Safe Enough To Be Honest

Amy Edmondson talks she uses the term psychological safety is like taking the brakes off. Essentially it's like it's like your car analogy. You can put a fantastic fast engine in a car, which is all the tools and resources and goals and stuff like that, and point it forward. But if you'd leave the brakes on, you're not gonna go very far.

So psycholog psychological safety is like taking the brakes off. It allows for that increased increased conversation and sharing. Because one of the one of the other things that gets batted around quite a lot is that is that psychological safety has nothing to do with job security. Which on one hand on one hand is true because we cannot necessarily guarantee job security.

It's psychological safety is not about giving someone tenure, right? But in so many organizations we work with, and we've done a lot of research on this as well, we find that when there are periods of disruption, like rounds of redundancies and things like that, where where there are e where there's either one coming up or there's one that's recently happened in the past, psychological safety takes a massive hit. And when we when we talk to folks in the organization, we do qualitative research uh in there, we find that understandably it's because people are concerned to to greater or lesser degrees people are concerned that if they admit a mistake or raise a concern or point out that this project's going to hell or this project has gone over budget or something else, bring up some bad news basically.

Tell all the bosses people things they don't want to hear, that they'll be they're putting their head above the parapet, they'll be marked on some spreadsheet somewhere where someone's putting scoring in scoring employees as to who's gonna get their heads chopped in the next round or something like that. So so of course that that degree of job precarity or precariousness does uh incre uh di decreases psychological safety necessarily. It's also interestingly true that people who have people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, so people grew up poorer, comparatively poorer, or in more precarious households tend to feel less psychologically safe in the workplace because for various reasons, but in part because they sense they've got this this inbuilt sense that there is a less of a safety net should they should something go wrong at work.

Whereas people from more advantaged, privileged backgrounds tend to feel safer, tend to put themselves forward for more projects because they've they've got something to fall back on if it goes wrong. Welcome to the Secret Life of Great Leaders, a podcast by Triple Goal. We share deep transformational conversations around leadership and personal development to help you uncover the unseen facets of human growth and leadership impact. I'm your host, Michael Bunting.

So, hi, it's Michael Bunting here. Welcome to the Secret Life of Great Leaders. Today I'm really excited to have Tom Garrity with us. Tom is a psychological safety expert.

And today we're going to talk about all the myths, the misunderstandings, what it is, why it's important. If you're cynical about this subject, this is probably going to be a great podcast for you to listen to. Welcome, Tom. Thanks so much.

Yeah, it's great to be here. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And just for context, I'm in Australia. Tom's in the UK.

And Tom, so give us a bit of a history, if you don't mind, an introduction. How did you get to this? What was your journey to really make your life so central about psychological safety? So, yeah, good question.

And it's there's kind of there's almost two answers to that. So, my uh like academically and work-wise. So, my my background is um is in ecology as a as a as an ecological researcher originally. Spent a few years doing that, and then I moved into technology and managing people, managing teams, uh in the world of work, and and and became and remained really passionate about creating the conditions in which people can thrive and do their best work and enjoy our work.

Like work shouldn't suck, right? And um, and through that came across the term psychological safety and had a bit of a light bulb moment, like the actual like epiphany, like light bulb above my head moment, uh, when I realized that this was the term for the stuff that I'd been trying to do all along, but just hadn't yet had the language to describe it. And so that led to me getting really into it, evangelizing about it a bit, banging on about it to whoever would listen, and doing meetups and talks and and blogs and stuff stuff like that, and that led to where we are now.

Um so so yeah, that's the sort of potted history, I guess. Can you tell me the connection, uh if there is one, between ecology, which I'm assuming is the study of ecosystems, and the preservation of ecosystems or natural ecosystems? Is that correct? Yeah, yeah, exactly that, exactly that.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so and I think this is this is where it gets really interesting because ecology very much sort of rejects the what we might call the positivist or reductionist sort of paradigms of of straightforward cause and effect, which which are sort of basically it kind of rejects the whole sort of simple answers to complex questions kind of thing. So because you can't just walk into an ecosystem and make a change and do something and expect and guarantee a certain result, right?

So and it's the same with organizations, the same with people. We can't there is there is no way you can't just walk into an organization or do a thing, turn a lever, switch a dial, and guarantee a certain result. And in fact, in organizations, you you won't get the same, you might do that thing one day and do the next thing, do the same thing the following day, and it will get a different result. That's out of the point.

Like it's it's unpredictable, it's complex, it's emergent, and that's it's the same with psychological safety, right? I think I'd give you uh it might be a great example. I I teach at Sydney University on their MBA program, and and we gave the students last year one of the one of the research things they had to do is go and identify the unhelpful or destructive behaviors that are reducing performance, innovation, and workplace engagement. And one of them came back and reported that they they found that people weren't collaborating enough a year ago.

So they changed the reward system from an individual nomination to people being able to nominate each other peer-to-peer, and that had a bonus effect. What that resulted in unexpectedly was everything was a committee. There was way too much fake collaboration, there was sudden politeness to everybody and not doing any accountability. So the idea that you, oh well, we'll change the reward system and we'll get X different behavior completely backfired, it didn't work.

It got the opposite. Would that be as simple just to get our listeners across, like a simple example of this makes logical sense, cause and effect, you put it in play, and you get this completely unexpected result. Exactly that. Exactly that, exactly that.

It's um, you know, in in ecology, there there are loads of classic examples, and particularly in Australia, right? You've got like toads and things that you introduce and then, you know, and suddenly have this wild, dramatic effect on the on the entire ecosystem. It was completely unpredictable. In hindsight, was it predictable?

