Mark: 0:00

actually managers are really important and they have a really, really big leverage on the performance of their team.

Andrew: 0:06

Oh, manage, management is really important.

Mark: 0:09

Management. Yeah. Um, the skills of management. Yeah. And somebody possessing skills, which we might call a manager

Andrew: 0:27

Today we're talking about safe to challenge, and we're going to look at the history behind that phrase. It's a pretty commonly used phrase in contemporary organizations, but a load of research behind it. And often actually the term safe to challenge can be mishandled, mistreated, misunderstood. So the plan today is to go back into a bit of the history and bring us right up to the present day. Um, it's a concept that emerged in the 1960s and then it became popularized by the work of a Harvard academic, Amy Edmondson, towards the end of the 90s and into the 2000s. And it was brought to the attention of the kind of tech industry and the modern workforce and. You know, arguably popularized by a project from Google called Project Aristotle, um, which, uh, identified the importance of psychological safety for organizations. So we're going to dig into that, uh, background of the research. We're going to talk about Google's Aristotle project. going to look at some modern applications and tools for using psychological safety. And we're going to finish off on coming back around to the idea of, uh, concept of safety challenge and why it can be a bit tricky, uh, to foster psychological safety, to lead to safety, to challenge in modern organizations. Mark, when we met I remember we talked about team psychological safety. And I remember going, this guy knows about psychological safety. Uh, he's He's, he's a, he's a keeper!

Mark: 2:04

it.

Andrew: 2:06

that you, uh, had, uh, kind of had to get to grips with in, in your work, wasn't it?

Mark: 2:12

Yeah, it definitely was. And I, what I'm, what I'm, hoping we can do in this episode is really run through how I heard about it because I came to it. Relatively late with a new generation of certainly of managers that were learning about it. Um, and obviously we all thought that we'd invented it or actually we all thought that Google had invented it. So I think today we can talk a lot about what a big part Google had to play in introducing that to this sort of new generation of organizations. But actually, I think it's also really important, especially because you have a lot of the background in where that came from. You know, that concept was popular, popularized probably 15 years before. Google started talking about it and, and I think, you know, particularly with, with Amy Edmondson, um, I knew everything that Google had said and latched on to that and felt, you know, there was a lot of confirmation bias. These are the things that I feel are true. Google are saying the same thing. They've got a lot of, um, evidence that demonstrates this is what we should be doing with our organizations. Um, but actually, I think there's, there's There's a lot more to it if you go back and dig into the research past that just what Google say. And I think actually we see a bit of a trap with psychological safety in, in the modern workforce of it just being another checkbox exercise where people are saying we need that because Google have said it's important without really thinking about what that actually means inside the organization.

Andrew: 3:34

Precisely. Let's start with the definition. I'm going to travel back in time from the definition, but I think in case people listening have never heard of this term psychological safety before, let's talk about what it means. And, uh, broadly speaking, is the shared belief that The team, or indeed an individual, is safe for interpersonal risk taking. I say the team or the individual because it started off as individual psychological concept and probably the thing that led it to become such a widely used and referred to concept in contemporary organizations was Amy Edmondson's work, where she developed it into a concept that allows us to understand team performance. So it's the shared belief that team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, and those interpersonal risks are things like the risk of looking ignorant, the risk of looking incompetent, the risk of being seen as intrusive, or the risk of being seen as negative. I'm going to put a pin in that, but it's just to, so we know what we're talking about. It's that feeling of vulnerability when you're sticking your head above the parapet or speaking up in an organization.

Mark: 4:59

it's definitely one of those things that a team feels it when it's there, but might not know exactly how to but really, I think the key thing is The, the feeling that you are free to disagree, or that you are free to say something stupid, and that you won't be punished for that. There can be engagement with it in that situation that people can give you feedback, but it's that you are not, you know, you're not held to account, or your performance is questioned, or your capability is questioned. Um, and I think that's, that's really important. And so it's one of those interesting things, you can see it in teams, but it's really hard to tell them exactly. How it manifests itself and the things that they should be doing to see it.

Andrew: 5:42

The concept off risk and safety I think are useful to hold on to as well because I mean they're, they're sort of very functional words, but we're talking about and risk at a, you know, to a large extent an emotional level. And I totally know what you mean. When you say the term psychological safety, it sounds very academic. I always shorthand it with it's. If you want to think of a phrase that represents psychological safety, it's speaking up. Are you safe? Do you feel secure around the people with whom you work to speak up about stuff? Now, it's not only that, but that's a good shorthand. Um, and so psychological safety underpins that sense of security and speaking up. where we end up with talking about being safe to challenge, that is all about speaking up. It started, in the 1960s. Uh, it had a bit of a, kind of preceding, uh, gestation phase, let's call it, with the work of Carl Rogers. So, psychological safety comes from a, sort of psychological therapeutic, uh, therapeutic. background, Carl Rogers work was all about the patient therapist relationship and you know, reducing it to a couple of sentences, really what that work identified was, in order for a therapy dynamic between a therapist and a patient to go well, there needed to be this sense of security developed by the therapist in order for it the treatment to be successful for the patient. He didn't actually use the term psychological safety. So that's why I say it was a sort of gestation period. He had this term of unconditional positive regard. But, Carl Rogers then, uh, did a lot of work with the people who are largely credited with coming up with the concept of psychological safety, Edgar Shein and Warren Bennis in the 1960s. And. Indeed, Carl Rogers actually, did work alongside them. He published chapters in books that they edited. So you had Carl Rogers, you had Edgar Shein and Warren Bennis in the 1960s, uh, directly and indirectly collaborating over this emergent concept of psychological safety. A lot of what Edgar Schein's work is concerned with is about people's, uh, propensity to engage with organizational change and psychological safety being an important part of, uh, creating the kind of fertile ground to successfully achieve organizational change.

Mark: 8:29

Yeah,

Andrew: 8:30

Then we get to 1996, and this is, this is the, this is the bit of the, of the history that I love. I love the story of this paper and, and, you know, Amy Edmondson is, She's just a monster academic in terms of what she's contributed in this area. It's, it's had such a great impact. And actually it wasn't in business. It was in healthcare where she made these, uh, these findings and the way in which that has been understood to translate to lots of kind of high safety, high reliability environments, healthcare, aviation, space, um, nuclear. construction, but her original sort of seminal paper, if you like, 1996, the cool story about it is she was studying nurses and she was looking at psychological safety. She was interested in the concept of psychological safety. It wasn't an accident that she came across this, but she was looking at nursing teams. Um, and what she found broad strokes was, well, she had the teams that demonstrated really high levels of psychological safety. Willing to speak up, to take interpersonal risks, willing to look silly, willing to criticize, willing to show dis uh, express dissent. But these teams seem to be doing worse. So these teams were making more mistakes and this was odd to her. She was thinking, well, surely teams that exhibit high levels of psychological safety do better. But of course it's a bit like, you know, the levels of crime and the levels of reported crime. the thing she was actually seeing was that psychologically safe teams report more mistakes because they feel safe to do so.

Mark: 10:20

Yeah.

