk as you know i am your host roger from there be giants and uh as is often the case i love to speak to people that really interest me and do interesting work uh yeah there's always a connection with okrs uh and i'm really pleased is that we're ticking both those boxes today because i have my lovely colleague joe with us hi there joe hey raj hello and i'm happy to tick those boxes as well excellent excellent excellent now

we thought we'd do this because psychological safety is something that we talked about a fair bit on the podcast but maybe not so much maybe perhaps more from the theoretical point of view and you can bring some sort of practical hands-on experience from working with clients on this. So I thought, you know, that always, you know, kind of trumps what it says in the, you know, in the theory books.

So, but before we launch into that, I'm aware that there's potentially some of our listeners that might not actually know what psychological safety is or perhaps think it's something that it's not. So can we kind of kick off by just exploring a little bit about that? Oh, and also, sorry, I nearly forgot. Please do tell people what you do for us as well. We're just assuming that everyone knows every giant. Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, like Raj said, I'm Jo. and I've been with Derby Giants now coming up to three years this year primarily my role now is looking after our OCAL coach academy so I run it make sure that everyone gets what they need from the academy and we're making sure it's relevant but also do lots of consulting as well within sort of projects in Derby Giants though have come across you know quite interesting I guess experience in relation to psychological safety and as well my background

you know being in in learning and development training i've come across it a lot in terms of how it impacts people.

Training learning all sorts of things so yeah bringing lots of things to the table today roge, excellent excellent so yeah look why don't you tell us a little bit more about psychological safety yeah so i think first of all like you said there is a bit of a misconception sometimes when we introduce psychological safety with clients or work with clients and such train it that actually psychological safety is this thing where everyone's just really nice to each other

everyone just kind of like there's that kind of codliness i guess within within a team soft and fluffy yeah yeah yeah and it's and it's not um i mean of course there's an element you know well there is an element of respect and and that kind of side of thing but really what psychological safety is is about you know timothy r clark from the leader factor kind of sums it up and explains it in a really nice way, that it's basically a condition where human beings feel included.

Yeah safe to learn yeah safe to contribute and safe to challenge the status quo all without fear of being embarrassed or marginalized or kind of punished in some way so it's being able to challenge the status quo and you know kind of references this um thought of increasing intellectual friction so we're getting that intellectual friction amongst.

Team members but without having that social friction so you know me and you roger we could have an intellectual conversation we could disagree we could you could bring something to the table and i could really disagree with that idea or that thing that you've brought to the table but it doesn't mean that me and you have no no exactly you know we could still go for a gin after or whatever we want to do that's that's fine but it's about making sure

that we are if we are disagreeing with an idea and we're seeing things that come up that we feel safe that we can challenge that and that's where we get that true creativity innovation and without it you're never are going to really challenge the status quo and you know i guess people are just going to be too too nervous perhaps about making that contribution either because they don't feel like they'll be listened to or maybe they've seen others try in the past and

they've been slapped down there's a whole host of reasons why they might be reluctant to so many things and i think as well with psychological safety you know those people feeling safe enough to do that so safe to contribute or challenger safety it can take quite a while for teams to build that so build that what Timothy Alcott refers to as challenger safety and. Because it it takes building up those habits of okay

we've we've challenged someone we challenge an idea nothing bad happened to me or nothing bad happened to that other person that you know did it but it can take a long time to build but it can go in an instant so as soon as somebody then feels reminded of a time or a place where they didn't feel safe that's it you've kind of gone straight back to well i'm not doing that again and it can be quite a scary thought for some people.

