GA 377 | Psychological Safety and the 5Cs with Karyn Ross and Jessica House

One of the studies that I looked at showed that most people see their leader and connect with their leader in North America for less than one hour per week. And when you think about that, okay, like 12 minutes a day. And that was really suboptimal. And that people who experienced that were less innovative, they were less creative, they felt less engagement and attachment to their organization, and they felt less self worth.

Today I'm a excited to welcome Jessica House and Karen Ross back to the show. Now, Jessica was actually just on a few weeks ago and been a little while since Karen's been on, but she's been a repeat guest as regular listeners know. But today we had a really interesting chat on the whole topic of psychological safety. But in particular we honed in on what Karen and Jessica refer to as the five C's of psychological safety. So we, we kind of begin by just talking about what is psychological safety and how does that play an important role in a lean thinking organization, but also just really any organization or any place where human beings are interacting with one another. And then we dove into each of the five Cs and kind of step through each one and talked a lot about what it is. But then how can we actually practice it? And towards the end, one of the pieces of advice that Karen wanted to really leave with, folks, was the importance of being able to deliberately practice these five Cs. So maybe as you're listening to this episode, start thinking about ways on how you might be able to practice each of these a little bit more. Some of them I gotta tell you, I got a lot of work to do and some of them I feel like I do okay in. But as with anything, there needs to be continuous improvement in these five Cs. So really, really fun episode. It's a little longer than normal, so you might have to listen to this one in a. In a couple different car rides or whatever it is that you're. However you listen to the show. But, but yeah, please do listen all the way through because there's a lot of really good, important information a show notes for with all the links that Jessica and Karen and I talk about can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode 377 again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 377. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Jessica and Karen, welcome to the show. Ladies, how are you doing?

Fabulous, Ron, how are you?

I'm doing well, thank you.

Yeah, doing great. Glad to be here, Ron. Thanks for having us all Right.

All right. Well, yeah, I was just saying. Well, actually, Karen, before you even came on, was chatting with Jessica. And when. When do you think there's the last time that you were on the show? What's your guess? What's your prediction?

I'm thinking. Do you think it's already a year? Could a year have flown by?

It was February 13th, 2020. Yeah. So, yeah, it's June 7th as we're recording this one right now. So, yeah, it's been. Been a little while. Karen, what have you been doing? Come on.

You know, first of all, I'm worried someone might have taken over my spot.

I know you gotta mess around. You know, you're gon around and. No, no, it's all good. It's all good. And. And, yeah, and Jessica, you were just on a few weeks ago, episode 372.

So, yes, I feel quite honored to be back with you today and with such a special friend. Karen.

Yep. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, ladies, you know how we like to get going. We like our guests to share a quote. So do you guys have a quote that you want to share?

We absolutely do. So Karen and I came together and we actually created this quote ourselves. So our quote today is psychological safety is the prerequisite for learning, growth, innovation, and improvement. To be your best, do your best, and feel your best, you need to be psychologically safe.

Got it. Love it. Love it. So this is a really interesting topic. You know, psychological safety, you know, it's obviously way more than just what we're talking about within the lean movement, because even if you weren't practicing lean, you know, for sure, psychological safety plays an important part of the. Of the world. So. But I'm curious, maybe we could start things off with. I'm curious. I don't. I guess I knew that you both knew each other, but I'm curious to how you guys came together to start talking about psychological safety. Like, how did that come about?

Well, Ron, you're absolutely right in saying that psychological safety isn't just something that we need to consider in the lean world. And oftentimes because we have a focus on respect for people, thinking about and going to see all of those things does help us start out with an idea of psychological safety. But as I've been working with a lot of different organizations, especially throughout the pandemic, I really had the opportunity just to see what a devastating effect that had on people. That uncertainty, that worry about change, that extra burden of worrying about our family members. Jessica and I had the absolute delightful pleasure of Working together through lean coaching that I did while she was working for Algonquin College. And, and, But Jessica, and I'm going to let her tell this part herself, has an unbelievable background in mental health. And as I talked to more and more people and I saw what was going on in different organizations, and not only that, but even just on the news and watching what was happening, I really thought this is something that we have to not just talk about in the abstract and say things like, turn on your camera so you can connect with people all of the time. Those are all really good things and we should do them. But we really need, need to tackle this issue really head on and create something and create a focus on it. And I am not a mental health professional, and I thought, oh, but I know somebody who is. And so Jessica and I got together because if you're not sure what to do about something, you know, the best thing is to reach out and ask for help. So, Jessica, I'm going to let you tell the rest of the story from here.

