Building psychological safety at scale | with Madison Butler

Sam.

You're very welcome to the first shortlist of 2022. It's episode 82. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm your host of the Shortlist. I'm also the CEO and co founder of Social Talent. If you want to find out more about our shows, the other 81 shows, the next 83 shows that are coming up, you can go to socialtalent.com forward slash the shortlist. If you're listening live, we'd love to have your comments live. You're listening on YouTube or LinkedIn. Please join us and put your comments, our opinions, our notes into the comments. We'd love to get you involved. If you're listening to the podcast, you're very welcome. We have links to anything we share on this live broadcast, which is then put up as a podcast. We'll put them in the show notes on Apple, Spotify or wherever you're listening to this from. This week, though, we're going to be talking about building psychological safety at scale. Have you ever been in a meeting, perhaps in an organization, the organization you're in at the moment where you want to say something but you're thinking if I say this, I'm going to be maybe ridiculed. Someone's going to hold it against me. You know, they're not going to listen to me. I'm going to feel smaller after saying it. Someone might, you know, dismiss me or just even completely ignore me. Well, if you work in such a team or such an organization, you probably don't have much psychological safety. But psychological safety is one of those critical elements to driving productivity in teams, driving great innovation, and is part of the inclusiveness effort that you're going to hear a lot about and you've heard a lot about from our team already. And this is becoming a very, very important step. More organizations are beginning to recognize this concept and the importance of it and the importance of implementing it in their organizations and teams. And joining us, therefore, to discuss this is someone who's expert on this. I'm going to use the word expert. She might not be happy with, but she deserves it. And that's Madison Butler. Madison's the founder and CEO of Blue Haired Unicorn. I caught you finishing your little drink before you go online, Maddie. Maddie describes herself as a truth teller, which I know. She is a HR change maker, and she's dedicated to helping organizations get to the heart of diversity, equity and inclusion and become safer and more inclusive spaces. So I want to dive into this concept of psychological safety. We'll explain it to those of you who are unfamiliar with it, give some insight into why it's vital, but really talk to you about scalable strategies to allow it to flourish and really the importance of being an advocate for that kind of human experience at work. Matti, you're most welcome to the show. I was hoping you could introduce yourself a little bit better than I can. Tell us about your background, your passions, and why you're here today talking about.

This subject for sure. So I appreciate you. Thank you for the intro and I'm so excited to be here. I also would not call myself an expert, mostly because I don't know if any of us are experts in something that is ever changing and I'm still learning all of the time and every single day. But my name is Madison Butler. If you follow me on social, you probably know me as the blue haired unicorn or if you follow me on Twitter, whatever, it's the corporate unicorn because blue haired unicorn was too long. So I am coming to you from New England. I split my time between Texas and here, where it's 25 degrees this morning. And I have a passion for making sure that work feels good for everyone. I realized a long time ago that corporate America was broken and corporate structures were broken. And then I started realizing that it was actually only broken for some people. And I feel like I was put here to blow that up. And so when I think about what I'm passionate about and what I center my work around, it is really the concept that everyone should get to exist at work as exactly who they are without having to tuck pieces of them away all day just in order to be worthy of a paycheck.

I love that. I couldn't agree more with you. And it's something that unfortunately a lot of organizations still haven't kind of woken up to, but people are walking with their feet right now. I think that might be hopefully a catalyst for further change in this area. I want to jump into the news because there's a lot in the news around this topic, the broader topic of De and I, particularly psychological safety of late. I want to just kind of launch in Maddie with our first article and this is one that was recently shared by Forbes and the author is somebody called Paul Glover. And in the article which is entitled Overcome three Myths About Psychological Safety to Combat the Great Resignation, the author takes the opinion that psychological safety is one of the causes or the lack of psychological safety is one of the causes of the great Resignation that we're kind of living through here at the beginning of 2022 and have been for some time now at the moment. And the author goes a little bit further to kind of suggest that at three things that are kind of myths right out there around psychological safety. So we might, we might dig into these myths and maybe, if you wouldn't mind, Matt, you might explain psychological safety for the uninitiated and maybe tackle these three myths. And the myths that the author puts out here are that we already have a safe environment. A lot of folks believe that that is the situation that their organization. This author puts forward that that's not the case and has some good data on that, that it's the responsibility of senior leadership to create this environment of psychological safety. And then the third piece is that once you've got it, you're good. It's always going to exist. So perhaps if I can ask you to walk back and maybe in your own words, define psychological safety or what the lack of that looks like and maybe give me your thoughts on those three myths that this author is putting forward in this article, for sure.