Andrew: 10:21

and this was the, uh, this was not. necessarily a completely unknown idea, but she had this perfectly evidenced demonstration of how it happens, why it happens, and the differences between the profiles of the teams that demonstrate those differences. And That was really a big light bulb thing. It was okay. So if you have high levels of psychological safety, the people in the teams feel comfortable admitting their mistakes, uh, calling out errors and making sure they're reported. The ones that are not psychologically safe are covering up errors. They're not not making the errors. They're scared to report them. And of course. You'd hope in a hospital setting that wouldn't be happening. What it meant was, she was particularly interested in drug administration or, you know, drug selection error. So, the dosage was wrong or even the drug used was incorrect. When that happened, Was it diligently logged and reported and shared to try to improve? Uh, you mentioned learning, you know, this is a big part of it. paper is called Learning from Mistakes. Or, when someone made a mistake, did they try and find a way of burying the fact that it happened? Um, so that, this suddenly became the kind of shorthand, uh, in a technical sense for, uh, demonstrating you had psychological safety or not. Um, and, and that led to an amazing body of work on psychological safety. And as I said already, psychological safety in teams. So the thing about this work was this was taking place at a team level. Um, and if I can dig into a little bit of the technical kind of academic detail, because this is actually important from the point of view of, I think another thing that, is often conflated, if we can say that, it's not a grave error, but people quite often conflate trust with psychological safety. psychological safety is basically trust. Like if we trust each other, it's all fine. Um, and Edmondson does a really good job of distinguishing between what trust is and what psychological safety is and the slight subtleties of difference. Now, she talks a lot about trust and she will, I'm sure would be the first to say, well, you can't really effective levels of psychological safety without trust, but psychological safety is nonetheless different.

Mark: 13:02

Yeah.

Andrew: 13:02

in Scott Tannenbaum, Eduardo Salas's book, teams that work, they've got a really good way of summarising what Edmondson means. So they say that trust is giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, and psychological safety is believing that others will give you the benefit of the doubt. Edmondson's technical definition of this is the object of focus. So distinguishing from trust, it's about who is acting and who holds the beliefs about those Actions. So trust is giving the other person the benefit of the doubt and psychological safety is believing that others will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Mark: 13:41

something I wanted to jump in quickly with there, which is, cause we, we've looked at trust before and, and actually some of the evolutionary anthropology, uh, roots of trust in, in humans. I think there's something that, that I've observed, especially in the research that looks at this and then looking at the, the growth of human societies and so the processes around getting teams and groups to work. Trust was this, um, this concept, this observable characteristic, which was really important when you had very small groups working together. So in, in, you know, in, in very early days, you needed to demonstrate trust even to be in a team. So part of forming a team, um, at a very basic level, you are expecting that somebody is not going to be antagonistic towards you. We're going to create this team. I trust you. We've got a shared goal. I trust you not to Um, whatever, whatever chunk of the goal that we get is, you know, you're, you're going to do right by me at the end and trust is something which is relatively easy to create between individuals between two individuals, but gets much harder. As you scale, and so you almost need a replacement for, for trust as, as you get bigger. And there's lots of controls against that because instead of having trust between two individuals, you start having rules and controls and balances within the group. So the norms that exist, and we've talked about ways that groups will actually look at social loafing, um, and, and respond against that if they feel like somebody isn't performing. So. and I know this is an oversimplification, but sometimes I think about the concept of psychological safety being trust at scale, because you can't really trust a group, you can trust another person, and, you know, individually, you build that trust one to one, psychological safety is kind of believing that within, within that group environment, you can trust that you will not be judged for some of those activities. So speaking up, um, uh, making a recommendation, feeling, you know, saying something that might appear stupid and So there is this, this, this sense, um, that I get when you see this in a group that you're trying to build out trust at scale, and that's really what you're demonstrating with psychological safety.

Andrew: 15:56

I think that's a really good way of putting it. And Edmondson says herself in her work, if you and I were in a, in a, in a bigger team together, might trust you. There might not be any psychological safety in the team. So trust can exist in the absence of psychological safety, but trust doesn't replace psychological safety, um, at the, at the team level. And is the other part of the dimensions that she's very keen to point out is it's about the group level of analysis. So it's a, it's a, it's an aggregate held belief at the team level. It isn't, it isn't owned. It doesn't, an individual doesn't have property rights over the psychological safety of a team. They all contribute to it. They all pay into it. And that's what's interesting, the kind of two sided coin about psychological safety is yes it's the, um, you know, the safety to to take interpersonal risk. So when I act, it's that, um, I can, I can count on the fact that people will give me the benefit of the doubt, but the way that I act, what I act is also contributing to the way others feel about the psychological safety in the team. So there's constantly a two way street between your perception of. you feel as a result of your actions. And indeed, how are those actions contributing to how others feel? but it's a team level, aggregate held view. so it exists at the group level of analysis, which as you say, trust tends to be more of a, a kind of dyadic, thing between Perhaps two people or, you know, it's, it's identifiable, among different individuals within a group. The other thing, final aspect of the dimensions, I think is really interesting. She talks about time frame. So, The sense of psychological safety's existence is experienced in these really narrow interactions. Um, and it's so powerful that it can completely undermine logic and common sense and, uh, you know, higher, higher reasoning. Um, what, what I mean by that is, You go back to that nursing example that the teams that were not reporting a lot of the mistakes that had low levels of psychological safety, the sense of threat. So in those situations, you're talking about, well, maybe you gave a patient the wrong drug, which could had endanger their life. Well, the problem with the time frame of psychological safety, this really constrained time frame, is when I feel a lack of psychological safety, the, the impact that has on me as an individual is so strong I would rather protect myself. It's not conscious, necessarily. I would rather protect myself from that, um, the sense of suffering that you get when you feel that. I would rather do that than protect the patient. of warps your feeling. And the best example is from aviation, because, um, psychological safety is a big part of crew resource management, which is, a safety feature of, um, you know, behavior within, within aviation, um, to make pilots operate as, as safely as possible. And Korean air had litany of, of fatal disasters in the late nineties. And a lot of it came down to, uh, psychological safety between captain and first officer. But the amazing thing is that, you know, couldn't get a more potent example because the, the first officer in some of these, you know, the cockpit recordings, the first officer is essentially in order to protect themselves from the apparent suffering of a lack of psychological safety, will not say something, even though the consequences are the the terminal suffering of death. that's how powerful a lack of psychological safety is. You are essentially choosing death over the discomfort of speaking up the moment.

