Nigel Cassidy (NC): Ominous silences in meetings, too much comfortable compromise or a blame culture, afraid of being ignored or even mocked if you speak up. Welcome to your psychologically unsafe workplace. I'm Nigel Cassidy and this is the award-winning CIPD podcast. Yes, we are now award-winning. We've won Best Podcast at the Memcom Awards for Professional Bodies and the like. The judges praised us for our inviting listener experience and making a significant contribution to the discussion of work and HR. So, thank you very much indeed for that. Now, psychological safety. The concept has become pretty familiar, yet McKinsey found only around a quarter of leaders actually try to create psychological safety for their teams. Over half of employees questioned by Gallup felt venting at work could have negative consequences. So, this month we’re here with ideas and tactics to move the needle on psychological safety. What barriers must you get over? What gains can you expect? Well, with us, only right, we have an actual chartered business psychologist. One with a deep professional and research interest in this area. She’s the founder of Zircon, a talent consulting business and hosts her own Chief Psychology Officer podcast. It's Dr Amanda Potter. Hello.
Amanda Potter (AM): Hi, Nigel. Nice to meet you.
NC: With her, a leadership coach and facilitator, holder of a Master's in Organisational Behaviour, working with the likes of BP, the NHS and the Civil Service. He's also a fitness to practice panel chair for the Nursing and Midwifery Council and sits on complex employment tribunals, it’s Phil Lowe. Hi Phil.
Phil Lowe (PL): Morning, Hi Nigel.
NC: And from the home team let’s welcome CIPD's New Senior Advisor, Future of the People profession, her interests span employee experience and culture change. And she's completing studies for her Master's in Organisational Psychology. It's Theni Paramaguru. Hello.
Theni Paramaguru (TP): Hi, Nigel. It's nice to be here.
NC: So, well, safety or a lack of it. I mean, I'm sure we'll all go psychological in a moment, but I mean, just out of pure nosiness, I just wonder what's the most dangerous place or situation to be in in a situation like this? Any of you might have been in?
AP: Thinking about this question in preparation for this podcast was a really interesting one because it took me back to a time when I had to meet the global CEO of a potential new client. And this CEO had the reputation for making suppliers and senior leaders cry. And he was intimidating and he was determined to create holes in your science knowledge through his questioning. And the stakeholder who took me into that meeting went at lengths to apologise for that interaction because it was such an uncomfortable, rude and threatening situation where this CEO was really trying to trip me up and put me in a really uncomfortable place. The good news is, I'm quite confident as a psychologist having worked for 30 years. And I was also more scared, actually, of my co-director, Sarah, because if I did lose the contract after all the work we'd put in to even get in front of that CEO, she was more terrifying to me. So, he actively went out to make the environment feel psychologically safe. And so, for me, that one interaction was the one that really, really stays with me and has resonated for so many years.
NC: What about you, Phil? What was your most unsafe moment?
PL: Well, yeah, I was kind of thinking back about my experience with psychological safety. And, do you know, for many years, kind of earlier on in my career, I never felt a lack of psychological safety because I was so naive about organisational politics. And I would find myself in all kinds of situations where I'd say things, not realising that this was completely the wrong thing to say to this particular individual who was actually out to undermine me. But it was, I have to say, it was my wife who caused the scales to fall from my eyes once when I was in the middle of composing an email to a client where I'd had some really bad behaviour from a senior person I was dealing with. And I thought, we've got to put this right. And my wife just shook her head and said, don't do that thing where you feel you have to give them feedback. You need this job. And that, in a nutshell, is psychological lack of safety, I think.
NC: OK. And Theni, you were saying your life has been surprisingly smooth or you've managed to avoid such danger.
TP: I did say that before, but now hearing the other two examples, I can definitely think of some. I think, in particular, where I felt it most, just on a general level, is where I feel that someone's encouraging a sense of competition between me and my colleagues. And I think sometimes some businesses do that actively, in order to kind of, what they think, encourage performance, they think if they're competing, they'll do better. But actually, for me personally, and I think others, and we're learning this more and more, it actually can stifle good performance and stifle people from being able to bring their best to work.
