Leading Beyond Any Title

Leading Beyond Any Title - Operationalizing Psychological Safety for Team Success

• Terran Allen

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 In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, leaders are often charged with the critical task of fostering a high-performance culture capable of driving innovation and adaptation. Whether it's sparking creativity, enhancing collaboration, or pioneering new ideas, these goals are deeply rooted in social processes that can't be achieved overnight. Leaders must cultivate an environment that encourages open dialogue, experimentation, and even the occasional unconventional idea, all while maintaining a focus on the performance that leads to results.  

While psychological safety is frequently touted as the key to this challenge—where everyone feels secure enough to voice their thoughts—it's important to recognize that true psychological safety isn't created by simply declaring it or attending a single webinar. Instead, it requires a sustained, thoughtful approach from leadership.  

In this conversation, Craig and Jennie will delve into the leader’s role in building this critical climate. You'll gain insights into the subtle cues and self-awareness markers that indicate progress and learn practical strategies for consistently fostering a culture where every team member feels empowered to contribute. 

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Craig:

This is the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast, your guide to transformative leadership. We're your hosts. Hi, I'm Craig Hess.

Jennie:

And I'm Jennie Gilbert. Each episode of Breakfast will bring you weekly quick lessons and conversations about topical leadership challenges. You're guaranteed to leave with one big idea, two applied strategies, and three questions to consider that can help enhance your leadership every day.

Craig:

We'll bring you insights on how to lead beyond any title and unlock your own leadership potential.

Jennie:

And we both hope you enjoy this episode.

Craig:

It's 8. 01. Why don't we turn it over to you to kick things off and then we'll get into the conversation.

Jennie:

Let's go there. So talking of beautiful weather and long weekends ahead for most of us, it does depend where you're joining us from, for those of you in Canada. This is a photograph taken this week, actually, from the top of one of our buildings, SAIT Residences, and it is gorgeous out there. We're lucky. We live on some beautiful land, and at the beginning of every Friday webinar that we do, it is important to us just to pause and stop and recognize Where it is that we're located. So if you're joining us in Canada, thank you for taking a moment just to pause with us. If you're joining us from outside Canada too, this is a great chance just to stop and think about where are you? What are we doing today? What's coming up on the weekend? And what kind of land around you do you have to appreciate and recognize? Here in Calgary, which is where SAIT is situated, you can see from our turf field there that's us. We are located on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot and the people of the Treaty Seven. That includes the Siksika, the Pakani, the Ghani, the Soutena, and The Iyahi Nakoda of Bearspaw, Tuniki and Goodstony. And this area the Blackfoot tribes traditionally called Mokintas, which it means the joining of two rivers, the Bow River and the Elbow River. You can't quite see it in this picture, but the Bow River is just in front of the high rise buildings, obviously. We now call it Calgary, which is also home to the Metis Nation of Alberta. I think that's great.

Craig:

Perfect. Thank you, Jennie. And just some housekeeping folks before we get going clearly the chat folks have found that and there's that's always a great place for you to carry on the conversation, share your ideas and thoughts with each other. And you will see in there I've also put in some links to the upcoming sessions. Take a chance to register while you're there, etc. Please do connect with me and Jennie on LinkedIn. We're more than happy to connect with folks. As we go through this morning, if you have specific questions you would like to pose on the topic please try and use the Q& A function. It should be the icon next to your chat at the bottom of your screen. The chat typically, can fly by at times and we can miss questions in there. So if you have specific questions, please pop them into the Q& A. And we will do our best to create a safe space to answer those questions. And there's the segue, Jennie. We're here to chat about psychological safety. And I'm just going to throw this out there and give you the opportunity to take a direction that you like to go. What is it? What isn't it? Is it just a buzzword? that we've been hearing lots and lots about. Dealer's Choice, how would you like to start this morning?