Mark: 20:15

Edmondson, in her book teaming, which I know has it, it carries a lot of the, the earlier research into it. But there, there is a particular example which. stood out, and I'm just trying to make sure that I've, I've got the actual quote because she talks about the Columbia disaster and she talks about team psychological safety, uh, inside the group that that was, um, Responding to the potential, the potential disaster on the reentry. So in, in Mission Control, there was an engineer, Rodney Rocha, um, a shuttle engineer, and, um, he had requested images of the, the shuttle wing, um, and so he expressed the need for the satellite images in an email to his superior, and he found out that he was unlikely to get anything back, the request was unlikely to be honoured. So he wrote an email, which said,"remember the NASA safety poster everywhere around stating, if it's not safe, say so". So, you know, in, in theory, it's safe to challenge inside, inside NASA. And so he goes on,"yes, it's that serious". He didn't send the email to the mission manager. He only shared it with his fellow engineers. you know, that safety has a very distinct hierarchical level. And then, uh, later, he said"the engineers were often told not to send messages much higher than their own rung in the ladder". But then later, he was on, uh, it was a television interview with ABC News. And, uh, in that interview, he was asked why he didn't voice his doubts about the safety. So you're talking about an engineer that had, you know, a real belief because he was an expert on that particular part of the shuttle. He had a real belief that there was an issue. You know,"why didn't you express your doubts?" He said," I just couldn't do it. I'm too low down". And she, which, and by she, she means the mission manager, uh, team leader, Linda Ham"is way up here", gesturing with his hand held above his head. Yeah, so it's exactly that. And it's really interesting how it's sort of easy to think that team psychological safety is amongst one strata of a team,

Andrew: 22:16

Yeah.

Mark: 22:17

actually it has to be demonstrated. across hierarchical levels. It's not just me and my peers. If I say something silly, my peers aren't going to criticize me, but it's often much harder when it crosses hierarchical levels.

Andrew: 22:29

And one of the things that, uh, Edmondson talks about as a consequence of establishing psychological safety is boundary spanning. And that might be boundary spanning from a hierarchical point of view, like it was in the case of the Columbia shuttle disaster, it might be boundary spanning across teams. So it may still be at a kind of horizontal direction of travel, but you don't know people. Um, You're unfamiliar with the way they work. You might not speak the same kind of technical language as them. But if you have psychological safety, you feel supported and encouraged to cross boundaries. And you feel secure that there won't be that sense of being admonished, rebuked, penalized for doing so. In those cases, these famous cases where it's so useful to look into where it went wrong, quite often about that speaking up thing. But, uh, and, and indeed, perhaps, as we'll come on to talk about with challenging, like challenging the status quo, it could be as simple as asking for help. Psychological safety is not just about the big things where you think something's wrong and you need to blow the whistle or you need to, um, you need to challenge a kind of prevailing view of senior or senior people or superiors. might just be a case of asking for help. It might be asking for help from a colleague. Uh, so it can be quite low level, um, safety as well as these quite high profile things.

Mark: 24:02

Yeah, I think that's really important because I think there is a stigma attached. People feel a stigma attached to saying that they don't know how to do something or saying that they're overwhelmed because they feel like the implications of that is they're saying either, um, I can't, I can't cope with the work. You know, I'm not, I'm not good enough or, um, you know, I don't have the skills or the capability to do this. And it, it feeds an internal narrative. You know, I'm, I'm not good enough to be here. And, uh, one of the things, and I know that Edmondson talked about this specifically, is it's just like trust. It's one of those things you can't just snap your fingers and create in an organization. Uh, it has to constantly, constantly be demonstrated, but it also has to really be demonstrated as we saw from that. That Columbia example has to be demonstrated from the management level through the hierarchy down, because it's one thing to trust an individual colleague that they won't make fun of you, you can ask for help. But it's another thing within the group to say that everybody around me is not going to judge me if I say, I don't know how to do this. I'm feeling overwhelmed and I need help. Um, I've got too much on my plate and I could, you know, I could do with some assistance.

Andrew: 25:10

Something that quite often needs to be highlighted whenever you're getting into a conversation about the practicalities of psychological safety. So team psychological safety, Amy Edmondson's concept, group level of analysis. It's a concept entirely upon the idea of a group dynamic, a team dynamic, but the, the proportionate impact of effective leadership setting team psychological safety can't be overstated. the, the ability to set. Team psychological safety lives and dies by effective leadership.

Mark: 25:44

Yeah,

Andrew: 25:45

so pivotal. Tell me about Google.

Mark: 25:49

Psychological safety probably popped up on my radar probably around 2016. So the, the, the background to this, Google have always been an organization that has really focused on how to be more productive, how to support people inside, inside their organization. And that really started, um, in the mid 2000s with a project called Project Oxygen, which we're not going to talk about too much, but effectively project oxygen was really interesting because the, the tech bro founders of Google at one point had said, we don't need managers. We just need brilliant programmers and it'll be fine. Uh, which is probably a, a belief that I had around the same time that they had it. It's like, if we just fill a room with brilliant engineers, everything will be great. And. In very brief, what Oxygen did is said, actually managers are really important and they have a really, really big leverage on the performance of their team.

Andrew: 26:43

Oh, manage, management is really important.

Mark: 26:47

Management. Yeah. Um, the skills of management. Yeah. And somebody possessing skills, which we might call a manager. Um, but yeah, and it, and it's hard. And it is different from, from being an engineer. It's not just something that you do on the side. Um, and I'm sure we'll come back to, to oxygen at some point, because that was, that was quite groundbreaking. It sort of drew people's managers attentions, especially in this sort of this new digital economy, when people. Didn't know how to work is a very, so we've spoken about VUCA before, this volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous environment that, uh, the digital revolution brought with it, suddenly things moving much faster. Um, everybody was looking around at that period, looking to see how people were doing better. And obviously Google was a big success story, even through the early 2000s. by about 2012, Google had moved on to another project, Aristotle, and it's called Aristotle because it's the team being greater than the sum of its parts. The famous Aristotelian quote. and

Andrew: 27:49

had it on his LinkedIn, I think.

Mark: 27:51

he did. That was, Yeah. that was, that was his, uh, his bio. Um, um, I still forget which one was which, Oxygen and Aristotle, but Oxygen being the managers are the oxygen that fuels the team and Aristotle being the team is greater than some of its parts. So, Google did this research and it wasn't a one off. It followed on from what Oxygen had done. And that was published that so they were actually very, very open with the work that they had done. And I originally thought, as we were talking about this, I thought that I had come across the psychological safety from the Google point of view from Laszlo Bock's book, which we've talked about before. So Laszlo Bock's book, Work Rules, that was published in 2015.

Andrew: 28:34

hmm. Mm hmm.

Mark: 28:35

Lazlo Bock was the VP of people operations at Google. So he ran the team that was running Aristotle. But actually, interestingly, there's no mention of Aristotle in, uh, in the Work Rules book. There's only mention of oxygen. So he's actually talking about a lot of the things that we would sort of recognize from this Google, Gugelian approach to management, but he wouldn't talk about it. I was quite surprised. And then I realized that, um, actually there was this overlap. So Aristotle had started in 2012, which is probably about when Laszlo Bock was starting work on the work rules book,