Essentially it's about building trust isn't it in that respect and i suppose one of the things which leaders and managers have to tackle is when they get new members of the team joining you know whilst there may be a high level of psychological safety within the team that they're joining perhaps previous scars previous experiences from elsewhere they still carry with them so they still might need to build up that trust as well so you know just because it's there

doesn't mean that it's there for everyone does it no exactly and and it and again it's about yeah that person like you just said there could be bringing up old stars could be bringing up you know their own situations or experiences that could end up also in some instance maybe rocking the team as well as the team could feel really psychologically safe but then actually somebody else coming into that team oh actually can i can i say this to that person they're going to take them away

all you know and it can it can change the whole dynamics of the team which i guess is really and you see it happen as well you see it happen in maybe going slightly off topic here but say if we're running a workshop so if you're running a workshop like a any sort of workshop or whatever.

That looks like you might be working with one team and you might be getting lots of different ideas lots of people speaking up lots of people saying things as soon as somebody else comes into to that session yeah it can really it can close things down again can't you can feel it as well you can feel when okay that that's different like you know people were challenging each other people were saying things and now you know i don't mean to say a ceo because the ceo is the person that always

you know disrupts things but say a ceo then comes into that workshop and you know everyone just falls silent you kind of yeah yeah yeah yeah okay i don't want to say the wrong thing and not in front of the boss. No, exactly. Yeah, damage my prospects. Yeah, exactly. So talking of bosses, talking of leaders, right, there are plenty of leaders, and I would say I've worked for a few of them myself over the years, who kind of really like...

Managing people through a healthy bit of fear so they are the ones who are kind of right at the minimal end of psychological safety but reckon that they still get results so okay you know all the research shows does that psychological safety really does make a difference but just just why should leaders care now why should they care about this now yeah i think it's a good good question i think it's around you know why should leaders travel one i think first of all it's a bit of a tough market

out there in terms of jobs at the minute and actually if i'm a i'm an employee and i'm looking maybe for i'm not happy in my job or i'm not um you know i'm looking elsewhere for something i'm gonna then match up what i'm doing now to maybe something else and And if that doesn't quite match up with if I'm if I'm like, I don't feel safe in this job, I feel like I've got low levels of respect or whatever in my job. And I'm not able to kind of contribute.

I'm not able to do things that could that could push people out of a job like ultimately. But also what we're trying to do is build people's autonomy and build up this, I guess, freedom where people don't feel like they're just being micromanaged. And they and they can kind of do their roles without you know being told what to do every every five seconds yeah so empowerment is what you're talking about there isn't it.

Yeah massively you know and that kind of links again to OKRs you know what we want to do is make sure that people feel as though you've got a clear end destination you've got that clear outcome that you want if you like and you're allowing other people that opportunity to say hang on a minute hey i i can contribute to that i can i can do something here yeah and you yeah you're giving that yeah that autonomy that empowerment to other people because without it all you all you all you're

going to be doing all the time as a leader is just telling everyone what to do all the time so as a leader why should i care well i want to kind of give other people the chance to do things so and again as a leader i can kind of then hopefully take things off my plate i'm not having control over absolutely everything and you're not kind of always being looked to as that person that makes every single decision you know you're providing other people the opportunity to do that yeah and i it

would be really interesting to see if there's any data out there that can that can show a correlation between organizations with high levels of psychological safety and attrition rates i mean actually this takes me back to something i read. That was published by Google a few years ago. And they've got their own internal

organizational consultancy called Rework. And when they asked high-performing teams across the business, what's the one characteristic of a team that makes it high-performing? They said psychological safety. Now, okay, Google is a very, very innovative, experimental organization. I've just said Google and my phone's just burst into life.

They're a very innovative experimental organization so you want to they they want to encourage those ideas and those those those crazy curveballs coming forward so i can imagine why psychological safety is right at the top of the agenda for them but it's just it's interesting you know in terms of how they define high performance which is a lot of ideation work and you know a lot of innovation work you know if you're serious about that what i'm hearing is it's you know you can't afford

to overlook psychological safety at all no and it and actually so baby giants we run a scan by the fearless organization that we've kind of been trained through and actually one of this it's a psi scan and there is huge correlation between actual team effectiveness it's a it's a if you have like a really high psi scan so where the the team feels safe and feels yeah safe within the team yeah there is that kind of high leading indicator

from your scan that you're going to have a very effective team because you've got a team that wants to challenge each other that has, high safety high levels of psychological safety when it comes to like true towards risk and failure.