NC: Absolutely. Excellent. So, Amanda, I mean, clearly having a psychologically safe workplace is good PR. Nobody wants an unsafe one. But there is so many definitions around, aren't there? What for you is the most helpful definition? What we actually mean by psychological safety?
AP: It's a great question. And before I answer, I'd love to make the point that Theni has just said about competition, because we have actually identified in organisations that companies that have KPIs and reporting measures and create a sense of internal competition have the lowest levels of psychological safety. But what's really interesting from our research is that psychological safety, we all know when we're talking about it, is an environment where people feel confident and comfortable to speak up, to ask questions, to innovate, and to learn from their mistakes, to share and openly learn from their mistakes.
NC: Phil, do you think psychological safety is misunderstood? I mean, a lot of people might think it's just about, you know, just forgiving mistakes. You know, as long as we all learn something, it doesn't matter if people make mistakes. So, in a way, it's about what it isn't, isn't it?
PL: Yes. I mean, one thing that it definitely isn't is about making people just feel fluffy and happy and, you know, like the world is a great place. I mean, in a way, I'd love to have all organisations feeling like that, but it doesn't tend to get the work done. You've got to think of it as a kind of dilemma between challenge and support. The teams and organisations with a lack of psychological safety are generally where there is high challenge. And in fact, Amanda's research, I think, bears this out. High challenge, but low support. So, in other words, you know, it's all about competition and potential punishment. The danger is, if you think that psychological safety is switching to the opposite, low challenge and high support. You get a kind of warm bath, which is, OK, you've made a mistake. Don't worry about it. That's fine. Just carry on. I'll sort it out. I'll pick up the pieces. And what you somehow need to do, it's a bit like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time but you've actually got to keep the support up for people, care for them as people, while setting high standards and making sure that you're supporting them to deliver those high standards.
NC: OK, I get all that. But, Theni, it is a bit subjective, isn't it? The degree to which any of us might feel free to pipe up at work depends on so many factors and some of them are within ourselves. So, I just wondered if the CIPD itself has any kind of angle on what actually the desirable level of psychological safety looks like in an organisation.
TP: Yeah, well, actually, the CIPD, we did an evidence review on psychological safety and trust, which are both distinct but interrelated concepts. And what they found, one of the most important things in the five drivers that they found were important to encourage psychological safety. And what they found was that psychological safety was the role that leaders and managers had to play as role models to demonstrate that they were really encouraging of people coming forwards. So, there were various ways they could do that. They could do that by providing autonomy to employees to help build trust. They could do that by encouraging constructive feedback and actually listening to that feedback. We've all been in meetings where leaders might encourage questions, but then they shut down the conversation very quickly. So, you can kind of tell when they really want a question and when they don't. So, I think that's really important. And then the other thing that came out in that review as well is also involving employees in the decisions that are going to affect them and that autonomy can also have an effect on wellbeing as well as psychological safety. So ,through these behaviours, there is multiple benefits to be had.
NC: And yet, Amanda, you were telling me beforehand about managers who do all the things on paper that look to create psychological safety, but you say they mess things up.
AP: Well, we have a theory in our organisation around good leadership and strong management and we found very often from our research that even the best leaders, even the best managers don't necessarily create psychologically safe environments, because if you think about those leaders who are pushing the hardest, they're creating relentless environments. Those leaders who are trying to come to the right decision might create very inclusive, collaborative, consensus-driven environments. And so, we are our belief is, actually, the path to hell is paved with great intention, and we have found that even leaders who are very high performing and high potential in terms of their own capability, they're not necessarily creating environments of trust, to Theni’s point, where people are taking accountability and ownership for their decisions, or they're able to build resilient mindsets because of this very relentless, very hardworking environment that they're creating.
