#112: Psychological Safety in the Age of AI

Speaker A: Welcome to stepsero. Modern work is a lot. Let's take it one conversation at a time. My guest today is Mehmet Baha, uh, global trainer and speaker and the author of Creating Psychological Safety at Work. In this episode we talk about what psychological safety really means, beyond the cliches, why leaders still push back on it, and how they can use it as a foundation for navigating AI adoption without losing what makes us human. Let's get into it Baja, huh? Welcome to the stepsero podcast and thank you so much for making the time.

Speaker B: It's my pleasure, Matia. Thanks for the invitation.

Speaker A: I'd like to focus the next 15 minutes or so on a couple of topics that I know are very dear to you. You consult on them, you speak a lot about both of them, and that is psychological safety and A.I. fluency, or A.I. uh, adoption, essentially. I would like to bridge psychological safety with the current state of AI and the future of work. And let's see if we manage in such a short time. If that's okay with you. I'd love to start by clarifying a few things about psychological safety. I have read your book, which is called Creating Psychological Safety at Work. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the topic. And I started with the assumption, just like most people, I think, oh, I know everything about psychological safety. It's a topic that I've heard many, many times. And then I realized, actually, you know what, my knowledge is quite superficial. It's quite limited. I stopped at just be nice to your colleagues, let them speak up. But I know that there is a lot more to it. So should we start with the definition of psychological safety?

Speaker B: Yeah. First of all, thanks for taking the time to read the book. It means, uh, a lot to me. So psychological safety, the definition, it's based on the researcher, A. Mattinson, the leading academic on the topic. Psychological safety is a work environment where employees feel safe to express their questions, concerns, ideas and mistakes. It's a key aspect of high performing teams and organizations and it's the responsibility of leaders. Leaders actually play an important role in creating psychological safety. At the same time, it's, uh, the responsibility of each and every employee to foster psychological safety at work.

Speaker A: And the great thing about one of the many great things about the book, and this is actually, I believe on page two, it's in the very, very first stages of the book, you made a point to show some hard data about psychological safety you mentioned. And these are, if I'm not mistaken, Gallup numbers you mentioned reduction in turnover, reduction in safety incidents, increasing productivity. So the roi, so to speak, is proven. Is there, the data is there. Do you still see companies and leaders in, in this day and age somehow doubting the importance of psychological safety or in any way pushing back, saying, no, Baja, thank you, we don't need any training about it?

Speaker B: Yeah. So actually you're right. It's on page two. I have the book with me. And let's start with the data. So when employees feel that their opinions count at work, actually employees feel safe to express their opinions and their opinions count, meaning that the opinions are valid. It's basically a workplace on psychological safety. And we see the following benefits. 27% reduction in employee turnover, 40% reduction in safety incidents, 12% increase in employee productivity. So think about a large organization with thousands of employees. These are huge benefits. And coming back to your question, actually there are still organizations or employees or professionals who still doubt, um, about psychological safety. Because for them, psychological safety seems like an abstract concept. One reason. Second reason, they don't know good practices. And third, some people, some business professionals have a different understanding about psychological safety. When they think about psychological safety, they think that it's about being nice, avoiding conflict and accepting low standards, and um, not having the courage to deal with a difficult issues. And unfortunately I see this as well. So there is still a lot of work to be done.

Speaker A: And I mean, you're absolutely right. I also believe there is, um, somehow a consideration around psychological safety that is related to softness in a way. I believe leaders may go, well, Baha, uh, we don't really need a, uh, therapy session. We need results, we need numbers. And somehow there is still this idea of psychological safety making teams softer or in a way less accountable. Is that the case?

Speaker B: What?

Speaker A: Would you answer that?