Attitude to like asking for help that kind of stuff and if we're seeing high levels of that and also we're seeing high levels of team effectiveness whereas if you're going to see really low levels on that scan and again you're not and if we're speaking to that kind of testing learning adapting we're not getting that testing part so people aren't testing they're not learning so we're not adapting so we're not kind of iterative in our approach so interesting interesting Interesting.

I remember reading as well, I think it was one of Amy Edmondson's books, her example of how she managed to draw a line between low levels of psychological safety and huge, huge bottom line hit to an organization.

And she cited the example of Volkswagen and Dieselgate in America, because the CEO at that time, a chap called Ferdinand Piech, brilliant engineer had been there you know at the forefront of german automotive engineering for a good few decades and well worthy of that ceo role however his attitude and approach was very autocratic and often you know leveraging fear and threats and unfortunately no one really felt safe enough to turn around to him and say

when you you know when you even though you've made america the the number one target market for us.

America doesn't really consume diesels like like like europe does and consequently in order to get get under the the level of the emissions regulations particularly in california they had to create these defeat devices to to fool the emissions and and as a result and as a result of that it cost them billions of dollars in america and that was that primarily that was put down to the fact that nobody would actually stand.

Up to him and say we're not actually properly set up for you know for for trying to get into the u.s market in the way that we are you know in the models that we currently offer in the technologies that we currently have so really really interesting you know arguably i think there's other examples like nasa and so on and so forth with the shuttle disaster there's there's there's you know where people have two ones a hundred percent yeah yeah yeah you've got plenty of examples of

where people have you know not felt because possibly because of status and seniority not felt you know like a nurse didn't feel like they could challenge a physician in a perhaps an operating theater or something and something seriously has gone wrong yeah it's it's a fascinating area it's fascinating area it is and i always end up in a bit of a rabbit hole in my brain when i think about it all and then it's like oh wow we've been in this

conversation for however long having a chat about it and actually just just on that actually that on that rabbit hole kind of segue as you were talking i kind of was thinking about something, we said right at the start about this misconception as well with psychological safety deep. Yeah. And. I've ran team debrief sessions on psychological safety where we've had a conversation as a team based on survey results.

And actually, sometimes what happens is, kind of coming back to your point around why should leaders care about psychological safety? Growth. So leaders should care about psychological safety because, and I'm not just talking like business growth, I'm talking like individual growth.

So I'm thinking about an example specifically in mind where, you know, this team, again, they were a great team, you know, lots of kind of fun between them, banter, you know, all that kind of stuff, like really pride themselves on kind of being a bit of a, I guess, a chatty team and fun team.

And they've gotten to a point where actually, you know, what I was kind of calling out and seeing was they were really good at kind of bigging each other up and being like, oh, you know, you do this really well and you do this really well. And they had a lot of sort of self-reflection of what they could do better.

What I didn't see or a lot of what I felt was missing and I called it out was what they didn't do was tell each other maybe what they needed to improve on and when I called it out what the kind of leader was was saying was oh well you know we don't we don't really need to because actually what we're doing is you know no one really does anything wrong so no one really does anything wrong so we don't need to sort of speak about it we

don't need people to say because no one does anything wrong or you know that kind of conversation actually then what happened was when we were kind of then debriefing that calling it out other people in the team were like well actually i'd really like to understand where i could do better and where i could improve, yeah but because in that team they didn't they didn't quite understand what psychological safety was or like what it really you know was all about is that

they didn't want to hurt each other's feelings so they didn't want to say to you like oh roger you know i think x y don't you do this this better, they thought that might hurt someone's feelings. So it's like, well, no, actually the other person sat there going, I'd love to know what I could improve on because I'm going to grow. I want to do something differently and better, but no one's.

