[00:00:00] Dan: Welcome back to we, not me, the podcast where we talk everything about humans, connecting to get stuff done, I'm done Hammond. 

[00:00:13] Pia: And I am Pia Lee. And how are you in sunny Italy? Slumming it.

[00:00:19] Dan: Yes. Loving it still it's yeah. I must say it's been pouring with rain back in the UK, so very glad to be enjoying the good weather here. But it's really interesting this week, we went out with some neighbors of ours and we were observing how communal Italians are, You know, they're they don't care if you get in the way and the one, the street, they just walk around you. They're very easygoing and very communal. And there's a lot of mask wearing going on, so people are thinking about others and. Yeah. In this conversation. I mean, just people saying, oh no, absolutely not. We can't work in teams. Italians don't work. It's all about the individual. So I'm currently a little bit confused about the, we, not me here in Italy, what I've observed and what the Italian say of themselves. They're eternally humble, but yeah, it's caused me a bit of a pause for thought.

[00:01:04] Pia: So maybe, maybe they see it as community-based, rather than, uh, rather than as a team-based thing. 

[00:01:11] Dan: I think it might be that. Yeah, it seems to be something like that. And how are you doing peer? What's a what's going on for you? 

[00:01:16] Pia: I am doing very well. It's been a big week, hasn't it? We've had the 20 year Memorial for the nine 11 and, incredibly powerful. We all know where we were during that day. But such a significant change for the whole world, really. And, it's interesting considering our, the topic of our podcast today around psychological safety, a little story that I'll just indulge that was told to me a few years after nine 11. And I'm sure there are facts around this that may not be with my memory may not be a hundred percent, but here's the essence of it. 

[00:01:57] So, four floors below and the world trade center. After the plane hit a manager, woke up gain consciousness and there was a couple of people left that were alive, and this guy had also been in the military. And uh, I'm thinking back now to Rob's no significant performance challenge. There, they were in a burning building and, and he said to them. and he was quite directive in the star. We're going to get out and this is how we're going to do it. We're going to hold hands and never let our hands go, and we're going to catch. So we're going to count off. So it went literally 1, 2, 3, when it goes back to three, it goes back to 1, 1, 2, 3.

[00:02:45] So they went down a few flights to the stairs and it went 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. People started to join. And I can't remember the exact number, but I, from memory, I think it was 87 people that got out alive using that method. So, you know, the holding of that space in a moment when everybody might've panicked and just creating that almost, I think it was the mental focus as well as the physical support, and that story I have, I've always remembered. 

[00:03:22] Dan: a lovely, positive story. Cause it's been a, it's been a yeah. Pretty negative week on that front. Hasn't it? And let's hope the next 20 years can have loads of we, not me. And we hope that our podcast will boil us along through that. But that story is a re is that as you say, a really good segue into our interview for today with Dr Jessica Tomlinson, she's going to talk to us about psychological safety. It's a wonderful conversation that we've had. So let's go over to that now.

[00:03:45] Pia: 

[00:03:47] And welcome, Jess. Great to have you on the we, not me show today and just tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are. 

[00:03:55] Jess: Thank you for you for having me on. Thank you, Dan. Uh, so yeah, I'm just, um, I'm a clinical psychologist by trade, but my work. More than 10 years now has been in corporate organizations with a particular focus on leadership development and coaching. Um, and I'm now the associate director at enlightening. So we're an executive coaching and leadership consultancy, and we work in a variety of different ways with leaders and executive and board teams supporting performance, leadership capability, wellbeing, and team effectiveness.

[00:04:25] Pia: Brilliant Wolf that's a wealth of knowledge and welcome. and um, I'm very excited because we have our first doctor on the program. 

[00:04:33] Dan: here to sort your various

[00:04:34] Jess: please. Nobody faint, 

[00:04:36] Pia: okay. All right. Okay. Ooh. Yeah. And I've always feely a little touch and go there. Alright. Not that type of doctor.

[00:04:42] So we though are here. So the subject today, which is really powerful. It's talk about psychological safety. And this is a term that has been used in, in the last few years and as ever, we could understand it and talk about what it actually means.

[00:04:59] Jess: And I think that's a really good point payer, and I think it might be useful for us to look at what it is, and also a bit about what. I think as something kind of rises in, in pop culture and particularly sort of in business and management pop culture, there is the risk that, that we get some myths and misconceptions. 

[00:05:13] So I think it is useful to look at both and psychological safety, it does get described and defined in different ways, but essentially the way that I understand it is it is a belief that a certain type of interpersonal risk taking is safe. And so, you know what I mean by that specifically is that it's safe to do things like ask. Raise a concern, ask for help, share a half-baked idea, report a mistake without fear of ridicule, rejection or retribution. So typically we're talking about, we're talking about environments that there's generally trust, there's generally respect and this kind of a sense that you will be given, and I guess in return, you will give the benefit of the doubt.

[00:05:57] we think about human interactions and the way that we experience human interactions because of how we're wired, we are so sensitive to interpersonal rejection, social threat. So even minor experiences of being ridiculed rejected or face him some kind of social retribution feels very threatening for us in almost the same way as it does right at the other end of that spectrum.