Andrew: 29:09

on the

Mark: 29:09

but it only really, the, the project only really came to public attention. It was one of, um, one of Laszlo Bock's team published the, the findings of Aristotle in late 2015, November 2015, but it was, um, it was an interview. New York Times interview or, publication that really brought, Google's research into psychological safety into. The, the public zeitgeist, so that the article really talked about, um, made public all the findings of, um, Aristotle and what Aristotle was doing was if you have a team, how do you really make that team perform better? And although we now is, is very easy to say, here's Aristotle, it talked about psychological safety. Actually, the findings that Google had were, there are five things. that, uh, make teams perform better. So if you want a really, really effective teams, there are these five things that you can focus on to make sure that exist within that team, that, that are going to really help. Psychological safety was the first, and what was quite interesting is it was. Yeah, it's a, it's a little bit academic still when you're talking about psychological safety. It's not necessarily something that an average person in an average team is going to, you know, understand and back then it was a new concept. So, today, and partly because of Aristotle and Google and the New York Times, Uh, article it's become popularized and so where I think we'll talk about in a little while is now almost any technical team, uh, engineering team, software development team will start talking about psychological safety, but really what they're talking about is what Google talked about with Aristotle I think on my journey, I'd come across at least some of the basics of it by picking out what Laszlo Bock was doing in"Work Rules!" And then watching because I'd seen oxygen. And then obviously that became Aristotle. So I was, I was consuming all of these things. Out of academia in in practice looking at them. So Google released the findings and and still talk about it today. They have a site or a, um, uh, sort of a theme of Google rework. And so you can go and Google Google rework. And they talk a lot about the findings, both of oxygen and Aristotle. Um, but there were five things that Aristotle found. It wasn't just psychological safety. So just in being fair to Google, they they had these five. Um, With the top of the pile being psychological safety, have it, is psychological safety.

Andrew: 31:35

safety in terms of statistical significance. It was the thing that had the most disproportionately positive impact on the performance of a team.

Mark: 31:43

exactly right. they described it as team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. I think that language is really clear and people can understand it. Um, and I think it's, it's a great definition. The other four just, just for completeness were dependability. Team members get things done on time and meet Google's high bar for excellent. Structure and clarity. Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals. Meaning work is personally important to the team members and, and impact. So team members think their work matters and, and create change. So this. All of those things tie up with a lot of the things that we have talked about. So the sort of the autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And so people feeling that their work is important, having clear goals. And some of these things are integral to a team being a team. And a lot of that comes back through communication. But I think it was significant that at the top of the pile, psychological safety, this behavior, this observed behavior was the biggest thing that had an impact on teams.

Andrew: 32:46

And I think it's a timing thing, but it did growth mindset, which I find fascinating as another psychological concept that has deservedly great traction.

Mark: 33:01

so that there? was actually I think the, the thing that I found interesting with growth mindset, a lot of that popularized by Matthew Sayed and, you know, sort of in Black Box Thinking and some of the other, the other, um, work that he had brought it to a much wider audience, you know, thinking that, that understanding this concept of a growth mindset of being able to, um, be open to change and challenge is really interesting. A lot of people, a lot of our listeners will have heard of the work of Carol Dweck on growth, growth mindset, or read Matthew Syed books and be familiar with that concept, um, of, which sounds really similar, you know, on the face of it. I think growth mindset and psychological safety, they, they overlap in, in a lot of ways. What I found really interesting is just as Laszlo Bock had talked about what Google were doing to create this environment of growth and adaptability. And again, that goes back to what Amy Edmonds saying, saying you need psychological safety to be able to adapt quickly. You need to become a learning organization. Obviously, the work that Carol Dweck did on growth mindset was, was really similar to that. Satya Nadella wrote a book. on how he had been handed Carol Dweck's book, uh, read it, I think by his wife, gave him the book, and then thought this is so powerful and so important, I'm going to align the whole of Microsoft around the growth mindset. And literally his book Hit Refresh is, which is 2017, so a little bit later, um, his book was how he had sent out the edicts within Microsoft that we are going to be an organization with a growth mindset. And again, I find this, this sort of movement between an individual concept and the group concept backwards and forwards quite interesting because growth mindset is very much an individual concept.

Andrew: 34:45

Yes.

Mark: 34:45

is, you know, I can have a growth mindset, you can have a growth mindset, but we together, our organization doesn't. But, That's what Satya Nadella talked about. We as Microsoft are going to become a, uh, uh, an organization with a growth mindset. And it was saying a lot of the same types of things, like the, the, the, the symptoms of establishing either psychological safety or growth mindset were considered to have the same outcome. When I've, when I've been looking at this, and if you, if you compare what Google was saying, what Microsoft was saying, I think it's fascinating to think that the growth mindset, just like trust, growth mindset is really an individual capacity to learn and adapt and be open to experience and, um, and, and, and improvement. So to take that experience and improve off the back of it. One of the reflections that I had is a requirement in a team setting for you to be able to have a growth mindset, to be allowed by Your team, your peers, your managers to have a growth mindset is psychological safety. So one of one of the interplays between those 2 concepts was, I found it really interesting to consider that to individually demonstrate a growth mindset. to have this sort of organizational growth mindset, you need to establish as a prerequisite psychological safety, because without that, uh, safe to challenge, lack of fear of showing vulnerability in a group setting, you can't have a growth mindset because you'd have to extract yourself out of the culture to demonstrate a growth mindset.

Andrew: 36:17

Yeah. And also in the reverse, you could have a group of six people or a team of six people who all individually hold growth mindsets, but they may not have team psychological safety. So it works in two directions, which is why, like you said, I think the idea or you take that kind of vision of the organization is going to have a growth mindset that that sounds brilliant. That sounds really exciting and and like it could have a positive effect. The devil's in the detail and you must handle with care the translation of a concept that's developed as an individual idea and then just. it wholesale and considering it to be applicable to, um, a different level of analysis as it would be in a team. Um, you know, uh, Richard Hackman called that the cross level fallacy. Uh, of assuming something is neat and explains something to you at a certain level of analysis. That means it will perfectly help you understand something at a different level of analysis. Nonetheless It does work, but you need to, I think you need to retain the nuance of, of the work, for example, that Amy Edmondson did and that we've already discussed, like the different dimensions of team psychological safety, understanding it. and Amy Edmundson's done a lot of work on team learning behavior because ultimately what psychological safety is enabling you to do is understand your limits as a team and improve your performance by using challenge and setbacks and failures as those opportunities to improve. But Some of those challenges come from within the team itself, so the psychological safety isn't there, then you don't get that data, because people aren't willing to share it.

Mark: 38:12

one final part on that crossover between growth mindset and psychological safety in, in the Teaming book, um, Amy Edmondson talks about some of her research where she was looking at surgical teams. As opposed to the pharmaceutical teams and she was, she was talking about, I think it was four teams that were implementing a new, uh, a new surgical process, uh, in different, different organizations. As I was reading it, I just felt that there were these enormous overlaps with what Matthew Syed was talking about in Black Box Thinking. So he contrasts airlines with, you know, the aviation industry with surgeons and how you sort of get that fixed mindset with very senior, surgical practitioners that if you get to the top of the tree, your opinion is everything and so you will never admit. That you've been wrong the opposite, you know fixed mindset rather than growth mindset, and it was really interesting because When she is talking about her research into those studies, she is almost saying that she could observe within those groups that the leaders, specifically the leaders in the two less successful, um, adoptions of the, of this new surgical process had fixed mindsets. Whereas the other two, the, the teams were more open to challenge. They had less experience. But they were actually much more successful with the adoption of those surgical procedures.

