Influencing psychological safety

Anna Slaydon: Welcome to Leadership Amplitude, a podcast production of the BB&T Leadership Institute. I am Anna Slaydon and I am here with Dr. Patrick Gallagher and Eileen Hogan from the Leadership Institute. Hey, guys. Thanks for joining us.

Eileen Hogan: Great to be here.

Patrick Gallagher: Hey, how are you, Anna?

Anna Slaydon: Now, we are in a little bit of a different situation than we usually are for these episodes. At the time of this recording, we are all kind of dealing with social distancing associated with COVID-19. And so Eileen and Patrick are called into the podcast which is kind of exciting. It is our first time with called in guests. So thank you guys for working with me on that.

Eileen Hogan: You’re welcome.

Patrick Gallagher: Absolutely.

Anna Slaydon: So let us introduce – I know Patrick, you have been on the podcast before. And Eileen, it has been your first time so Patrick, why do not you just introduce yourself.

Patrick Gallagher: My name is Patrick Gallagher. I am the Director of Research at the Leadership Institute. In my role, I am responsible for sort of coordinating and bringing together the empirical research and insights that we can use to inform our programs and to uncover new knowledge that includes conducting original research of our own. And I also am responsible for measuring the impact for our programs in our clients individually and in their organizations.

Anna Slaydon: Great. Well, thanks for being on the podcast again. Eileen, why do not you introduce yourself as well.

Eileen Hogan: Thanks, Anna. I am Eileen Hogan and I am one of the senior consultants at the Leadership Institute. And I am responsible for designing and developing and delivering much of our content, right, directly face-to-face with the clients and through other options like phone and WebEx. Content related to all things leadership related.

Anna Slaydon: Well, thank you both for being on here. We had a regularly scheduled podcast series that we were going to launch into focused on positive psychology. But based on current events, we wanted to be really responsive to what our listeners needed most right now. And I thought it was really important, Eileen, I know you have recently produced a white paper on the matter of psychological safety. Eileen, tell us a little bit about psychological safety. And I will get you started with I read your white paper and I saw this phrase, “culture eats strategy for breakfast and psychological safety can eat your culture.” So tell us about psychological safety.

Eileen Hogan: Thanks, Anna. So psychological safety was a term that was really coined by Amy Edmondson who works with the Harvard Business School. And it is about really how does somebody feel about expressing and really being their full selves at work, right? It touches on how they perceive that what they do and how they interact may be rewarding or threatening in terms of taking interpersonal risks. So fundamentally, that is what it is.

Anna Slaydon: Tell me about how that plays out in terms of, in real life. So that is the definition of it. But give us some examples of psychological safety.

Eileen Hogan: When people really feel psychologically safe, they feel accepted, and respected. They can fully be themselves. They are going to be invested in their work. They will ask questions and push back on ideas in a constructive way, trying to make things better for their clients, for their teams, for their organizations. Really trying to help drive the organization forward. It might look like it is fairly easy for them to hear constructive feedback. They are willing to give constructive feedback in all directions whether that is just to their direct reports, to their peers or going up the chain. They just really feel comfortable being who they are and fully invested.

Conversely, when somebody does not feel psychologically safe or they have a low sense of psychological safe, they are coming from a very different place. They are going to withhold. They have some sense that there is repercussions of some form when they are themselves. Those repercussions may be they get some critical feedback delivered in an unhelpful way. They might feel marginalized, humiliated, embarrassed and like they are being rebuked. So it actually sets them up when they have this sense of their son repercussions or retribution from being themselves, it sets their brain into this survival mode which is very different than when there is high psychological safety and that is really where the real lever is for this.

Anna Slaydon:  I am wondering, Patrick, I know you do a lot of work around culture and engagements and considering the workplace kind of at a higher level in terms of both the individuals but also how the individuals interact as a larger organization or larger organism. I am wondering if you could share some of your perspectives in light of your engagement work as to where does psychological safety fit in with engagement?

