Welcome everyone. Today we're talking about how to create a psychologically safe environment in your organisation. The easy part is diagnosing the problem and realising we need to do something. But once we've identified a risk, what now? Welcome to this episode of the Chief Psychology Officer with Dr Amanda Potter, Chartered Psychologist and CEO of Zircon. I'm Christian Lees-Bell. Hello.
Hi, Christian. Thank you so much for hosting. This is very much a long-awaited episode because we first published our podcast on psychological safety in February 2022, so over a year ago, and it was our greatest download in terms of figures and also feedback from our listeners. So we very much realized that clients are wanting to hear more around psychological safety. So once they have their environment of psychological safety diagnosed or identified, what do they do about it?
So today, the episode is very much about how can we improve psychological safety of teams and organizations?
Yeah, and I remember listening to that episode, and it was fantastic. I really enjoyed it myself. But before we discuss the practical, so what and what to do around improving psychological safety, can you remind us all, Amanda, what psychological safety is?
So I think we should maybe go to the Amy Edmondson 1999 quote, which which is very much about psychological safety is when people are not afraid to take interpersonal risks. And it's the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up, for sharing ideas, for asking questions and for admitting to mistakes. So psychological safety is very much about interpersonal candor or interpersonal risk.
For me, this is a really clear concept. You know, when preparing for the podcast, I wanted to see if people's interest in psychological safety around the world has actually increased over the years. So I went on to Google Trends. I looked at LinkedIn and I was right. Over the last five years, especially, people have been Googling and talking about psychological safety more and more.
Some of the breakout searches and queries are about psychological safety at work, team building and agile teams, as well as searches for TED Talks and books on the subject. So it doesn't appear to be a fad. So I wonder, Amanda, what are the benefits of having psychological safety?
There are many. If you think about what the research is saying, It's really talking about innovation, creativity, reducing error. It talks a lot about productivity and efficiency as well. But more importantly, I think it just creates an environment or a climate where people want to share ideas. They want to speak up. They collaborate not in a consensus driven way, but in a ideation way. They want to share ideas and come to the table with new suggestions.
And all of that kind of stuff really helps with teamwork. It helps with productivity and ultimately it helps with retention of hopefully the right people in the organisation.
Are there any stats for this?
There are. Accenture did some research and they found that high psychological safety leads to a reduction in turnover of 27%, increased engagement up to 76%, 50% higher levels of productivity, 74% less stress and 29% higher satisfaction. So pretty impressive stats actually.
And it looks like the benefits of both the less tangible ones, such as life satisfaction, but that high psychological safety, I guess it also translates into tangible things, more objective measures like financial turnover and productivity.
Crazy, actually, what a significant impact it has on things like financial turnover and productivity.
What do you think are the most critical elements of psychological safety?
Well, we found 10 elements of psychological safety from our research, which many of the listeners know already from our previous episodes and the fact that we keep referring back to psychological safety. But the three that are foundational from our research are purpose. So teams that feel safe need to have clarity, need to have purpose, need to understand why they exist.
The second is trust, that they believe that they can trust their colleagues and that they are trustworthy and will deliver on promises and that they're with good intention. And the third is connection. Do they know their colleagues interpersonally and individually, both inside and outside of work do they have real conversations or do they just have professional work-based conversations
going off track for a moment i was thinking about high performing or high potential and psychological safety and the links there is it the case then that high performing leaders always create psychological safe environments amanda
i wish that was the case and you would think so wouldn't you you would think that high performing or high potential leaders would be by essence great at creating psychologically safe environments but not always because if you think about leaders who are often highly successful. They're often incredibly decisive. They're very competitive.
They may communicate really well with impact, but there may be elements around their very action-oriented, future-focused, visionary, sometimes demanding and single-minded approach that could undermine psychological safety where people don't feel like they can speak up.
That's really interesting. I wonder, have you got any example of that?
It makes me think about a CEO that I've been working with recently. He's all of those things. He's action-oriented. He's decisive, future-focused, visionary, demanding, single-minded. And the impact of that is that the leadership team pick their battles. And even when they know he's wrong, they are unlikely to challenge him, which frustrates him.