Speaker B: Yeah, actually, um, that's a perspective and it's actually not correct. Because when you look at successful organizations, successful teams that have psychological safety where they feel safe to express their questions, concerns, ideas and mistakes, There's a very famous research in 1990s, researchers are looking at two teams in a hospital, Team 1 and Team 2. In Team 1, they notice that there is not any reported mistake. They go to team two and in team two they notice that there are mistakes made. Researchers get together, they start investigating this. Their first instinct is Team 1 should be more successful because in Team 1 we cannot see any mistakes. They have some doubts and they say, okay, let's go back, dig, dig. And try to understand what's going, going on here. It turns out that in team one actually they make mistakes, but they do not feel safe to talk about mistakes. They have a low level of psychological safety and it's a very dangerous zone because they are likely to repeat the same mistakes. In team two, on the other hand, they make mistakes, they learn from the mistakes, they share their learnings. The possibility of repeating the same mistakes is much, much slower. Team two is more successful because they have psychological safety.

Speaker A: I love that you mentioned this because this is one of the parts that stood out for me in the book. And I'm somehow paraphrasing what you write in the book, but you essentially say, or you give let's say, let's call it a pro tip when it comes to psychological safety. And I'm, uh, looking at my notes and it's about a question that leaders can ask to encourage mistake reporting, which is exactly what you mentioned. And that is what is responsible for this mistake or failure instead of who is responsible for this mistake or failure. So automatically reframing that question immediately makes the team feel a lot safer, makes people feel less on the spotlight. And you also mentioned earlier in the conversation the responsibility of leadership. And here is where I want to bridge our conversation and go from psychological safety to maybe psychological safety in the modern age with everything that is happening around AI. Because the same leaders that are somehow tasked with promoting psychological safety at work are also the same leaders that are pressured or required to embrace this fast adoption around AI. And we know that AI is generating a lot of stress and anxiety right now. There is this fear of being replaced, there is this pressure to upskill very fast. Do you think that it is harder to build a psychological safe organization in this day and age because of what is happening with AI?

Speaker B: Interesting question. If it's difficult to create psychological safety in times of AI, uh, I'm not sure if it's difficult or more easy. At the same time, AI presents its own challenges as well. And, um, when we look at the future of work, I believe in a future of work which will be, which will be based on human and machine collaboration. This is the direction that we are going. And the future of work based on human machine collaboration, it will be also human centric. And in this future of work, we need three principles to foster psychological safety. Make it safe to do experiments, make it safe to show curiosity, and make it safe to show what makes us humane. So make it safe to experiment. We can start with low risk, small experiments. And in these small experiments we need to define the range of risks. They need to be calculated risks, upper and lower bounds, or, uh, risks. And then as leaders we need to make it safe to do experiments and also make it safe to share the band and the ACD from the experiments so that we can learn from this. One example is Google. Google has a tool called Dog Fooding. This is basically a tool, internal tool. Before launching a new product, employees can share their, uh, ideas, questions, concerns about the tool. And one of the reasons why this is successful is that Google makes it safe for employees to express their questions, concerns and ideas about their new products. They use this tool to make it safe. The second one is make it safe to show curiosity. To show curiosity in the case of AI means make it safe to critically evaluate AI's work. AI can have hallucinations, AI can have errors. So we need to show our curiosity, critically evaluate its work, work with a diverse and inclusive group of employees to check AI's work and in the end use AI not to replace us, but to collaborate with us to augment the work, work. And in, in that we need to show curiosity. And the last point is to show what makes us human. AI is wonderful in pattern recognition, data, uh, administrative tasks, and humans. We as humans, we can show our creativity, human judgment, empathy, compassion. No AI algorithm can understand the human sensitivity to emotions, the social interaction. So the action point there is to show the humanity. Write handwritten thank you notes, for instance, try to have deeply personal, uh, bonding in relationship with employees. So make it safe to experiment, make it safe to show curiosity, question AI's work and make it safe to highlight what makes us human.

Speaker A: That's quite practical. Uh, do you see any, I'm curious, based on your experience with speaking with leaders and teams and companies as a whole, do you see any specific blocker or pushback or obstacle that prevents organizations from showing safety around experimentation, curiosity and humanity?

Speaker B: Yeah, there are of course many blockers. And one of the first ones that come to my mind is about senior management. Senior management. Ideally, they need to be role models in this. First understand these concepts and put them into practice, and then to invest in these for the organization through trainings, uh, programs, structures, systems, tools. And now nowadays, especially with the boom in AI, there is a lot of buzzword and sometimes companies just use these words without really understanding or really putting them into practice. So the first blocker, and one of the main ones is senior leadership, their mindset, once they're open to this, understand these concepts and um, implement them, it's easier for an organization to create this work environment where people feel safe to experiment, question, and also show what makes them human.