So typically when I describe psychological safety, the thing that I think about the most is, is am I allowed to show up the same way that the person next to me is showing up? So, for example, if you take a straight white male, they kind of just get to show up in that identity. Me as a black queer woman, do I get to show up with all of those identities or do I have to pretend that I don't have some of them or lean into other aspects of that identity in order to be socially acceptable or, you know, less intimidating, whatever it is. And so when I think about psychological safety, it is the act of existing without fear. And I think it's interesting because one of the myths I do kind of disagree with, I do actually believe a lot of the responsibility does sit in senior leadership. It is everyone's responsibility because so much of this work is self work. But if you have everyone you know at the bottom of your organization doing the self work, but senior leadership doesn't do the work, then I don't actually think anything changes.

Yeah, 100. Even the author here admits that, you know, he, in his, in his paragraph, he jumps in to say initially it is their responsibility, and then kind of goes on to say, you know, you need to have it across the business. But, but I'd agree with you that it has to come from the top. If you're somewhere in the middle or down the bottom trying to push psychological safety in your team, you might have some success, to be fair, but it won't be Long lasting because everybody in the team will see what. Well, this team is safe. Our leader and our colleagues are good. But look, if we move team, you look to the rest of the organization. That's not how they operate. That's not how the senior people, the owners, whatever they might be, will operate. Do you think this, the concept of psychological safety, do you think it overlaps with perhaps a term that is less used today than it was five, six years ago, which was covering? I know that a good friend of ours and social talent, and I think yours as well, Matty Torren Ellis, first kind of presented this concept on our platform about five, six, seven years ago. The concept of covering and those who cover when they come to work, whatever that might be, that, that hiding a part of themselves, whether it might be their gender, whether it might be their, their, their ethnic background, might be their beliefs, their religion, whatever that might be, that they feel they have to hold that bit back. Do you think that covering and psychological safety are kind of two parts of the same idea? Are they different? What are your thoughts?

There's for sure. So, you know, when I refer to covering, I typically talk about code switching and I do a lot of work around that because that's actually been, for me, one of the hardest things to unpack and to understand that, like, how hard I was code switching for so long. And part of it is that it's like societally ingrained into you. Whatever your identity holds, you are told that it is supposed to exist in a certain way by media, by the things you see on TV, by the things you see on TikTok, by the things you read in books or see on the news. And so you're already leaning into who you think you should be. One of the things I often talk about is like, we're taught that there's a right way to be black. And so you lean into that because you think you have to do that in order to be successful, because that's how it's painted. And I do think they play a huge part. I don't necessarily think they're the same thing, but I actually think they kind of just hold hands. So if I don't feel psychologically safe to be myself, then I am going to essentially come to work every day and put a mask on. I'm going to turn on my phone voice from 9 to 5 so I sound less intimidating. I'm going to laugh really hard at people's jokes. I'm going to wear the clothes that I think I'm supposed to wear. I'M going to straighten my hair until it basically burns off. Because for whatever reason, we've decided curly hair isn't professional. And so I think a lot of people do that. I have someone in my network who lives in California, and I think we all think of California as, like, this, like, great place to be if you are different or if you are someone like me. But they are trans and they go to work every day as if they are a CIS man because that is the safest thing for them to do. And so for me, that's why I often say I do believe that the power sits at the top of the food chain, because at the end of the day, if I don't feel safe, then I don't have a choice. I still need to be able to put food on my table. I need to be able to pay the bills. And so I'm stuck in this rock in a hard spot of do I lose my job because of who I am, or do I go and show up this way because that's what I need to do. And so the leadership team and the leadership table needs to be able to set the precedent that everyone gets to show up however they need to, because at the end of the day, they get to really set the tone and make those calls.

Something I want to tackle straight down because it comes up sometimes in this issue. I think it's. It's worth tackling. Before we go too much further. When you talk about everyone showing up the way they want to be, one of the identity of the person in the team is someone who is a racist, a bigot, a hater. Can they show up as well? Do they have permission to be themselves in the same team?

No. And so, you know, it's funny, I get that question all the time. I actually had someone, I think, what day is tape? Wednesday, Monday. Leave a really wild comment on my LinkedIn about it. And it's essentially the paradox of tolerance and intolerance. We can't be tolerant of intolerant people because then we just, you know, it's a cycle. However, the way I explain it is I did not wake up and choose to be black. However, you wake up and choose to be a racist or be a transphobe or be a homophobe, whatever it is, that is a choice that you're making every day. It is not an intrinsic part of your identity. That's why we can grow out of it. We can learn out of it. We can choose to educate ourselves to be better and do better, no matter what. I do I'm still going to wake up tomorrow as a black woman. And so that is the biggest difference for me is when you choose to ostracize people and you choose to be harmful, it's a choice. And so I don't allow those choices to thrive in my organizations because my responsibility is to ensure safety for my people. And if I can't ensure that I hold people accountable for being harmful, intentionally or not, then I haven't done my job.