No one's telling me you know so if i think i'll do everything perfectly how am i going to grow how am i going to improve um yeah so i know that was a little bit of a rabbit hole a bit of a no i think that's entirely relevant joe i do think that's entirely relevant because i mean you what you're doing is you you're helping the listeners kind of get a little bit of an insight into you know the work that you've been doing with the teams actually on psychological

safety and you know helping them to get their heads around it what it is and what it isn't and and perhaps enabling them to make some breakthroughs. I mean, your point about growth for all, not just for the business, not just for the team, but also for the individuals, that goes back to Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset and yet being such an important part of organizations now. And I'm going to quote another one here.

You know, McGregor and Doshi, when they did their really important work on the different types of performance where you've got tactical and adaptive, And it's actually adaptive performance nowadays, which is what makes the difference. Everybody can kind of hit the targets and do the numbers and hit the quotas. And that's just, you know, that's baseline performance. That's what we do. It's those that can adapt, adjust, and as they go through that process, learn and continue to iterate.

Eight and it's that which makes the biggest difference in in in modern organizations and workplaces yeah which is why it complements the okr methodology so well roger well funny you should say that yes exactly exactly exactly so is there anything more that you can tell us about the work that you've done with clients on psychological say to you you've given that great example about that that team getting that insight is there is there anything else that you can share with

us any other nuggets yeah i mean so you know the work that i do is um not just kind of going in and running team debriefs in scans and actually using actual data and results to to kind of debrief psychological safety within teams and kind of start conversations although that is a that is where you see a lot of really interesting conversations to be honest and really a lot of in-depth.

Insightful reflections and conversations come up you know i can talk a little bit about that if you if you want to yeah so what we do is we go into like i said it's through you know we've gone through course and been certified in a fearless organization scan where we go in we run the scan survey it's a really simple survey it's got seven questions we split into four different domains and And what that gives us is information and data on four different kind of

domain areas linked to psychological safety. And that enables us to, one, as a consultant, you know, kind of build a bit of a hypothesis, paint a bit of a picture from these scan results. Sorts bearing in mind some of these teams we've never worked with we only know a little bit about we then kind of go back to the team share the results share a bit of this hypotheses.

Start the conversation and then what that does is you just kind of facilitate and build on that yeah and then by the end of that debrief session that team session we hold each other to you know they hold each other to account of actually what are they going to do differently and what are are they going to do with the team to ensure that actually we're building on these areas that need need support and we link it all back to business goals as well roger you know we kind of say

right at the start for us to if we want to increase psychological safety this is where we this is the reason we want to do it because we want to see an improvement in these sort of areas you know one team actually quite quite without even the link being there to begin with they were seeing a dip in creativity right innovation and then again from all the scan results, It was when we kind of came to it, actually, you could really see the link and

you could really understand actually where it was falling short. So, again, we were able to really tangibly make those links.

In terms of what we could then do as a team to improve that and to support people to get creativity and reach you know the goals that you want to see so that's one element sort of going in and running scans and surveys and team debriefs other element you know we as i'm sure some of the listeners will know we you know have our coaches so we train people in actually how to support psychological safety as well train leaders as well when we do the consulting making sure that leaders kind of

leading from the front i guess and role modeling sure sure sure yeah i i don't know what else so when you when you're training when you're doing the training on the um on the coach academy and you're introducing psychological safety do you see light bulbs suddenly switch off is this is this something which they've kind of always sensed and always knew but never really known so to speak yeah you know again you have those conversations where you and again i always I had

a wise colleague from Giants actually taught me, with psychological anxiety, we've got lots of different models, we've got lots of different things that we can draw on. One of the first things she always said to me was, one, all models are false, but some are helpful.

So one, it's like we're saying, take value from what you can from them. We're not saying this is gospel, this is exactly what it is.