Yeah, for sure. No, you set the stage quite well, Karen. My background is in mental health. And so oftentimes, when working with children and parents and families, we would talk about the importance of psychological safety. It really is the prerequisite for growth to happen in kids. And so when Karen and I came together and we were in our coaching relationship, we were often talking about situations where people were perhaps getting a little bit stuck or that we weren't seeing people be able to thrive at work. And what it came down to oftentimes was their psychological safety or the psychological safety needs not being met. So that's when we thought, you know what? We need to come together and do something about this. So we created the five Cs.

And Ron, you know me, I'm the kind of person who, when I think somebody needs to do something about this, I always think, okay, that somebody needs to be me. And in this case, I thought, oh, that somebody needs to be me. And Jessica as well. And Jessica, I love to help.

I love it. I love it. Well, I don't want to assume anything, folks. I mean, psychological safety has been, is. It's been a really popular term. Amy Edmondson, I think, is probably the person that I first heard the phrase from when I read her, her book a few years ago. But maybe let's begin with what is psychological safety? Even before. And then we'll get to the five Cs. But let's just start with what is psychological safety? And maybe what is psycholog? What isn't psychological safety because I think there can sometimes be some confusion.

Absolutely, yeah. So for me, psychological safety, it's a belief and it's a feeling that you can be your true, authentic self. So without fear, without repercussions, it's really about being able to bring your whole self to work or to any situation. When we think about psychological safety in the work context, what you would notice is that you're free to be able to ask questions, to take risks, raise problems, ask for help. It's that feeling of being included and being cared for by the people that you're working with, being respected and truly appreciated.

And I think so often in the lean world, we're used to thinking about physical safety, right? So we have 5s, we're on the factory floor, we're looking for things proactively that might cause people harm, and we want to clean up so we can highlight problems. People often ask me when it comes to services, well, you know, we can 5s our desktop and put things away, or we can think of, you know, we might get carpal tunnel syndrome from too many clicks, but there aren't really a lot of safety issues. But as we went along in the pandemic and we were really disconnected, you know, suddenly people, one day you could. Were at work, and then one day you weren't at work and you didn't have your team. And I think that safety, really, psychological safety, feeling that you can be yourself, you can express, okay, I'm disconnected, I'm worried about something. I have these other things on my mind. Things are difficult for me, really became in a way, much more visible. Whereas maybe when we came to work and we hid part of ourselves, like Jessica was talking about, because we left our personal life at the door and we put on our professional self, I think we had an opportunity to see those kind of gaps that people were, were feeling in their ability to say, I'm actually having a mental health issue, I actually need support. I'm feeling disconnected, I'm feeling stressed. I don't feel that I can do my job properly. And I think that we got an opportunity to see and focus on some different things.

Okay, so that's a good answer on psychological safety. What about these five Cs? What are they?

Yeah, so the five Cs are really five factors that when you practice them consistently, it's going to result in psychologically safe work environments. So Karen and I like to describe the five Cs as the prerequisite for learning, for growth, innovation and improvement. If we dissect them all. The, the five C's are clear expectations. Is the first one connect regularly. Is the second care genuinely consistent kindness and co regulate emotion. So those would be the five Cs.

Got it.

Would you like us to give you a little more information about that?

I would. I would.

So think about for clear expectations, how even when people were working in person, how oftentimes we aren't sure what's expected of us at work, what's the priority? On a daily basis we have 10 different things we're supposed to do. Which one should we do first? Those expectations really aren't clear. When expectations aren't clear, it's hard to be certain and know what to do. And it's very stressful. When we all sort of left the office and things became even more uncertain, the truth is that those expectations could become even less clear. People need to have a very clear sense of what is expected of me to do today. How does my role fit in with the larger organization and also then the clear expectation of what should I do to raise problems if I don't feel that I know those expectations or if I feel psychologically unstable. So that would be clear expectations. Jessica, do you want to add to that?

Yeah, I just wanted to add that oftentimes I think we assume that employees know what the expectations are. But clear expectations for us is really about checking to make sure that there is a shared understanding of what's expected. And so oftentimes we're going to have to teach them to ensure that understanding of the expectation.