PL: Just if I could, just come in on that, actually, because there's some research which an authentic leadership consultancy called Holos have been working with, and I think it came from the Centre for Creative Leadership originally looking at what they call stages of maturity somewhere in the middle, you've got, you've got a dichotomy between independence and interdependence, the kind of independent mindset is, I think, kind of speaking to what Amanda has just been describing, which is the world is competitive. No one's going to help me. I've got to help myself. I've got to go out and sort of get loyalty from people so that I know I'm safe. Then you have the interdependent, the next stage up, which is I can work together collaboratively with people and co-create something really good. And I think, Amanda, what you were just saying just made me think that, you know, nobody gets up in the morning and says, let's see whose life I'm going to make miserable today. But actually, we get up, you know, thinking interdependently, I'm going to be psychologically safe, I'm going to get everybody working together, working collaboratively, and so on. But by the time you get to your morning coffee break, the sort of feral nature of organisations has created a kind of independent mindset in you, which is people are trying to do bad things to me. I better hunker down. I've got to compete. I can't trust anybody. Now, I'm overstating it, of course, for the sake of a short story. But I think that's the trouble. And that's one reason why people who genuinely want to create psychological safety find they trip themselves up and they don't get it done.
AP: I couldn't agree more, actually. And what's really interesting is we work with a major organisation across the UK, a national organisation, who found that their desire to create a highly collaborative workforce resulted in groupthink and consensus-driven cultures, which fundamentally undermined their preparedness to take accountability for decisions and their overall level of psychological safety. So, their capability models were driving the organisation towards this sense of group ownership, where actually what they needed to create was greater sense of accountability. Because otherwise people were deferring up to the chain of command all the time.
NC: I'd like to explore a little bit more how psychological safety kind of works in organisations, Theni. I've seen this sort of chart of four stages, which begin just with basic inclusion and then sort of move forward into sort of learning exchanges, experimenting, making more meaningful contributions, and then being able to challenge people, you know, is the final stage. Can you sort of turn that a bit more into real life? I mean, I just want to understand a bit more of the value, the value of psychological safety.
TP: There's a talk that Matthew Syed gave a number of years ago where he talks about the cultures within industries that where safety is of the utmost importance. So, in that talk, he talks about the health care industry and the aviation industry and this was a number of years ago but a lot of what he said then still resonates and kind of resonates more with the psychologically safety concept. And it also goes a little bit to the point Phil was making at the start around what psychological safety is and what it isn’t because a lot of people think, well, it's all very well, you know, encouraging failure. But actually, if people's lives are at risk, you know, we have to be careful. So, in this example, he compares the aviation industry with the healthcare sector. And in the aviation industry, you've got a culture where if a mistake happens, there is a commitment to really understand why that mistake happens. It's not about the individual that, quote unquote, made the mistake. It's about what were the conditions within environment that led to the mistake? So, they really interrogate what happened and because of that, it's one of the safest industries in the world. So, plane crashes compared to hundreds of years ago are very, very rare. And it's because you've got that black box, that black box is interrogated when a crash happens. Whereas in the healthcare sector, you've got a sense where when a mistake happens, the focus does shift straight away to the individual. And that culture of OK, why did that individual make that mistake? Then leads to people trying to cover up mistakes or deflect blame. So, you've got this blame culture, which means that when mistakes happen, it's much harder to learn from them because people are more focused on protecting their role within that organisation. So, you can see how safety is important in both. But one, where you've got that psychological safe environment, you're able to learn from that mistake. And in one, it could take years and years to uncover. So, safety as a result, as in general health and safety, reduces. So, it's much less about encouraging mistakes, but psychological safety is about accepting that mistakes are going to happen. But how quickly can we learn from them?
NC: Yeah. Does that have any resonance with you, Phil? I know you've worked with people in the National Health Service.