Patrick Gallagher: Psychological safety is one of the conditions that we measure and client organizations to really diagnose the state of engagement. So we measure engagement, we measure 15 different workplace conditions that are known to affect it and psychological safety is one of those things that goes back really to the roots of employee engagement work as one of the crucial conditions to have highly engaged employees. And engagement is important. I think everybody is pretty much in agreement now that engagement is important. It leads to better well-being among employees so our employees are happy, healthy and more fulfilled. And it has got positive business outcomes, too. So there is kind of a twofold benefit to high employee engagement. And again, I think everybody’s in pretty good agreement about that. But the how to actually foster it and build it in your organization is definitely something a lot of organizations still want to know more about. Psychological safety is one of the conditions that seems to be very important in a lot of different organizations for supporting high engagement.

 But we sort of – we divide up all of our conditions that we measure into six kind of buckets that people can think about as the drivers engagement. And one of them we spend a lot of time with, one of those areas is could connectedness. For us, psychological safety is in that bucket of connectedness. And that might not seem intuitive at first but I think one of the important things to understand is that psychological safety is a very social kind of idea or condition. What makes people feel unsafe is the potential social consequences of speaking up or taking inaction. And if the perception is there that speaking up or doing something out of turn or some kind of action will result in a sanction by a boss, a sort of social exclusion of a work team, those social consequences are typically much more powerful than something physical or even something related to money. Those powerful social dynamics are sort of the key to psychological safety.

As you can imagine, picture yourself in a workplace where you sort of fear the consequences of certain actions. That is not – like Eileen just said, that is not a condition that you want to be in every day. And that is not how you are going to do your best work if you are thinking about those social consequences.

Eileen Hogan: Nobody wakes up in the morning and says I want to feel psychologically unsafe. It is just an icky feeling. Right? People do not wake up wanting to do that. But something happens in the world, and our brain, trying to help us, will interpret certain things as threats. And when that happens, our brain takes over and puts us into this fight, flight or freeze mode and in this protective mode. And we need some grace to be able to work out of that. One of the worst things we could do for people is to make them wrong or give them a sense that something’s wrong with them because they do not feel safe in the situation. We want to create that space and give them grace to say I understand that is where you are at right now and once that is acknowledged, we can help people move forward. So that is really important. Nobody wants to be in this place. And we can be effective in helping people move forward once we had knowledge that that is where they are right now. And make it okay for them to be there.

Anna Slaydon: Can I like my leader and also feel that I am not psychologically safe? Are those things connected in any way?

Eileen Hogan: I think that both things can be true at the same time. That I can like my leader as a person and even some of the things he or she does in terms of our relationship. And there can still be some things that happened between my leader and I or even on the team with a leader, that would lead me to feel psychologically unsafe.

Anna Slaydon: Leaders who are trying to get a gauge of their – the psychological safety of their teammates, it is not enough to just say I get along really well with them. We go out on Friday night and we all go bowling or we do something like that. That likability of the leader does not necessarily dictate the level of psychological safety that that team experiences.

Patrick Gallagher: Yeah, I would agree with Eileen.

Eileen Hogan: I would agree.

Patrick Gallagher: Yeah, I agree with Eileen’s description. Psychological safety is not perfectly correlated in technical terms with liking. So you can genuinely have a team that really likes each other and people who like their leader and still feel like there are restrictions about what they can say without repercussions. So that is one scenario. I think generally the more people like their leader, the more likely there is to be psychological safety. But it is certainly not a given just because people like a leader that they feel safe expressing anything.

There is another scenario, too, that I think is probably a lot more prevalent in the leaders that I have worked with and heard about from other staff here at the LI. And that is I tell people all the time go ahead and speak up if you have got any reactions or any contributions. I say that all the time. So there should be plenty of psychological safety. But it can be way more complicated than just having that invitation out there at a meeting. There are all kinds of circumstances where that is still apt to stifle that contribution. For one thing, it could be in a public forum where an employee does not feel like well, I cannot say this in front of everybody else. If I could say this one-on-one to the leader, I might say it. But if this is my only chance, I am not going to say it here. That disconnect between what the leader thinks he or she is offering and the actual conditions of psychological safety may be a big problem.