Yeah, this is such a good one. You know, the whole idea of, of certainty and how, how devastating uncertainty can be. And I think that was a big part of the whole pandemic thing, right? It's like no one knew what was coming, right. Or what, what to expect or when this thing's going to be over or whatever it is. And, and having that un, that uncertainty in the air is very. For some people in particular, it's, it could be completely debilitating. Like I know some people who, like, if they don't have pretty good certainty in their life, they are going to be, they're going to really struggle, you know, Whereas. And I also know some people who can just roll with things, man. They're just like, I got it, man. I'll just figure it out, you know, and, and, But I would say there's a lot more people who, who probably err on the side of uncertainty is going to really rock their world, especially now.

Ron, what you're saying is really resonating because during a pandemic there's been so much uncertainty in people's lives. And when there are so many things that we're not able to control and we're not able to kind of fall back on our routines or the things that are very well known to us, I think we need even more clear expectations at work so that we can start to establish some level of psychological safety.

Got it.

And actually I just wanted to build on that a little bit because I think one of the things as lean practitioners, we're always, especially for leaders, we're always trying to get leaders out of that mode of telling and into the mode of asking. And sometimes I think that that's left leaders in a very difficult position as well. Because when we're in a time that's very uncertain, actually giving clear direction and making sure that your expectations are very clear is unbelievably important. And it may not be time to ask people, well, what do you think we should do? What do you think we should do? Right. And that's going to go back down to co regulate because in times of uncertainty, leaders need to lead and make sure that you're telling people, please work on this, please don't work on that today.

Okay, so clear expectations, that's number one. What was number two?

Yes, so number two is connect regularly. This is really asking leaders to connect with their people at least once a day to see how their team members are doing. As human beings, we really, really need connection, to feel our best, to do our best and be our best. We're wired for human connection. That's actually how we learn when we were feeling connected with people. It creates the, the environment for us to be able to really learn and thrive. And so connecting regularly is the second c. Karen, do you have anything else that you want to add to that one?

Yes. In my new book, the Kind Leader, one of the studies that I looked at showed that most people see their leader and connect with their leader in North America for less than one hour per week. When you think about that, okay, like 12 minutes a day. And that was really suboptimal. And that people who experienced that were less innovative, they were less creative, they felt less engagement and attachment to their organization and they felt less, less self worth actually. And that optimally it was found that you should spend somehow about one hour with your leader. And leaders, I'm sure, are thinking, well, how could I possibly spend one hour with a team member right in a day? But think about it doesn't have to be one Hour. But how often would you check in with people? How often should you, and this is really a lean principle, right, Go to Gemba and see, get out from behind your desk. If we can do it virtually. People need connection. People need, need to, especially in times of uncertainty, they need to. And hear a leader's voice.

Yeah. You know, something that we've done here at Gemba Academy since the very beginning of our little company. Every morning at 10:30 central time, we, we have a more a morning sort of stand up and over the years we've used different ways. We're currently on like a Google Hangout, Google Hangout link kind of thing. And, and it's just, you know, some mornings not everybody's got their cameras on, but for the most part they do. And we just, you know, we've got like a little standard work that we follow as far as, you know, on Wednesdays it's such and such teams going to kind of lead and, and so forth. But I'll tell you the reason that I have fought for that meeting to never, ever, ever die. It's just the fact of just seeing each other and having a little laugh or something like that. It's just so, so important, especially for us, because we are a virtual team. Right. I mean, we're all spread over the, the country really. And you know, I totally get this one because being able to see each other and just to just, just to say hello, it makes a big, big difference.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you know what, Ron, as you're talking, it makes me think about this move to remote work has really lessened our opportunity to connect informally, like all those, you know, little safety buffers, I like to call them, where you meet at perhaps the water cooler and you're able to connect with your colleague and say, how are you doing? It's just tiny little connections that happen daily that we're not no longer able to have access to in this remote environment unless we build. And so building them in the way you've done at Gemba Academy, it's so important.

Yep, yep. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Connect regularly. What's number three?