PL: I have. And I generally agree, and I'll come, can I come back to that in a moment? I did also want to say, Theni, that I think it's absolutely right what Matthew Syed says about it. But I think if we look at the very recent examples of what's happened with Boeing, you can see how easily you can lose that. You know, Boeing had a kind of reverse takeover of McDonnell Douglas and a new culture came in that was all about making money, make money, make money. And then you end with a situation where they didn't tell the pilots flying their new plane that they'd fitted a computer that would make it go into a dive in certain situations. So, the pilots didn’t know what to do. And that shows you how powerful I mean, Peter Drucker, the management writer, who said culture eats strategy for breakfast. And I think the Japanese saying, the fish rots from the head is also quite relevant to this, that you get a kind of a new directive from the top and it can undo all the work that you do. The NHS, yes, I mean, I absolutely agree. I’ve worked a lot in the NHS over the last 15 years and it’s a kind of complex. Well, sorry, I’m not saying anything you don’t know if I say it’s a complex organisation but my observation is that I don't think anybody really understands how to make it work and what they do is they fall back on what's the latest model and they implement a new model and then another new model and then another new model. And the people doing the kind of frontline work, dealing with patients and service users, just start to sort of buckle under this relentless pressure. You have a difference, I think, between the people who deal directly with patients and service users, who kind of are motivated clearly just to deliver good care where they can. And then you have the people who are responsible for those people who actually have to deliver stats and numbers and cost savings and things like that. And I think they are the ones who are constantly driven to send down new directives, it just doesn't seem to work from my perspective anyway.
NC: Well, it sort of seems to link back to what Amanda was saying earlier. How then, let's put it back to you, Amanda, how do you get leaders to get their teams to sort of deliver this high performance, while not damaging people's safety.
AP: Do you know what? It really starts with each of those individuals and their resilience and their mindset, because all of the research that we've been doing has found that resilient leaders create safe environments. Decisive leaders also create safe environments, which therefore means that if we are turning up to work with a negative mindset, experiencing negative affect, we are more likely to use negative language, our body language is going to change and the environment, which is psychological safety, it's an environment, it creates a feeling in the room is going to be one of tension. It's going to be one of discomfort, so it very much has to start with each of those individuals, and it has to start with personal awareness and resilience. And so, if we want to create a really good, a positive, psychologically safe environment, we have to learn how to hack the happiness chemicals. Inside our brains, so if we're going back to the neuroscience, we need to work out how can we release more dopamine, the motivation and reward transmitter, serotonin, the mood stabiliser and oxytocin, the love and trust hormone, so that we feel more content, we have more self-belief, we turn up with more self-confidence and we create an environment where other people feel more confident. And therefore, the most important thing is they're therefore more likely to speak up to challenge, to ask questions and to create this environment of safety.
NC: So, in practical terms, I mean, Phil, when you work with managers, you know, looking for promotion, learning to cope in more senior roles. I just wonder how you open their eyes up to all this. I mean, it's like teaching them to listen, not to be autocratic in many ways. I suppose you're sort of teaching them not to behave like they think senior managers ought to.
PL: There are some levels of challenge in actually creating new behaviour that people can use to promote psychological safety. So, if you've got somebody who is genuinely motivated to change their behaviour, who's a natural learner, you can do a lot of great work with them and they'll try stuff out, and then you can come back and talk about it, and so on.
A kind of coaching approach, and that can work. The trouble is that very often the people who are causing a lack of psychological safety are dysfunctional in some way. I mean, I’m using the term mildly, but they don't know they've got bad habits. They don't know what they're doing wrong, and they don't thank you for opening their eyes to it if you're an outsider. And generally speaking, what you have to do is you have to get their boss, doesn't have to be their boss, but somebody who they really respect has got to take them aside and say to them, in effect, look, your behaviour isn't working. And if you can't change your behaviour, there's no future for you here.
AP: I think the habit point is one that's truly interesting and the reason it's interesting is very often the habits come from a good place. For example, leaders who create psychologically unsafe places are often those who create relentless environments because they push hard, they work hard or they look for consistency because they don't want to make a decision that isn't well-approved or doesn't land well. Or they avoid failure because they don't want to make mistakes or they're nice all the time because they want to create an environment where people feel like they're included and they're part of something that is important. But all of those things, so relentless, being overly nice or lacking purpose or too much consistency, all of those things undermine psychological safety but they come from a great place, they come from an intention of trying too hard.
TP: We obviously have those leaders that lack awareness that Phil was talking about that don't necessarily want to or they know they've got a psychologically safe environment and they're happy about that. But as Amanda was talking about a little bit earlier, there's also those leaders with good intentions that do want to create this environment but might not be sure how to and they might be facing a culture where people are used to kind of staying quiet, where there's a lot higher levels of deference, where they actually might underestimate how much effort they need to go into to encourage people to speak up a little bit more.