Jennie:

Oh yeah, we do those buzzwords, don't we? There's a few of them out there, but Psychological Safety is, no, it's been around for a while and I think that's a really good place for us to start is what is it and what isn't it. It is, if we take Amy Edmondson's, definition. Now Amy Edmondson for those, perhaps it's a new topic to you. One of the first to bring it to general recognition, but it was around long before Amy Edmondson brought it to the forefront in 2018. The Definition that's stuck is that climate where people feel safe enough to take interpersonal risks and by interpersonal risks, we mean asking the question, sharing concerns giving our ideas, even if they're not fully formed. Anything that requires that interpersonal risk between people. And the other thing I'd add with psychological safety is that it's that climate piece of environment. It's like an umbrella over a team. It's over a group of people. When we talk about one on one, we might talk a bit more about trust. And you can't build psychological safety if you don't have trust within your team members. What it's not there's a whole host of things. It's not in its most, obvious form. We see teams that appear to be very nice, very lovely, very cordial. But the problem is that when we need those gritty conversations, when we need that friction piece. Nobody's talking. Or, it's not protecting emotions. It's not having besties on your team the whole time. It's a little bit gritty. And I think one of the problems, to your point, Craig, is it just the sort of craze of the day. We latched onto this because one of the ways that it came to our, social media really is the way that it emerged was because Project Aristotle, which was a Google project, recognized that their highest performing teams had this thing that they called psychological safety. So everybody says, okay if Google's high performing teams has it, we need it too. How do we do that? And so now it sits as a little bit of a checkbox. And it can't be the goal. Like it is, it's a whole collection of behaviors that lead to this climber. It's not a check situation. There you go. There's tons at you. Now you pick.

Craig:

So you just can't declare that we are psychologically safe and move on is what you're saying?

Jennie:

Sadly, no. And I would suggest that you don't sit down with your team and say, let's have a conversation about psychological safety.

Craig:

That's interesting because That was a question I was going to pose to you here at some point, but let's just put a pin in that one for right now, because you talked about high performance teams. Yeah. And I think what I'd like to try and dive into a little bit is, so high performing teams have high degree of psychological safety.

Jennie:

shows that. Yeah, most

Craig:

So what does that look like in practice? So if you're a leader. And you're looking at your team, like, how does a leader recognize that you actually have a good level of psychological safety on your team?

Jennie:

Good question. So I think there's a number of different things that you can look for. One, how does the team handle failure? Two, as a leader, does your team challenge you? And often the problem with that is when we get challenged, the ego comes to play. And so as a leader, you might rebut against it. And there's nothing wrong with that rebuttal. We're talking respect. How does that conversation happen? But actually as a leader, if your team challenged you, that is greatest compliment ever because they feel safe enough to do that. But how does that conversation carry on? So when we're in that climate that we're talking about, the challenge, intellectual friction's high, social friction. is low. And so that's a key piece within there. I think as a leader, too, is when everybody knows each other well enough beyond the job title. How are you building your social capital? Because if all we know is our function, we've nothing else to work with. And we like to have those different connections that we can make. You and I can. disagree vibrantly in a meeting and still laugh and talk about hockey half hour later, my lack of knowledge of hockey, no doubt. But because we've got that social capital, I see more to you than Craig who wants to talk about hockey.

Craig:

Yeah. Debate, I think is a respectful debate is a good sign. I like that comment you made about, is your team willing to challenge you?

Jennie:

Yes.

Craig:

And that, that I think could be a real flag for some folks if, if you pause and think about it and realize that No, not really. Team just generally agrees with me or doesn't say anything to your point. there's gotta be some flags for you to consider. But the whole concept of, respectful debate and challenge and be able to have a conversation and then to at least be able to commit and move forward, right? So I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but is there something in there around, it's good to be challenged and good to challenge each other and have those conversations, but at some point you do have to put a stick in the sand and say, we've made this decision and whether we agree with it or not, we're going forward. I don't know if there's.