He's actually said, I know that I'm coming in with a very single-minded view to something, and I'm not the expert, and I employ experts to challenge me. Yet I can see them wavering, and I can see them holding back. Thank you. core values not just psychological safety but true safety and so whilst it's great that he's a decisive competitive powerful leader he also needs to make sure he gives people their voices that he really makes sure that he asks enough questions to get them to open up
is it the case then that he himself is resistant to higher psychological safety
do you know what no he's brilliant man and he cognitively gets the concept of psychological safety and in fact when they hire me as a consultant and our organization as a consultant I had to send him white papers he researched us he interviewed previous clients I even had to send him unpublished podcasts on topics that he was asking me about because I needed evidence to show him things and reasons why I was taking certain methodologies and approaches with his organization so he's incredibly
diligent and cares enormously really really cares but actually his true combination of strengths coming together signifies and signals to the business a way of operating and a way of conducting itself, which undermines psychological safety. And so his intention is not to undermine it. His intention is to drive high psychological safety, but actually he creates a sense of hierarchy.
And people really respect that hierarchy and they respect the status of each of the more senior people in the team and therefore defer to that status and to that leadership team.
I guess with somebody like that, who's so dynamic and with that dynamism, it's so prominent amongst the team and so noticeable, it could potentially prevent maybe some of the junior members of staff, the colleagues to speak up. And I think it's really important in our research in psychological safety that junior people have a voice and can challenge so they're not deferring to leadership and they can listen up. So yeah, that's a really fascinating point there that you made.
It's so consistent with the messaging of Martin Bromley in the podcast we recorded a few weeks ago, because Martin was very much talking about the importance of listening up particularly in health care and he was talking about the just culture you know justice culture and actually the things that undermine it which could be fear and it could be blame what's so interesting is i don't think people are afraid of the ceo that we're both talking about today but they're more junior employees and
leaders want to please and impress this ceo so i don't think they're afraid of him but i do think that they so desperately want to do the right thing and want to impress him and his business partner and the rest of the leadership team that they are therefore reticent to speak up therefore the ceo and the c-suite leaders of that organization need to ask more questions they need to remain as curious and open as possible all the time i was at the salvador dali exhibition yesterday on brick lane
which was utterly brilliant by the way and there was a fantastic quote in there And I'm praying that I took note of it. And it said, Darlie's gaze was restless, curious and visionary. And that for me was really important. I thought that really describes a CEO that will create psychological safety. One that's restless because they're always driving for success. Curious because they're asking questions. Yet visionary because they create that clarity and purpose.
It really hit me actually when I went to the exhibition yesterday, which was very good.
So we talked about psychological safety in episode two. But what is the real purpose of this episode?
The real purpose is that a number of clients who are focusing on psychological safety are coming to us because they're using the Be Talent psychological safety questionnaire to understand and identify their psychological safety strengths and risks, which is great because the tool is a great summary for individuals, teams and organizations. And so they're in this great position of identifying the risks and the strengths through the product. But what do they do with it?
How do they take that information forward in order to create a very psychologically safe environment? And how can they measure the tangible difference pre and post the work that they do with us?
We do these psychological safety audits for clients, and I've been involved in them myself. Can you give me any examples of clients who demonstrate examples of high and low psychological safety?
I was thinking about this question because I know we were talking about whether I could. And actually, I think rather than talking about clients, I was going to refer to a few public notable stories that have been in the media. The first example was Anglo American, who are a previous client of ours. And they're a mining company, of course. And they had a new female CEO. She was the first female CEO of Anglo American.
And she was someone who created assemblies and insisted on hearing every miner's opinion of how things were going and how they could be safer. And this listening up, which is what we're talking about now, resulted in a drop of fatalities and increased operating profits, even though they had slightly lower revenue She even shut down the most dangerous mine as a result of those assemblies and as a result of listening.