In hindsight, you can look back and think, right, well, we did this thing. That was a sensible that at the time it seemed like a sensible thing to do. Yeah. But but in trying what in organizations, effectively, what we tried to do what what that was was sort of they were playing people were playing one game.

And of course, like life is games, we're not suggesting these are everyone's got like ulterior motives. But um, people are playing one game. So we're gonna change the the rules of the game from individual bonuses to these kinds of bonuses, and all all you've done is created another game. You've created another game, and and you're not sure how how people are gonna play it.

And what of course you end up with is stuff like is is the theater that the game rewards. It's not the actual behavior. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I'm assuming this is a good entry point for psych safety because sometimes when we do our work on leaders, we we we put self-regulation at the center, the ability to what we say go further than self-awareness, the ability to not only see our patterns of behavior, but actually regulate them.

But in our team development programs and work, we put a psychological safety at the center because we think of it as the way a team regulates itself. So in other words, it's the ability to call out the patterns of behavior or decisions we're making that are not helpful and regulate back into helpful is enabled by psychological safety. So we think of it sometimes as the organizational self-regulation in a way. Yeah.

Yeah, I like that. I like that. I like that. And it's it's like so many things in the workplace and like so many organizational dynamics, it's a feedback loop, right?

The better we get at that, yeah, the more we develop that muscle, the more we work that muscle, the better we're going to get at it. Great. So let's just begin for our viewers, listeners. What is psychological safety?

So, yeah, so psychological safety, just as a almost like a side note, we should we should recognize the fact that psychological safety as a term first emerged in the 1950s with Carl Rogers, the the OG humanistic therapist, psychologist. Um so it's not sort of a new, you know, it's it's sometimes treated as like a brand new, like a really new thing, but it's not a new thing. It's been around for 75 years. Well, it's been around for longer, but we've had it, it's had a name for that time.

And then Ed Schein, the famous Ed Schein and Warren Bennis used the term in in one of their books in organizational change and group methods in the 60s. And then we've got Kahn and Amy Edmondson in the 90s, and and we could talk about Amy Edmondson's work, but essentially what we're what Amy Edmondson managed to do was codify the definition, sort of create this canonical definition of psychological safety that that we can all hang the hook on now, which is which is that a it's a a shared belief held by members of a team or group that the group is safe for interpersonal risk taking, that we can that it is safe to suggest ideas, ask questions, admit mistakes, raise concerns.

And and this is this is the thing. Like it's it's it's a group phenomenon, it's not an individual phenomenon. Like we don't have psychological safety sitting in the room by ourselves. Um it's about the the safety in taking interpersonal risks.

Any and that might be speaking up like verbally, but it might be writing something on a post-it note, or using sign language, or or even just sort of or even just getting eye contact with someone. Whatever, whatever that interpersonal interaction is, that's something that is suppressed or encouraged by by psychological safety. Okay, fantastic. Let's let's get into a few nuances straight away, right?

So does if I'm speaking aggressively and disrespectfully to someone and I'm called on it to not speak like that when I claim, hold on a second, I thought this is a psychological, psychologically safe environment. We said we can speak our mind. What's the problem here? Are there any rules around that in studying the diff.

Yeah, so but and and what so we and of course what's really interesting is that we immediately get into the complexity and diversity of psychological safety and what it looks like in different groups and in different contexts, right? Psychological safety or you know, asserting that we're in a psychologically safe environment doesn't warrant reckless behaviour, doesn't mean that we have avant-garde permission to say whatever we want, however the hell we want to say it, right? That's it's not it's not that.

It means, arguably, taking greater care over what we say and how we say it and how we respond to other people when when they take into personal risks. That's that's wrapped all wrapped up within the caveat that the social contract for this group, like this group may have decided collectively, do you know what? Um we we collectively agree that yes, we can shout at each other. We can scream and shout and swear, and that's that's our agreed social contract.

And so if you've agreed that, then that's arguably what psychological safety looks like. Of course, you know, if we look at psychological safety in different cultures around the world, uh, you know, we do we do a lot of work with folks in um in Holland and and the Dutch like I f I find Dutch groups to to be almost uncomfortably direct. Like I I you know I sometimes sit and I'm like what my god you're being like this this feels so rude and direct and and like uncomfortable to me.

But that's that's i i that's the difference between high context and low context language and and different cultural approaches. And it'd be similar if I spoke Japanese. I don't, but if I did speak Japanese and I went and I um went to a Japanese organization and sat within one of their group meetings, the style of approach again would be would be very different. And so it's not necessarily psychological safety isn't necessarily about mandating how we speak or how we behave with each other, but it is it is insignificant about empowering the group themselves to decide collectively what that looks like and that it should evolve and change and adapt over time.

So could we say in modern organizational language that would be there's an agreed set of values, usually published values in organizations, then there's an implicit values, explicit values, a whole range of but we're basically saying, look, there's there's a contract here on the way we behave, and that becomes the ground at which we determine if we're acting in a psychological, s psychologically safe way. We're following the values to some degree. It's it's that's that's definitely one of the approaches.

There's a there's a there's a couple of caveats there, a couple of almost like traps that that we see organizations fall into. One is that those values, those contracts, um can't be imposed upon people in teams. You can't just say, these are our organizational values, these this is how we this is our set of what the things the beliefs that we assert to be true and say, and therefore they're yours. Because I mean you you can, but it but it won't work very well because they're not theirs.

They haven't that group haven't collectively had any say in in in what that means. And this it this applies specifically, especially in distributed to multinational organizations, because what we may assert to be true in, let's say, a um a big American corporate firm won't feel the same, won't won't necessarily feel uh won't, you know, won't align with folks say in a s a small European offshoot office. Um the other thing is that those those values actually have to make sense.