Speaker A: And I'm thinking of a Real case scenario. Right. There's a wide spectrum. I believe when we discuss AI, we go from ride or die. Right. Adopt or be forgotten to AI is great and it will make the future of work bright and shine and all of that. So we have somehow the doomers, but also the promoters in a way. And people don't really know what to believe these days. And this is definitely, I feel a bit of a challenge to what is happening in the modern workplace. And certainly it can drive employees to maybe be reluctant to admit sometimes that they don't really understand all of the AI tools. They have a hard time keeping up. They don't necessarily feel proficient with all the new technological advances that the company would like to promote. Do you think that in a way keeping silent around these issues can be a big performance problem for teams and organizations?

Speaker B: Yeah. So let's start with the first aspect of the question. So optimist pessimists, Some people say it will bring the end of the world. Some of them are super optimistic about it. Recently I was reading the book called Zach Krauss. He was one of the first employees of Chat ChatGPT OpenAI. And in the book he mentions about different perspectives like the very optimist ones and um, and the pessimist ones as well. I am m sort of in the middle, close to the optimist ones in the sense that I'm aware of the risks of AI, deep fakes, cyber crimes in the hands of malicious actors, it can create really big issues. And in the book it was mentioning that the possibility of an AI disaster versus nuclear or pandemic, according to certain experts, it's as lower possibility than a big scale. Again, um, pandemic or nuclear disaster. And coming back to employees fear. The CEO Nvidia once said there are basically two types of people. Those who use AI and those who don't use AI at all. And he says that people who use AI are more likely to advance and thrive in their careers. So I believe that it's crucial for the business professionals at the moment in different varieties, from creatives to lawyers, administrators, to to learn the limitations, the possibilities of AI and to integrate that in their work. And it also is related with the equitable AI deployment. So as an organization, organizations should give equal opportunity for employees to learn these skills and integrate it in the work. Because if an organization is not investing in that, and in many cases individual employees are using AI at work, but they do not feel safe to share this. I know examples where employees are using AI but they don't say this, and it's not transparent either. So we also need to, as an organization, as a team, advocate for irresponsible AI use. Irresponsible AI use means you critically evaluate AI's work, you work with diverse, inclusive group of employees to check its quality. And you also, um, you have a critical approach about AI's work and you also clearly mention how you use AI in your work. For example, on LinkedIn, I see a lot of posts generated by AI and not many people do not even mention that AI wrote it. So it's similar in organizations as well. Let's say I'm creating a work report and I need to transparently say in this part of the work, I use AI to do the analysis and I checked it, I validated and et cetera. So I think two extremes are not good. In a nutshell, either we are going to hell with this or going to the, you know, paradise. And second, organizations should give tools to employees to learn these limitations and possibilities. And third, for employees to use this technology in a responsible way and in a transparent manner.

Speaker A: Any last word of encouragement for a leader, a uh, people manager who tomorrow goes back to work and somehow is tasked with shielding their employees from all this chaos and ambiguity and stress and at the same time push AI tools and meet those requirements from the upper levels. Anything you can say, any step that they could take. And I know this is a big question, but maybe you have a perspective about it.

Speaker B: So it's challenging, it's difficult. The world is changing so fast. The geopolitics, uh, the technology, it's not easy. Two things. First, be transparent, give space to employees to express their concerns and be transparent about this as well. And second, give opportunities to employees, starting with ourselves, to reskill those I think who can adapt, can survive and thrive in the world. Because if we keep the same mental models of five years ago, we as a team, as an organization are not likely to uh, survive. So be transfer transparent and at the same time see this as an opportunity to uh, reinvent how we do our work, how we think, how we lead teams and how we do work.

Speaker A: And with this pahat, thank you so much again for making the time and I hope we can do this again at some point in the future.

Speaker B: You are welcome, Matteo. Take care and see you soon.