It just shows as well as creating a higher level of safety, dropping fatalities, then there was also a bottom line benefit as well. What about the low safety example?
I think you pointed out to me, Christian, was the Boeing 737. They had a huge number of catastrophes, 2018 to 2019, where 346 people died. And it resulted in the longest grounding of an airline in the US.
And they suspended the production of the aircraft indefinitely which of course impacted their reputation massively and this was caused by their automated flight control system which employees had serious concerns about but they didn't want to speak up because they're afraid of losing their jobs so if the more senior people had been listening and observing the behavior of these people who are being more reticent in sharing the risks they might have spotted that something was wrong so it is about
speaking up but it's also about listening up too
and i guess for them to create an opportunity in an environment where people can have their voice heard and then share their concerns then there needs to be create some space and opportunity for that and sometimes to pause I guess as well not just to carry on driving forward.
Pause is so important you're so right.
So how do you change the level of psychological safety in a team?
There are four broad steps so the first one is awareness which is actually quite simple now that we have built the model created the tools which is the questionnaire and the cards it It's quite simple, actually, to identify and become aware of the level of psychological safety in the organization. But whilst doing that, always remembering that the intention is usually very good from individuals and from leaders, and they want to create high psychological safety.
But very often the behaviors that they demonstrate, the interactions that they make can have quite negative consequences on psychological safety.
And what about the second,
Amanda? The second is recognition. so once you're aware you need to then recognize as individuals so you and i christian we need to recognize the impact that we have on our team as senior members of zircon and be talent so how do our individual behaviors impact the level of psychological safety in the team whether our intentions are good or bad and what are the behaviors that we need to continue doing and some of the behaviors we need to stop doing
and the third
the third then is contracting so as a team you and i would need to agree what needs to change we would give each other feedback we would look at the results of the questionnaire and we would recognize and identify some of the behaviors that were working and not working and what needs to change between us and finally just to preempt you asking me the next one is to agree the action so what are we going to do about it and some of the actions we have for example if the risk was around personal
connection so christian if you were all work or being professional and not focusing on the personal stuff some of the actions that you could put into your agenda is that the beginning of every meeting that you have with one of our team, you have a five minute catch up with no agenda. That would be a great one. Or you would have a series of questions that you could give yourself that you ask people just to warm up the conversation, just to get more familiar with people all the time.
So you could give yourself a few micro actions just to create that sense of personal connection with some of our team. If indeed that was you.
Yeah, it does sound as though it could be. I love that. I love the way that you've structured that in a really simple and quite intuitive way as well. I'm wondering, you know, what practices then do you put into place to help clients?
So we're working with a major global luxury brand at the moment. They're rolling out psychological safety across the organization. And what we're trying to do with them is build a suite of actions through a playbook that they can take. So no matter what the psychological safety of one of their teams around the world, wherever it's high and low, they can turn to this playbook and they can tackle it in four ways. They can tackle it in terms of a macro lens.
So do the policies and the processes, the standards of communication, the leadership models, the values, do they all drive an environment of psychological safety? So that's the first one, macro. The second one is micro. Do they have good team meeting etiquette, for example? How do the communications start? How do they introduce new ideas? So they're the micro things that could change.
They seem really straightforward. What about example resource? Yeah,
so example resources is the third one, actually. So for that client, what we're doing is we're pulling together podcasts, white papers, all sorts of research that help people to increase the level of psychological safety in organizations, books, everything. So the third part of that playbook is resources. And the fourth is much more targeted around the results of the questionnaire.
So for each of the 10 scales of the psychological safety questionnaire, we have identified three types of resources. targeted development actions, if you like, or suggestions for teams and individuals to improve their level of psychological safety. And they're very practical exercises or activities rather than resources or things to read
and do. How is behaviour going to actually change? And I think the way that you've outlined this and our approach to the so what I think is going to be incredibly effective in helping organisations to actually put this into practice and to give them a real, as you say, a playbook and a guide going forward. I think it's amazing.