I love that. I think it's worth clarifying. We did that several years ago. We put a kind of equal opportunity statement on our job advertisements. We said, I can't remember the exact words we use, that we welcome everybody, different backgrounds and beliefs and faiths and so on and so forth, but we don't welcome our people who are going to be racist, intolerant, etc. And I think that is an important caveat to put in here because I think you can perhaps perceive this to be encompassing absolutely everyone. And then you might dismiss the idea as unworkable. I love that you put that caveat in there to make sure that people understand what we're talking about. By everyone can show up. It's obviously not extremist views. From the perspective of being non inclusive. You have to come with this inclusive approach and within that framework, everyone can show up, I think is what we're saying. And you have to work towards that. Tell me about individuals who are perhaps more marginalized, whatever their background and psychological safety. I'm going to go on a little bit and point out our next article. There was a data point that mentions the difference between individuals who are marginalized and those who are not and its impact on psychological safety. From your experience, Maddie, if you're in a marginalized category or a marginalized individual, whatever that might be, do you find that psychological safety is harder to find for individuals who are more marginalized? And if so, by what factor, in your opinion or in your experience?

100%. I think it is really hard with the more identities you hold. So I think of everything through an intersectional lens. And so as you hold more identities and more identities that create barriers for you, it's harder to find a place where you can exist with all of that. Mostly because when people design and they lay framework for things like this, they think about like the basics. And when I work with clients, the thing that I consistently tell them is you have to design your organization one intentionally, but you have to design it intentionally for the most marginalized person, even if they're not here yet. You need to think of every person that's not here and build for them. So that way when they get here, they never think that they're an afterthought. But too often, that is the hard answer, because there's no end. Because you can never think of every identity. It means you're constantly building, you're constantly growing, you're constantly having these really hard conversations. And it's easier to say, well, okay, we have made black folks comfortable and we've made women comfortable and we celebrated Pride Month month. So I think we're good. That's the easy answer. And so a lot of companies lean on that.

I think, to me, when I kind of first read Amy Evans book on this topic, you know, really jumped out at me because I've been talking for some years with people around diversity inclusivity, because diversity, I guess folks were largely pointing to recruiting and TA teams and saying, well, here's the ways that we can drive more diverse hiring, which will fix. I'm using air quotes there for those listening our diversity challenges. And then you learn obviously about the issues of inclusivity. And I felt at the time, this is five, six years ago, there was a lot of people out there who felt it was. They didn't really understand how to drive inclusivity. They couldn't put their finger on it. Right. This was their kind of complaint. Genuinely. People who wanted to help, they really couldn't figure out how to do this right on scale. And when I first read Amy Edmondson's book, which kind of, I guess, coined the phrase psychological safety or made it a little bit more popular, it hit me that this is an approach that will work for everything. This isn't about. We have a focus on gender, we have a focus on race, we have a focus on X, which is, I think, how most companies approach diversity inclusion today. They pick their tribes and they try and work towards protecting and enhancing the experience for those individuals of those different sections of society, as opposed to coming back to something that's just more, more, more, more rooted in base principles, which is if we create psychologically safe environments, we can be inclusive to everybody. Because that's the whole point. It isn't about a gender focus or race focused or anything else. It's about how we treat people. And that's what I really, really loved about it. I might maybe take that into our next article, Maddie, which is a piece of research that was published in Harvard Business Review only last month. And this is by Juliet Burke. And it's, I guess, summarized in a book she's recently published, and the article was published by HBR a few weeks ago and it's entitled Three Small Ways to Be a More Inclusive Colleague and Juliet's research over the last three years published in this book and this summary article. HBR focuses on perhaps a less understood element of psychological safety, which is moving the focus away from the leader and looking at what a colleague can do. I wonder if you could maybe use this, perhaps as a jumping off point, Maddie, to talk about how you bring psychological safety to an organization or a team and perhaps maybe share your insights on the leader's role in that, the team leader, whatever that is, and then perhaps also what colleagues can do to reinforce that or build upon that, maybe to take some of the points from.