We say I I can't remember what the firm was, but there was a firm that I remember one of their core values was don't be a dick. Which is which sounds great, right? But like, okay, well no one people very rarely think they're being a dick. Yeah, exactly.

So we we almost like that that's almost meaningless. Yeah, exactly. So in other words, what we're saying is which is what we advocate for, you can have organizational values, but they can be interpreted at a behavioral level that's most suitable and understandable and contractable for you. Yeah.

And that could part social contract around psych safety. We're saying, okay, here's how we're gonna treat each other. This is what makes sense to us. Yeah.

Our way we go. If that's violated in some way, let's say we think respect is like not calling people names or labels and not swearing at each other, then that's a contract for psych safety. I don't know if that's violated now, got it. So let's talk about go on, go on.

Um, so could you just touch on something really, really powerful, which is which is that um so Eleanor Ostrom talks a lot about commoning and governing the commons and and things like that and won a Nobel Prize for it. But that's sort of aside, but what what she talks about a lot about is is the is the ability for a group to define their own structures and define how they work and things like that, but also the the the ability for a group to impose consequences to to penalties for for holding holding peers and members of that group to account, to high accountability, to high um standards of of behavior within that group.

And and that's that's critical to a social contract, because a social contract is meaningless if if when it's breached nothing happens. Yeah, so this is a you okay, we segue perfectly onto my next question, which is the whole subject of accountability. Now just tear it up with what our research has has shown us, um, and also some of the classic quotes we've heard clients say. So I'll start off with our research.

So we research our organization is called Triple Goal, and and about the way I do keynote talks now is I introduce and say, if you read up, if you look up the topic of leadership on Amazon, you'll come up with over 60,000 titles. To say it's overwhelming on what leadership is is ridiculous, right? But what we can seem to get agreement on, which we ended up naming our business to, is what are leaders supposed to achieve? What are they supposed to do?

Not the how, but the end result. And unanimously, we've never had a client disagree with us in the last five years. They're supposed to help teams deliver great results, so achieve the goal that they're trying to achieve successfully and well. So whether that's be a positive net promoter score, raising funds for a charity, or increasing market share or profitability, whatever that is as a result is important.

A successful leader will help a team achieve that. The second element is learning and agility. So they're excellent at self-disrupting learning and learning from mistakes and creating organizations. So we call it great performance, great learning.

And the third element is happy people. So they create fantastic environments where people thrive, they feel valued, their work is meaningful, they feel like they belong. It's a happy workplace. So we call that the triple goal.

And then we we we we've we found it that they're all three very significant and important. Now, what happened for us was really interesting because we have our own 360 assessment. And for the listeners who don't know what that is, it's typically where a leader gets assessed by their direct reports on a set of questions, uh, anonymously, in our case, it's about 100 questions. Then they get ranked against the whole population leads around the world on how they're leading against these researched established questions.

And what we did unusually a couple of years ago, we traditionally in 360 assessments, you measured like the bottom line, like is the ecosystem healthy? It's like, oh, the water quality could be like a kind of bellwether of that. In leadership 360s, it's called leadership effectiveness. That's the bellwether.

Is this person an effective leader? And so we stayed with tradition and we asked those questions too. And it's a way to test whether you're asking the right behavioral questions. But we introduced new questions, and they were how's this person's team performing?

And from the perspective of the boss, the peers, and the directors, how well is the team performing? How well is this team innovating and learning that the leader's leading? And how happy is this team, right? We introduced these new three things.

Now, we also introduced psychological safety. We ask eight, and originally eight, but now five psychological safety questions, roughly based on Tim Clark's work around, you know, learner safety up to challenger safety, right? Inclusion safety, learner safety, contributor safety, challenger safety, right? And we try and ask those graded questions.

Now we would have expected to see this is the interesting part, right? We would have expected to see if the leaders were highly effective in people's eyes, that their team would be high performing. Obviously, we measure both. It turns out we regularly saw the opposite.

We saw the leader being rated as highly effective, but the team's performance score from all stakeholders could be a gap of 30 to 40 percentile gap, right? Then the other fascinating thing, which we had, you know, through my own journey around psychological safety, we had her, you know, we had this, especially if you look at even to Clark's work, that the innovation zone is where you've got the highest level of psychological safety. That's an assertion I've heard said multiple times, right?

And so we expected, because we measure psychological safety and innovation as two separate elements, we expected to see a higher correlation there too. And by and large, there is a correlation, but we would constantly see exceptions. Probably every fifth assessment, we would see wow, the team feels really psychologically safe around this leader, but the innovation and learning is low. How do you explain that?

That doesn't make sense. And again, from the popular view, which is why I think this podcast is really important for people to understand that the popular view is often inaccurate and misses the whole picture around psychological safety. Because we eventually came to the conclusion, based on our research, that the leadership effectiveness score is more or less a popularity vote. It's not a performance vote.

And what's extraordinary about that is the entire industry I work in around assessment of leaders has primarily shaped good leadership as popular leadership. And it's why I think a lot of people have become very cynical about organizational development work or even leadership assessments, because they don't change anything, they're not used particularly skillfully, and they're a popularity vote anyway. And let's face it, what we're up, what we're trying to get here is innovation and performance.

We want all three. We want innovation, performance, and happy people. And so then we found the same with psych safety is that psych safety became more the the questions we we ask, which are very, you know, we've we've we've validated them that they do in fact measure psych safety. But it's interesting that you could have a highly cyclical.