[00:06:21] Pia: I think I read something today, actually about micro aggressive moments and how they can layer up to that people don't realize that they're actually creating a fence and they appear to be micro aggressive, but they layer up and then they, and then whoosh tip, tip people over in that, in that perspective. So what, isn't it. So where do we get confused?

[00:06:42] Jess: I think, um, it really sort of gained popularity when Amy Edmondson did her research in the late nineties and she kind of stumbled upon psychological safety by accident. She wasn't the first researcher to look at it, but she did really help popularize the term. And what her research showed is that in medication error rates in hospitals, which is what she was studying, higher performing teams made more mistakes.

[00:07:06] So at first that seems really counter-intuitive. But in actual fact, what she found was that higher performing teams had climates and environments where they felt safe to report their mistakes so that they could put them out and then look at them together and ultimately look at solving them. And so I think that's just a nice frame to sort of think about what it is, you know, because in a really psychologically safe team, we might be seeing interesting things like high levels of error being reported, so the lower performing teams in her study just weren't reporting them. They were just too scared to tell made a mistake and that's in a super high stakes environment too. That's a life or death context.

[00:07:44] So if you think about sort of the organizations that we typically work with, most of the time, that's not life or death, we hope, and so the desire to protect yourself at the expense of, of what might be lost in. It's going to be even stronger, but if we think about some of them it's so, you know, this has really gained popularity sort of in the last 20 years. And I think particularly there's been sort of another surge in the wake of COVID of organizations thinking about what does psychological safety mean? How do we get it? And so this kind of rise in, I guess, sort of business or management culture, uh, means that there are things that are, that I think. Sometimes unhelpful in the way that people think about safety sometimes. So I think it would be useful to talk about some of those.

[00:08:24] So one is that kind of this idea that if you can create a relatively safe work environment that psychologically psychological safety will appear. So if we're not sexually harassing each other and being openly discriminatory and falling off the scaffolding, boom, psychological stuff, But in actual fact, and if you think about sort of how we're defining it, it's quite a specific description of a, of an interpersonal level of risk-taking. And so it takes hard work to build psychologically safe teams and work environments, and it takes a lot of focus, a lot of dedication and a lot of effort. So it's a much more than just good intent if we're all kind of good guys and we're all not being kind of just really awful to each other, it takes a lot more than that.

[00:09:09] Pia: So there's like a hygiene level, isn't that really like, not getting drunk on a team work do and making an inappropriate move towards somebody That's not psychologically

[00:09:19] Jess: not psychological safety, you know, that's bare minimum expectation, which is, which is kind of a world of. And in fact, you know, the researchers who were looking at psychological safety, you would say it's actually quite rare to find really genuinely psychologically safe teams is quite rare. Because it, is it's almost counterintuitive to our natural instincts in a lot of ways.

[00:09:40] Pia: Is it politeness? Do people need to feel like they need to be polite and protect each other's feelings? And so we can't really talk up.

[00:09:47] Jess: That's a great question. And, and I think one of the other really important myths is that it is about being nice and it is about avoiding. And I find this one interesting, because the way that I conceptualize psychological safety, it's almost the opposite. We're not talking about environments where people agree with each other all the time, in fact, we're talking about environments where people very openly challenge and where they willingly step into healthy debate and discussion and they disagree and they push each other and they have the tough conversations and they step into the difficult situations header. Which is absolutely not about feeling comfortable.

[00:10:26] It's in many ways, it's about being willing and feeling safe enough to step into those uncomfortable or those places of discomfort in the conversations that, that you're having with your teams and with your leaders.

[00:10:39] There was a really nice quote by Shane snow in an article that was published in Forbes, where he said safety is not the same as comfort and disagreement is not the same as day. And I love that because I think it really highlights how psychological safety and niceness and not the same, the goal here is not to make people comfortable, but the goal is to make people safe enough to be uncomfortable.

[00:11:01] Dan: That's a great distinction. I can imagine the Jess. I mean, if we look at the past of corporate culture, it's been, it's been really unsafe actually, if I think about the, um, via my own journey and, and those are people I know it's sort of it's, it's. Built to be unsafe. So it, has there been an overcorrection, is there a danger of overcorrection maybe the people sort of see that and say, well, actually I'm not going to be like that. And I'm just going to be really nice. And you've sort of missed that more nuanced area that you're talking about. 

[00:11:31] Jess: Yeah, it's a good question, Dan. I don't know if it's an overcorrection or a misunderstanding. So, I, I don't know if it's because people are trying to over-correct or whether they think that that's, what's required of them to get to psychological safety. And I think, another one of the big myths, which might sort of talk to this is that, to have psychological safety in an organization, I have to let go of my standards of performance excellence, or I have to lower my performance standards, and again, you know, I find this interesting. 

[00:12:01] If you think about psychological safety and performance standards, they're kind of two parallel, equally important, but distinct, um, elements of, of an organization in a workplace. And we need both of them. We absolutely need both of them. And rather than psychological safety being about lowering performance den, What you're trying to do by creating an environment that is psychologically safe is create and enable the behaviors that will ultimately drive higher performance.