That article for sure. So I think as a leader and when you sit at the leadership table and even as a manager, your role is to set a precedent on your team. This is what we expect, this is what we believe, and this is how we're going to move forward. Which means like, also setting the tone of like here is what we do not tolerate. I think we have a hard time saying the things we do not tolerate because again, it becomes an ugly, hard conversation. As an individual, so much of this is self work. And so when I talk about allyship or I talk about being an accomplice, for me the most important part is that you start examining the thoughts that you're having. And it's really hard to do that because it means you're constantly having to be self aware and in tune with yourself. And why I say, you know, this work never ends. You don't get to a day where you're like the Mother Teresa of inclusivity and you're done working because at the end of the day, bias doesn't actually go away. Biases aren't all bad. The reason I don't cross the street when a bus is coming is because my brain tells me that's bad. And so you constantly have these biases. However, how you put them into the world and how you interact with others is 100% your responsibility. It is 100% your responsibility. How you handle your own thoughts and do you let them control how you treat people, control how you navigate your workspace, how you hire, how you fire, how you promote all of these things. It ends up being a much larger thing than that one thought you had. And so as an individual, your responsibility is to one, educate yourself on the experiences of others to understand how differently they navigate. But it's also your responsibility to call yourself on, frankly, your own bs. And that is really hard because I've learned that at the end of the day, the majority of us want to be good people. And so having these conversations and having that look in the mirror means you have to say, I've caused harm and I've been wrong, I've hurt someone. And too often that is too hard of a conversation to have because we've been taught that being a good person is black and white. It is a binary thing. Either you're good or you're bad. And if you say you've harmed someone now you've put me in, I put myself in the bad person category and I don't want to do that. So most people end up digging their heels in and doing the oh, I didn't mean it that way, or you're just being too sensitive or whatever it is. Instead of, instead of having the courage to be so self aware to say, you know what, I've caused harm and here's how I'm going to forgive myself and here's how I'm going to move forward to be better as a colleague, as a friend, as a partner. But then you have to do that constantly, forever.

It's hard. I was thinking about this recently. I've had a journey myself the last three years over my leadership style. And I look back at glassdoor reviews a few years ago that would have called me out as a leader of an organization in a negative way. And of course I was really annoyed at the time. Most of those things are actually quite true when I look back with the benefit of distance. They weren't wrong and I've worked to try and change those. But your point, you have to be quite self aware and you have to make a decision to be self aware and self aware every day and every minute of every day and try and think about these things and do your best to change them. And that that requires first of all, the willingness to do it and the commitment. But it does require techniques. I think folks who are up for this still, they still require guidance. They still require though, how do I do it? Like, tell me what I need to do, what I need to look out for. And if you're working with teams, because I know you do this, Maddie, every day you work with teams to try to help them build psychological safety. And isn't just a case of here, read this book and all will be good, or hey, be self aware and you're going to be fine. Talk to me about some of the tactics that you use with teams you work with that work that people find useful techniques because you are right, it's a bias that's built in. You're trying to work against it. So talk to me about some of the techniques that you found that work day to day that others can perhaps use from this for sure.

So one of the things that I love about this is really allyship and being inclusive is a verbal. So it is work. It is something you have to do and you have to do it all of the time. And so one of the things I tell people that I'm working with one on one is when you have those thoughts, write it down, put it in your phone, and then every time you have that thought, I want you to go put a check mark next to it. Because the more you're aware that you're having thoughts that are harmful, you can train yourself on them. But if you pretend that they didn't happen and you just tuck it away, then you don't learn and you don't grow. And the other thing I encourage my teams to do is have open dialogue about the things they know people think and say about them, the things that make them feel excluded. I think one of the most universal feelings is exclusion. And it's not talked about because it is hard and it's painful and most likely it is rooted in some kind of trauma. But it is the thing that I think every single person outside of we can now all relate to. Covid. Everyone has felt exclusion at some point. And so I typically run an exercise where I talk about the things that you feel like you're stereotyped on. And I have you say them out loud. So I get all kinds, like, I'm old, but I'm not old school. I am black, but I'm not angry. And having these conversations I think is so important because if you can recognize what people think about you and the way it makes you feel, you can really start to dive into how the things you think and say make other people feel feel.

I love that it's kind of by calling it out yourself, you're exposing it and allowing it to be a thing that's, that's out there that you're aware of. I think you know, you're right about the idea of exclusion. One of the things that really got me from that HBO article wasn't necessarily the three small ways to be more inclusive. They're interesting, they're really good, I like them. But the, the insight that the author had around the flip side. Interpersonal exclusion is damaging and usually Subtle. And, you know, the author here pointed out that she. For example, I observed people consistently give endorsements to some peers, but not others. I heard about overtures to lunch, which were ignored. And I saw people respond impassively to ideas presented by some, but animatedly to those presented by others, irrespective of the quality of the idea. And this really kind of hit me because it was, ah, it's not the action that's causing the problem, it's the inaction, you know, and the folks who are being, you know, being exclusive here, they're not trying to be. And they're not even aware for the most part. But we've all. I've witnessed those. I've probably, I definitely have been the person who's, who's delivered that exclusion without intention. Is that something you see? And can you, can you work to, to, to get rid of a lot of that? Like, and what works to try and make people aware? The list, that writing list is fantastic. It's a great way to go back and be conscious of it and get into the habit of it. What else works to try and identify first those moments of perhaps accidental exclusion and then to perhaps work against it.