Psychologically safe team with low innovation and low learning. And so what we found is that it turns out that psychological safety can be accompanied with low performance, frustrated employees, and low performance. So the assertion that if you have psych safety, you'll have high performance is just not true. So we then began to discover in our research that it turns out the key thing is accountability.

This is the topic you talked about. Is that the teams where there was high psych safety but low accountability were the ones with low performance. Is psych safety is still crucial. We came to the way the analogy I gave this was it's a strange analogy, but it's like if you've got four wheels and a car with an engine, you'll guaranteed go 200Ks an hour.

Not true. And in many ways, psych safety is asserted like that. If you've got a car with four wheels, you'll go 200ks an hour. No, you you need a really powerful engine too.

And it turns out in our research that accountability, the ability to have direct conversations, hold people to those contracts, both performance contracts and behavioral contracts is fundamental for the whole thing to work. But you get this comp we've heard this so many times. People say someone's losing their job, right? There's actual consequences coming.

And then they'll say things like, so much for psychological safety. And it's like they're interpreting psychological safety as job safety, like I'm safe no matter what, right? So these are the things that we've love to hear your commentary and insights on what I've just shared. Because I think a lot of people have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

They're like, enough of the psychological safety BS. We're here to do a job, we're here to actually perform. Now, and I'd also love to hear, once we've cover this, just talk about people also need to hear the consequences of you know the airline that didn't crash because they didn't. I'd like to hear those examples later, right?

Because it does matter, obviously, in life-based situations. But I'd love to get your response to what I've just shared. Yeah, nice. And I think uh yeah, and I think what like one of our critiques of of the uh popular, the more sort of popularist mainstream sort of LinkedIn kind of vibe stuff on psychological safety is is that it's a bit of a panacea, it's a bit of a it it's perceived as a bit of a magic wand sometimes and presented as like as the it's I I don't think it's I I think it's very rarely presented as the only thing you need, but I think it's often interpreted that way.

And and of course, like and you s you know, you you described it yourself, you know, you you it's it's not the only thing you need. You could have a group that feel very psychologically safe, but don't have the skills, resources, a shared goal, any capacity, any decent tools to achieve the thing. And then so they're not going to be high performing, right? They're they feel psychologically safe with each other.

But and you can also, and of course, because psychological safety doesn't just apply to work groups, it applies to, let's say, like a like a therapy group, like an Alcoholics Anonymous group, right? That group feels very psychologically safe together. They're not trying to achieve anything. They're literally their only purpose is to communicate.

So the idea that psychological safety is almost is performance, is is not is is conflating two things. But and and I like your point about accountability as well. Psychological safety is fostered through greater accountability. Performance requires, you know, team outcomes and performance require require a degree of accountability or high high degrees of accountability in order to perform.

Teams need that to perform. So it's it's again, it's like a flywheel effect. Team members being accountable for their behaviors in the group foster greater psychological safety. There was a really interesting, oh I say interesting, interesting because it was rubbish paper that was released quite a few years back now that tried to assert that there was that there was such a thing as too much psychological safety.

And what they showed, what they found was that they studied a bunch of groups and and found that some of the groups were, when they got psychologically safer, as they got safer, they started to see patterns of behavior that were, in quote, bad. And and this is bad, but like they started to see things like racism, racist comments, misogynistic comments, and things like that. And the point is not that that group was too psychologically safe. The point is that people in that group were racist.

That that was the problem, not not the high psychological safety. The problem was a lack of accountability for for standards. The problem was just like you say, like, yes, high psychological safety is good, but we also need higher high accountability. We need skills, resources, goals, capacity, tooling, stuff like that.

Amy Edmondson talks, she uses the term psychological safety is like taking the brakes off. Essentially, it's like it's like your car analogy. You can put a fantastic fast engine in a car, which is all the tools and resources and goals and stuff like that, and point it forward. But if you'd leave the brakes on, you're not gonna go very far.

So psychologic psychological safety is like taking the brakes off. It allows for that increased increased conversation and sharing. There's so much there's so much hair here as well. One of the one of the things you mentioned again was also about job security, which which is an interesting point because one of the other things that gets batted around quite a lot is that is that psychological safety has nothing to do with job security.

Which on one hand on one hand is true because we cannot necessarily guarantee job security. It's psychological safety is not about giving someone tenure, right? But in so many organizations we work with, and we've done a lot of research on this as well, we find that when there are periods of disruption, like rounds of redundancies and things like that, where where there are e where there's either one coming up or there's one sort of recently happened in the past, psychological safety takes a massive hit.

And when we when we talk to folks in the organization, we do qualitative research in there, we find that understandably, it's because people are concerned, to greater or lesser degrees, people are concerned that if they admit a mistake or raise a concern or point out that this project's going to hell or this project has gone over budget or something else, bring up some bad news, basically. Tell the bosses people things they don't want to hear, that they'll be they're putting their head above the parapet.

They'll be marked on some spreadsheet somewhere where someone's putting scoring in scoring employees as to who's going to get their heads chopped in the next round or something like that. So, so of course, that that degree of job precarity, precariousness, does increase uh decreases psychological safety necessarily. It's also interestingly true that people who have people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, so people grew up poorer, comparatively poorer, or in more precarious households, tend to feel less psychologically safe in the workplace because for various reasons, but in part because they sense, they've got this inbuilt sense that there is a less of a safety net should they, should something go wrong at work.

Whereas people from more advantaged, privileged backgrounds tend to feel safer, tend to put themselves forward for more projects because they've they've got something to fall back on if it goes wrong. Okay, let's let's try and get I have this very formulaic mind, even though I've spent 35 years practicing long silent meditation retreats. Um where I I I'm trying to help people pragmatically apply stuff all the time, right? What does this look like tomorrow?