And the plan is that we'll make this playbook readily accessible to our clients who are using psychological safety. It's partway through development at the moment. And we've written it once. It's going through its multiple version process, as we always do with everything.
everything but i'd love to just give you one of the examples because it really relates back to the conversation we're having earlier christian which is about speaking up if one of your team is not speaking up and if you are scoring low on the speak up scale of the psychological safety questionnaire we are recommending a number of recommendations the first one is very simple you could encourage the quieter members of the team to speak up by asking them direct questions and bring them into the
conversation the second one could be that when you're asking the whole team for their insight and their input you start with the junior or more inexperienced people first and you build up to the people with the greatest longevity and experience and the third one could be that you could be prepared to and gently openly disagree and challenge colleagues both senior and more junior when you don't agree with them and you encourage other people to also disagree and to challenge respectfully but also
providing evidence of why you disagree and what could be different so you're always encouraging everybody to have an opinion. And you role model that by doing that yourself gently, disagreeing with people rather than wanting to always just be positive or approving different ideas.
So I guess it takes some time, but if that's role modeled and it's consistent, then I can imagine just how powerful that is. What other factors influence psychological safety then?
It seems from my research, there's a whole load of things that influence psychological safety. And one of the biggest ones we're noticing is the resilience levels of lead How resilient leaders are feeling has a massive impact on their fight or flight response, their feelings of vigilance. Are they scanning the environment? Are they at hyper arousal? Or are they so anxious that they're in that freeze hypo arousal stage?
So resilience for me and mental well-being, mental health has the greatest impact of psychological safety.
And I love a bit of neuroscience like yourself, Amanda. Can you tell us a bit more about this? Oxytocin comes to my mind when I think about things like trust and psychological safety. Is that right?
It is completely right. So oxytocin is produced through the sense of belonging, being trusted, giving trust and laughter, and it can suppress the amygdala, which is the emotion center and limit that fight or flight response and limit the production of cortisol and the signaling of adrenaline. So from a neuroscience perspective, we know that our brain is looking for threats and looking for for rewards in our environment and perceiving a threat will result in us playing it safe.
So not challenging the status quo, not speaking up in meetings and not even listening up as well. So not being prepared to listen to each other. The interesting fact there is that if we don't feel safe as individuals, we'll both stop speaking up and listening up. And we want to suppress the role of cortisol and adrenaline because we want to suppress that vigilance fight or flight response.
And we We want to create a greater sense of safety so that we're more prepared to challenge, more prepared to speak up, question. And in the words of Dali, be restless, curious, and visionary.
And I guess also to improve and to support wellbeing as well in the organisation, just, you know, you're creating, I suppose, happiness throughout the team as well, if you're boosting these neurotransmitter levels and reducing cortisol, I guess, too.
We recorded a podcast, didn't we, on happiness? It's so true, Christian. There's so a link between the two and you don't want just a happy clappy team who aren't necessarily very productive clearly but there is a very good strong link between happiness resilience and psychological safety
a bad thing to be happy at work so in addition to the resilience and the general leadership style of a leader impacts psychological safety
it really can in addition to resilient leadership impacting psychological safety and the psychologically safe environment positively impacting our brain chemistry leadership style also impacts psychological safety and there was some really interesting research from McKinsey what they identified is that depending on the style of the leader it has a significant influence on the environment that impacts psychological safety what it found is that authoritative leaders can negatively impact can break
down psychological safety consultative and supportive leadership can significantly aid psychological safety but But what was interesting is I thought challenging leadership would actually be a positive, but it's not unless it is encouraged or supported by that very consultative, supportive style as well. So challenging alone is not great. You need to combine it with a bit of compassion. So challenging and compassionate works well, but challenging by itself does not.
It kind of makes sense. You know, we need to be challenged to learn and grow and to build our resilience. In my own coaching work, I've heard quite often that if people don't feel supported and listened to by their manager, may start to worry or feel doubt and not feel so safe to take, I guess, those necessary risks they need to be at their best or to thrive, be out of their comfort zone sometimes.