[00:12:29] Dan: I was going to say that was the Amy and Vinson study, I guess. Wasn't it. The, those that those two were bolted together, the high performance and

[00:12:37] Jess: Absolutely. And you know, she sort of talks about if you have hyper high psychological safety and low performance standards, that's just an apathy zone. You know, that's not what we're striving. We want them to be both high, which is the sort of high-performance and the learning zone. So we wanting people to be curious and ask questions and challenge each other to innovate and solve problems differently and have healthy conflict, which enables all of this which ultimately then enables high performance 

[00:13:04] Pia: when you were saying that I was thinking about. We've all come from our very first squad, which is the family that we grew up in. 

[00:13:12] Jess: Yes. 

[00:13:13] Pia: And, um, and we learned don't we, we learn what that safety looks like in the relationship and the dynamics know it's very complicated then when you're coming together in the workplace and what works for, for historically, like what used to work in my family isn't necessarily gonna work in yours, 

[00:13:31] Jess: I think one of the other sort of myths or misconceptions about psycho psychological safety is that it is at the, the level of the, of the enterprise or the organization in actual fact. It's quite yet. You know, you talk about the family peer. And I think there's some lovely ways to think about psychological safety in the family and it is quite intimate. And so psych safety actually exists much more at the level of the team. So the people that you are working with and communicating with in a regular, in a regular way, more than at the organization level. So you will see within a single organization, different pockets of psychological safety within different, and it's dynamic, it's fluid, it's it changes, unfortunately, it's not a check. The box, psych safety is done off. We go. it changes as teams change the dynamics in the teams change. As people in the team change themselves, the dynamics in the team change. So teams who've got very low psychological safety with, with deliberate and focused attention can absolutely build that up over time. And similarly teams that are high in psychological safety can have it lost in an instant, if something significant happens or it can be chipped away over time. Like you mentioned those microaggressions peer that cheaper way of a time. So it's fluid, it's moving and it's talked about a lot as, as the kind of never-ending job of the leader, but I think I would add to that, that I think it's also the responsibility of the team, I think everybody plays a role, not just the leader. Yes. They play an important role, but everyone in the team, I think has a responsibility to sort of hold this and work towards building this climate for, for themselves and their their peers.

[00:15:08] Pia: In my experience, working with teams. It's a lot easier to say the word psychological safety than it is to do it. It's a very deliberate act. And we were talking about principles, lie playing the ball, not the person because we can become personal and that's not going to improve. So how can you have that debate? You know, one of the questions that sits in, in Spotify is straight talking without offense done. When you and I were in a team where that didn't exist and we were all being awfully nice and thought we were being in a lovely culture, but the performance wasn't matched to it. And we actually had to have the conversation together. We need to have a different conversation.

[00:15:48] Jess: Absolutely. Yes.

[00:15:50] Pia: prefaced everything that when we were going to say something, it was potentially contentious or uncomfortable. As you said, we talk about this is straight talking without offense. And then everyone be like, Okay, 

[00:16:02] Jess: Okay, we're ready. 

[00:16:03] Pia: way. We're ready

[00:16:04] Dan: Strapping 

[00:16:05] where, uh, where

[00:16:05] we're going to have this. Yeah. And then afterwards, well, that was straight talking. Was it without events is the question, but yeah, but it gave us a language. Doesn't it. To, uh, to talk about 

[00:16:14] Jess: it's really interesting because we do a lot of work with teams that, that we kind of see as being stuck in harmony. There's a lot of respect. There's a lot of care, people are nice to each other. Everyone gets along, but there's something getting in the way of them being able to feeling comfortable to really step into that, that challenging dialogue or that conflict or that disagreeing, and the result of that is that they get stuck and they don't get the best from each other. They don't get the best from the team. They're not innovating. They're not performing at their best.

[00:16:42] Pia: And I remember somebody said to me many years ago, what percentage do you have to contribute? In a relationship for it to be fulfilling in terms of communication. So not very good at masters, Dan would attest to. And so that was 50, 50, you know, they do 50, I do 

[00:16:58] Dan: that seems reasonable. 

[00:16:59] Pia: as it makes a hundred, I thought I was so like, whew, got that one. Oh no, there's a no, if you want a hundred percent back, you have to give a hundred percent. 

[00:17:08] Jess: Yeah. 

[00:17:09] Pia: And what that means is, is that level of commitment to that site. You got to you can't, you can't hang back. Because you frightened of what's necessarily going to happen because everybody else will hang back. So it is that that's that high level. Cause I would imagine if you've got high, psychological safety, you're going to have a lot of trust in the team as well. Is that, does that come with it? 

[00:17:29] Jess: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the difference between psych safety and trust is that generally speaking trust is between sort of two, two people or two, two entities. Whereas psychological safety is kind of trust within a team. And so I think that's important to call out peer because you might have two people in a team who trust each other. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the team has psychological safety. It means that those two have a strong connection and strong trust, so it's kind of trust, but at a group level.

[00:18:00] So, you know, it's, it's not, it's not easy to build. It's about more than good intent. It's not about being nice and being comfortable. It's actually about enabling people to step into the discomfort. it drives performance standards. It doesn't lower them. And I guess just that. It's intimate, it exists at the level of a team, not the organization and it's fluid. 

[00:18:19] Dan: I must say, as you've been going through. I think I must still have some scar tissue from some of my corporate

[00:18:25] Pia: you're going to give me 

[00:18:26] Dan: didn't have psychological safety. 

[00:18:27] Pia: get, have I getting, am I going to get feedback at this point on air? 