What is this like how? What do I do, right? So let's say I'm a brand new, I'm a leader, I've just well, I'm a leader of a team. Hopefully that's the people listening to this, many people, right?

Yeah. And I go, right, I've got to get psychological safety right. And I'd like if you can answer why, why, and then how. Why and then how.

Nice. The why question is really good as well, because it has two answers. One is one is a sort of utilitarian answer, which is like higher psychological safety leads to better outcomes. Whatever your organization does, like it leads to fewer, fewer safety incidents, it leads to higher innovation, it leads to better staff retention, all this sort of stuff, better outcomes, whatever you do.

And so that's a good, if you like, utilitarian financial organization reason to it's also there's also a moral right degree to this. Like, even if psychological safety didn't have those positive outcomes on teams and people in organizations, it would still arguably be the right thing to do. It's still we still, I believe, have a degree of a moral right, an ethical right to feel psychologically reasonably psychologically safe in the workplace. Safe enough to be able to say, I'm, do you know what?

I'm really struggling. I've got too much on right now. Um, or or I need some help with this thing, or um, I don't know how to do that task. Can someone help me?

We have we have a right to be able to do that. We fundamentally should be able to do that. So it kind of there were two whys there almost. So in some level, it's about parenting.

And you could say, take a parenting example, it's it's a utilitarian, you could say you've got to raise this healthy child, but actually it's about being a kind, ethical human being that raises children that are psychologically healthy and not fully damaged. That you should have psychological safety in your home as a parent and as a leader, like you're not there to do, you don't want to leave your job one day. Say, Michael did a great job of damaging people's mental health. Uh, you know, he achieved the targets, but he along the way he left destruction and damage.

And those people that he damaged took that stress home to their children. So Michael's been responsible for damaging generational, old generation of people. Our research shows that it's about a third of a person's mental health can be explained by their boss's behavior. Yeah.

One piece of research we did at one point. So, okay, so we've got the why, and then the and we'll do the how, and then if we could do the um how do you do it, and then also what it's not. Let's be really clear what it's not, like misconceptions, right? Yeah, so the how, the reason the how is tricky is because it's in it's incredibly contextual, right?

Uh what we might do in a you know in a Japanese manufacturing team will be quite different to what we might try and do with a with a surgical team in an American hospital, right? But there are a lot of commonalities, a lot of common themes. Um power and legibility, right? So power, loads and loads of evidence going back decades in safety critical organizations, high reliability organizations, aviation, space travel, and things like that show that people tend not to speak up against steep power gradients.

So where there is a steep power gradient, and that might be, you know, if you think about it, if you're running a team meeting and the CEO walks into the room and sits down at a table, that's created a steep power gradient. Assuming they announce themselves as a CEO or everyone knows them knows they're the CEO. So there's a steep power gradient there, people are much less likely to speak up for all sorts of reasons. Um so so one of the things to do is to try to mitigate, to lessen, to sort of flatten that power gradient and and mitigate the impact of it.

So uh so one of the practices, for example, is that uh and a lot of aviation teams and surgical teams do this, when when you walk into a room and you you you you you work with a team of people, you instead of saying, oh hi, I'm Dr. Smith, and I'm the chief consultant anaesiologist here in this trust, and I've got 40 years experience and you know, and I've got my crown on or whatever. Like you, you know, um, instead of saying that, say, hi, I'm Jane, and I'm looking after the patient's anesthesia today.

We introduce ourselves by our name, by how we like to be referred to as, and what we're doing in that space, not by our job title role or level or grade or rank, because by invoking rank and grade and stuff, we're we're creating a power gradient. So there's basic sort of stuff like that, and we can mitigate power gradients. So if I'm the CEO and I walk in and I want this group to feel safe around me, I can do that, I can introduce myself. Could I do something like share some worries or mistakes that I've made recently to reduce that power gradient as well?

Yeah, yeah, you it you can model some vulnerability. I would it arguably um better to model humility rather than vulnerability. Because modeling vulnerability can sometimes suggest that other people have to do the same, even if they don't feel safe to do so. So it can lead to weird places.

Modeling humility by saying things like, uh I don't know, or asking the questions that you may feel uncomfortable asking, or and normalizing saying, actually, do you know what I don't know? What do you think? By my by modeling humility and uh and asking more open questions, that's that's a great step forward. Okay, great.

So we've got trying to normalize me as a person, not as a power structure. We've got role modeling humility. These are two hows I can do. Right?

What else can I do? We literally have a list of about 180 things on our website, but we can come back to that. But another one, and it's about improving the legibility of the space. And what what we mean by that is the sort of the structure, the uh the the ability to predict and understand what this space means and look like looks like.

So so this this couldn't be as simple as having a really effective meeting structure and protocol so that people know when them when they're in a meeting how they're meant to speak up. Like, are we meant to raise our hand or you know, click the raise hand function on Zoom, or uh, or is it just a free-for-all? How how can people contribute? Um, is it by writing stuff down?

Is it by sp only speaking up? And if you are only doing speaking up, then what about the people who have speech differences, voice differences, stutters, stammers, or a newer diverse, or or or or speak a different language? So better defining what the space looks like, and this involves social contracts and articulated accountability and um good practices, like we espouse things like lean coffee meetings, ladders of participation, pace, and there's loads of like practices for this, the and-on chord and things like that.

Or the and-on chord, right? Yep, I know that one. Listeners, and on chord, you can pull something, it's from Japan, right? Yeah, yeah, it's from the Toyota prediction system.