Jennie:

Yeah, so the challenge is good. Like when we think about what organizations are asking from their leaders, they want innovation, collaboration, creativity. There's three more buzzwords for you right there. Each one of those in any form is a social process and a social process means people. And for us to hit that high performance as people, we're going to need that. environment, let's call it psychological safety here, to be able to have those conversations to get there, because we can't be creative and innovative if we all sit around the table and agree with each other, or, and we've spoken about this a lot, if you're the hippo in the room. Highest individually paid person's opinion and you come in and just give your idea and then we all just agree with you because you've said that and you've made your mind up. That's not a healthy challenge or healthy debate or even a healthy collaboration. So how do we make the conflict productive is one part of it. We need the conflict, but we will need it to be productive. And then the other part I think that's important here is as a leader, how are you showing up? Because there's a big difference between a collaborator and an opponent. If you are just, I'm just being devil's advocate and I'm pushing back at you. That's a bit more of an opponent than a collaboration perspective to it. As a leader, and there's tons of us out there, do you have the need to be right? Because if you need to be right, that conversation is going to stop. Much quicker. How does your curiosity set? And the problem is a lot of the time we're under the pressure of time. And so curiosity, understanding, even collaboration all take time. And we want an answer yesterday. How do we blend those two things? We talk all the time about tension in leadership, tension in workplaces. This is a healthy tension that we need to find the balance with our teams within. To your point, if you hold the title of leader as a role, leadership as a behavior, then yes, we do have to put a stick in the sand at some point or we have to make a decision, but there is a big difference in the decision that the team can own. Even if I don't completely agree, I know. The good reason behind it, then a decision that the leaders just meant and said, we're going this way. Now, sometimes we have to do that, but are we making sure that when we don't have to do that, we've got that climate going on?

Craig:

Yeah, no, I was just gonna comment on that. And those situations are typically. Very rare, few and far between, where you basically have to say, this is what's happening.

Jennie:

Yeah.

Craig:

That is, yeah, that's not the norm. If it is the norm, that's perhaps a different podcast. I'm not sure what to make of that one, but how do you bring that in? One of the things that we've talked about before is if you don't have that active descent on your team, appointing somebody's the devil's advocate or putting the empty chair at the table I don't know if you want to touch on that a little bit, because I think that's a very tactical and practical tip that we could share.

Jennie:

And it speaks to you definitely, before you start that, you're not saying, okay, let's make this a psychologically safe conversation. What you're saying is, the value and the contribution in this conversation is us disagreeing. So let's set up, okay, one of the fundamentals of psychological safety, set the stage. So what does active dissent or positive dissent look like? it speaks to your culture, but things like, observe, don't interpret, ask, don't tell, focus on the issue, not the person. They're just three simple ones for you You don't want list too long, but those were the guardrails. This is acceptable. This is not. so if you come in telling me how it should be, somebody's able to say, no, that's not the way we're operating in here. And then once you've got that set up, the exercise that you're talking about actually comes from David Markway. He calls them red and black cards. I use playing cards and one of them has a different picture on it. And if you get the picture when we hand the cards out, your job is to disagree. so what happens within a group that's not used to this, a group that's used to sitting is that somebody will say, okay the card's making me say this. What if this is the case, or, and it is basically playing. Devils Advocate. eventually what happen is someone across the table will say, can you give me the card, please? And then they'll disagree. And then eventually you don't need the card because we've set up that climate where actually this disagreement or this dissent or seeing it differently becomes really healthy. And another version is the empty chair. I love the empty chair in a meeting room. What would the stakeholder say? What would the client say? What would the team who's not here say? It just allows us to speak from different perspectives, to see from different perspectives, or even just to open up that conversation.

Craig:

Yeah, absolutely. And it gives permission to somebody to dissent who may be afraid to dissent.

Jennie:

Totally. In psychological safety, what we're talking about is permission and respect. And every, as we move through this and we get better and better, all those are the guardrails. So giving permission is key and I think the one piece we need to include in there, like we set the stage we've had the conversation, but especially as a leader, but we want to watch our team for this too, is are your responses productive? And we are always projecting something. So I'm not just talking about the verbal response and all my fellow eye rollers, that's a response to it.

Craig:

I don't know if you caught that. We have some questions here. I think we should pop over to one. It's interesting. we get versions of this question for almost every topic that we cover. And that is, how does one manage up psychological safety if those above don't practice it?

