Psychological Safety by Iterum

As challenging as it can be to give feedback, receiving it can be just as difficult. In cases where receiving feedback feels challenging, remember that since all feedback is based on opinion and perception, not all feedback is helpful or accurate. Just because someone has given you feedback, it doesn’t mean you need to act upon it. Their perspective may be skewed, or in the worst cases, their intention may not be positive. So when you’re receiving feedback, consider: - Is this feedback truthful? - Is this feedback specific and actionable? - Is there positive intent behind it? - Is the person delivering it doing so with care and concern for me? - Is the person delivering this feedback experienced or qualified to do so? - Is this the right time and space for me to receive this feedback? If the answer to any of those questions is no, then you have a right to question or even disregard the feedback. Tom Geraghty was once told to “be less English”. Tom is English, and he rejected that feedback because he can’t, and doesn’t want to, be less English. However, we should also try to resist our natural temptation to defensiveness. Even if some of the answers to the above questions are “no”, there is probably something you can take from the feedback in order to improve or reflect in some way. Great feedback can enhance an already high performing, psychologically safe team, but poorly delivered feedback can destroy psychological safety. Be careful, empathetic and mindful when delivering it. Contracting with people about not just how, but when and if, they’d like to receive feedback is powerful, and kind. And that’s why we continue with teams on this topic. So far, in our work with teams, we’ve found that between 70% and 80% of feedback is not useful, and some of it is even harmful. Only 20%-30% of feedback that people receive is actually useful! And this is often simply because so much feedback is delivered poorly. We deliver a workshop that examines the purpose of feedback, the characteristics of good feedback, traps to avoid, models to use, and practices to employ. We want to make sure that in the world of work, feedback does much more good than harm. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

Done well, it can create psychological safety and help teams and organisations perform at their best. However, done less well, #feedback can be delivered in such a way that it causes harm, intentionally or not. Delivering feedback badly is one of the quickest ways to destroy psychological safety and break down trust in a team. If we only remember one thing, we should make it the “Platinum Rule”* – Treat others as they want to be treated. That means delivering feedback in a way that the recipient prefers, not the way we prefer to deliver it, or even the way we would prefer to receive it. Elements of good feedback include:  - Well intentioned - Non-trivial  - Truthful - Consensual - Actionable - Timely  - Specific - Private  - Delivered from your perspective, not that of others - A two-way conversation  - Focused - About behaviours and performance, not personalities or style - Combined with positive encouragement We explore each of these points individually in our article** A couple of extra notes here: 1. If you’re a manager, be aware that almost every comment you make can be perceived as “feedback” by your team members, even if you don’t intend it as such. What we intend as throwaway comments can have a big impact on people who look up and/or report up to us. 2. Bear in mind that sometimes no feedback might be the better option – if someone needs encouragement, is finding life or work challenging or has recently experienced trauma, the best thing to do may be to simply say “Well done, keep going.” Feedback can wait until they’re in a better place to receive it. This is another reason why it’s critical to check in with the recipient before providing feedback. Receiving feedback can also be challenging - we’ll dive into this next week. In the meantime, you can learn more about delivering effective feedback here: https://lnkd.in/eaRHWPsh Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

Can psychological safety improve wellbeing? Mental Health at Work is the theme for World Mental Health Day this year, and we can’t not highlight the way in which psychological safety at work and mental health at work connect. Thinking about what psychological safety and wellbeing look like when we achieve them can give us more of an understanding of how they overlap and how they differ.  For instance, tangible indicators of psychological safety include people respectfully disagreeing with each other in meetings, saying “I need help with this,” or admitting “I’m pretty sure I messed up there”. In contrast, some of the many indicators of wellbeing at work might include (and these will look different for everyone!) positive and cheerful conversations, seeing colleagues enjoying an extended lunch break together, and people taking more holidays and fewer sick days. And it doesn’t just apply to “work” either, the same effect is observed in areas such as elite sport*. So, how does psychological wellbeing improve wellbeing at work exactly?   Well, this is not an exhaustive list, but just as a starting point, psychological safety can boost wellbeing in the following ways: - A more comfortable work environment: It simply feels better and reduces anxiety when we work somewhere that’s free from interpersonal fear. - Greater access to support: It makes it easier to speak up when we’re struggling, and allows us to access the help and resources we need. - Improved identification of issues: It allows systemic and structural challenges to wellbeing to be identified and addressed. - Avoiding blame culture: It steers us away from “blame and shame” cultures and practices, which can significantly increase stress and anxiety at work. - Fostering innovation: It lets us be more creative and problem solve, which helps us to find more fulfilment and meaning in our work. We also find that wellbeing and organisational support strategies, such as work-life balance policies and mental health resources boost psychological safety because it’s easier to build relationships, communicate effectively and address issues when you are feeling well. And if implemented properly, they also send a strong signal to employees that they are genuinely cared about. However, poorly implemented support systems and mental health resources send the opposite signal – that they’re a tick box exercise and a sticking plaster for more serious systemic issues. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

We love this sketchnote by Tanmay, who focused on one of our recent newsletter topics with his illustration. Arriving in your email inbox every week on a Friday, our newsletter contains new, useful, insightful or controversial content all about #psychologicalsafety research, applications, practice and opportunities to collaborate. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/eJnD6dMQ 