Care genuinely. And this one to me as part of all the work I've been doing with kindness is unbelievably important. Because if you're a leader and you say, or your organizational values, talk about how much you appreciate and care about and respect your team members, if this appears disingenuous to people, then there is going to be a problem with psychological safety. People understand what real caring looks like. We have families, we have People in our lives that we care about. We have people who care about us. So it's really important that we don't just pay lip service to this idea of respect for people or caring for people, that if you're in a leadership position, those people who have come to work for you have given you the gift of the time of their lives, they're not actually ever going to get that back. Right. And it's really important to care genuinely about them as people, as whole people. Then we want them to bring all of their talents, their creativity, their emotions, their empathy, their compassion. We want them to bring that with them to work because that's what's going to allow them to give their best. So this one is really one that everyone's going to have to search their soul for and really think within the interactions they have. Do I really care about people or do I really care about the ends and the bottom line? And did they get this done? We need to care about people genuinely.

Yeah. This is a hard one, though, you know, I mean, it can be because, you know, Karen, you and I have talked about this one in the past, you know, when we've been talking about different, you know, kindness or different topics like that. And, you know, especially today in this, it's not just today, it's been for all of mankind, you know, I suppose. But, you know, there's people who just don't agree with one another. Right. And you can. And it can be very contentious or whatever it might be, whether it's politics or religion or something like that. I mean, it can be really hard if you, you know, strongly disagree with someone to, you know, genuinely care for them. Right. Or care for that situation. So how do you balance that when you're in those tough situations? Because, let's face it, there's a lot of them in the world today.

Absolutely. And my suggestion is going to be look for similarities rather than differences. So our brains are hardwired for this negativity bias. Right. So to look at the negative, and we tend to look first at what's different. Oh, that person has a different political belief than me. Oh, they have a different religious belief. Oh, they have. You know, we're drawn to that.

First, they like the Yankees.

You know, you can bring it down to the smallest thing.

Right, right, right.

And let's look at the similarities. This person has a family. This person cares about their kids. This person wants to live in a safe environment. This person, although I might not agree with their beliefs, has put time and effort into researching and thinking about them and coming to the same conclusions. And I think if focus on actually probably the 99% that we are the same and want the same things as human beings and understanding that 1% is different, that that's okay. I'm who I am, that person is who they are, that. That we really need to care about them as a human being. Sometimes I think, oh, I wouldn't want their child to get sick. I wouldn't want their child to have Covid. Right. So I think that's the key. Focus on similarities.

Yep.

I really like that, Karen. It actually, it aligns really nicely with attachment theory and how people form attachment with others. And I think we really need a solid foundation. When there are intense disagreements or different political views, what do we fall back on? And I think if we can fall back on what we have in common, like you suggest, Karen, then that can ground us. But also we would suggest that proximity to people. So again, that connecting regularly the people that we are around, often we learn more about and we can find things we have in common with them. But if we're not spending enough time with our people, we're not necessarily going to know what we can fall back on in terms of our relationship when times get tough. That's why in families, we're able to have these types of disagreements and still come out the other side. Okay. It's because we have this strong, solid foundation that's built around us. We have a lot of time together. There's a lot of things that we can identify that we have in common. We feel a sense of belonging. These are all things that we need to work on in organizing so that when times get tough, we can fall back on them.

Yeah, I love it. Okay, so so far, we'll do a quick review. We're more than halfway through, so we've had clear expectations. We've had to. We were going to then connect regularly, and then we're going to care genuinely.

So let's go to number four, consistent kindness. And as everybody who's listening knows is this is an unbelievable passion of mine. And I'm going to talk about the kindness first. And Jessica, I'm going to send the consistent part over for you. Okay. So when we go to work, you know, we talk about respect for people, we talk about those things. But to me, that's like a large umbrella, and it's not always really very well defined. And I'd like to add here, kindness. And kindness is the action that people take to turn their feelings of empathy and compassion. Empathy is what Allows us to actually look for the similarity and say, oh, let me put myself in Ron's shoes, or let me put myself in Jessica's shoes. Let me really go and see and understand what they are experiencing. And then compassion is the feeling that we have that when we see someone suffering, we want to actually alleviate that suffering. Kindness is the action that turns those feelings into something positive that benefits others. What we need, especially from leaders at work, especially in uncertain times, but to really create that feeling of psychological safety is consistent kindness. Consistent actions that show that the leader is focused, genuinely cares about creating positive actions that benefit the person who's following them, that they're not just here for their own benefit, for their own gain. You as a person are not just the means to their own ends, but we need that kindness. Nobody is perfect. Nothing is perfect. We all have a bad day. This morning I woke up and my daughter called me and she wasn't feeling well. And even though she's had the COVID shot, of course, I'm her mom. What was I saying? Go get a COVID test. Right. We all have things that are not going to be perfect in our day. We are all, despite our best effort, going to make a mistake. So we know, we need to know that when we bring those things to our leader, they're going to react with kindness. Kindness actually creates trust. Unkindness creates fear. Kindness and fear don't go together. And if you're in a fearful environment at work, an unsychologically safe environment, chances are you're going to find fear. And where you're going to find fear, you can tie it back to unkindness so that kindness is unbelievably important. And now I'm going to turn it over to Jessica to explain why the consistency of that kindness is so important.