Eileen Hogan: What happens is that you have a situation like where Patrick’s example, a leader will say I offer people the opportunities to speak up all the time and I encourage them to speak up. And then when people do make that choice, and people perceive there is some negative fallout from it, it is the individual that feels the psychological safety. It is hard for a leader to really understand. A leader cannot necessarily assess without checking with me and assess my level of psychological safety and to be willing to engage in a dialogue about that; about what is going on for me. What is my experience of some of the things that are happening in the ___ ___?

And it can be hard to really appreciate that from a leadership perspective, especially if the leader themselves has never been in a situation where they have felt a low level of psychological safety. So that can be a challenge if they have not experienced that. And even in the current environment, the leader feels psychologically safe, it be hard to extract to somebody else may not be feeling psychologically safe in that environment. So there is some things that get into the way there of leaders trying to really understand and appreciate what the experience is like for the employees.

Anna Slaydon: You can have multiple people in the same room having the same experience but they may not be feeling the same way. They may not all necessarily feel psychologically safe at that moment.     

Eileen Hogan: Some may be feeling psychologically safe and some may be feeling not psychologically safe.

Patrick Gallagher: That is the dynamic in the room that yeah, we have already kind of mentioned the idea that a leader, there are some barriers. There is some reasons why it is hard for a leader to sort of recognize if that is the case. If some people feel safe and others do not. And that has the potential to sort of build into other things. So if I am a leader and I am sitting with a team of six and three of them feel like they can contribute and they can speak freely and three of them do not feel that way for whatever reason, there is a rift forming in that group I would bet between the people who feel like they have the freedom and have the ability to speak up and contribute and those who do not feel that way. There might be some resentment, there might be some bad feelings towards the leader, towards other members of the team. And if the leader cannot or is not sort of aware of those dynamics happening, there is a lot of potential for bad things happening there.

And a lot of leaders have experience with that kind of thing and maybe there is a rift between a couple of sub teams and after being into it, you find out that one team feels that the other team has sort of more connectedness or more closeness with the leader or they are able to sort of get their ideas and whereas other parts of the team are not. So having experience with issues like that, psychologically safety could be at the root of some things like that.

Anna Slaydon: Looking at this, it seems like there is a lot of reasons leader should be interested in creating environments where or relationships that have a lot of psychological safety. It is great for productivity. It is great for innovation. People are just not as restrained in their ability to contribute when they are feeling safe to be able to do that. Eileen, I am wondering if there are ever circumstances in which a leader may purposely create an environment of, an environment that does not have a high psychological safety; but consciously make the decision to say this is working for me and I do not mind that my team has low psychological safety. So almost playing devil’s advocate, why might they feel that way?

Eileen Hogan: Sometimes leaders have experienced some level of success by those kinds of behaviors. And so they are working with in some limited scope of like this is what I know to do. This has helped deliver success for me in the past. I expected to continue to deliver success for me in the future.

And the trade-off is that they are limiting how much success they can have. They really are leaving potential on the table when there is low psychological safety because people are not able to reach their potential when they do not feel psychologically safe. And there is impacts beyond what they are losing in the moment about morale and people’s commitment to driving the strategy forward and people’s commitment to staying so it impacts retention and turnover which has some impact on short-term and long-term results. So I would say that some leaders are doing it and they are willing to take the trade-off without being really aware of what that trade-off is truly costing.

Patrick Gallagher: And I would add there is almost kind of another way to tell that story. Eileen mentioned a while ago the things that can get in the way of a leader really having an accurate perception of how things are going. I think that is a good theme and so one of the ways that we might arrive at the situation that you described, Anna, is that a leader is successful and they get promoted up a few levels. They are having a successful career. And over time, they start to think well, things are going really well and the way I am doing them must be good. Must be strong. And this could be unconscious. So even without trying to craft a certain culture, a leader might find herself building something that unintentionally has low psychological safety and it could be working for to a certain degree so that they just naturally do not seek out the conditions of psychological safety or seek out the true feelings of all their team members and discover that there might be some low safety. And like Eileen said, over time, that is probably going to limit the achievements of a team or the work that a leader can get done through other people.