I know one of my colleagues who was a coach, she worked with a leader that said that almost had to overestimate and really kind of exaggerate when people contributed, to say, oh, thank you, Sarah, so much. That really means a lot, that you could contribute that or say, I really liked it when Matt spoke up about that and challenged me on that. It might sound a bit…
NC: Possibly, I might find that a little bit patronising, perhaps.
TP: Potentially but I think if a leader does it consistently and is able to say, these are the behaviours I want to see, because by just saying, I want everyone to speak up more, people might just be a bit like, oh, I'll wait for them to do it. So, if one person can do it and you can say, by celebrating that, you're saying to the team, this is the behaviour I'm going to be rewarding, and this is what I want to see more of.
NC: And Phil, I love the way you put your hand up so politely just then.
PL: It's because I don't feel psychologically safe. I can't just jump in without fear of retribution. Theni, I know I really agree with what Theni was saying, but I just wanted to pick up on the fact that I don't think it's patronising when it comes from a genuine place and the way, if you're if you're somebody who wants to do more of that behaviour, the way to make sure it comes from a genuine place is to is, you either love this phrase or hate it, but somebody put it as catch them doing something right. If you can say in some detail what I really liked about what you did in that meeting was and then describe it accurately. It's very hard for the person on the receiving end to say, oh, you're just saying that because they can see you've made the effort to see what they've done well. So, that's what you need to do. Now, it's a habit. We're talking about habits and you can use nefarious means to develop a habit. I had a client who used to write in his diary. 10.30am, give someone a compliment. Now, as long as nobody saw his diary, that's absolutely fine. He knew that he would forget. He knew he had to get into the habit, somebody else had a right-hand pocket full of marbles.
PL: And every time they gave somebody a piece of positive feedback, they could transfer one marble into their left pocket. And the idea was by the time they went home, they had a left pocket full of marbles. So, you can, you can use little artificial means to develop it but I think if you do it with, with the right intention, it will come across well and it will have a positive impact.
NC: Theni, I wondered if you could suggest any other things that should be in your toolkit or practices that HR might be able to facilitate to sort of help all this to oil the wheels somewhat.
TP: Yeah, I think the other one which I spoke to a little bit very briefly was around giving employees the say. So, giving them a voice in any change that's about to happen or if an organisation is looking to make change, actually get employees involved from the very beginning because that means that they, they feel like they have a voice and they have a say in what's happening to their organisation, which will increase their levels of trust and also help them feel more psychologically safe. But also, it just means that they're more likely to be engaged with that change as well when it does happen. And in terms of research, Amanda, you've already referred to one or two of the things that you found. But is there anything else you can share with us that will just kind of explain what you can do and what the benefits are in real life?
AP: There's two ways I'd love to approach this. There's one from the individual's perspective, how we start the day, for example, if we start the day by getting up, looking at the daylight, looking at the sunlight, looking out the window, going for a walk, meditating, doing some exercise, all those things. We're going to help us release those neurotransmitters that help us to feel good and content and have self-belief. So, therefore, we show up to work as an individual and we contribute to that conversation within the team in a positive way. Because, unfortunately, our brains naturally have a negative information bias. So, 80% of the information we store is negative, 20% is positive and those negative memories are like Velcro, and the positive memories are like Teflon. And so, because of that, what happens is we have to retrain ourselves to Phil's point. The point about habits is excellent. We have to retrain ourselves to focus on the positive and we do that by looking after ourselves, starting our day well.
But the other thing, Nigel, is to really understand how we feel. And so, we within Zircon have built a tool, a psychological safety tool, which we're currently having verified with the BPA, the British Psychological Society, which helps people to raise their personal awareness and their team awareness to understand against 10 scales of psychological safety. How do I feel and how do we feel and what do we do about it?
NC: Makes sense. One other bit of research I know you've done. I'd just like to get a little bit from you while we're talking here is about hybrid working and I was surprised by how unsafe you found that was.