[00:18:33] Dan: It'll be all fair. Don't worry. Don't worry. It'll happen. No, but looking back to some of my corporate life, you know, it, it did some of those things I was thinking, wow, I was so far from that. And actually it did evoke a reaction in me and I, and, and, um, Going back to those parties. What is happening to us as humans when we are not psychologically safe? 

[00:18:54] Jess: One of the things that's that I find quite interesting about psychological safety is that in a number of ways, it's actually quite unnatural for us to engage in the sorts of behaviors that, that a psychologically safe environment is asking us to. So, if we think we're kind of evolutionarily programmed for impression manner, So largely unconsciously, we are constantly adapting and modifying our behavior in response to how we think we're being received by others, which is also not how we're actually being received well it's but it's how we think we're being received by others. We are constantly moderating our behavior and that's because we want to be part of the in group, we want to be part of the tribe, part of the herd. It's the safest place to be. And so, we don't want to go to work and look stupid and disruptive and ignorant and argumentative because those things generate that, that social rejection in that social threat. 

[00:19:51] And what we know from the neuroscience and there's a lot of neuroscience, some real science about this, but what we know is that our brain experiences that social rejection, that sort of interpersonal threat in the same way that we experienced physical threat, even life and death threat. You know, there was even a really cute study done quite a while back now, where they showed that people playing an online computer game where they thought they were playing with real people and they weren't, they were playing a computer, but they thought they were playing with real people and they just had to throw a ball back and forth between them.

[00:20:22] And when the computer stopped throwing them, the ball, their brain activated in the same way as physical pain. you know, So our brains feel physically hurt when the ball doesn't get thrown to us.

[00:20:34] Pia: Is that rejection? 

[00:20:35] Jess: That's that social rejection. Yeah. So it was a, it was a ball game between three people. And at one point the computer stops throwing it to the, to the person. They just throw it back and forth between themselves.

[00:20:45] Pia: It brings back these sort of slightly traumatic memories of when you're in the under eight netball team and you didn't, and you didn't, get chosen, you know, when he used to be lined up. I well, actually I used to do it because I was, a PE teacher. So I used to make them all light up and there was always somebody that didn't get peaked. So. 

[00:21:02] Jess: yeah. 

[00:21:03] Dan: It was always the ginger lad that couldn't play football. That was the, and it was me. I'm still, I'm still suffering to

[00:21:10] Jess: Well, that's when your brain feels that his pain as it's the same area of the brain that lights up as if someone kicked you. And so if you think about that how kind of threatening that is for us as, uh, as human beings, that social rejection, it sends us into a, into a fight or flight response.

[00:21:27] And so when we experienced that fight or flight response, essentially what that does is that shuts down the parts of the brain that are responsible for all of our higher order thinking. You know, so our working memory, our abstract reasoning, critical insight, innovation learning, you know, collaboration, problem solving all of those brain functions get shut down when we're in that fight or flight state.

[00:21:50] Pia: I'm going to ask this one. What's abstract reasoning?

[00:21:52] Jess: I started research. So kind of looking for patterns and identifying, uh, different nonverbal patterns.

[00:21:57] Pia: Right. So the bit the sort of, uh, the higher order things rather than the Berry basics. so, that that eye gets tired. That can't work as well. Then when we're in that fight or flight, 

[00:22:07] Jess: That's right. And if you think about the sorts of work that, that, you know, that the people that we work with tend to do this is very problematic. So for organizations who are relying on knowledge, intensive work and knowledge, intensive workers who are, you know, trying to solve complex problems in new ways, in interdependent relationships with other people in complex and changing environments, all of that thinking is the thinking that we need them to have, to be able to do. But these feelings of social threat and social rejection, essentially shut them down through our fight or flight 

[00:22:40] Dan: It's so severe in terms of performance, but, uh, and, and presumably on long-term health of, of our teammates and the people around us in a sustained imagine a sustained state, like that would have an impact on people's health and wellbeing in the long term? 

[00:22:56] Jess: Absolutely. There's heaps of research on the impact of sustained kind of stress, um, and sort of elevated fight or flight reactivity. And in fact, some of the research shows that the more time you spend in the fight or flight state, the easier you will get there. So that part of the brain actually grows over time, like a muscle. As you use that muscle more and more and more, it grows. And as it grows, it's more easily activated. So it's a very unhelpful loop that we create for ourselves by staying in that state and absolutely things like cortisol and the stress hormones are known to contribute to a whole range of physical health as well as mental health.

[00:23:34] Pia: And is that the same as when certain situations happen, you feel yourself being triggered, is that a similar type of thing? You know, You can actually feel like almost like in the core of you, you can feel your. Judd or you can feel your heart rate quicken or you can get all sweaty. There, there actually is a physical response. I think you said that before, 

[00:23:54] Jess: There's a very physical response because quite literally, our body is a brain and our body is preparing us to fight. Well runaway at top speed pretty much, and so, in addition to all of the impacts on our thinking and our brain, absolutely it triggers impacts on our digestive system. It triggers impacts on our respiratory system. It sends blood to our limbs so that we can run or fight it's a whole body experience.

[00:24:18] Dan: It puts a huge responsibility on all of us, doesn't it in the workplace. And particularly people who see themselves in a, in a leadership role, but what, so how it's clearly something that we want to have? How do you, how'd you go about bringing psychological safety to the people around you?