Jennie:

We do. Yeah. No. Okay. So the, but this is key and we need to always be talking about this. The person that you're managing up to is a human being as well. That's the first part that I will always say. So the rules aren't that much different. Psychological safety is about a climate. So the first thing that we need to build is the trust. And when you're looking at trust with that person, where has trust been eroded that you don't feel safe enough to speak up. And there, there's some interesting research. I can't remember whose it is, but you only need 7 percent of the team to start to model the behaviors and it will ripple through that team pretty quickly. So if you have a small group of you that are prepared to practice that and prepared to put that into action, it is amazing the traction that it can get pretty quickly. So what I'm talking about in a team conversation, let's say, is if Somebody makes a suggestion and the leader goes to shut it down. It is well within your own leadership as behavior, not necessarily a role, to say, actually, I think that's a good question. Could we double click on that? Simple as that. Or, somebody makes a suggestion and someone says, Oh yeah we tried that last year or something along those lines. I know we tried that last year. And I think there's a seed or there's a nugget in there that we could actually pull out and expand on. The problem with it, Craig, is it requires a courage and that's the risk. So there's always risk within psychological safety as well. We're always weighing up. Will I or won't I? And then I think the other thing that, that's really important and I think leaders need to know this too. You can do everything in the right sort of frame to build this climate, but you still have humans showing up in your team and every person on your team has a different story. And you can't control that story and you can't control what they turn up with. So if I've come to your team and I'm pretty new and my experience in my old place of work was, Horrible. And I got shut down every time I spoke. It's in fact the reason that I left. It might still take me a while to change that. And that's difficult. we've just got to be aware of that. We can have the conversation. We can't control other people. We can only set it up for success.

Craig:

Yeah. And if you're in a position where you're worried and there's just a, I'm going to soft fly by in the chat earlier that, being vocal is going to quote unquote, get you into trouble. That's a tough spot from where to start.

Jennie:

It really is a tough spot. I think, there's a couple of things to look at. First off, always come this way. Okay. So what does vocal look like? If you're blaming, shaming or judging upwards, then yes, you're gonna, you're gonna activate the ego and the challenge and everything else. So is your language matching? The situation, right? Permission and respect. Do you have permission to speak up? If not, then you can ask for that and it's gradual. This is a thing. There isn't a 10 step. You will get it if you do this. It's about building the relationship and building the climate.

Craig:

Yeah. And to your point, I think we often come into these conversations or these ideas and think that where am going with this? You talked about time earlier, right? And I guess I'm trying to tie this together is that a lot of this is work and it takes time to happen, right? Especially, we don't know where your starting point is, but it may take days, weeks, months to move from here to there. And it's not going to be the result of I was on this webinar and I. Now I'm going to throw a red card down and say, I disagree. And then suddenly it's all great.

Jennie:

And I think the other part too is that it doesn't finish. Like it doesn't ever finish and you can continue to learn. Like when we were working with people, there's always, Oh, I never thought of trying that. So we can bring those in and then we've got to put them into. Practice and see how that works and does that fit our team and bend it. And there's someone from our team leaves and somebody else comes in. Okay, really we're starting again and bringing that person in within a and to remain at high performance. That is consistent work. And so it doesn't stop.

Craig:

No. Another question here, I think it ties with a couple other ideas that I was looking at is that, do you think extrinsic factors outside a team can make or break the psychological safety of that team or willingness of its members to engage in those positive behaviors? External factors can make or break the psychological safety of the team. And I think I'll also tie into this, because you and I were talking in the pre show around, if things aren't going well on the team, if there's pressure for results or whatever it might be. So they fit together.

Jennie:

They do. I think it has potential, and I think if ever there was a time for a team to lean in and engage in that culture that they've built, hoping that they've built it. That's it because if that pressure is a condition from the outside that we can't control, often we can't control the condition. So the pandemic gives us a good example. There's nothing we could do about that. Those are the conditions. And so the teams that had the psychological safety already built were the teams that were able to pause and have that really, vibrant conversation. How are we going to make this work? What does this actually look like? And you see it even now. Okay are we bringing everybody back to face or are we staying hybrid? There are different perspectives in there. And where you get a conversation that is. so vibrant, there's that psychological safety. So I think they can affect it. And the other thing that springs to my mind Margaret Heffernan's analogy, every good company is made up of your bricks and your bricks are your objectives, your vision, your mission, your values, whatever all that stuff is. But it's the mortar between the bricks that holds the company together. And that mortar is your people and the connection between your people. And so it doesn't matter what the external factor is the connection between your people. And another one that leaders might have to consider, and I am not opening this box, but in a lot of our performance management systems, we run people in competition against each other. And that actually makes it quite hard. To have that connection and have that safety. So as a leader, you're working with some extra dimensions. It's not impossible, but you have to be aware of that. And that's in that set that stage piece, what is acceptable? What's not acceptable? How are we doing that?