Anna Slaydon: We acknowledge that low psychological safety can still have some successful results but not as successful as they could potentially have. They are leaving some success on the table.

Patrick Gallagher: Yeah, I think that is definitely true and just to be a little more concrete about it, a team without psychological safety really is restricted to be the strategies on the tactics and the creativity of one person, the leader. And any good leader or any experience leader knows that when you leverage the talents of everybody on the team, first of all, when you build a good team and then you allow for their inputs, what you can do grows exponentially. So limiting yourself to only one person’s ideas and thoughts really limits what the team can accomplish.

Anna Slaydon: Let us pivot a little bit and let us talk about the current environment. I am going to use myself as an example. I have been working from home, abiding by social distancing now for a week. My daughter has been out of school for a week. Right now, the feedback we are getting from school is she will not go back this school year. My environment has changed dramatically. When I go to the store for groceries, there is not a lot of groceries left. We really had to hunt for toilet paper and for me to and I know I am not the exception. But for me, it is unsettling. And there is a lot of, a lot right now, a lot of conflicting information that is coming out. You cannot turn on the TV and not see it. It is all over the radio. So it is either kind of cut off from the world or you are plugged into the world but all you get is this overwhelming amount of information which does not always make sense and does not always agree. So there is a lack of clear messaging. And essentially what I am driving at is I, and I think my situation is very similar to what many employees are experiencing, it is unstable or it feels unstable. I am confused. I am uncertain. And while I am safe, I am in my home. I have a job. I am very blessed to be continued to get a paycheck which is not the situation for everyone in the United States right now. I do not know that if I were to say globally, I do not think that my psychological safety is very high right now for reasons that do not have to do with my work. Again, I am very blessed. I still have a job and a paycheck. But my life outside of that is chaotic and I cannot control that. And my leader also cannot control that because he is going through the exact same thing.

So I am wondering if we kind of refocus on this environment that we are in and talk about psychological safety in the workplace when there are external factors that are outside of the control of the leader. What does the leader do about that?

Eileen Hogan: So Anna, I think that probably a lot of people listening to this can really relate to the things you were sharing there and describing there. And I think it is important to recognize that some of this is related to even something like more fundamental than psychological safety. It is kind of our foundational safety. We think about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. There is our basic physiological needs that we all have around water, food, warmth, shelter, rest.

 And then psychological safety kind of sits on top of that as one of the next steppingstones but they are kind of working together here. For a lot of people, just their whole fundamental sense of safety around what is – what does life look like now? It does not look like it looked like yesterday or even this morning because there are so many changes coming with this and there is a lot of unknowns as to what it is going to look like in the future. So people in general are – this general sense of not feeling safe and their brains, our brain is trying to help us out, are putting us into this kind of protective mode; this kind of like fight, flight or freeze mode – whatever your tendency is there. Trying to protect us and keep us safe. And so we do not have a lot of energy for really thinking. And I do not know about you, Anna, I have had a really hard time focusing at work the last week or so. And for me, it is related to these things going on outside of our [audio fades].

So in terms, though, of what leaders can do, right? First of all, we have got to recognize people are going through these things even the leaders we are looking to for guidance and direction. We have to recognize that people may have trouble focusing. They may be easily distracted. What seems like irrational decisions, because our brains are not operating on full capacity when we are in these states. So first of all one things leaders can do is just kind of recognize that.