It's uh it's a it's a it's a codified way of essentially speaking up, essentially pulling the cord, it's taking an interpersonal risk. And it's a it's a codified way of doing it, and people are praised for doing so. Brilliant. So just contextually, if my memory is correct, this happened in Toyota where people saw a defect or something going wrong in the production line.

They could pull the and on cord to alert it. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, and crucially, it's not just for defects. I mean, it's it's it's a it's often it's it's probably primarily used for defects, but it's also for improvements.

Like we've just realized how we can make this better, safer, more efficient, faster, cleaner, whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. Great.

Okay, good. Okay, 180 things we'll never get through, but you know, just talking about the big things. So so meeting clarity, engagement clarity, how to raise things, when to raise things, creating structure and process around that can be very useful for creating safety. Yeah, yeah, exactly that, because it makes the space so much more predictable.

You can one way to think about the psychological safety, if we're if we're trying to think about it in different ways, is is as I'm gonna say positive interpersonal predictability. The ability the better ability to predict that if we take an interpersonal risk, it will be responded to positively. But part of that, part of that is is having these sorts of known structures. Like if we walk into a meeting, we don't even know who these people are, what type of meeting it is, yeah, how how we're supposed to speak up, then we're probably not going to speak up.

Just because we haven't, we don't know the the rules of engagement. Got it. And if I admit a mistake, and it's a serious mistake, and I'm in a team, and now there need to be consequences, because that mistake wasn't okay, and in my mind I'm going, you know, I can admit a mistake, psychologically safe environment. How that's like where the rubber hits are, that's a really tricky area because if one of my team is members said, by the way, I posted something, you know, that now has been interpreted as a high hypothetically a racist comment on your LinkedIn profile.

My EA did that, like, and said, Oh, sorry, I've made a mistake. And then my response is supposed to be, no, it's totally fine. You've just wrecked my reputation. Blah, blah, blah.

You know, like, how do I, and I think this is a question on people's minds. Like, how would I address that in a way that's holding a second? You might lose your job for this because that's just you've crossed the line. But a fact that you've raised it and not trying to hide it, I'm deeply appreciative.

At the same time. So this is this is fascinating. I mean, we could do a whole podcast on this, right? So let's get back to the word accountability.

The word accountability is accountability. It's the ability to give an account. It doesn't mean if you do something wrong, you'll be smacked. Like, which is often what it's interpreted as, right?

But accountability means the ability to give an honest account and account for the decisions and actions that we took. Um, so we do a lot of work around human and organizational performance and and things like that. And and this is where we're starting starting to get into that realm. But let's come back to the mistake.

The mistake has been made. The mistake has already been made. So what do we want now? We have two choices.

We could not hear about the mistake, or we could hear about the mistake. If we hear about the mistake and we punish it by what whatever, sacking them, smacking them, kicking them in the face, whatever, like whatever it is we do. Then yeah, like we might uh that may feel emotionally satisfying, but we but we have to recognize that we may not hear about future mistakes, because that person, along with anyone who observed that, is going to take away the lesson that if they admit a mistake, they're gonna get smacked for it.

So we have to recognize that if whilst it may feel emotionally satisfying to apply consequences, then it but it may not be operationally useful. We see this in healthcare a lot. People make mistakes all the time in healthcare that result in patients dying and harm being made. But the the point, at least most of the time, is that if we admit the mistake and we clarify and we surface how we made that mistake, why it was locally rational to us at the time, why it made sense to us at the time, why that decision made sense to us at the time, um then the benefit from disclosing that mistake and collectively learning from it is the is a greater prevention of future mistakes.

Not only will we hear about future mistakes, but there should be fewer future mistakes because we collectively learn from it. Yes. And I would say, and if you're listening to this, I will just take a the real hypersonics view is that some people can use it as a defense. Well, if I admit this mistake, then they then I know there won't be consequences.

So I'll just admit it straight away, right? And now you're supposed to guarantee me no consequences. Like, oh, by the way, I gambled the company's money on a horse race, big mistake, sorry. Um Yeah, yeah.

And and this is exactly it. This is why the whole the whole the concept of local rationality, which is sort of trying to understand wh why this decision made sense to that person at the time um and what kind of mistake it was. Like, was it a a slip or a lapse? Like, do you drive, do you drive a car?

Yes. Yeah. Uh have I am aware this is a podcast, but have you ever unintentionally gone over the speed limit? Yes.

So that was a slip or a lapse, right? We wouldn't like this is we the law may disagree, but arguably we would feel that we shouldn't punish someone every single time they drift slightly over the speed limit because this is a normal part of human variability. So we shouldn't punish someone for that sort of for for that sort of slip or elapse. Then there's mistakes, which is like when presented with incomplete information, say we we have to choose between X or Y, we choose Y, but then in hindsight, it turned out we should have chosen X.

Yeah, is that is that something someone should be punished for? Probably not. Maybe they didn't have the information to have. Then there's things like deviations and violations, which is where someone does something or doesn't do something the way they should have, should have, in quotes, done it.

And of course, this might be this might be normal work. Maybe everyone does it that way. And maybe 999 times out of a thousand it works out fine. But on this occasion it didn't.

And so finding fault for for that deviation is probably not the most operationally useful way to go. So understanding the context, as Sidney Decker says, getting into the tunnel with people and that this doesn't mean that someone isn't culpable for actions. Like in healthcare, you know, you've got people like Harold Shipman and and people like that who killed patients. Of course, they should be held accountable and culpable for their actions.