Andrew: 39:37

that, that, reinforces the idea of leadership is so pivotal to establishing psychological safety. I'm reminded of a story a doctor told me. Consultant, female doctor, saying when she asks Male, more senior consultant for their input on, on a decision. What she has realized now, I'm not trying, I'm not trying only to make this about gender, although I think that gender plays a significant part in this story, but there's also a thing about psychological safety and belief about, um. What kind of atmosphere and climate are you modeling in the response to questions and input from your colleagues? When she asks for input from a more senior consultant, even though she's a consultant herself, what she's realized is the senior consultant believes she is asking them for the answer. not for input. So when they give her the unquote answer and she does something different, they take offense to it. And that's a really nice demonstration of, of a lack of, uh, trying to foster psychological safety because you're engaging in the conversation on the basis that, um, no, that there's, you're not safe to ask for help actually. You're, you're, you're, I'm just going to give you the answer and you're going to do what I tell you. Before we move on to finally talking about that idea of safe to challenge in the contemporary there's a really nice book by an academic called Tim Clark. And what he did was he developed an idea of progression of stages of psychological safety. And I think this sets us up to talk about safety challenge really nicely, because Rightly, his experience and his research demonstrate that yeah, so like you were saying earlier, Mark, you can say, well, Google says way to success in teams is to have psychological safety. So let's just have that. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go get ourselves some psychological safety. What Tim Clark's work does really nicely is demonstrate how you Nurture the levels of psychological safety towards the point where it's really functioning at a high level and getting you, uh, the value that you need to get, uh, from it. the first level of the four is inclusion safety, and he's talking about, well, You actually just need to, you need, I suppose the common throwaway line is, oh, you need to feel seen, but it's not so much that as he talks about, you need to feel that you are worth, that your worth as a human being is being noticed and appreciated. Not your worthiness, not, not, Uh, our, how much we value you is contingent on what you, what you do. It's just no baseline. You're, you're accepted. You're in the team. You, you belong here and you demonstrate your behaviors, demonstrate and reinforce that belief that everybody, everybody's welcome. and you need to start with that and you need to make a considered effort to develop inclusion before you move on to any of the fun stuff. You know, um, After that, interesting on the basis of what we've just been talking about with growth mindset is learner safety. So once you feel genuinely included, then feel safe to learn. And that's where that thing of asking for help. Asking silly questions, being vulnerable of, uh, about your, um, the limits of your understanding or, uh, or knowledge. Learner safety gives you permission to share those insecurities, um, asking for feedback, all of those sorts of things. So, you know, as an academic, that's something I think about in the classroom. I need to start with trying somehow to foster a sense of inclusion to get my students to the point where they feel comfortable enough to ask questions and comfortable and I'll say, I don't understand this or, you know, can you, can you, can you go over that again? I don't get it. Um, then so that's learner safety level two, then it's contributor safety. So then it's about safe to get involved, you know, in a, an organizational team setting. It's about a bit of autonomy and agency around about. Fulfilling your role. So once you've got to that point of you feel safe to, you feel included, you feel safe to ask questions and show your ignorance, receive feedback and kind of get going, then it's about right. now got the sense of autonomy and agency that an empowerment that you can, you know, You can kind of, uh, yourself in the role that you, that you have in your part of the team. And only once you've gone through Inclusion Safety, Learner Safety, Contributor Safety, do you get to the golden Challenger Safety. That's the, once you've achieved all those other stages, that's when you can stick your head above the parapet to challenge the status quo, where you feel like, yeah, I really, I'm, I am permitted to question things, to offer constructive criticism and dissent, question the way we do things around here, to question the culture perhaps, without fear of, retribution, admonishment, uh, or being, or being shut down. And That's the thing that fascinates me about the, the obsession. I think there is a bit of an obsession these days in it's almost trendy. It's like, you know, an organization where it's safe to challenge and that gets banded about and it's, it becomes an initiative led by senior management. So, you know, we want, we want our, uh, our junior people to be safe to challenge is an admirable goal. I think you, I would never say, oh, that's misguided because that's good, but perhaps, poorly framed in terms of an ambition, because one of the issues, given all the things we've discussed today about the complexity of psychological safety, the, um, the, the fact that it is, gradually, it's nurtured, and what Tim Clark talks about is that it, developed in these quite specific layers, um, that have to come one after another. If you focus on the challenge, you're focusing on the sharp end. Um, and actually my opinion is could almost do the opposite. You could actually be creating an atmosphere where you're making it less psychologically safe. Because if you're, you're almost not, I don't mean this, doing it deliberately, but putting such an emphasis on the challenge, people might feel under considerable pressure to

Mark: 46:48

Yeah.

Andrew: 46:49

up. They might almost feel bullied into or kind of harassed into saying, Oh, I'm supposed to like, I'm in this meeting. I think I'm supposed to be telling people that I don't agree with it. So I'm going to challenge it. Um, and that challenge is being launched in an environment where there is no psychological safety, there will be a very strong reinforcement of a message that says, you know, you're not safe to do this. and, and the, and the issue is that. Even worse than that is the leaders who, if they are, um, misguidedly setting that as an agenda, they will see the evidence that it's working. They'll say, well, people are challenging. So, we've got psychological safety. But you don't. And my analogy to this is, the focus is on the wrong bit. If we go back to those levels of psychological safety, or stages of psychological safety, inclusion, learner, contributor, challenger, You should be focusing on the inclusion. And actually, to some extent, it's not, I don't mean this in such a black and white way, but to some extent, shouldn't ever need to, or you shouldn't overly need to stress your expectation of challenging. You should focus on the inclusion and the challenging will happen naturally. It's a bit like, the problem with focusing on the challenge is, it's a bit like a comedian in a comedy club. Being like, well this audience is rubbish, they're not laughing at my jokes. I need to tell them to laugh more. I, there's not enough laughter. I want the, the, the, the evidence that I am funny is when people laugh. So I need to tell them to laugh more at my jokes. No, no, you need to write funnier jokes. You need, you need to focus on your joke writing. Not, not what the audience are doing. Um, and that's one of the difficulties with. Um, taking too much of a focus, I think, on the challenger safety is sort of missing the point.

Mark: 48:46

we heard that in the, the example that I shared earlier around the, the Columbia situation, you know, they're saying that on the walls, um, there are literally signs saying, if it's unsafe, you have to say, um, but people didn't feel safe, particularly the engineer that might have prevented the disaster didn't feel safe. Sharing. Above a, a certain tier. And I think, and I think that actually leads quite neatly into maybe talking about how you can implement some of the things that, uh, lead to, to psychological safety, but also how it gets misused as well. I know that, you know, you, you've experienced some of that firsthand, particularly with safe safe to challenge around how you know that, that sense that you are getting told. You have to be safe to challenge can have a like a skewed effect when it's actually being passed down inside the organization.