What people can give right now may not be what they could give under what used to be normal circumstances. It is just not possible. So if leaders can recognize that, that is a good place to start. Opportunities for leaders to recognize ___, engage in conversations and – just let people be where they are at. To be confused and frustrated, to be disconcerted, to be sad, to be angry. And just acknowledge those feelings. So that is one thing. Once people can get their feelings acknowledged, it gives people space to kind of move on. When people’s feelings are not acknowledged, they can kind of get stuck and almost get under the control of their emotions. When those emotions could be acknowledged, it gives you space to make different choices and not just [audio fades]. We can give them information and give it to them frequently, very transparent information. If you do not know something, say so. Tell them what the reality is so that they will have information on a consistent basis. You can ask what their concerns are and what they need and how we can help meet those needs. Patrick, your thoughts?

Patrick Gallagher: I would pretty much echo a couple of things that Eileen said. Yeah, it is important to remember, I guess, that psychological safety is not necessarily the same as safety in general. So if you feel like your job is threatened or your loved one’s health is threatened, that is just kind of basic human safety. Psychological safety is whether people feel like there are consequences at work for saying certain things or taking certain actions.

But I think what is crucial for the leader to recognize, and Eileen just described these. What is important for the leader is to make it okay for people to have feelings that they are having right now in the workplace. That is what will really have a detrimental effect that people feel like oh, this is not the place for me to bring these emotions. I have to sort of shut them off or leave them at home when I come to work. And that is, I think, I just do not think that would work in the environment we have right now at this moment. If people feel like they cannot be themselves and express those anxieties or even their hopefulness and their positivity, if work is a place where that sort of cannot be addressed and cannot be shared, that is probably not going to be healthy.

We certainly would not say – I do not think leaders are responsible for making people feel less anxious. I do not think leaders are responsible for sort of conducting therapy sessions and helping people get over anxiety or anything like that. But there has to be at least, like Eileen said, the opportunity to acknowledge it and to recognize it and not to just sort of sweep it away. Maybe there is a few minutes of informal discussion and some well wishes for everybody before you go on with the meeting. I think that is something a leader can do. And do not feel burdened to, like I said, conduct some kind of therapy. Just kind of have a little talk about what is going on, about how anxious people are. And that sort of sets the stage for a safe environment.

Anna Slaydon: You know, I saw this situation where an email or to go through and it was a teammate who had done a conference call and because daycare’s are now closed, you could hear in the background of their conference call their child. They have a very young child so the child was kind of cooing and looking for their mother’s attention. And she was apologizing to her leader for how embarrassed she was and how unprofessional she felt like it was. Clearly mortified by it. And I really related to her because I have got a seven-year-old running around in the background and I have had some of those same moments where you just cannot control that environment. And I thought the leader’s response was so incredibly kind. Right now, that is okay. She handled it beautifully. Everybody is having this situation happen. It is totally understandable. It was not distracting. He felt like the call went very, very well. It was something people probably did not notice. So I loved that he both normalized it but also reinforced that she still had high performance and so he did not perceive her performance as lower because of something that is just indicative of where we are right now.

Eileen Hogan: That is such a great example, Anna, of the very simple way that a leader can help support higher psychological safety. To say hey, it is okay. These are sort of the situations that we are in right now.

Anna Slaydon:  In the words of Kelly King, “there is no facet of society that cannot be improved by better leadership.” Those words are incredibly meaningful especially now during this unique season of our lives. We are committed to being with you every step of the way as you move forward, leading your families, your organizations and your communities. So we will be increasing the amount of podcasts we produce over the next few weeks and they will be very relevant to the challenges you face. Some of our upcoming topics include Managing Change that is being done to all of us, the power of purpose during challenging times, and triggers, what are they and how do you manage them?

[Music]

To make sure that you get all the great content, I would encourage you to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can follow us on LinkedIn or visit us on the web at www.BBTLeadershipInstitute.com. Make sure you subscribe when you visit our website so you get our email newsletters. And of course, you are always welcome to email us. We are at LeadershipInstitute@BBandT.com. That’s Leadership Institute @B-B-A-N-D-T.com. We are here to support you and we are just an email away. Thank you so much for listening in and will see you on the next podcast.

Leadership Amplitude is a podcast for reduction of the BB&T Leadership Institute. All rights reserved.

[End of Audio]