[00:24:35] Jess: Again, you know, I think because it is somewhat unnatural, you know, it's a natural response to. Um, admit our mistakes to not ask questions, not ask for help, because that keeps us safe. And so I think just kind of acknowledging that. And first of all, just understanding this is actually tough, it's tough for us to do as individuals and it's tough for us to build within organizations, and it requires that quite deliberate and quite specific focused effort and attention. And I think Pia said earlier, just telling someone that what, what you say and will, will not be used against you does not a make them believe it or B make it true. And I think that, that's the other thing, you know, as, as, as a person, we are all imperfect as well. So we might really want to build psychological safety in our teams, but it's hard for us to do that too, because that means we actually have to be willing and able to, to take on what we're asking them to, to give, and so I think it is, it's just worth sort of acknowledging that it's hard. It's it will, it can be hard. It can be hard work, and that's okay. And that we're all imperfect in that.

[00:25:36] But Amy Edmondson outlines kind of a three stage process in her book in the fearless organization. And she goes into lots of detail in there and talks about the different sort of leadership behaviors in each of these stages. But I thought I'd just sort of highlight, um, what that process looks like here and sort of think about that a little bit. So the first is really about setting the stage and I think, you know, in my mind, this is really about building.

[00:26:00] The kind of business case or, or building the case for psychological safety. And so this is about acknowledging quite overtly that this is uncertain work. This is complex work, you know, there are going to be mistakes made. There are going to be things that we don't know, that's the expectation, you know, that's not the risk, it's the expectation.

[00:26:20] And particularly thinking about failure, what is the role of failure? What is the view of failure in this team? And the fact that failure will be accepted , but in many cases probably expected and sort of setting that as again, the norm rather than the exception. And then finally thinking about the, you know, the purpose, so really highlighting, what is the purpose of what we're trying to do here? What's the meaning? You know, why would we ask people to step into this uncomfortable space? What is important about them doing that? What's at stake if, if we don't. So if we think about her research study in the nineties, she was looking at medication error rate in hospitals. I mean, what's at stake. There is people's lives, so that's pretty significant. And you know, she, she has shown in numerous research studies that even in life or death stakes, people are reluctant to report mistakes.

[00:27:09] Pia: And they're frightened to do so because they are going to show somebody up or because they're going to get into trouble themselves?

[00:27:17] Jess: Yeah, that's right. So they've shown that people reporting their own mistakes and reporting other mistakes that they've seen. It's the same, there's a reluctance. People don't want to do it. And you know, it comes back to that kind of the fear of the sort of social rejection and we do have a tendency to overplay. Immediate consequences and downplay future ones. So, like immediately I might get fired if I've given the wrong amount of insulin to this diabetic patient and they'll probably be fine at least for some time, you know? So, so the immediate danger to me in that moment the way our brain works, it seems bigger. It seems bigger than a possible life-threatening risk. So really sort of thinking about what's at stake. 

[00:27:59] And, you know, your point earlier around the family and sort of creating psychological safety in the family, you know, thinking about that too. So you've got a, you've got a toddler who spills a glass of milk on the carpet. Now, if they don't feel psychologically safe at home, they're not going to tell you that there's filter glass of milk on the carpet. It's not going to stop them, spilling the glass of. But it will stop them telling you. And so what's at stake. There is that you're not going to have an opportunity to clean that up before your whole house smells like rotten eggs. So thinking about what is at stake here, why are we asking you to step into this and really trying to connect people into that kind of meaning and purpose.

[00:28:32] The second step then is really about actively inviting. Participation in this process and some role modeling. So generally that sort of starts with the leader, being able to show some humility, being able to set the scene a bit around, these are some of my gaps, this is the stuff I don't know, everything. I need you to bring it to me. I don't have all the answers. These are the mistakes that I've made and really start role modeling that, and then actively seeking the information. So finding ways to be. Build processes build structure to allow people to give you the information that you're asking for. So you know, that might be sort of informal conversations or team discussions. You might just really prefer. Someone gave me a challenge. Someone give me feedback. You might sort of draw conversation out that way you might set up more formal structures. You might have focus groups, or you might have kind of monthly workshops, you might have mistakes Monday. Where there's a meeting where everyone has to come and bring him a steak and you put them on the table and you workshop them, but whatever's going to work for your people. You need to really enable that people are just going to start automatically coming to you with all these mistakes and questions and half cooked ideas. You have to enable that

[00:29:41] Pia: That seems pretty dependent on the, the leader role modeling. And, and that takes quite a high degree of humility, like in your corporate experience, is that harder to do as well? Is that tough for leaders who have maybe been developed under the view that they have to be the technical expert? They have to know all the answers. They've got to be it. And so to actually admit. But I don't have all the answers and I might need your help here. And these are the things I don't do as well, who that could be that could be quite difficult for some people to do.

[00:30:16] Jess: Yeah. And I guess it's kind of this, there's two things I'll say on that one is that, and we've worked together over a number of years payer, and I feel like we've been talking about that being the time for a new kind of leadership for a while now, we've been talking about the, this new kind of leadership that is about vulnerability. That is about being really self-aware and understanding their impact on others. That is about role modeling the imperfections , of human beings and sort of making that okay. That I think that's worked at organizations have been doing and trying to do for a while now, which tells us that, because if it wasn't tough, we'd probably be doing the next new kind of leader, which I'm not sure what that's going to be, but I think we're still working on this one. 