So I often think those are still fairly rooted in bias, just a different kind of bias. So one of the things that we see often is when you have a manager who is like really tight with a couple of people on that person's team, they typically get stretch projects. They're more likely to be promoted, they're more likely to be involved in more things. And so that's not a bias in a negative way, that's a bias in a positive way. And so that could be rooted in anything. It could be rooted in similarity bias. We potentially have the same background, we went to the same college, whatever it is, and so we end up excluding people on the other side of the table while thinking we're doing a good thing. And I often encourage people to examine that, examine how you are promoting how you're giving stretch projects, and then really think about why. Thinking about the why is hard because too often you say, well, they're the right person or they're really smart or they're really motivated, whatever it is. But so much of this is rooted in a bias some way or another. And so being able again to say that out loud and have these conversations out loud, this is why, for me, so much of promotion processes and stretch projects and anything at work needs to be not only documented, but there needs to be some sort of process so that we are not Just giving it to people that we like. I would say the same thing goes for recruiting. How often do you have a recruiter that comes to you and you're like, oh my God, I love this person. And when you say why, it's we just got along, like we had like a vibe. And if we hire on vibes, we just inherently hire for sameness. And so then you turn around one day and you're like, oh my God, I have 200 of the exact same person. How did this happen? And it's because we don't want to be challenged. Humans are inherently conflict diverse. Despite what TikTok and social media will tell you, we don't actually like conflict very much. So when I go into an interview and you have a completely different communication style than me, I know you're a completely different person to me that I would never want to hang out with on the weekend. I'm probably going to want to hire the person who I want to get a beer with, who likes the same hockey team. And it's really hard to train yourself in the opposite way. But one of the things that I think is hardest for teams to understand is you don't actually have to hire people you want to hang out with every weekend. I know we've been really conditioned to believe that we're all a family, which is my least favorite word at work, and we should all get along. But when you do that, that's how that problem happens because you've turned everyone into little mini versions of yourself. And then those are the people that you want to give projects to because you know it's going to come out exactly the way you would intend it to.

Yeah, and you mentioned, you know, processes earlier on. To me, I'm a quite process driven individual. I've always felt that a good process can reduce a lot of the bias by making sure you have consistency and that you can also validate and defend a decision really well. Because a good process, if the process is agreed and you follow the process, it's quite defensible. You know, we looked at whatever attributes are we assessed on the following, you know, criteria, and here's the scoring mechanism. And therefore that's why we hired the person. Not because I had a good feeling about them or whatever it might be, but even to your point about voicing your, your opinions and actually sharing it or documenting it, it's quite powerful because you might go and make a decision that you're going to perhaps give someone a stretch project. I'm going to give Maddie a stretch project because I just think she's the right person for the job. But I've got to write down the reasons why she's right and the reasons why others aren't right. It becomes harder for me to defend if it's driven by bias. I'll probably still try and do it inadvertently, but it will be harder if I have to document it and write it down. Which again, back to a good process will help. I'm going to bring in a question. The comment, by the way, if you don't mind, Maddie, from Kathy Iverson. Hi, Kathy. It's great to have you listening again. Kathy's saying the leader needs the awareness and understanding, then act, then to act with intent. But I think there is genuine fear of bringing to leadership attention that there is a problem and that team members may feel excluded and there may be backlash. And how do you start the conversation? How do you start the conversation, Maddie? And what are your thoughts on Kathy's comment there?

So I think the most important thing to understand is it is not the marginalized person's job to fix your organization or to bring it up or to save themselves. They are so busy trying to be two people every day that this is again, why for me, it is solely the responsibility of leadership to start this conversation. Because in order to be a good organization, you have to realize this stuff without someone coming to you to inform you that they've been traumatized. Because this work needs to be baked into the foundation of your business and not just in your recruiting and your hiring. It's every piece of your business's functionality. And so of course we want to be able to start the conversation. But I would never tell someone to risk their safety in order to start it.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. That came up on a recent episode where we were discussing in terms of diversity initiatives, a lot of the different ergs that were set up were largely being run by marginalized individuals who identify in those communities. And they were being asked to do so on their own time and still get all their work done. And thankfully, you've seen a move by some progressive organizations to involve more people and more involved leadership who aren't necessarily in those communities and make it a paid thing that, you know, are paid extra for it or you have reduced hours in your other job. Because again, it is often laid the responsibility is laid on the individuals who are being most marginalized, who I think the only thing that they are required to do is act by leading with their feet. Right. If you're in a situation where you don't feel psychologically safe. You don't feel included. You should, you should go somewhere else. The market right now is probably good enough for you to be able to find plenty of opportunities. Opportunities and hopefully find a team or an organization who are making you feel safe. What is, you know, how do you start this, Maddie? So, like, if you're, if you're a leader or you're a colleague in a team and you feel you've got a leader who will support this, what are some of the early steps you can take to try and drive more psychological safety? Like I've heard in the past, for example, that you can run your meetings in different ways. There's techniques that leaders can do to ensure there's, you know, more voice given to those who don't necessarily have voice or don't comment as much. What are some of the techniques you've seen that work? You want to get this up and running, your team, start this. What, what, what can, what can people do?