Craig:

Yeah. I think the other thing that came to mind for me here too is what is it you're hoping for? So if you're dealing with these external factors or you're dealing with conditions that have changed that are affecting performance, results, outcomes, are you trying to get back to what you had before? Yeah. Are you tethered to that point going, we have to get back to what this was? Or do you go, we need to go in a new direction?

Jennie:

Yeah.

Craig:

Because if you're tethered to this and not willing to think about what the other possibility is, there is going to be a tension there that you might not be able to resolve.

Jennie:

And I love that word, possibility, because to me, the root of psychological safety is now we're talking about possibilities. We've worked so long in the world of expectations, whereas possibilities, where are we going? And then, and you did open a great box there, if we want to go over here, what does it need to get there? How will we work together to get there? What does that look like in terms of support, in terms of learning? What does success look like? What does failure look like? Those are fantastic conversations that rarely happen that actually create The psychological safety, because if you have said to me, okay, success looks like this is what we will deem a failure. But if we do fail, it's a fail that we're aware of. That's what we call an intelligent failure. And we're going to stop and we're going to learn from that. Okay, now all of a sudden, I'm going to tell you when it's not going right because we're going to learn from that. And the whole point of learning is to evolve, to your point to evolve our beliefs, not to confirm what we already know, that's not learning, is to evolve what we know. And so when we set up those conversations, that's allowing us to behave into the climate that we want.

Craig:

Yeah, absolutely. And as a leader you could be. You're in this sandwich situation, right? So let's carry on this example. You're trying to take your team through, okay, this is what is now possible and where we could go versus, being tied back to here. If you're the leader who has the group above you saying no, we still expect what was back here. How do you, there's a lot of this managing up conversation that we have had here and how do you reset those expectations and do you have the ability and the safety to go. to this level and say, what we were expecting here isn't possible now, but this is what is possible.

Jennie:

Yeah, it is a big, so I think there's a degree of influence in here and you can keep this simple because we could talk for days on this whole part. If you're trying to influence somebody else, anybody else, up, down, sideways, whatever, one of the easiest versions to speak in is how are they judged? Because that's what they care about, right? We come with all our mess, they care about how they're judged. So rather than talking about all our mess, we're going to talk about how they're judged and how doing this will help that. If there's absolutely no correlation between how they're judged and what you're intending to do, then that might be a point to stop and come back to the drawing board, because we need that alignment. We've got to go that way. We might just be doing it differently, or it's a different possibility. The other thing that I was going to say is. We're back to almost like that courage conversation, and you and I spoke about this a little bit, I think it was last week, safety and comfy are not the same things. And so when we lean in on that safety piece, we're taking a risk. So that possibility is a risk. And so by the time you go to talk up, can you talk about that? And what that looks like. So what will success look like? What will failure look like? If that is all aligning who said it? Chris Shanbrook said it. That's a conspiracy towards excellence. I don't know many people who are going to disagree with that, but you've got to have the conversations here.

Craig:

Excellent.

Jennie:

a great combination of words? I told him I was going to quote him on that one, I did.

Craig:

That's funny. Yeah. Hey, there's a few more questions here that have popped in. The first one is around, is there a report or document about the Aristotle project? I'm sure there is.

Jennie:

is. Yeah.

Craig:

Fine. We'll find and share that with the follow up notes. There's a couple here that kind of go together. Okay. How can a team recover from an unsafe environment? I've stepped in to manage a team that had poor leadership previously and there's still a lot of hesitancy. Let's put that together with, I'm now a co leader on a team which did not previously have psychological safety. The same leader is still here. No one challenged. No one spoke up. I'm thinking that you will get there. But how do we change that culture and have the other leader on board? I'd like to be intentional about this. So it's recovering from this. If I can put those together saying recovering from a place of poor psychological safety. The one nuance is we have somebody responsible for the previous situation still there.