Yeah, I was just thinking as you were chatting, Karen, that I've had situations myself where I've had. I've surrounded myself with kind people and let's say a kind leader. For instance, there could be one time out of 100 where the leader wasn't kind. And all of a sudden my level of safety, feeling of safety and security has gone out the window. Because now things are really uncertain for me. When I go to my leader the next time, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to get. It's very unnerving when you have an experience with somebody that's unkind. So the consistency piece is really, really key, which is why as leaders, as people, we need to really be taking care of ourselves so that we can take care of others and we can be consistent in our interactions. And to do that, we need to be making sure that our mental health is being taken care. Because really. Yeah, it can take just one unkind act or, or one unkind thought that can really just change the relationship with the people that are surrounding you.

Yeah, no, like, this is such a good, good one. I'm pretty common. I've tell my kids this all the time. You know, it's okay, you know, you thinking about, like, if, if you're in a disagreement with someone, you know, just because you, you're not agreeing with them or whatever, you don't have to be a jerk. Right? Don't, you know, just, you know, just you, you can be, you can disagree and be kind at the same time. Right? You just don't have to be a jerk. So I feel like this is, this is another one that's easy to mess up if you, you know, don't control your emotions. And I'm really big on, like, stoicism, you know, and really trying to control what you can control, which is how you react to a stimulus. That's really the only we can control is how we react. And the ability to react with control and kindness is going to really separate great leaders from mediocre leaders, in my opinion.

I agree. And I think often we don't give people any guidance or any help to say, okay, you know, leaders are human beings too. Maybe we're having a bad day and we're doing our best to be consistently kind, but we can feel ourselves being pushed over the edge. We don't tell people that it's okay to say, you know, I'm going to take a time out because I just don't feel right. I don't think I can answer that right now. So we don't teach people strategies actively for how to do that and how. And, you know, it takes interaction over interaction over interaction to build up trust. And you can just think about. I'm sure every single person listening to this podcast can think of an example where they brought something to someone that they, you know, the person just reacted in a total, totally different way than was expected. Maybe they just lost their temper and blew up and years of trust are broken. And now it takes years because of that negativity bias we have. Right. We remember the negative things much, then maybe 20 years of positive.

Exactly. Well, here's another one. Maybe it's a slight caveat from this one. It's like, well, we will mess up. We're human. Right. And we're not fallible. We're infallible humans. Right. And so we're going to make mistakes. And so like I said recently with one of my children, I was just feeling extra crabby for whatever reason. And I remember they asked me a harmless question and I sort of wasn't very kind. I'll be transparent. And I sort of probably snapped at them or something like that. And then I felt horrible about it. And so it was two words that I used to try to remedy to the situation was I'm sorry, you know, I'm sorry for acting like a jerk. You know, will you forgive me? Or do you forgive me, you know, or something like that, you know? And so I feel like consistent kindness doesn't mean that you're perfectly kind all the time. Sometimes we mess up. But if you do mess up, own it and go say you're sorry. Right. And mean it. Right. And mean it. And care genuinely. Right. They all kind of interconnect here a little bit, but yeah. So I feel like this one is one where, you know, we're probably never going to be perfect. Right. But, you know, contrition and sorrow and just owning your mistakes can go a long way.

And what great modeling for your kids too. Right. What if your leader comes to you and says, hey, I really messed up. I was unkind, I'm sorry. Next time when you're in a situation, you go home and you are upset with one of your kids and do something, you're going to have that model for how to. How to act. Then you're going to give that model to your child who actually is going to grow up, become a leader, and that that model is going to spread.

Yeah, wonderful. All right, so what's number five again?