[00:31:00] So, you know, I think it is hard. I think people are aware. I think there's more awareness about the need for this kind of leadership, but I guess what I'd add to that is that those leaders need to have the psychological safety in their intimate teams to feel that they can do this stuff too. And that kind of leads into, I guess, the third stage in Amy's process, which is about monitoring your response and making sure that you are responding productively.

[00:31:27] So, you know, this is really about walking the talk, if you've invited feedback, but then you get defensive. You know, If you've asked people to ask more questions, but then you get irritated because they won't stop asking questions, you know, if you've asked people to share ideas, but you shut them down. Those moments, they kill the psychological safety, they reduce, people's willingness to bring those things to you. And so not only as a leader, do you have the challenge of having to sort of create the space for this to happen, but you have to be able to actually hold it when it comes, you know, when people bring it, you have to be able to hold it.

[00:32:01] And I don't think that's easy. And I think two things on that, again, one is, as I said, those leaders need psychological safety in their team. And with their leaders to, to feel that they can kind of try and experiment and fail and get back up and that's okay too. And I think that's also good role modeling to say, I'm trying to do something different. You know, we, we're kind of, we're trying to bring psychological safety to this team. That means that I want you to you guys to interact with me and each other in a different way. And it's probably going to feel a bit uncomfortable and we're probably going to make mistakes, but we're going to repair them and we're going to get back up and that's okay. And that's part of the process.

[00:32:34] Dan: I think in my first big management role, let's say my boss in that situation, whenever he came to our annual reviews, he'd say, you know, what are your development areas? And I was expected to show some humility, but I hadn't seen any from him at any point. So it was in a context of how do I, how do I phrase these development areas with. Actually saying in the thing, particularly negative about myself, that my care, because, because the, the model of leadership in that organization was to be the, that old model we're trying to shift. But to be honest with you, I then rolled that down into my team. If I look about that I didn't sort of create a gap there. I just thought, well, that's the model of leadership and it was my early leadership role. So I just rolled that down. So the impact can, as you say, roll down from one to another while psychological safety is in the team, it can, it can ripple through organizations. I think.

[00:33:26] Jess: Absolutely. I think also, it can kind of go the other way too. So, you know, if we're asking leaders to be vulnerable and show humility and do all these things, how that's received by that. Will impact on their level of psychological safety doing that too. You know, if, if their teams start showing less respect or whatever it might be, if there's that kind of social rejection or social threat in, in reverse, that has the same impact.

[00:33:51] And I guess that's why I say why. A lot of the time we talk about the role of the leader in building psychological safety. I do think we have to look to the whole team to hold some accountability and responsibility for engaging in these behaviors and in this kind of, you know, that, that language around giving each other, the benefit of the doubt

[00:34:07] Dan: How has COVID and the sort of, you know, the sort of move to more remote working, let's say if we look forward, which is going to be a permanent change, I suspect how has remote working impacted all of this?

[00:34:22] Jess: There's a few things that I'll say about, about that. So I guess, because psychological safety is such a relational construct, it's really not surprising that that remote work for any reason, whether that be because of COVID or for any other reason that that people are working remotely more and more, um, it just makes it harder to build. You know, it is, it is harder to, to kind of jump in and say, what's on your mind in, in sort of practical ways just to kind of come off mute. Can you hear me? Are you still on mute? You know, no, one's looking at me, I'm waving. And then by the time someone says, oh, Jess, did you have something to say, it feels too hard. So just kind of even practically those moments to sort of interject and share and just kind of genuinely, involve yourself in a conversation can be more difficult.

[00:35:08] Um, you know, we don't see a lot of people's body language and we know that so much of what we get from communication more than the words comes from people's body language. And we only get most people from the shoulders up, you know, in this remote world. So we're missing an enormous amount of communication information there. Um, and partly that also means that it's really hard to gauge how you're being received by others. And so if you think about our poor little brains, wondering if someone's going to throw me the ball or not, it's harder to figure out in a remote context if they are. And so this, you know, we're sort of primed for this social rejection, I think when we're not getting that, that, um, that relational validation from people in the room.

[00:35:46] And then I suppose if you put the COVID overlay onto that, not everybody but a lot of people at the moment are operating at just a higher kind of base level of threat and fear than they would normally be operating at. And so if you think about psychological safety as a tool, in many ways to reduce threat, psychological threat and threat state, we need it more than ever just to get back to baseline, and there's complexities in that. So the, the line between work and home has never been more blurred and that has some lovely elements to it. I think it's been a lovely reminder that we are all human and we all have the chaos and craziness that's going on in the background behind the sort of blurred fields, but the flip side of that is that people do feel quite exposed and vulnerable in a lot of ways, which again, sort of thinking about what's the what's, people's kind of baseline, they're traveling in relation to their threat state, um, at the moment.