AP: Well, we went out to nearly a 1000 individuals who were either hybrid or in person, in office or completely remote. And we assess their level of psychological safety using the questionnaire I just mentioned and so, there's 10 scales. The 10 scales look at 10 distinct aspects of psychological safety, for example, whether they are prepared to speak up and share ideas or whether they are consensus driven. Whether they feel personally connected or whether they are professional only in their conversations. They are two examples. On those 10 scales, we found that the teams that were hybrid had the lowest levels of psychological safety on 9 of the 10 scales. The teams that felt the most psychologically safe were the teams that were in person, in office, and the teams that were consequently remote, solely remote, were in the middle. And so, it's very much about that point that whilst we enjoy hybrid working and it fits with our wellbeing and helps us to be more resilient because hybrid workers are more resilient. Actually, it undermines how we feel in terms of safety.
PL: Well, that's really interesting. Amanda, I love all your stats. You've got some fantastic research here. You can see how hybrid working can breed distrust around people. For a start, why do people always work at home on a Monday and Friday and come into work in the middle? It's very easy for people then to assume that they're just trying to go away for the weekend all the time or come back late from something.
AP: I think one of the things we've realised from this research and having worked with clients since having conducted the research is that if organisations structure the hybrid working in terms of the location that people come into when they come into work, or the days they come in, or they create tea parties or do something fun when they're in the office. There’s a reason for people to come in. They all gather in a single location. We had one client, Smart DCC, who’ve got these giant offices and nobody knew what colour floor they were in or what colour area they were working in. So, they were all coming into work, but they weren’t together as a team. So, there seemed little point.
PL: That really makes sense because the sense of belonging is a fundamental of psychological safety. If you’re partly at home and then you come in, you don’t know where you’re supposed to sit. There’s a couple of real basic levers about psychological safety that this speaks to. One is significance, you know, it's a basic motivator for everybody. I want to feel like people notice me. I want to feel listened to, I want to feel like I matter and clearly a psychologically safe environment promotes that. At the same time, fear is such a huge driver of behaviour in the workplace that an unsafe environment drives that too. I'm frightened to speak up in case I say something stupid. I'm frightened to make a mistake in case I get punished. And for hybrid workers, I guess I'm kind of frightened to come in because I don't really know what's going to happen when I get there and I'm frightened to stay at home because people think I'm slacking.
TP: Yeah and I just because that research is really interesting, Amanda, around how in-person teams are the most psychologically safe. Because we associate those companies that are dictating and mandating five days in the office as those ones that are the least psychologically safe. Because they're the ones like the Amazons or the banking industry that they're known for encouraging their, not encouraging, mandating that their employees are in five days a week and we assume that's because of a lack of trust, they're focused on presenteeism. So, I just wondered if you had anything.
NC: I suspect they may not be doing it because they've seen Amanda's research.
TP: No, I think not.
NC: Maybe everybody should look at it and maybe, you know, we could all do things differently. So, what's the prize here? Let me just ask you all. How an organisation is going to benefit if psychological safety is done right? Amanda.
AP: So, we've recently run a series of workshops and coaching interventions. They're probably very similar to Phil with Network Rail. So, they had an engagement score of 15%. So, their net promoter score was 15% at the start of the project. A team who are feeling very unsafe and very disengaged and through a whole series of interventions around psychological safety, we have managed to improve that up to 79% over a year. And the result has been incredible because the amount of innovation, the preparedness to come up with new ideas, the amount of challenge that they're giving each other has increased monumentally because of their level of engagement and because of their level of psychological safety.
NC: I wonder if more trains are arriving on time, maybe not a similar percentage.
AP: Well, eventually. So, this is the Innovation Centre. So, definitely they will be but eventually that would have a great impact. So, on that one team and the rest of the business, the level of engagement has been incredible.
NC: Phil, benefits?
PL: Yeah, I mean, it's an overused word, but I think productivity in its broadest sense, it has to come from people who are more motivated. If you follow that idea of significance, if a climate of psychological safety makes people feel like they matter, they will almost certainly contribute more to their work. And if they contribute more to their work, the organisation will get more. I mean, I think in terms of innovation which I know has been mentioned before, I don't want to use productivity as feeling like a sort of rather mundane word. I mean, in general sense, they produce more innovations, they produce more products, they get better results. Turnover will be lower in terms of staff, which is a huge cost, of course, to organisations, all kinds of benefits. I won't go over it here, but if anybody wants to look up Google's Project Aristotle, that was a big project that looked at the benefits of having psychological safety first. And they measured it in numerical terms, in terms of income, and in terms of turnover and other measures like that.