Andrew: 49:37

Yeah, I did some work with, uh, the civil service and I, and I know that in the UK civil service, I know that in the UK civil service, there is quite a, um, effort culturally to, an ambition to develop a sense of being safe to challenge. Um, again, which is admirable and understandable. Um, but a question I had on one of the, uh, sessions I did with civil servants was, oh, we have, you know, from a, a member of the team, you know, it wasn't from someone in a leadership position per se saying, we have this thing about being safe to challenge. And if I can summarize, this person felt really uncomfortable about it. So the, the, the concept of safety challenge was stressing them. Um, and It comes back to that idea of, well, if you're being told to challenge in a climate that lacks psychological safety, that's the worst of both worlds. and you could see that, uh, even going further, word itself, so think of my kind of, uh, linguistics slant here, but the word challenge itself had almost become toxic. It had become, uh, it had become toxic. impossible to use because it represented so many difficult things for the people who were being encouraged to do the challenging. Um, that they almost, when they heard the word safe to challenge, it felt like, it's a bit like, um, you know, that resilience, resilience gets banded around to you. You need to be more resilient. There's a bit of a victim blaming thing about resilience is, well, the problem is just people aren't resilient enough. So you need to challenge more is, is, uh, uh, could interpret it as, um, passively sort of doing a bit of, uh, by proxy victim blaming of, well, you know, we'd all be in much more psychologically safe atmosphere if you just challenged more.

Mark: 51:35

there is a really interesting overlap. I don't want to spend too long on it, but I always find it really interesting around. The Kim Scott book, Radical Candor, I think, encouraged lots of people to try to focus on feedback, and there's a lot of great material in that book, but the flip side of that is I saw the concept of Radical Candor being adopted, you know, this typical thing of, you know, here is, here is a concept and then, you know, managers or leaders get hold of it and slightly twist it to their own, to their own use. I saw radical candor getting used really as, uh, as a way of bullying because the culture didn't exist that would allow that type of feedback. So radical candor talks about how it is better for the organization and for the individual to hear feedback, you know, for you not to obscure that. Um, but I think that is easily misused. And again, probably a requirement for radical candor is psychological safety in the environment, and especially crossing those those hierarchical boundaries, because I think it's easy. One of the points that I wanted to make, I always think is really, really important when you look at teams and you look at the impact of seniority on those teams. There is And almost almost invisible to the person in the leadership role, the leverage of their position is incredibly impactful on on the people below. We saw it with the Columbia example, but it is very easy for a leader to think. Oh, I'm I'm modeling these behaviors, but even a slight deviation away from. Demonstrating that this is an environment where people are safe to challenge or that they indeed themselves are vulnerable, which I think is really important, has a massive, massively leveraged impact on on the people within the team. Receiving some feedback from a peer is uncomfortable. Receiving feedback from a manager or a manager of a manager is that much tougher. And I think it's really easy to be, um, outside of that environment and believe that, you know, this is fine. I've said that we need to be psychological safe. So we are, so I can give direct feedback. And everybody will just accept it in the spirit that it's given. But you're missing so much about the way that the culture actually is, um, and also not. fully understanding the importance of the hierarchy and in the way that that's received.

Andrew: 54:04

And nuance to it because now we're getting into so what actually happens and the other side of it is there's the challenge, right? So we're talking about safe to challenge. You need to need to be in a psychologically safe environment If you challenge a superior on a decision or the way that we do things around something. And for very good reason, challenge isn't going to result in change that the, the substance of the challenge might suggest was what you were looking for. That doesn't mean that there's no psychological safety. It's about how that responses handled. So I think there's another, so the two way street of the, it's so incumbent on people in leadership positions to handle the, the asymmetry of the power that they hold in these sorts of scenarios with real care. And understand it's a bit like, you know, parenting. You're like, You need to perform this role of it's okay. I appreciate that. You've said this and it might feel a bit fake, but it's so important. you know, actually. There's a way of doing it sincerely. But the, but the thing that my point is that you need to make sure that there's a, a, a soft landing for a response that might not be what the person's looking for in their challenge. Because I think there's a, sometimes I wonder if there's a missing word because it's a bit safe to challenge. It's about safe, safety to unsuccessfully challenge. And the safety to unsuccessfully challenge is about what happens after you've challenged and how you are able to then regroup and, engage in dialogue after that, because if you feel I felt completely comfortable raising my voice and saying, I don't think this is the right way to do things. The equally important second half of that equation is I continue to feel safe to do that again, even though I know and understand why the thing that I said hasn't been taken forward. Cause I do think, yes, there's the responsibility on the leader. A psychologically safe environment also means that the person doing the challenging is completely clear on the fact that it doesn't mean that when they open their mouth, the thing that they want to happen will happen. That's not psychological safety. And you talked about, Amy Edmundson says, it's not about being nice. No, it's not about being nice. And it's not all, it's not about getting your way all the time. that's a bit of the, of the puzzle that needs. equal amounts of attention because I think as well a leader who's not involved in cultivating psychological safety will also think well they've challenged me great I'll shut them down now we're psychologically safe because they did the challenging bit and I can now just carry on the way that I wanted.

Mark: 57:06

I heard. Thanks very much.

Andrew: 57:08

Yeah.

Mark: 57:08

Um, I think, I think that leads nicely on for us. Just if we talk about maybe some of the misunderstandings and misconceptions, so you just mentioned that concept that, um, sort of a misconception is, being safe to challenge is the thing and then everything else will fall under it. But actually, that creates much more, much more pressure. One of the ones that I've seen or a couple that I've seen, I've definitely seen the misunderstanding of yeah. psychological safety as being an environment where performance isn't important. So where psychological safety is the most important thing and performance comes a distant second. So in that instance, I have seen team members misunderstand that It is the most important thing for them to come to do their job and to make sure it's a nice culture for everybody to be in on that that comes first and that actually delivering anything comes second. So you can actually see. Well, you know, we couldn't push for a deadline or we couldn't exert ourselves particularly hard because that wouldn't be psychologically safe. And I think that's, that's, that's important. That's one of certainly one of the misunderstandings that I've that I've seen that is at the detriment of performance to enable psychological safety where I think that is definitely not true Both of those things can exist. You can definitely have a high performance culture with strong psychological safety And although they might be linked you would actually expect performance to go up in a highly safe environment One of the other Ways that I've seen it misused is almost as a personal shield. And, and I think this, this one can be particularly troubling, where you can find that somebody, um, can object to some feedback that they've had. So maybe they're being told that, that their performance could be the entire team isn't performing and that individual is responding on behalf of the whole team, perhaps in private. Or it could be that their own. personal contribution has been criticized. And they're saying, they come back and say, well, I don't feel psychologically safe. So yeah, this is, this is the red flag that they wave, that they feel is going to be the ticket that they get to, to complain about the organizational culture. And, and again, that's not really the point of this. This is not saying that you will not be criticized. It's actually quite the opposite. It's trying to create an environment where you are potentially going to hear things that are uncomfortable. Um, and you know, you might even be fired because your performance isn't good enough and that's really unfortunate, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't a psychologically safe environment. That actually just means that your performance wasn't sufficient to do the job.