So number five is co regulate emotion. So co regulation is really just a fancy way of describing a process where your emotions and behaviors work to match the emotion and behavior of another human being. That happens using verbal and nonverbal feedback. If we're calm, for instance, others will match our state of calm. If I think about leaders, it's really important for leaders to keep this in mind because we're in positions where people are often looking at us to see how we're responding. We're the face of change. We're the face of communicating significant information. And so if we're in front of people, and we are. If we're stressed ourselves, oftentimes we end up creating stress in the people who are looking to us. One good example that I can think of is being on an airplane and going through turbulence. I know for me personally, I often look to the flight attendant to check their facial expressions and see, is this something I need to be worried about here or am I okay? And if, if they're looking calm, instantly I feel myself start to calm too. So that's a really good tangible example of what co regulation is.

Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, that it's, it also sounds similar to what we were kind of talking about a little bit earlier on on. The ability to control your emotions and the way that you, you know, you inter. And somebody cuts you off in traffic. You know, you can really, you have two choices. Do you honk your horn and send signs, sign language, you know, across the highway or do you say, oh, I wonder if that person's rushing to the hospital to be with their sick child. I hope they're, I hope they're okay. You know, I mean, it's the same stimulus. Right, but, and how we, how we choose to react to it is going to radically, you know, impact how we feel and probably how we drive over that next 30 seconds. Right. So it's really, the choice is ours.

All of these five Cs and especially CO regulate, I think bring us back to the fact that we're not only paying attention to ourselves as leaders. To co regulate means you have to first go and see and understand, well, what are people feeling? Are people uncom, what help do they need? Now I need to moderate my own emotion. I need to make sure I'm calm so that they can be calm. That psychological safety means that someone is actively using all those, these five Cs to focus on the people they're leading to focus on care for other people. It's not, you know, just all about me. It's really all about the people that I'm caring for. And then of course, as Jessica always says so correctly, caring for ourselves and filling up our cup, putting on our oxygen masks so that we can make sure to help others.

Yeah, love it. Okay, so clear expectations. Connect regularly. Care genuinely consistent. Kindness. Co regulate emotion. So Those are the five Cs so do you guys have like a. I, I thought somebody may have held up in a, on the camera like a document or something that spells these out.

We do, Absolutely. We have a document. So Karen and I pulled together the five Cs in a visual format and we're happy to share with you and the listeners.

Okay, well good. Well maybe send it to me and then we'll put it in the show notes because I feel like that could be a useful thing, you know, just to have printed out, put up on the wall or something like that, you know, to, to, to. To remind yourselves of what we're trying to do here with these, with these five Cs. So, gosh, there's so many different directions that we could go from at this point. But I'm curious maybe, I mean, do you guys, like, have any just like, sort of like meta advice for how we could take what we've just learned and, I don't know, build us into the way that we all operate as human beings and leaders and lean thinkers?

I think that that's a fabulous question. And really, when Jessica and I started working on this, we really were thinking about how 5s, in a way, is sort of just part of the DNA of lean. Like, can you imagine talking to someone? Even a person who is first starting on their lean journey can probably tell you about 5s. And so we're really thinking that we would love people to not just think about 5s, but for 5c's to become just as well known. And that when we think about that respect for people, that umbrella, that in the same way we have five S, we have five C's. And you know, I'm always going to tell you exactly the same way for it to become part of our DNA. And Ron, you and I have had so many discussions about this, you probably find it in every podcast. Practice. Right. All of this is nice. In theory, where we really learn is practice. And I think we've also had quite a number of discussions about Deliberate.

Yeah, I was gonna say, don't forget the D word. Yeah, yeah. Deliberate practice. Yep.

Jessica, do you have anything you'd like to add about that and about how we can deliberately practice?

Yeah, no, I would just add that. Developing awareness. So even just learning about the 5C so that we have a little bit of awareness that we all have psychological safety needs and that we can start to think about how safe we feel in different environments that we're in. We can start to think about our organization and where we're feeling safe and where we might not be feeling like our psychological safety needs are being met. This is really the starting point, is developing that awareness and then to Karen's point, starting to just practice working through the five Cs and see how it changes your own assessment of psychological safety.