So that was the first thing so it's about going right using this kind of model or using this thing and what can we take from that and going hmm i wonder if something is going on so we're not using a model or using a framework or using whatever to diagnose things but we're using it as a tool to kind of give us some grounds to go this is showing up so this behavior is showing up or this reaction is showing up yeah i wonder if something is going on for that person and you you

kind of go down this route of um exploring it rather than going that person isn't challenging so they don't have challenger safety you know and kind of going down yeah yeah so you know when we have these conversations people are going actually yeah you know in little things like how if you go into a conversation expecting the worst and not giving somebody that kind of benefit of the doubt you're entering that conversation already maybe

with your backup and i'm not gonna get the other person's back up and all these sorts of things when we talk about psychological safety and encouraging people and um supporting other people again you have all of these kind of like you said light bulb moments people go oh yeah actually if i'd have thought about that in a different way in that situation maybe i would have got a different response. As you can probably tell, Roger, I get quite passionate about this. Yeah, no, I can see.

You know, to be honest with you, Joe, I see in you what was in me about sort

of good 15 years plus ago around the principle of emotional intelligence, actually. And looking at EQ, psychological safety, together, I see that psychological safety, I don't know whether the authors, whether Tim Clark would disagree with this, But I kind of see it as almost like an evolution of some of the really important principles of emotional intelligence.

You know, if you're going to develop and encourage strong psychological safety in the team or the organization that you follow, you can't really do that if you don't have good emotional intelligence. If you can't read people, if you can't create, you know, a situation where people are going to feel safe to challenge and speak up and so on and so forth. So I think there's definitely, I'm seeing in my mind a bit of a Venn diagram

with quite a lot of overlap, I think, rightfully so. I do love a good Venn diagram. I can think of a few, actually, that would match quite well as well in terms of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see where you're going with that. So we've talked about it in a really, really positive light so far. Okay. And I don't think there's any argument that good, genuine psychological safety has so many benefits. I don't think I've yet to find anyone arguing against it.

However, have you ever found that perhaps it's misused in some way? Or have you heard of it being misused in some way? Good question. Perhaps where leaders might actually try and fake it if they're not actually being genuine. Yeah, I think, I think.

First of all i know that there's a couple of bits of research coming down about this yeah and you know and kind of reading reading about it but i think first of all i think the point is first of all leaders sometimes might not want to i don't want to say fake it but more again they don't understand it yeah they're trying to they're trying to do it in a way that maybe me then doesn't doesn't marry up and doesn't come across as authentic authentic yeah there's not that kind of

um congruence so what you know i'm kind of saying something i'm doing something and then people are kind of going well that's not that's not what i mean you know like an example from an article would have been you know asking everyone or everyone knowing that you know full well what the answer is or know full well what you're going to do but still inviting others to to kind of think about it without actually saying well I know I've got thoughts I've got ideas or whatever and

you're still inviting people because people then are going to be kind.

Of saying things or thinking things where it's like well I know that they know what they're going to do anyway so what's the point of me knowing what I'm going to do because they're just going to go off and do their own thing anyway and that's what they always do you know so I think there's kind of a I don't know if fake it is that is a strong word I think it's that people don't necessarily understand how to use it to its you know to how it's kind of intended what i

mean what are your thoughts so that the the one that i think i've seen a number of times without perhaps realizing it but i've observed it in in leaders that i've either worked alongside or even worked for at times is when they ask for feedback but actually they're just kind of paying lip service to it and you know that nothing's going to happen with it.

And what's the point and that's usually when you can hear a pin drop if if if there's a sense that that's what's going to happen that that usually means that it's not forthcoming or p or someone just says well what's the point i know i actually i can give you i can give you an example so back in my corporate days when i used to manage a big logistics and engineering operation i took took over particularly the engineering part after they'd had successive managers they'd had like three or

four managers over the space of two years and the very first question i got was well how long are you going to be here for and and i had a real uphill challenge to get them to win them over basically and get them to to trust me that i would you know be true to my word and And eventually, I managed to build, I mean, I didn't use the term at the time because I wasn't aware of the principle. But looking back, I can see how I actually managed to build a psychologically safe environment.