Jennie:

Okay. First, always build the social capital, build the connection. So it's a connection between the people and that's not a fun filled day. It could be, it could help, but you can build connection in every meeting, in every conversation that you have. And the key here is it's not just leader and connection with the people on the team. The team has to build connection with each other as well. So we always refer to, connect before content. And every meeting you have, even if you only take two minutes, I'd love to see you take 10 minutes. How are you building that connection before content? And they don't have to be the fluffy questions and conversations. If you Google it, you'll get all kinds of. Superfluous stuff, like we really want to get to know who's who on our team. So when you're rebuilding or if you're coming in and it's not great, that's the first part that we want to do is build that social capital, build that cohesion amongst the people. Then I would suggest the, when you look at Tim Clark's work, the first level of psychological safety is inclusion. And we're actually quite rubbish at inclusion, despite all the conversations that have happened. So does your team feel like they belong to a team? There's a good conversation. What is it that we do as a team? What are our rituals? What are our values? How do we operate to other teams? How do we operate to our external people? And already you can see this is time. It's not just happening overnight. And then I think the other part is, are you modeling the behaviors that you want to see? That's crucial from a leader. You're always projecting something. And so when in that team where you're a co leader and there's one that doesn't, and you're the one that does, or you're the one that wants to, it's just like we spoke about earlier. Somebody speaks up in a meeting, what's your productive response to that? And if you have a voice at that table, you have a voice at that table. And you get what you tolerate. So if you let the other one shut it down and you tolerate that, you just said to the team, okay this is appropriate for us, so don't tolerate it. And be careful in there, rule number one, do no harm, calling someone out. around a table of people is often blame, shame, and judgment. So call them in, have a conversation afterwards, one on one. Calling in is usually better than calling out.

Craig:

That's a way

Jennie:

to start.

Craig:

Another Question here. How does a psychologically safe culture set a company apart from its competitors? How does it drive competitive advantage?

Jennie:

Your turnover will be an awful lot less. Your productivity will be higher. Your performance will be higher. Your creativity, innovation will be higher. People will want to come to work. And once you start to get those, there's a momentum going that way. And if you want the solid textbook answer, we can send you the, here's the reasons to do it. But it just provides a better environment. And the other thing I would say at the moment too, like we're all full of reskilling and upskilling and AI is doing this, so we have to learn to do that. You have the psychological safety, that becomes an environment where learning. Is part of the fabric and Craig, you wrote about that, I think this week on LinkedIn, it was a good article that's something that we have to do is create these cultures of learning.

Craig:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing I would add too, cause it leads into my next question. When you have that psychologically safe space, you have teams that are willing to give each other feedback. You have teams that are Really willing to try and to potentially fail. Maybe Jennie, we could touch a little bit on, the role of feedback and the role of failure in trying to create a psychologically safe space.

Jennie:

Okay. Yes. This is a good question. And brought in because we haven't talked about that. So in the levels, the first one is inclusion safety. The next level that we'd get to if we've got the inclusion safety is learner safety. And if we're going to learn, we're going to fail. And even if we're not learning, we're humans, we're going to make mistakes. So what we've seen in the reaction to psychological safety are the crazy sentences, accelerate your failures, all of them. Fail fast. Fail gracefully. That's not very helpful. I know there's people saying to me, I don't want to celebrate this failure. Okay, let's de stigmatize failure. How are you dealing with the mistake that's happened? Amy Edmondson, I actually think she is the go to in this area. Her new book, The Right Kind of Wrong, is fantastic. And it's in our resources. I've already got that in the resource slide for this week. So for those of you here for the first time, the slides come out as a PDF. I don't use them in here, but they're there. And the second slide, I think when you get it, always has two or three resources on it. She talks about three different kinds of failure. And I think that's important for us to get our heads around is. There are basic or simple or everyday failures. These are the ones we make because of an inattention or we didn't obey the process or whatever that might be. And so that's a very different conversation to the intelligent failure. And an intelligent failure is one that we have set up. That's almost like an experiment. We're going to try this for a little bit and our aim is to learn from it. And if we get success, fantastic. But if we don't. The whole key is that we've got a whole load of, let's call it data, that we can learn from. In the middle of there is this complex idea of a complex failure. And that's when there's lots of different things at play. And it's really hard to pinpoint where the failure is. So then we're looking at that kind of retro analysis afterwards to look at that. So we've got all these different kinds of failures. This simple sort of route for a leader is how are you destigmatizing failure? And this is one where people's past experience really comes in because lots of people grew up in an environment where you spilled the milk and somebody yelled at you and it's like World War III because you dropped a glass of milk. And other people have come from an environment where you spill the milk, someone hands you a cloth and say, please clean that up. Those are two really different ways to handle failure. So you're dealing with the humans on your team who are all going to handle failure. And then the other thing, this is a really long answer for you is as a leader, are you talking about your failures, your mistakes, what has happened? Because if you're not talking about them. And I just saw, I think it came by in the chat there, the difference between falling and failing. Simon Sinek has a two minute old video that talks about what if we change the words of falling? So if you fall off your bike, it's really funny for me to say, I did fall off my bike recently. You get back on and you ride again, right? But if you fail, our instant reaction to that is done. So sometimes. Absolutely.