[00:36:44] And then the other thing, which we're sort of spending a lot of time talking to leaders about at the moment is this these kind of micro interact. So a lot of the conversations that I think can be very powerful in building psychological safety are often the conversations that happen outside the room, so that the conversations that happened in the hallway, the water cooler conversations that happen after the meeting, it's when someone sort of pats you on the back and says, Hey, thank you so much for raising that question or raising that issue. That was really important. And I'm really glad that you did. Or it's when someone says, Hey, that would have been really tough admitting that you got that wrong, but thank you for doing that because now we can do X, Y, Z, and we can fix it. Those conversations are very powerful in terms of building psychological safety, but they don't tend to happen in the room. And so what that means now in this remote Zoom environment is that they're largely not happening.

[00:37:37] Pia: And I wonder whether we are, we're actually falling into. Some pretty bad habits, back channels texting one another, because you wouldn't do that in a room. You would actually, because you've because it would be so obvious that you're doing it, but you can do it without anyone else knowing, but there is two circular conversations going on. One about what you're talking about. And then the other one is talking about the person That's talking about that. that they're poor habits. We start to lose respect for people when we're doing that. And we're not able to actually front up and, and have a straight conversation. And, and then the other one that I was thinking about too, is psych safety and our kids, you know, social media platforms. We seem to sort of be able to make huge judgements there, and make people feel quite vulnerable, even if it's around how many likes they've got or whether that's what engagement is that Scott, but a brain can play all sorts of tricks with you about

[00:38:37] Dan: It's like the ball being thrown to you. Isn't it a like on social media? It's a,

[00:38:41] Jess: Well there's been some very kind of interesting and scary research actually around the brain impact of things like likes on social media platforms and how incredibly rewarding that is for our brain, to get those likes. And so you can imagine what kind of behaviors that that generate is. It's really problematic and the feelings of social rejection. That's right down that people aren't throwing me the ball. I don't have. Is incredibly damaging in that platform because you're also not getting any of the other stuff, it's quite binary it's either like, or not like, you know, you're also not getting the smile or the warm energy from another person it's just very stark and so quite impactful, quite scary.

[00:39:24] Dan: At the moment it's getting podcast listeners for me that that's the, that's where I get my kicks. Uh, it's a bit sad, but there it is. Um, but I think I'm really interested in this, this one just as well, because I think there's doing a lot of work with teams that one-to-one connection piece that I there's this sort of micro interaction. I've certainly been in teams where we've lost that all of my dealings with has with a team level, but actually then I think, oh, I'll say I've never actually, I haven't actually spoken to that person except in a team context. And those one-on-one connections, I think, are those the chance to have those micro-actions, I've had to be much more deliberate about that and something I'm still working on, but it's certainly had an, a positive

[00:40:02] Jess: yes. Yeah, I think, and I think that's right down and as you would walk into a meeting room with PBR, Hey, I haven't seen you for ages and how are you going? What's up. It's just that stuff, which, which doesn't happen. You know, there's actually something quite, it's quite disruptive around the way virtual meetings start and end. It's very stark. It's like, it's on and now it's a black screen, whereas that's not how typical kind of human interactions happen. There's a flow in, and there's a flow out. And it's often in those flow in and flow out times that we are just having those relational times with people that is lost.

[00:40:37] Pia: So, how can you manufacture that in a virtual world then? I mean, is it, you don't want it to feel forced, you know, let, let's have the rapport building session.

[00:40:46] Jess: So we're just going to make T meetings 15 minutes longer so we can wander in at the start and wander out at the end. 

[00:40:51] I mean, I think that's the challenge for leaders and teams right now, peer. I mean, I don't, I don't know the answer and I think, I actually think you need to be thinking creatively about the answer to this question for your team and your people and what's going to work.

[00:41:06] So for some teams and some organizations, there's a lot of social activity happening in and around work at the moment. So they have trivia nights all the time. They do wine matching Zoom meetings. They might have fitness classes, all sorts of stuff happening, which is really about creating that, those interpersonal relationships and that connection. But for other organizations or other people, that's, that's just not okay. For them. And so I really think that's the one of the key calls to action for leaders and teams right now is to think about how do we bring some of these water cooler conversations back into the room in a way that's going to work for us?

[00:41:40] Pia: And for some people that's going to be easier than others. I would imagine it's going to be more natural for some, but I think everything you've talked about is, that all this work has to be deliberate. It's got to be consciously thought about.

[00:41:50] Dan: There's quite a spectrum of a bit of bass ability here, but I guess we've all got to do what we can, but, um, just there's so much there to digest. How would you, could you sum it up for us? Could you in a few takeaways, what, what, uh, how would you boil all of this, this goodness down that would need to things that our listener can take away? 

[00:42:08] Jess: I think the first is kind of thinking about what psychological safety is and isn't. So it's not about being nice and lowering performance standards. It's, it's not about doing it once and checking a box and it's done, and it's more than just the absence of danger in the workplace.

[00:42:24] Psychological safety is really this kind of ongoing and dynamic process of building a belief in the team, a shared belief in the team that it's safe to do things like ask questions, share half-baked ideas, raise concerns, report mistakes without the. Of ridicule rejection or retribution.

[00:42:43] I think the second key takeaway is that we are imperfect, we're all imperfect. That's kind of the whole point of this. We are imperfect and we need to make that. That's kind of what psychological safety is trying to do. And so I just think for teams and leaders who are embarking on this journey to build psychological safety, just to sort of hold that as we are gonna make mistakes sometimes as we do this and that we are going to repair from that and that that's okay too, and that's part of the process.