Andrew: 59:46

Yeah, I think there's potential for a kind of disingenuous deployment of, well, this is just evidence that this is not a psychologically safe. working environment and that's why I'm being targeted when it may be happening in a place which is has successfully fostered a psychologically safe team dynamic So it can be it can be weaponized like any of these things and um I often think one of the of the things to look out for there is if it is conscripted into being something that that person owns. So that defense is like, I do not feel psychologically safe. This therefore is evidence of a lack of psychological safety in this team. Therefore, you know, you're a bad leader. And go back to Edmondson's work. It's not owned by any individual. So it doesn't mean, look, if that's the reaction that someone has, The sentiment could be accurate. there's nothing in someone saying that, that tells you one way or the other, because it's to do with context of the team. But it's possible that by conscripting it into the individual, there's sort of individual perspective, there's missing the point. So, uh, it's an, it's about an aggregate level of, shared beliefs about, uh, what, what the team climate is like and. One person on one occasion claiming because I don't like the feedback I've received means this is not psychologically safe. It is not evidence of a lack of psychological safety. So it should, you know, you, you can, don't want to say you should treat any comment like that with a pinch of salt,

Mark: 1:01:30

Well, indeed, indeed, you can't, I think the, the issue becomes that it, it does become a flag that people. feel that they can waive. You have criticized me and therefore this isn't psychologically safe, which then calls into question the team environment. Whereas that is, you know, that certainly shouldn't be the case. There were two other misconceptions or misunderstandings that I wanted very quickly to, to mention at the manager level. One is there is no single measure of psychological safety. Even if we could dip a thermometer into a team and take a reading on how psychologically safe it was, that is not really indicative. And, um, part of the reason for that is. Every individual within that environment is going to have a different, uh, feeling, like a different concept of how psychologically safe it is for them. Some of that is temporal. It takes time to feel safe in that environment, but there's a lot more factors to that. In fact, got an episode coming up where we're going to talk about personality, but personality is a really big part of that. Very confident people are more likely to feel psychologically safe. People that score higher on neuroticism and constantly question themselves are more likely to feel that they are not in a safe environment, and so need extra work. to try and demonstrate to them that actually this is a safe space. So there is no one size fits all, even, even in a small team. You cannot just say this is psychologically safe or not safe. It may be for some and not for others. And so you need to keep, working on it. The other thing that I wanted to mention quite quickly, it's really around your point of inclusivity, but was just, you know, as a note for managers that psychological safety is not just procedural. It's not just cultural or, you know, or modeling from a manager. Some of it is structural as well. So you talked about the, the, the steps to get to the challenger safety. Learning safety is part of that. Um, as an indication, it's much easier for somebody to come into an environment, um, as a learner. And have someone else learning at the same time as them. So, you know, if you're structuring a team, if you're thinking about, here is my team, I'm going to have people that are very, very capable. They're experts, they're senior people within the team, senior practitioners within the team. And there is one junior person, It's going to feel very different for that junior person to the, to the senior people. So you can actually address some of that structurally by trying to make sure there's always two learners in a team, or, you know, there is a constant progression path because then people are much more sympathetic to the states and can see reflected other people. You know, it's the sense that I'm a learner. I have a buddy that I am learning at the same time often, you know, we can experience these things together. Some of those things, some of the structural. work that you can do on a team as a manager can actually help create a much more, um, much more inclusive environment. So if you're the only woman in an all male team, maybe it doesn't feel as safe for you as it does for the men. So there's lots of criteria where you can look at that and say, well, actually, what can we as an organization be doing to make sure that the, the structural environment for those teams to perform actually helps create that atmosphere.

Andrew: 1:04:41

Yeah, that is the self reflection element for people in positions of leadership is vital on your example of someone potentially someone on the receiving end of negative feedback around performance. So you know that this is not a psychologically safe team. Um, as I said, they, they That statement could be true or false, depending on the context, but certainly I would always say if you're in that position of leadership, that's a good question to ask yourself is are the dynamics around this person's experience of psychological safety in the team? Because That idea of it being an aggregate shared belief at the team is true. There's research out there that is trying to work at you, but what does that actually mean? Because aggregate is a number that doesn't belong to any one individual. someone who's high in neuroticism may experience a lower level of psychological safety than someone who's, Very open, uh, open to new experiences and less and less neurotic. But the, the person in the position of leadership needs to do a good bit of self reflection thinking is this person, have I set a climate of inclusion? Is this person feeling, the way that I want them to feel when they're on the receiving end of feedback? In a, in a perfect psychologically safe world, that person will be, will understand why they're receiving whatever feedback they may be receiving, good, bad or indifferent. retaining your focus on, on, uh, maintaining that is really important. very worthwhile. Um, and that's something that Edmondson talks about modeling vulnerability. We talked to Alina Kessel in our, in our episode where we interviewed her and she talked about as a, you know, a senior leader in a global organization about modeling fallibility and being willing to be open about your personal vulnerabilities. And a bit like that idea of the people who are looking up to you. they see what you're doing and the that you're doing it is giving implicit permission to behave in that way. So if a leader is never showing any weakness and never, and never, um, accepts that, Uh, things where they've fallen short of expectations or where they've been unsuccessful or or whatever, then they are modeling that to the team. They're saying it is not okay to fail. It is not okay to share, the mistakes that you've made, or the problems you've encountered. and those sow the seeds of, um, a low psychological, safety environment.

Mark: 1:07:23

you just gave, gave this great example of Um, modeling. And for me, that's that's definitely my number one tip, but especially at a leadership level. Um, I think, I think within the organization, it is clearly not sufficient just to put on a wall. If it's not safe, then say so. We heard about that in the, um, the space shuttle. disaster scenario in Amy Edmondson's book in teaming. One of the things that I wanted to call out from that, particularly in that modeling, and we talked about hierarchy, is she gives an example of where the, um, the leader within that mission control setting that was, um, responding to the potential disaster around the space shuttle, uh, at one meeting stood up, uh, to kick off the meeting. And rather than inviting a lower ranking expert within that group. to give an opinion, invited her second in command to step forward, but came out and gave an opinion. And that opinion wasn't necessarily based in the same amount of expertise as the more junior people in the team. I thought that was a really good example. Or anti pattern of this modeling, where in that particular instance, the leader did not model an environment which was conducive to psychological safety because she immediately established through the hierarchy, you know, I'm going to go to my second in command first, rather than making this an open scenario for everybody to contribute to. We've talked about the outsize, uh, impact of, of hierarchy on the way that psychological safety is perceived, receiving criticism from somebody more senior, or actually witnessing vulnerability, as you mentioned with Alina in that previous episode, modeling vulnerability is hugely important. And I think it is important for leaders to really demonstrate constantly to really overemphasize demonstrating that they are vulnerable, that they can make mistakes, that they are not infallible, uh, that they can be corrected, that they will take criticism. I think it is important as well for people to reflect and just to Talking about that modeling and talking about the, um, how people feel about psychological safety that just saying this is a psychological safe environment doesn't mean that you can openly criticize people in that situation because it is psychologically safe, because actually it might be damaging in that situation. So everybody has to be mindful. You don't sit in the meeting and openly criticize your boss, uh, or something that your boss is saying because. You're, you have a claim that it's psychologically safe, there might be a time that is better than an open forum to do that. And so there is always nuance in how you demonstrate that this is a psychologically safe environment.