Craig:

I think the other thing too something that came to me, Jennie, is a concept that we've talked about here before is, what can you pre approve? And I'm going to take this from the perspective of, what failures are okay ahead of time, right? And if you do fail, it's like you're pre approving experiments, right? But the expectation is come back and tell the rest of the team what you learned.

Jennie:

Brilliant.

Craig:

And if

Jennie:

you have that conversation, we're set up for success. Yeah.

Craig:

and Jeff Bezos talks about level one versus level two failures. Level one is, Amazon doesn't exist anymore. Level two is, the company's still going to carry forward, but you've learned something. And so don't go experimenting with potential level one failures, but level two failures for sure. Let's see, we have time for, I think, a couple more questions here before we've got to start wrapping it up. On some of our operational teams, we've had people give up sharing their opinions and concerns, so they've quit sharing their opinions. Now leaders are being asked to work on psychological safety. one thing we're considering is some sort of peer support model. Have you heard of a peer support model working to improve psychological safety overall? Would that be like the 7 percent change idea? I'm not familiar with the 7 percent change idea. I don't know if you are, but peer support groups for psychological safety.

Jennie:

So I think the 7 percent is what I was chatting about before, where you just need 7 percent of your team to adopt. So if 7 percent of the team are sharing their concerns, theoretically, that will catch on and breed. I wish I could remember who said that. McKinsey. I think it was McKinsey. Okay peer support. I don't know. Peer support is good if you've got the connection between your teams. I think a lot of it comes down to, if that was happening somewhere, we'd miss the fundamentals of Psychologically Say. So actually the first thing I would do is go out and talk to your people, one on one, have a conversation. I've noticed that nobody's sharing their ideas or their concerns. Can you fill me in a bit on that? Now, the key with that though, is the trust piece, the sincerity. if you're just going to go, and you're not really listening then you're not achieving that aim. But. People want to be seen, heard, and understood, so Craig as a director, if you go down three levels and engage in conversation there and actually care and listen, which means the voice share is far more on the other side. I think you'd be amazed at what you find. If you're not going to get anything back from those people, and I don't mean you personally, but then you're right back at square one. You've got to start building the connections really quickly. Once you've got that information, it probably will be pretty clear as to whether this is, we haven't set the stage properly, or we haven't actually created the space for people to talk. I think about it nine times out of 10. Okay. I'd love to hear your opinion on this. Let's go round table. Never going to work, right? That's not a space for voice at all. So there are different structures and different processes that we can use to create that space effectively for people to share their voices and their opinions. And it's not an anonymous survey either. And then the other key thing, and this is something that leadership teams could work on is what is your productive response? What are you doing with that? And how are you making that work? So next time somebody who hasn't shared an opinion, a concern or whatever does, what does that look like, sound like on your side as you respond to that?