In my experience, also a supportive manager who includes me in the decision making process, it helps me to feel like I can, I guess, more easily tackle harder challenges and also share when things are not so good. How do we know if there is low psychological Well that's
great feedback by the way for Sarah so I hope she listens to this podcast. That was nice Christian. holding back from making suggestions or suggesting new ideas. And finally, if people are defensive and not wanting to take on board new ideas or look at a problem from a different angle. Each of those could be signs of low psychological safety because that's low listening up.
Another one is when relationships and interactions are incredibly transactional and there's no personal elements to those relationships. It's all business.
And can more psychological safety be actually bad for some people in some situations?
I don't know if I've ever seen an environment where there's too much psychological safety. Psychological safety has beneficial impacts for everyone. And I think it's important that we don't confuse the ability to speak up and to challenge one another with being unkind or aggressive. There's a responsibility for both leaders and individuals to speak up, to challenge, to question, yet in a kind and non-aggressive way.
And so I think sometimes there could be an excuse that I'm just creating a psychologically safe environment. So I'm just going to say what I think here. I think that would give the impression of having too much psychological safety, but yet it's not. It's just bad manners, I think, or bad etiquette. And they're using it as an excuse.
And I guess in some cases, when people are using that as an excuse, I suppose it could also be that there's a poor understanding of really what psychological safety is in the first place.
Yeah, that would be completely it. I'm just going to say what I think. I'm going to get my emotions off my chest. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to make sure everyone understands exactly how I feel. That is not psychological safety. Psychological safety is all about positive intention with it as well, rather than just letting everyone
have
it.
What about culture? Can we change the culture through psychological safety? Or does the culture change psychological safety?
Well, that's a conundrum, isn't it? So it works both ways. The two are intimately interconnected, but they're not the same. Because we have to make sure that we firstly understand that psychological safety is a climate because it's about how we feel and culture is very much about how things are done in an organisation. It's the unwritten rules that are deeply embedded and very procedural and therefore can take a long time to significantly change across an organisation.
So to answer your question then, a culture can massively impact and undermine psychological safety if it's very rigid, very procedural, very process-oriented where a supportive culture can help to lay the foundation for building a really positive environment of psychological safety. So culture can impact psychological safety, yet conversely, by fostering an environment of trust, cohesion, understanding, challenge, listening, can positively impact the culture over time.
But often we see that happen in pockets, is my experience, when there's a very structured, robust, and disciplined culture in an organisation, what you see is you see leaders create psychologically safe islands where they put their arms around people figuratively and create this sense of safety within that team. And so that safety doesn't necessarily transmit across the organisation. It's within these little safe islands.
So this psychological safety sounds like something that we need to keep revisiting and to not do a training on or an assessment and then just presume that people across the organization are psychologically safe and always will be.
It's completely true. And I think that's why our thinking has moved on. We've very much been in the diagnose and assess and understand stages. But really, we now need to move into the so what and the understanding of how we can work with our customers to really make that difference and make that change. And so that's all the work we're doing now around the playbook. And really being clear, just to reiterate the four things.
So what are the macro changes in that you can make in an organisation to policies, procedures, behavioural models, values? What are the micro changes you can do with your meeting etiquette, for example? Once you've done your survey, what are the very targeted changes that you can put into team meetings and so on, depending on the results?
And finally, what research and podcasts and white papers and articles can we share with individuals to help them understand and truly start to think in a psychologically safe way?
And I'm sure our listeners will have got some really good valuable takeaways from this I've really enjoyed this episode it's broadened my knowledge and passion of psychological safety and it's taken that a little bit further today so thanks very much I also wanted to thank Attila and our team for his research and hard work helping us to prepare for the podcast and a final thank you to you Amanda if you'd like to hear more about our research looking at psychological safety you can download our
white paper from the website which is www.zircon-mc.co.uk Thank
you, Christian. I hope everyone found today's episode useful. It was a bit of a build on the previous one around psychological safety and I hope there was a few little elements and tidbits in there that were helpful for you to be talking about with your clients and your internal customers. So thank you everyone for listening and I hope you have a wonderful and successful day.