Yeah, I'll tell you, the one that I need to work on, I think more than any of them is number two, connecting with folks on a regular basis. I mean, you know, again, here in my company there's 15 of us or so, so it's not like unmanageable. But still, you know, being able to just pick up the phone and call Steve to say, hey, how's it going Steve? You know, oh good, Ron. What do you need? Nothing, just calling to see how you're doing, you know, and you know, don't even have a reason to call people. Right. I mean, I feel like that's something that I, I need to personally work on because you know, in this busy, everybody's busy, busy, busy, but sometimes you just need to call up. Hey, Karen, how's it going? You know, it's been a while, you know, was just thinking about you.

Yeah, yeah. And everything's so structured now, isn't it Ron? Like we have zoom meetings which all come with agendas typically. And so there isn't necessarily the space built in for those natural connections. And so if this is our reality for some time and we're working remotely and we're not necessarily able to just pass people by in the hallways, how can we build it into what already exists? If it's hard to see, squeeze extra in, how can we build it into what already exists? So a zoom meeting. Can we start with kindness rounds? Can we start with checking in with people and asking how everybody is doing or what they did on the weekends? These are just small, tiny steps that you can incorporate into your daily work that can make a really big difference.

Yeah, I think it's also super important to remember there's. I spent a lot of time actually asking people what their definition of respect was a number of years ago when I was, I was really interested in this because we spend so much time talking about respect for people. Almost 100% of people said respect means that my leader believes that I can do my work and leaves me alone to do it. And that was such an eye opening thing for me because that idea, especially in, I would say United States, in North America, that idea of autonomy is so important for people that somehow we think that trust means that someone's going to leave us alone and let us do our work in kind. Leader. And actually throughout these five Cs, what I'm going to say is I believe that actually that connection, that getting to know someone as a person, recognizing who they are, them for who they are as a person, for the effort, for the time that they do their work, that's actually the way to build trust. So I think that some of this is changing this whole idea of what respect is. Respect for me is not leaving somebody alone. Respect is really connecting regularly. What is the worst thing? If somebody is put in jail and we want to give them the worst punishment, they're put in solitary confinement. And so I think we really need to rethink as a society. And I think that the pandemic has given us the opportunity. What things are really important. What does respect really mean? And I really think it has to do with that real personal human connection. Because what did all of us miss the most? Yeah, we miss being people. We miss that connection.

Yep, exactly. Wow. Good stuff, ladies. This has been super fun. 42 minutes now. Look at that. It always happens, you know, when you get rolling. This is. This has been really good. So maybe let's just wrap things up. I don't know if you both want to maybe share just some like a final words of. Words of wisdom or just maybe a practical tip. And then I want you to definitely both tell folks how they can connect with you individually.

Yeah, I can start. I mean, Karen, you just summed it up so nicely there. But really, it's never been more important to pay attention and care for the people around us. And I truly believe that when we do that, it's the key. It's the key to successful relationships, to successful homes, to successful businesses. And quite frankly, it's just the right thing to do as human beings. So that's what I'll leave you with, Karen.

I'm going to say that we spend so much of our time at work, even as adults, even if it's now at home time, on zoom. And that what we learn at work and what we teach people at work and how we feel at work transfers to every other aspect of our life. If we don't feel psychologically safe in our work environment, all those feelings of fear and anxiety and the effect on our mental health, it doesn't just affect us. It affects our family. It affects our community. And as Jessica said, it affects the world. So please, please, please, please take the time to think about your own psychological safety. If you're a leader, really take this seriously and focus on the psychological safety of those in your organization. Because the effect is not only at work. It goes everywhere else in the world.

Got it. And what's the best way for folks to connect with you?

Ladies, I would say the best way to reach out is by email. So my email, jhouselighthousecw CA would be a great way to connect with me and Karen.

You can find me at karen k a r y narenrossconsulting.com you can also connect with me on LinkedIn for my personal profile. Also, the New Social Media School for Kind Leaders and Karen Ross Consulting. Also, please follow us at the Love and Kindness Project Foundation.

Yeah, and we'll link to everything in the show notes. So I'll have you guys send all those over to all the links over. So this is episode 377. So just go to gembapodcast.com look for episode 377 and we'll link to everything Jessica and Karen just mentioned. So ladies, thank you again for coming on. This has been super fun.

Thank you so much for having us, Ron.

Always super, super, super fun. And thank you for all of the work that you and everyone at Gemba Academy does to actually bring so many interesting and important and caring topics to people all over the world.

Thank you. We're trying. We're trying. All right, ladies, well, I'm sure we'll talk again down the road. As always, keep up the great work. And again, thank you.

Thank you. Take care.

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