Andrew: 1:10:02

that comes back to my point of there's, there a continuous two way street on, on everyone's behavior. If you genuinely subscribe to the idea of, being a member of a psychologically safe team, you can't only view it through your individual perspective. You have to consider, well, yes, it's psychologically safe. So I can speak up and say, the boss is a dickhead. But expressing yourself in that way, you are potentially reducing the psychological safety for your teammates. So you must always retain the two views. because you are, you are a custodian of the psychological safety. with all of your counterparts. And you're the caretaker of it in everything that you do and say. Um, that hopefully that doesn't make people, people feel too under pressure, but it's important that you always keep that in mind. I think exposing the practice of behavior that leads to psychological safety in small deal ways, because I think this could turn into propaganda, which you don't want, but taking the opportunity to highlight when someone has stuck their head above the parapet to question something. And that has resulted in a change or that time where I made a mistake or that time where I got that wrong. In a low key way, to make reference to evidence that there is psychological safety retained within the team is good going too far. The other way, making propaganda of it can have its own issues, but being mindful of that, that modeling work and like you say, fallibility, vulnerability, owning your mistakes and making sure that people know about them a person in leadership is important. On a kind of more inclusion level, another tip for me is really investing in in familiarity, investing in the fact that this is a human thing. Now, I know there's, there's debate about, you know, how much of yourself should you bring to work? Uh, but we have to bring some of ourselves and The definition of a team involves relational and instrumental dynamics So it's not just about the technical administrative dimensions of your job. It's about your, it's about you as an individual, as a person. and. In order to have a successful level of psychological safety, you need to have human relationships. And you only achieve those by engaging in experiences that allow you to interact beyond the technical aspects of your job. So, having opportunities to become familiar with each other, and, you know, that does translate to the dreaded away days and things. But

Mark: 1:12:55

Yeah.

Andrew: 1:12:56

well, it works.

Mark: 1:12:57

psychological safety exists in remote teams. Um, and we've spoken a lot about how to make virtual teams work together, but bringing people together, go out for a meal, um, you know, spend time that isn't on the work is a really important part of building the, the, the, the social bonds between people and those social bonds build trust. Interpersonal trust and that interpersonal trust can extend out and strengthen the psychological safety.

Andrew: 1:13:23

Another thing that I think Tim Clark says that I think is useful, especially from a leadership point of view, is I think it can feel very high pressure, this whole thing about psychological safety. We need to be building all the time. It's essential. It's, um, it's hard to do, but like what Tim Clark talks about in his book, which is to say, you know, some contexts. Um, he talks about how when you're responding to a crisis or you're responding to a threat or, or some form of, um, you know, external, quite often what that results in is the need for permission to speak up is dealt with by the situation. So we're all dealing with a problem here. We know. We we know we need contribution. We know we need people to get involved. Um, there's no, there's no need to question the status quo because the status quo has hit us in the face with a problem. So we all know what the problem is and responding to it. And it's quite useful to distinguish. Is this a situation where we're just in response to an incident mode, which case? I don't really need to worry about protecting psychological safety because actually there's quite a lot of implicit psychological safety created by the scenario. If you're in a more forward thinking context and you're planning into the future, strategizing, or it's a more general and might be, Give the opportunity for someone to question a process, question a decision, or, or suggest a way forward in the future that no one else had previously suggested. That's a scenario where you need be switched on to retaining psychological safety because that's the place where someone may be censoring themselves on the basis of not feeling comfortable speaking, about speaking up.

Mark: 1:15:10

my extension to that is there is no one size fits all. Um, one size doesn't fit all, but also within a team. Within an organization, one size doesn't fit all. And so I think being very conscious that you can't just take something that has helped create psychological safety in one organization and bring it to another doesn't necessarily work. And even within the context of one team, the team is constituted by the people within the team, and they will all have different responses to the ways that you're trying to create it. And so I think it's very important, as you have said before, to be willing to experiment in all of these things, be willing to experiment. Don't assume that there is a. checkbox exercise that just says in this environment, this is what you do to create psychological safety. You have to look at the situation. You have to look at the context. You have to look at the people. Um, and then you have to try to create ways that come up with This culture, this sort of symptom of all of the things that have been created, which is psychological safety.

Andrew: 1:16:09

And that probably leads me to my final, which is, you know, talks about experimenting, is Amy Edmondson talks about practice fields. It's a big thing in aviation, healthcare, simulation, all these sorts of, um, initiatives that are precisely designed to give you the opportunity to, to, to learn and fail. So other words involved in psychological safety, but Create practice fields. And in a regular, say, like a business setting, it might not be a simulator, but certainly, especially if you're in a position of leadership, I would say, you identify opportunities that you could regard as, spaces in which you could experiment. So there may be low stakes, scenarios where you're going to be interacting with the team. But you can think about how am I modeling fallibility here and your career isn't on the line or your promotion or your bonus isn't on the line. It's more or this is this is a chance for me to say, okay, I'm going to make a point of saying a thing that I got wrong. And I'm going to make a point of trying to elicit some input from more junior colleagues who I normally not expect to feel brave enough to speak up and Those thinking of those environments as practice fields means that when you really do need it, you've had a go of doing it. It won't feel as a leader. It's not going to feel completely alien and uncomfortable. And you might get the vital input from a junior colleague who otherwise wouldn't have contributed had they not had that opportunity to, to, to contribute in a practice session.

Mark: 1:17:42

for me, there is an element of don't talk about psychological safety. Don't, don't create a slide deck that says we're going to become psychologically safe. I think actually doing, having that practice is the thing that happens. So you don't say we're going to be psychologically safe. You say what we're going to do is we're going to demonstrate some of these behaviors that will lead to it and almost takes away some of that pressure of creating this, this thing, this object. That you're trying to achieve of psychological safety and instead saying that's hopefully going to come at some point in the future, but actually giving us an opportunity to practice modeling the behaviors, listening to the team, trying to understand the context and the responses from people and whether we're getting it right or wrong, you don't achieve psychological safety, you sort of achieve within that particular group, within that organization, within that context, the things that evidence that exists. It's, you know, it's not something that you just flick a switch and you've done.

Andrew: 1:18:41

at a, some kind of high level, you can probably roughly say the prevailing situation is that it exists. You can't point to it and you can't say at any one given moment, Oh, this is us doing psychological safety. Um, it's, it's not like that. All you can do is try and, like, You know, Richard Hackman talks about you create the conditions. So that's why going back to this idea of the, the, the difficulties with focusing on safe to challenge is the same problem is you focus on the challenging, you're missing the point. The challenging should be a lagging consequence of the conditions that you've set. Well, that was quite a significant safari around from the 1950s of definition and background to, uh, the concept of psychological safety through to the, the impact of Edmondson's work, how it then, uh, became turbocharged by Google's Project Aristotle and bringing it home with this discussion around some of the difficulties of, of implementing psychological safety and modern teams. And could we call it some of the misinterpretation of the elements of it, this idea of, you know, safe to challenge, maybe getting the wrong end of the stick, but, um, it's been, been fun to kick it about.

Mark: 1:20:11

Yeah, it's absolutely great. And I love that, that interplay between all of the academic research that existed so long before Google. And like you say, then the The supercharging. So thank you so much. Thank you to everyone for, for listening to this episode and for all your work in preparing Andrew. hopefully we'll see you all on the next episode.

Andrew: 1:20:29

Cheers, Mark. See you again.