[00:43:14] And then I think, thirdly, just off the back of, of the conversation that we were just having, I really think that the call to action now in this sort of, you know, remote and COVID world is for leaders and teams to get really proactive, and I think really creative in thinking about how we can bring these micro interactions, how we can bring these water cooler conversations back into the virtual room 

[00:43:37] Pia: My key takeaway from what you've said is that we're human and there's a lot of work to do, but it really matters. It really matters the impact of not. Of not focusing on this can be devastating for individuals. And if the tide is rising a little bit around us, in terms of intensity and pressure, we probably need to put more focus on this, not less. 

[00:43:59] Dan: And it has a real edge to this, both from the point of view of not doing it leads to poor performance outcomes and also, poor human outcomes. So I think it's something we will have to look at and we've had loads of food for thought today, Jess. So thank you very much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on when.

[00:44:16] Jess: Pleasure. Thanks for having me on guys.

[00:44:18] Dan: Well, that was so full of useful. And I think incredibly pragmatic advice. Don't UPR. Dunno. What, what 

[00:44:29] Pia: she's. 

[00:44:30] Dan: of that? She's 

[00:44:31] Pia: The doctor is a legend, absolute legend, 

[00:44:37] who, if I feel better already, I feel safer knowing the doctors around, um, I thought it was, I mean, there was so much there, but w w something I really took out was this is psychological safety is simple, but not easy. And, and that doesn't mean that we don't do it. It just means that actually probably you've got to pay a bit more attention to it, and it requires some deliberate thought and seeing the dynamics now, particularly if we've got more people, either working in a hybrid or remote working, we can get all this, all this mess can happen for in terms of communication. So we need to be really clear. There's you talked about those there's. Micro interactions. And in those migrated, aren't going to get out. we can lose it, we decide, oh, and M is that happening? And then, we can make two plus two could equal five, you know, in our heads. and that isn't and so we need to be, we need to Really create an open space. And then the other part attached to that is that that needs the leader to leave yeah, that is a role modeling situation. You can't expect the team to do it and you 

[00:45:47] not to do it So. 

[00:45:48] Dan: to that. See that, that person doesn't it. Yeah. Yeah. I must say when she talked about people walking into meetings, I had this horrible thought that I was in a, like a nightmare, like a fever dream that I was in a meeting with my pajama bottoms on, in a, in an office. But that I had to quickly put that away. Remember that 

[00:46:05] Pia: I was just as most of your Zoom.

[00:46:07] Dan: Exactly. 

[00:46:08] Pia: I, you spent most of this summer. I 

[00:46:10] think 

[00:46:10] Dan: meeting. No, it had to put that on 

[00:46:12] Pia: that. 

[00:46:13] Dan: I thought that was really fascinating. And how deliberate and how much investment you have to put into this? Um, this subject though, it was really interesting cause this, the, the, the, the takeaway for me was, was also around how it, how safe, psychological safety effects, cognitive, cognitive function. My, and something happened 

[00:46:31] Pia: A bit, a bit like how you're trying, trying to speak now 

[00:46:33] is that cognitive function, is it. 

[00:46:35] Dan: do, trying to think of too many things. Um, but my, my daughter this week came back from, from work. So I was talking to a friend of hers about her work. And, um, she said that this friend of hers has two bosses basically. And one of them in summary doesn't make her feel unsafe.

[00:46:52] And the other one makes her feel safe. And she said just off the, just without any cue from, from anyone, the thing is. Boss a is there I make more mistakes? And I thought, wow, that is so interesting. And Jessica touched on that, that how, when, when you, aren't feeling unsafe that your cognitive function drops and has all kinds of other effects on your health. But, that was really fascinating to me. So if you want performance, this is not an option. The initial study about from the.hospital sort of spelled that out. So that was my big, big takeaway. I 

[00:47:24] Pia: Yeah. 

[00:47:25] Dan: interesting.

[00:47:25] Pia: It's so subtle, but you're in that sort of, you know, you're in that mental scramble, it's like your sort of tossing around your mental tag, your tele, trying to sort of like get all these brain is going too much going on inside and then you drop your drop plate. So, you know, you did it is that we've all heard that and it's oh God don't, it's like when you're skiing, don't hit the tree. Don't hit the tree and

[00:47:50] you hit the tree. it's the same. 

[00:47:52] Dan: Yeah. And you're double guessing yourself all the time. What can I say here? What, and weighing up risks and so on. So I thought that was really, really fascinating.

[00:48:01] Um, brilliant. Well, I'm hoping that I'm sure there's a lot there for everyone to, to go after our resort. Uh, for this show, we'll have lots of links and useful stuff for people to go and see as well on spotify.net. Just go there and click on the we, not me podcast.

[00:48:16] Our next show pier is all about sales teams. I'm really looking forward to this. I've worked with a lot of sales teams in my life and they can be very interesting Beasties.

[00:48:26] Pia: Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait. Is an Anna Britain, a guest is our, is our guests double-barreled names. Oh, that's that's She does. 

[00:48:36] Dan: So we'll have a good exploration of that.

[00:48:38] So if you've enjoyed this show, please do pass it on and share the we, not me love, um, we don't meet, it's produced by Mark Steadman. And that is all for this time, but we'll see you next time. So it's a goodbye from me. 

[00:48:50] Pia: And it's a goodbye for me. See you soon.