So when I teach, I have a framework. And so for my framework, it is education, self work, which is just coded as do the work, eliminating the trash, and then equity at scale. And so, one, you have to be willing to educate yourself because I'm a firm believer and you don't know what you don't know. And trust me, we do not know everything. And so if you don't understand the why behind psychological safety or the way that other people navigate, then it ends up just being like this fun buzzword that's a bunch of lip service and like, essentially a smokescreen to convince people that you care about them when in actuality you have no idea what you're doing. The self work, which is what we've talked about for most of this, is having the hard conversations, figuring out how your own habits have driven harm in your organization. And then that third piece, which is basically dismantling the oppressive systems in your own organization right now. And for me, that is the part that is hard. It is the part that is the most necessary. But it's, again, the hardest part, because that means you have to examine every policy you've ever written, every policy you enforce. And on the flip side, if you've written a policy like the one you have in your job descriptions, we don't tolerate racism. You have to actually start thinking about, have I actually enforced these things? Have I actually held people accountable with these policies? Because the one thing I notice is a lot of us have these policies in our handbooks that we don't ex, you know, we don't accept transphobia, homophobia, the whole list of phobias. But then when Joe Bob is a great performer, the policy doesn't apply to him. And so what you've actually done is caused more harm than good because you have a policy that you only enforce for people who aren't good at their jobs or who aren't, haven't been here 10 years, or aren't the cousin of the CEO, whatever it is. And then the other piece is, how are you holding people accountable? Because if you ask people to sit next to their essential abusers every day, you can't claim that you believe in psychological safety or equity. And for me, that is the hardest part. And then it also means you're examining your vendors because now that means when you think about how you're partnering with people to look at their values too, it's a very big, large scale process and the bigger your company is, the longer it takes. But for me, that is the core of it because like I said, this has to be baked in to your business and every single process of your business, not just the ones that are public facing.

When you go back to your first point of four, and I really like them, Maddie, you know, when you look about why you should do this in the first place, you know, I've had to reflect, and I imagine many others have had to reflect in the past about, you know, you're having a conversation or an interaction with somebody, let's say someone in your team who has done something wrong, as in the outcome wasn't what you wanted. It's easy to criticize. It's easy to kind of just download on them all the things they did wrong and point these things out, right? And sometimes you feel good about that for a few minutes, maybe even an hour or two. I found the things that were wrong and I pointed them out. What does, what good does that do? Like, the person you've just unloaded this bunch of crap on now feels like shit, right? They're kind of going, I'm deflated. I have no motivation. What you want as a leader is you want the thing to work out. Whatever the thing is, you want it to be good or better or delivered. And when you point out endless mistakes and you come down and criticize them, it never ever achieves the outcome you want, which is that the thing gets fixed, right? Or maybe they fix it and then resign, right? Because they go, screw you. I'm going to do this one thing and then I'm gone. You got to think about the outcomes you want, you want people who are just motivated. Yes, you'll find flaws, mistakes, problems, but it's how you build an environment where you allow somebody to understand perhaps what went wrong, learn from it and develop further and get the thing back on track or fix it or improve. And you know, if you are a leader who wants to get things done and wants to achieve things, this is the only way. Look at the why. You have to have motivated individuals with the right skills who know then how to do their work and understand how to do the work. And the kind of the opposite of psychological safety, which is criticism, which is blame, culture, all that stuff, it never works. Right? That's my experience. Right. So I cannot see why somebody would argue against the why behind this. But you're right about the structures. That is the harder piece and I imagine it never ends. Back to one of your earlier points, Maddie. You're always going to be looking at the structures, revisiting them, testing them, making sure that everyone new to the organization deploys those policies in the right way, understands what we mean by them, that you're correcting things that go wrong, don't go wrong. Right. You'll have somebody who does something and maybe it's you in a meeting, you do something wrong. But again, calling yourself to a counter, again creating the environment where someone else can call you to account, you go, you're right, I did that. I shouldn't have done that. Let's not do that again. It is an endless kind of process of self reflection. But the outcomes, surely they, surely outcomes more than justify the effort required to do that. What are some of the outcomes you have seen from more psychological safety in a team? What are the kind of things that individuals or organizations could expect from psychologically safe teams?