Because actually, the mechanism, interestingly, that I used for that was I brought in lean production management into the operation. And a lot of that focuses on root cause analysis. So where there's issues that go wrong, it's not about blaming, it's about getting to the root cause of it so that we can re-engineer the process so that it doesn't happen again. And yeah, looking back now, I can see how that was a real culture change, culture shift for them away from you're all...

Fecking useless which was basically what the what what what what the previous leaders had said to them because i remember actually one of them saying to me why should we bother we always get blamed whether it's our fault or not yeah and and through and through sort of taking that different approach and using you know all right it doesn't have to be lean but it just so happened that that's what the company was was signed up to at the time and on reflection i and see

how that started to build the psychological safety that we needed. So really, you know, the bottom line impacts of all that work was that we managed to start to win the confidence of the wider organization back because they were getting blamed for everything previously.

And we started to open up new revenue streams because our core business was in slow decline. And we knew that we needed to diversify. Otherwise, I was going to have to lay people off. So I was able to redeploy their skills, repackage the services that were offered by the division and go out there and, you know, get new business from within the organization because that's how it worked. We provided services to the organization.

So, yeah, so there was a, you know, there was a direct bottom line benefit to it as well. Oh, for one hour as well. Yeah, you know, I hadn't even thought of that. It just popped into my head. So there you go. And I'm supposed to be the one interviewing you. After you've been the coach on A-Mudge. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. So let's wrap things up then.

So what would you say to any of our listeners that were thinking, oh, crumbs, I could probably do with improving the psychological safety a bit in my team or my area. What would you what would you say to them, I'd first of all think about where they actually think the rest of the team are in relation to cycle safety so have they picked up on things where people are falling silent again you know in meetings in workshops um are we noticing that maybe certain people are dominating conversations.

Are there people that maybe I don't know see this is almost seem to be not I want to say say passive aggressive but not in a term that in the in the workplace i mean so say passive aggressive as if to say i'm going to do that project or i'm going to do that task but then just never do it or i'm going to go to that meeting and then never turn up to that meeting so i'd start to try and first of all understand where your team are at so where where are people what people display it yeah and

then from that you can start to then build on it so again using that kind of i wonder if something one is going on for that person that i could support or two two what am i doing as a leader that could diminish psychological safety you know am i am i being authentic am i being congruent in my behavior in my thoughts and so yeah i would kind of i guess again i'm going around the houses here but one do a bit of reflection think about the behaviors

that are showing up in your team the things that are coming up yeah and then do a little bit of reflection on yourself as well in terms of are you authentic and and are there areas that you can support cyclical safety are you inviting challenge are you setting clear parameters around kind of roles and responsibilities for people in your team to provide autonomy are you making an environment where people can learn that learning is encouraged again i've gone off on a tangent roger

sorry but there's so many different things but i think overall just do a bit of reflection do a bit of reflection and think about how you can support it.

Okay all right and if If anybody wanted to reach out to find out more about the work that you do and the psychological safety scan, which you mentioned, how can they do that? You can go to our website and book a call. So do you usually put the link in, Rog? Yeah, we'll put the link in the show notes, but most people know where we are. Yeah. So, yeah, just go to therebegiants.com and you'll find a multitude of ways to reach out.

Jo, thank you so much for lending me your time. I know you're super busy with our clients.

Um yeah it's always good to to have a catch-up so just want to say thank you to uh all our listeners uh it's really great that you tuned in uh there'd be no point in doing it other ways and we always um appreciate your uh your time we are going to start soon doing some uh request shows Jones so if you've got any questions about OKRs and you're perhaps wanting a bit of advice a bit of a Q&A we're playing with that idea at the moment so watch this space and

we're working out the best way for you to send in your your questions to us but yeah hopefully something new coming okay so that's all for now and I'll see you again on another giant talk very soon.