It doesn't mean it doesn't mean that we we we completely avoid any consequences, but it does mean that we should feel safe to disclose the why and the how and the context, and more importantly, how we can improve collectively for next time. So what I'm getting from this is that it's primarily about curiosity and understanding first, and then if we can see that the the intention was correct. I suppose the way I'm processing this is if it turns out that the intention, let's say they they took some money from the business and gambled it for the intention of self-enrichment, well that's that's a violation of the values.

So if it's not a violation of the values, it's not it's not sunk the company necessarily, in which case there's consequences for anyone anyway, everyone anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's trying to understand that person's context. It's trying to understand why they did it, and then perhaps create deep learning from that understanding, which is why I'm guessing psychological safety is associated with learning.

Exactly. Because how can we learn from something if we can't talk about it? Right? This is we fundamentally psychological safety is the thing that allows us to have these conversations, it allows us to describe why we made that decision or what led to that outcome.

It's interesting. We have a new definition. We shifted it about a year ago, not even a year ago, about six months ago, where we're trying to define what a great culture looks like, and it comes out of Gottman's work and it's really beautiful. It's just one simple sentence, nothing's undiscussable.

That's a great culture. Perfect. Love it, love it. And it fits this too.

But we talk, we do a lot of shadow work with clients where we get them to acknowledge their less than wholesome patterns of behavior that we all have and own it so that it becomes discussable and it becomes addressable, and we can return to better behaviors without denial and consequences. It's very similar to this, to what we're talking about now. Just to try and bring it to. I know it's a complex subject, and we we all love simplicity even when it's complex, but yeah.

You just try and wrap up, like, okay, you're a new leader, you're listening to this podcast, and here's five things, right? You've talked about, let's say five, right? Five things you really want to do well to start the process of psych septic. First, introduce yourself or act as your name, what you do, don't create power.

Second, be humble. Acknowledge you don't know when you don't know, make it safe for other people. Great, role model it. The third thing you've said is, you know, create clarity for how things get addressed in the team.

That's one of the ways you so how do we, the and on court, how do we, when things are not working well, are we struggling? What's the way we raise issues around here in this team? Creating what you what did you call it? Yeah, so we we sometimes refer to this as legibility.

Like it's easier to read. It's easier to read the space. It's it's obvious how you raise things, how you admit where that creates safety. Two other things, just you know, I know it's a massive topic, and that's why experts like you are around for it, but um, what else?

What are a couple other things I can do? So I can create clarity, legibility, I can be humble, I can normalize myself to not create like I'm this almighty powerful person. Yeah. So one one would be reframing work is a learning endeavor, not a delivery-making stuff endeavor.

Like the the point of work should be learning how to do it better next time. Because there will be more next times than there are this time. This is why you know Toyota Toyota call themselves a learning organization, not a building cars organization. A nice side effect of being a learning organization is building more and more cars at ever higher quality.

The point, the point is learning. And and so that's really powerful because that framing work is learning necessitates and encourages speaking up about not only what went wrong, but what went well. What did we do well in this time and why did that happen so well? So that's that's a really, really powerful reframing of work.

Psychological safety looks different for everyone. The, you know, what works for one team won't necessarily work for another team. What works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another. Eye contact is a terrible advice out there about eye contact and psychological safety.

Like, for many neurodiverse folks and folks in different cultures, like Japanese, some Japanese cultures and some African cultures, maintaining sustained eye contact with someone of a higher status is is not respectable. And for many neurodiverse folks, maintaining eye contact is difficult, if not impossible. So to them, psychological safety may look like staring at the ceiling, looking down at the ground, it may look like doodling, it may look like fidgeting. It is it isn't going to look like what psychological safety looks like to someone else.

So embracing that diversity and complexity. Yeah. Which I know is ambiguous and vague, but it's very tricky. So when we say psychological safety, what we're saying, just to sum it up again, we're saying, I'll give you the classic ones that I know, it's the ability to acknowledge that I don't know the answer.

It's the it's a feeling of being included, even though my accent or my skin color or my gender or whatever, there's a feeling of like I belong and I'm treated like I belong. There's a sense of being able to acknowledge mistakes or share mistakes. There's the ability to ask for help, all of which don't carry emotional cost or punishment. All of these.

None of these cost ridicule, cost exclusion, cost labeling. Yeah. But there's still accountability based on structured contracts. Contracts for performance, contracts for behavior, values and right.

And that accountability still has a strong place. I think also I I'll just say this, Ali. You haven't said this, but you've certainly implied it, is when we don't hold people accountable, we invariably hurt other people in the team. We invariably destroy the social contract at some level.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And then it becomes unsafe.

In fact, even possibly even worse than we started with. Because if we've if we've put all the effort into a social contract and then demonstrated that it's that it's meaningless, it has no teeth, then it's even worse than we've we've broken a lot of trust. Yeah. And the consequences can be catastrophic.

Anyone who's ever come across this topic will tell you, you know, the multiple the airline piloted and challenges senior and ended up with taking hundreds of lives. This can literally be life and death in many organizational contexts. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And there are far, far too many examples of that from the real world, from the from the VASA, which is like 400 years ago now, and uh uh the Challenger space shuttle, Chernobyl, the Magasaki train crash, the global financial crisis. Like pretty much I I I'm yet to find a really bad thing that happened that that didn't in somewhere along its causal chain, didn't have some gate somewhere where if someone had spoken up and and been listened to, it might not have happened. Okay, so um I just wanted to bounce uh uh another idea of you.

When we when we termed when we work with psychological safety, we had a moment of insight in our work where we we go, well, psychological safety seems to be a really important condition for truth telling. Like a really important condition. It fosters honesty. And if it's not psychologically safe to be honest, that tends to shut down honesty pretty quickly.