So I think one of the most important parts of psychological safety, outside of, you know, the ability to feel safe in my identity, it's also the ability to feel safe in being wrong and being able to fail. And so when you have teams who feel safe to fail, that means they're also feeling safe to try new things. And that is what drives innovation. Because if I'm too scared that I'm going to like get fired if I mess one thing up, guess what? I'm going to do the same thing every day until I leave. Because that's the safe thing to do. One of the things I tell my team, because I do have, you know, a full time job as well, is that 50% of everything we're going to do is not going to work. And that is okay. Because if I hadn't been allowed to do that, I would have never been in the role that I'm in today, because someone gave me the opportunity to fall directly on my face and then get back up and say, okay, here's what didn't work. I'm going to try something new. But if we have people in this, like, lock of fear, they're never going to do that. They're never going to flex. One of the things I always ask in interviews is, what's something that you haven't been able to work on? And that's something that you want to flex this year, because I want to be able to give that to you. And when we do that, we allow people to not only innovate, we allow them to grow. And when our people grow and do better, guess what we do better to. And today, Even on my LinkedIn, the thing I posted today, like a business hack, is like fire the people who are harmful to your organization because the rest of your team will thrive. It's really that concept of like, one bad apple spoils the bunch. If you have one person who's intentionally causing harm on your team, guess what? Everyone is going to shrink into little tiny versions of themselves and they're going to put their head down, do their job, and then go home and just dread that they have to do it again tomorrow. If you can rid your company and your organization of that harm, you will watch people bloom and grow and show up completely differently than they're showing up right now while having to sit next to someone who's causing them trauma.

I used to work with someone like that. I worked in a staffing agency, Maddie, many years ago, and I had someone on my team and she became the biggest biller in the business. And she was just acid for the organization. She was just so harmful to everybody else and critical and hiding information and just nasty. But she was a big biller and I wanted to let her go and my boss said no because she brings in too much money. And I left, and then three more people left and eventually that, that individual left. And my former boss was able to realize the mistake by keeping her on. And you're right, you gave the example earlier. You know, you have folks who are the big billers or whatever they might be, and the high performers, and therefore it's accepted because they're very good at their job, etc. Which is just not good enough. Your example of, of the fear of, of mistakes or errors is really good. I don't know if you've Read Matthew Syed's black box thinking, have you read that book? So that's a good. I, I think the psychological safety concept wasn't, or the phrase wasn't used at the time you wrote the book. For those of you who haven't heard the concept, the book kind of looks at the medical profession and uses it compared to the aviation industry at the time, where the aviation industry, if I'm not mistaken, Maddie, according to Syed, really, really promoted sharing of information around failure. So if something failed in, in whether it's design of an airline or if you're flying a plane, in fact, in the legal framework, if you reported it within X days, you were, you were free from litigation. So they actually built a process that said if you report the error, no matter what it is, no matter what damage it causes, you report it. You can't be litigated against, we'll protect you. Whereas then in the medical industry, where there's enormous litigation, that fear of litigation means that people don't share what went wrong and therefore no one learned anything. You didn't learn from all the mistakes that were there and the aviation industry had come from, you know, whatever the deaths were 30 years ago to like tiny numbers. Whereas the, the healthcare industry haven't improved that much because the culture of fear of mistakes was so high in one because the processes didn't allow you to share it. Whereas in the other sector it was the complete opposite. That's systematic, right? That's, that's the difference is our people's lives, which was the major thing in both industries, lives were saved in one by bringing more psychological safety and trust and lack of fear of sharing information and sharing mistakes. Whereas the other industry, which is the healthcare industry, that all of us still doesn't have it to this day, it doesn't have that psychological safety from what I believe. So tell me, you know, as we kind of come to inclusion on this, from the perspective of psychological safety, you know, who in the organization can start? We talked about leadership. We talked the first article saying, no, it's not only leaders that need to do this. And the second article talked about the power of peers, right? If you're sitting here going, I, I work in a team that doesn't feel terribly safe, doesn't. I don't feel like I can share my opinion. I don't feel like I can share my errors a whole lot. What can you do? You know, what are the first steps to try and drive more safety in, in the organization? Can you read some stuff? Can you? Other podcasts Listen to. Can you share something with your, with your boss? What would your advice be?

So I think middle management plays a great role in this, is as a manager, if you can recognize those things in your team, having conversations with your team and being able to say, how can I support you? And then as a peer being able to say the same thing. I end every single one on one I ever have with the line, how can I support you? One of the things that I have found really incredible that has been remarkable in the work of psychological safety is understanding my own communication style and then being able to say to someone, how can I communicate this information to you in a way that boosts you rather than tears you down? I think one of the hardest things about work is communication. And it's something that we have to do constantly because as humans we all communicate very differently. Maybe when I'm angry I want to talk about it right now, but when you're angry, you need to take a moment and instead I push it on you. And you think I'm like a terrible person. And so now you don't like me. Now I haven't made you feel safe. And so being intentional around asking people what they need from you, how you can communicate things and how you can be a better coworker, peer or manager to them. Because one of the things that we've realized in remote work is everyone's got like a different style when it comes to video chats and meetings. I always ask people, do you want to have your camera on or do you want to have your camera off? Because you may not feel like you want to show me the background of your house or your kids distant learning or whatever it is. And it's such an easy question that puts the power back into other people's hands. And I think that's a lot of what psychological safety lacks, is having power and feeling like you have the power to make decisions. You're just like stuck with wherever the river takes you. And putting power back into people's hands helps them feel safe. One of the things that we've implemented in my own organization is really taking the hierarchical structure out of our organization and creating essentially business pods. Where someone may lead a business pod that doesn't sit at the leadership table, but that is their expertise. So the person who leads our marketing pod is not my VP of marketing, it is our brand person, because this is their bread and butter and exactly what they're a subject matter expert in. And then every pod has to basically give information and get information from other subject matter experts who don't sit at the leadership table, but it allows them to have some power in decision making within our business framework. And for me, I feel like that makes everything feel a little less scary because it means my opinion matters, my skill set matters and I'm not just here like doing my job. While everyone works around me. I get to have insight into what's going on and I'm also consulted about those things.

