24. Simplifying Psychological Safety

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace with myself Prina Sha, where we uncover ways to make your workplace a much better place to be. Psychological safety. I have been told by some clients that it is too hard. So let's simplify it. First off, let's define psychological safety. I have four points. Psychological safety happens in a workplace when I, as an employee, can speak up at work with questions, concerns, and ideas. I can ask for help. I have interpersonal acceptance. So that's inclusivity within the team and beyond. And I can speak up without fear of reprisal. So that's psychological safety defined. I can be me comfortably and fully within the team. The opposite of that in many workplaces is that there's no psychological safety because of the fact that it does take effort to create. Yes, hierarchies do create a division. And impression management. That is when I will speak, when it will be well received, otherwise I'm gonna stay silent because it might rock the boat. If that resonates for you at your workplace, then we have to learn new behaviors. People need to speak up with their ideas, people need to report errors, and people need to have a mindset of continuous improvement. So when I used to work in corporate and manage a large team, we used to have pre- and post-mortem sessions rather than jumping into the next project, which is just so easily done in most workplaces. Another thing you can also do is an unsafe workplace test. I'm gonna simplify this one also because of the fact that you already have lots of data and material at work. So, unsafe workplace test number one. What are your past culture or engagement survey results? What were the themes that were appearing from there from a psychological safety perspective? Another thing you can easily do as an unsafe workplace test is listen. Are people speaking up? Now, if you're gonna ask them to speak up, you have to listen. I'm gonna give you a bad example here. When I worked in corporate a good few years ago, I supported a senior leader to do post checks for their branch. I, as an external, as an independent, neutral party, interviewed every single person within the branch and asked them what's working well, what's not working well, and what solutions do you have for improvement? Simple. It's a continuous improvement task with that as the simple intention. However, when I shared the results with the leader of the branch, they took it very personally and ended up dismissing the results and then creating their own and then relaying back to the branch that they were problem makers, they were trouble seekers, and that everything that they have raised is untrue. Imagine how that landed. That branch certainly did not laugh together. And in that example, therefore, what the leaders were doing, and lots of the team members also, is that they were focused on impression management in trying to impress that branch leader. So they only spoke out when it suited them, and that resulted in a very combative workplace culture and a bad workplace environment. Therefore, to create psychological safety, if you are finding it too hard for your organization, your leaders need to learn new skills. One of the biggest skills is self-awareness of their positional power and how they can help or hinder the people that report to them. Leaders need to be aware of the fact that they can come across as intimidating and therefore the positional power that they have can stop others from bringing their best selves to work. Leaders need to exercise curiosity, open questions, active listening, and break that one-track thinking. That's not going to work anymore. And leaders can do this, and individuals can also do this by self-coaching weekly. I'm going to add a link to a free guide that I have for self-coaching that you can download at your leisure and see how you go with that because you really need to observe your behavior as well as your challenges and triggers every single week and how you are responding to it. Creating psychological safety can be done, but you need to work hard on yourself to be able to create that for your workplace. When we're considering psychological safety creation for teams, I highly recommend that you meet regularly for development, at least every six months. Development can be in the form of learning external, wonderful new things, focusing on yourselves as a team and how you can continuously improve. You can have a facilitator run such a session, an external party, to really focus and poke and prod and ask the questions that everyone's not willing to ask as well. Sometimes now, when I run such team sessions, I always ask the leader if they can be within the session rather than leading the session with me, that they are a participant and they take their leader hat off. Because removing that positional power hat opens your eyes so much, and the leaders that I've worked with who have participated as a team member have seen the true fruit of their labour in such a session. So taking off your leadership hat, I know it's very anti to everything that you have been taught, it's very worthwhile in when you want to create psychological safety. Teams need to have an agreed purpose so that they're not going in different directions. And many teams do, no doubt you have a few examples. Teams need to understand what we stand for and what we stand against as a collective. Now each team is different, which is why each team needs to understand the behaviours that they want to create and enable psychological safety. I'll give an example of my corporate days when I managed a very large HR team. We had a shared purpose. I shared how my role was difficult and how and why I needed their support. So here I'm creating that interdependence, and it's really important for my team members to know how I rely on them. So I had to articulate the difficult elements of my job so that they could understand it. We as a collective then talked about the challenges that we all face, and oh my gosh, it was really insightful. It was really handy for me to learn all of the challenges that each team member faced because I had no idea with certain aspects. We also talked about the fact that human resources is an error-prone area. So my line was if you mess up, fess up and we'll deal with it. But please feel free to come to me when something has gone wrong. And once I created that rationale for people to speak up, they really and truly did. And my team excelled and we met so many of our goals as a result. So my question to you is how are you going to create psychological safety in your team? Whether you are a leader or a team member? There's so many ways that you can do it. Are you allowing the team to truly and freely speak? Are you sharing your pleasures and sorrows of your role? Are you sharing how we are an interdependent unit, a collective? Are you sharing how people can speak up and share when things have gone wrong? So these are just some of the ideas that I have. Check out the show notes to learn more about Project Aristotle by Google and all of the learnings that they have had in relation to psychological safety and see what you can implement to create a better team for you. Are you ready to take a stand against crappy workplace cultures, lousy leaders, and toxic teams? If that's you, if you're ready, then you need to join the Ways to Change Your Workplace Facebook group, which is linked in today's show notes. I'll see you there, and I'm looking forward to you tuning in to the next episode. Ciao for now.