And what's so interesting is that there's an expression from multiple philosophers and wisdom teachers that go something more along the lines of the greatest lies we tell are the ones we tell ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this was Carl Jung's quote, actually, that particular one.

And so what we we realize is that people have an interesting internal relationship with themselves, where the harshest critic is themselves. And if they spoke to other people the way they speak to themselves, those other people would not feel psychologically safe. So we came to coin it in a way we're saying, do you realize you don't feel psychologically safe with yourself? I don't know, you said earlier it's relational.

But it was like, yeah, but in order for me to acknowledge the things I don't know, the things where I'm struggling, the things where I feel insecure, to acknowledge the behaviors I'm doing that are not helping my marriage, my parenting, my leadership, to acknowledge these. I need to be able to acknowledge these things honestly with myself and not then follow it up with harsh, stinging judgment. Because as soon as I do that, I shut psychological safety down in myself. And then the truth dies.

And then learning dies. And this is crucial. It's learning, as you said. If I can't tell myself the truth, or I can't tell my boss the truth, or if I can't tell the truth full stop internally and externally, learning must by definition die.

And I often ask the question, how much how much curiosity does your inner judge have? And everybody finally acknowledges nothing. Well, curiosity is the it's the most fundamental quality of learning. So the judge has no real purpose other than it's trying to shame you and correct you and make you a good boy or girl.

I'd just love to hear your, as you hear that, you know, what's your reflection on that? Yeah, I I think it's I think it's so true, and it's it kind of comes back to a lot of humility work, you know, Ed Shine's work. Humility and and and so much, so much around therapy and self-reflection and mindfulness. Um and I very much agree that the way the way we talk to ourselves influences the way we talk to other people.

And we we are our own harshest critics. We uh and this this particularly applies to people who are more driven, more, more ambitious, um, more successful a lot of the time. We're we're increasingly hard on ourselves, hold ourselves to ever higher standards, and and and the these built-in habits um become normalized, and the way we talk to ourselves and the way we punish ourselves for for not achieving something or doing something, in quote, wrong, um, will influence the way we we interact with others, and and that then perpetuates this whole this whole vicious cycle of of of you know how we respond to others and then how they respond to us, and then that affects how we feel about ourselves, and that affects how we speak to ourselves, and so breaking that cycle.

Yeah. So I think it's trying to bring this to a close, Tom. What I'm struck by listening to you is how like you've got a quality of gentleness in you that it's quite striking, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, just so you're aware, Tom, and it's clear in your arc of your life. You know, the study of ecology to me strikes me as someone who has a deep care about life.

And it's like a love letter, in a way, to life. And I think your journey around psych safety. So I'd just like to invite you to share as we close. It's almost like there's something about you that appeals to the heart, right?

It's like if you're listening to this, what's your life about? Like, what's the message you want people to really hear? Why this profession? Why psych safety?

Why is this all so important? That's really it's really lovely to hear, and uh, and a wonderful question that I think is is incredibly difficult to answer. But I'll give it a shot. But I really, really appreciate that as well.

I think there's very disappointingly few of us get to do something with our work that is both deeply meaningful to us and has a positive impact on the world and allows us to pay our bills and pay the mortgage or whatever. And I'm incredibly lucky at the moment to be able to do that, to do something that really means a lot to me and has a degree of positive impact on the world and allows and and allows us to survive in this capitalistic world that we're in at the moment. I'm incredibly lucky and I feel very, very grateful for that.

And um, I hope it continues. Thank you. Thank you so much. I wanted to say one extra thing as probably catching you off guard, is I have a long history in mindfulness practice, a very, very long, detailed history in mindfulness practice.

And at the core of mindfulness work is this idea that no being wants to suffer. No plant, no animal, no sentient being. We should every one of us, when we're wake up in the morning, uh we we're trying to not suffer at some level. And so there's like this call to all of us to somehow live in a way that reduces the suffering of for ourselves and for other beings.

It's like this recognition of interconnectedness. And when I'm hearing you speak, what I'm hearing is a man who's committed his his life to the reduction of suffering, and that if it touches people in the workplace, that people suffer less, and obviously less suffering, also if you could frame it positively it's more joy, it's more connection, it's more meaning, it's it's it's these things that we all want for our children. Yeah. Yeah.

And this is what this work's about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely right. We've we've some somewhere along the lines we developed this internalized belief that work should suck. And it and if we're enjoying it, then it's not proper work.

But you know, we are allowed to enjoy work. We should enjoy work, we should we should feel fulfilled and happy. Yeah in work. It's it takes up a lot of our lives.

Yes. Tom, how can people get to know your work better? Where can they go? Oh, yeah, great question.

So so our website is psychsafety.com, and my email address is tom at psychesafety.com. And over on our website, there's loads of stuff that you can get involved in.

We have an online community that you can get that you can join and get involved with people all over the world. We have regular meetups, we have loads of resources and tools and things like that you can download with a newsletter you can sign up to, and tickers you can buy, and all this, and like over 350 articles and research papers on psychological safety. So if if this piques your interest, then there's there's almost certainly something there for you. Fantastic.

Tom, thank you so much for your generosity in sharing the and you know, coping with this person trying to keep it super simple on a very complex topic. So if you really appreciate it today. I I really appreciate it. And yeah, and I I've really, really enjoyed it.

So yeah, I really deeply appreciate it. The Secret Life of Great Leaders is brought to you by Triple Goal, where good coaches become great and leaders grow their impact where it matters most. Discover more at triplegoal.com.

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