TP: Yeah, I think Amanda and Phil have touched on the headline benefits in terms of performance there. But I also think it's something that we should really consider within the context of diversity and inclusion. So, a lot of companies are sort of feeling that their diversity and inclusion sort of efforts are stalling a little bit and I think one of those reasons is that it's all very well having a visibly diverse team. But if all the voices within that team don't feel that they're able to speak or contribute, then you kind of there's almost no point, really. Whereas if you create a psychologically safe environment, that means that all of those different voices you have in their team can actually contribute something. An example that comes to mind is that I've got a friend who has an ethnic minority background, and he joined the team as quite a junior member and he was invited onto the recruitment panels for quite senior employees that they were looking to bring into the organisation. And he was like, this is great like, I get to be involved in the recruitment decision of someone really senior, but he didn't feel like he could actually contribute to any of those discussions. They were, he was there almost as a tick box exercise. He was, he was there, he was in the room, but he wasn't contributing or influencing those decisions. So, that really speaks to the point about how important it is to make sure that you not only have a diverse team, but that individuals within that team actually have a say.
NC: I was trying to draw this to some kind of a conclusion to sort of go around to all of you, some sort of tips. I mean, I won't say quick wins because this is not that kind of a thing, but stuff that you can do to make sure that you are creating a safer workplace, but not one which is just kind of too safe. Speaking to what Phil was saying earlier, I heard this phrase, an employer was wanting good vibes only. I mean, that's a bit creepy, isn't it?
AP: Good vibes only is the opposite of psychological safety, surely.
NC: Absolutely.
AP: So, I would not start there actually. Personally, I would start with the foundation of psychological safety. So, from our research, we've identified that trust, personal connection, and purpose are the three aspects that are the real foundation of site safety. So, if we get those three things right, then we're more likely to create an environment where people are prepared to speak up.
NC: And quickly, how can people managers, HR, try and engender that?
AP: Well, we could start with the point that Theni and Phil were talking about, which is firstly, appreciation and gratification. If we're more likely to celebrate successes, if we're more likely to show appreciation, both to ourselves and to others, and to show gratitude to other people, we're more likely to create an environment where people feel included and feel like they can be themselves. So, it's a really simple one, which is to do a gratitude exercise or to show appreciation for colleagues. The 10 am point in the diary sounds strange, but actually it's a fantastic idea just to remind ourselves to say thank you a little bit more.
TP: Yeah. And to build on that point. So, yeah, I think the recognition piece is really important. Another one would be to, in order to role model, the idea of psychological safety would be for leaders and managers to encourage feedback and do that in different formats, not just in a team meeting where everyone is there, because not everyone will feel comfortable doing it that way. Just encourage people to come to you one-to-one and say, I really want to hear kind of what's working for me and what's not. That's the need for role modeling, what they want to see within the team and encouraging employees to see that they have a voice.
PL: Yeah, on the assumption that you're someone who wants yourself to create a bit of psychological safety around you, a very good starting point and really easy to do is next time someone talks to you, give them your complete and undivided attention. Never happens in organisations because everyone is multitasking, but it will increase the significance that the other person feels no end. They actually feel someone is listening and taking them seriously.
AP: A brilliant book, Phil. A Time to Think is a brilliant book, which really covers that, of course. We get our best ideas, our innovation, when we believe we are being listened to.
NC: Well, we've all got lots to do after this conversation. Let me just thank Authentic Leadership Coach and Facilitator Phil Lowe, CIPD's Theni Paramaguru, and Amanda Potter, founder of Zircon. I think we've all seen how psychological safety is so much more than preventing bossiness or just listening to people. It's creating a whole environment where people bring their best ideas forward and collaborate for success. Difficult, but so worthwhile. Until next month, from me, Nigel Cassidy, and all of us at CIPD, it's goodbye.