I love those tips and the ideas there, particularly starting with the communication style. It's something we started some of our teams here late last year in terms of trying to first of all establish each person's preferred communication style and making it part of our onboarding process when someone new joins to firstly understand their preferred communication style and giving them the language to use to describe that as well. It's a, it's a really easy thing to start with as a leader of a team. And you're right, you know, the communication style underpins everything. It may be harder to change the structures of your hierarchy of your organization, but any one of us can come to your team and say, hey, we're going to sit down and have a conversation about our communication styles and let's get to know each other around this. It's an easy and powerful first step. Mattie, I can't thank you enough for joining us this week and sharing some of those insights and your thoughts on psychological safety. It's super important topic, I hope. We hope we can get you to come back again and reshare some updated stories. But I'm going to ask you one more question before we go, which is to perhaps leave us with your piece of advice for our shortlist. Our 82nd piece of advice to add to the shortlist, beyond what you already generously shared, what other advice would you share as a closing note on today's.

Episode, for me, I think the most important work piece of information I could give you about this work is that you can't let your ego drive you. You will mess up, you will hurt someone's feelings, you will say the wrong thing, you will do the wrong thing. And if you let your ego drive you, it'll keep you there. It'll say, I'm not going to keep trying. I'm not going to do this again because failure feels gross. However, I mess up every day and I do this for a living. So I encourage you to stick with it even when your ego tells you not to, because that is the hardest part. And failure is how we grow and how we learn and how you Learn to do better the next time.

I love that. Maddie, thanks so much for joining us today. I hope you go to warmer climates soon. I feel your pain in New England from cold Dublin here as well. That's all. Get to the sun and let's all get free of this Omicron virus, the version of COVID we have today. And hopefully everyone out there is staying safe. Marty, we'll talk to you soon. Look forward to seeing your holiday snaps on Insta as well. Take care. Thank you.

Bye.

And thank you to you for listening to this week's episode. Hopefully that's inspired you to think about the psychological safety in your team. Do read those articles, especially that HBO article. It's really powerful. If you're a colleague, perhaps you're not a leader and you're thinking about what role you can play. I definitely recommend you dig into that article in more detail. If you're a leader, start with Maddie's closing advice there. I think that is awesome. I can work for you. But my advice is to come back next week in show number 83. Next week, the second of the year we're going to be joined, I'm going to be joined by the New York Times bestselling author and renowned speaker Dan Heath. If you don't don't know Dan Heath, where have you been? You have not read a single business or economics book or kind of society how people Work book in the world. Dan and his brother Chip are well known for authoring many best selling million selling books. I've mentioned many of them in the past. The Power of Moments and others, how to make make it Stick. Tons of different books that the that the team have written and Dan himself wrote a brilliant new book only last year on on Upstream and it's a really powerful, powerful book I'd recommend for everyone who looking for your reading list for the new year. But we're going to be talking next week on the show about employee engagement and the power of moments. The Power of Moments is a book that Dan wrote with his brother a couple of years ago but I think has a huge resonance in the talent space. And Dan just has some amazingly simple concepts he's going to share with you on next week's show about how you can create these magic moments in your team, in your business, in your organization that really drive employee engagement at different parts of that employee journey. So do join us for that conversation. Really privileged to have Dan join us on the show next week. It's only going to be available as a live broadcast. The recording is not going to be available, so you've got to be here live to watch it, unless you want to listen to the podcast. We will have the podcast up live on Apple and Spotify, but you want to see the live show joining the conversation, which I encourage you to do. It's next week, 12th of January, 4pm UK Ireland time. That's going to be 11am in the east coast in the US, 8am on the west coast. Next Wednesday, 12th of January. You can find us on LinkedIn or YouTube. Or if you're happy enough with the podcast, which is still going to be full of amazing advice and inspiration, you can check it out on Podcast and Apple by Wednesday evening next week. Until then, we'll see you soon. And take care.