Craig:

Yeah, you were triggering me with my favorite activity is the round table discussion. So

Jennie:

yeah,

Craig:

we have the same opinion there. But Jennie we're getting real close to the time and I know you've got lots of great ideas to share here as we wrap up today. So we've got a couple of questions, folks, that we will try and get to in the follow up. We have them, we won't lose them. We will be sure to answer them in the follow up material. But Jennie, why don't you take us through a big idea and some strategies and multiple questions to ponder.

Jennie:

Okay. So this should take us right there. There we are. At the end of every one of these, we try and finish with one big idea. Okay, so first things first, how do I get the word off my tongue? I can go out there and I can write and if by chance, you're simply listening to us, check out the slides in the links that we send afterwards, but we really have to move away from saying we need to achieve this psychological safety and do the work in how do we behave our way into the environment that we're trying to create, and that does require modeling and leadership and. Self awareness, I think. So two things that you could take and try out straight away. The first one, I like this, I think Blythe Butler introduced me to this term, speaking in draft. So one of the reasons that we often stay quiet and don't speak up is we want to be perfect. We're scared that we aren't quite getting it right. So we've talked a lot this morning about how permission is really important, permission and respect. So what if as a leader, You give your team the opportunity, and it depends on the conversation, but the opportunity to speak in draft. And if we're in a collaborative meeting, or we're looking for ideas, or we're just, we're throwing things out there to see what sticks and what doesn't. What if you started by setting the stage and saying, Hey, and for the next half hour, or this part of the meeting, or for this entire meeting, let's all talk in draft. It doesn't matter if it's perfect. It doesn't matter if it's fully formed. This is about. Your contributions and then within there again, the productive response is going to be Like just crucial within that. So when we do that, we get all those things that you can see on the slide there as well. The other one to take away and you are going to need to come back and look at this slide. There's a lot of information on here. This is Amy Edmondson's Spectrum. And I love this as a language piece because what she's done is taken at one end of the continuum with blameworthy failures and at the other end of the continuum, we've praiseworthy. And the cool part is when you look at this, Is that very few things that we do are actually worthy of blame. So that's a real shift in culture straight away. Cause we're very quick to blame. It's easy to throw blame. And it's not until we've become aware of that, that we realize just how much we do that. And so you can only actually blame somebody if it's sabotage. Now we're changing our language as we move up within that spectrum. So I think understanding and talking about what are failures look like. You spoke about this really well earlier, Craig. And okay, if it does look like this, I'm pre approving that, but I do want to know what the learning is. I do want to know what we found out. Then we're changing our mindset and that's what this is really about. And I think it was our title from mandate to mindset. What is the mindset that we need? And just for ease there as well, in that, if you want to frame what something is learning, what did we think would happen? What did we actually see happen? What did we learn and what will we do next time? That's cool. And so that's really instilling, that learning. Okay. Three questions that you can walk away with this morning and noodle over the weekend and into next week. And just because I will never give you just three questions, there's actually six for you. So take your pick. It's a big topic. You might see one on there that just grabs you and you're like, Oh, When was the last time I said thank you to somebody who challenged me in a meeting? That's a game changer. Right there. What are we recognizing? What are we tolerating? And the big one, we've began to touch on this at the end. How are you setting up the space for people to join the conversation? Roundtable isn't the answer. There you go.

Craig:

Thank you. And folks, we are back. Next week we're back to talk about engagement surveys. More importantly, what do you do with them once you have them, how do you make them useful? And then we're back in November. We will have some resources. And I know there was a question earlier around books that we could recommend on this topic. There are books. That will be coming out in the resources. So please do watch for that. As always, thank you so much for joining us, Jennie. Thank you. I appreciate you. Great conversation once again, and everybody have a wonderful Thanksgiving, hopefully you're able to celebrate with family, friends in a meaningful way and whatever's meaningful to you. So please enjoy it. And have some turkey, anyway.

Jennie:

Even if you don't have turkey, have a good weekend.

Craig:

Exactly.

Jennie:

Thank

Craig:

Have a great weekend, everyone. Take care.

Jennie:

care. Bye-Bye.

Craig:

Thank you once again for joining us on the Leading Beyond Any title podcast. If you'd like to stay connected and receive more updates from us, please follow state corporate training on LinkedIn. Stay in the loop with the latest insights and valuable content to the link in the show notes.

Jennie:

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