If you’re new here, no worries, we’re happy to repeat this one again: Psychological safety is defined as the belief, in a group, that we are safe to take interpersonal risks. It’s the belief that we are able to speak up with ideas, questions, concerns and mistakes, and that we won’t suffer negative social or professional consequences as a result. At the start of every single talk, workshop, and training session, we introduce our current working definition of psychological safety and provide some context about where it comes from (including #CarlRogers, #Schein and #Bennis, #Khan, and of course, #Edmondsons work). Clarifying terms doesn’t mean we think our audience is stupid. Far from it. It’s simply a recognition that their context and experience may not be the same as ours, and it would be a mistake to assume we’re all “on the same page” without checking. We’re also conscious that the same term can have different meanings across fields. For example, “resilience” means one thing in psychology, one thing in ecology and another in global health, but there are efforts to reconcile the divergence. If we begin a discourse with misaligned understanding, it’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to converge on an agreement or a useful decision. When terms are vague or inconsistent, they can lead to misunderstandings, confusion, or even conflict. Terms often suffer from “epistemic drift” – a passive drift away from their intended meaning. For example, the terms “Agile” and “DevOps” have experienced significant epistemic drift (or to use Martin Fowler’s term, “semantic diffusion”). Diffuse definitions can sometimes be useful – this ambiguity allows a wide latitude of contextual adaptation in practice. But with Agile and DevOps, it has also to some extent hindered our collective ability to apply these ideas in practice because there’s uncertainty about what they actually are. It’s not just that we love to repeat the definition of psychological safety: it’s foundational to the integrity and success of our work, and the entire field.  Maintaining clear and accurate definitions of terms such as psychological safety safeguards their theoretical and practical value. Something as basic as a collectively accepted definition of psychological safety supports cumulative knowledge, allows for productive debate and enables effective practice and implementation. Our shared commitment to rigour, clarity, and continual learning and growth in this area is what will help keep psychological safety from drifting into just another meaningless leadership fad. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

“Whose fault is this?” Have you heard this at work? Well, we have, and many others have too. Across the last few years, we’ve had over 3,000 people attend our workshops*, and through that work we’ve heard our "top" seven most common and/or most damaging things that #leaders, #managers and those in positions of authority can say that will damage not only #psychologicalsafety, but outcomes, #performance and #safety itself. We’ve termed this our Seven Deadly Sins of Psychological Safety:  1. “That’s a terrible idea.” 2. “You should know that by now.” 3. “Whose fault is this?” 4. “Everyone is replaceable.” 5. “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” 6. “Just get it done.” 7. “Not now, I’m too busy.” In our most recent newsletter piece**, we go through each one of the seven individually. For example, number three is: “Whose fault is this?” Rather than investigating context, local rationality, and systemic causes of incidents, blame cultures look for someone to point the finger at. This not only reduces our ability to truly investigate the multiple causes of failure (because blame often constitutes the end of an investigation), but is kryptonite to any future investigations that require people to admit to errors and mistakes, lest they suffer the blame and resultant punishment. We want to note that saying these things as a manager doesn’t make you a bad manager, or a bad person. Some of us have said all of these at various points in our careers, and fortunately learned over time that there are better ways of managing and leading people. There may also be certain exceptions where some of these statements are justified, and even necessary, but that doesn’t make it good general practice. What else would you add? Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

In 2012, Google began studying 250 attributes of their 180 teams. This was the beginning of #ProjectAristotle. The aim? To understand what makes teams successful. Initially, they thought that the recipe for a successful team would be a combination of high performers, an experienced manager and unlimited free resources. Later, they would find out they were wrong. Julia Rozovsky, the leader of Project Aristotle, was already interested in the way people worked. During her previous studies at the Yale School of Management. Rozovsky had two contrasting experiences with study groups, finding that both were composed of bright and friendly people, yet as a team, one group quickly became fraught. Rozovsky and her Project Aristotle team had already identified four key factors that created a successful team; dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact, but they knew there was something missing. Then, she and her team found Amy Edmondson’s 1999 paper on Psychological Safety* and this quickly filled the gap. They found that of the 180 teams, those with a strong sense of #psychologicalsafety fostered an environment where members felt comfortable expressing their thoughts and ideas openly, leading to more productive discussions and innovative solutions. They found that teams with an environment focused around value and respect were more successful. Team members most needed to feel they could speak up, sharing ideas, challenges and concerns without fear of embarrassment or humiliation. These findings challenged conventional beliefs about team composition and management styles. To implement their findings, Google aimed to create more psychologically safe environments by encouraging open communication, empathy and understanding. Their results had shown them that “even the extremely smart, high-powered employees at Google needed a psychologically safe work environment to contribute the talents they had to offer.” It was in fact a New York Times article about Project Aristotle** that propelled Amy Edmondson’s research on Psychological Safety into the limelight, and her 2018 book ‘The Fearless Organisation’ has inspired transformations in organisations across the world. Project Aristotle helped draw psychological safety out of academia and into the world of work and practice; enabling a paradigm shift away from traditional management practice towards a “new view” for the 21st Century. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

Lower psychological safety = higher chance of employee burnout. There’s a strong link between #psychologicalsafety and #burnout in #employees in the #workplace. If we don’t feel safe to ask for help, admit our mistakes, or raise concerns about workload, it’s going to contribute to an environment where we risk burnout, a situation where we feel overwhelmed, overworked, and unable to look after ourselves as a result. Acknowledging the role of psychological safety helps us to recognise that burnout is preventable, and it is not an individual’s responsibility to simply be more resilient. In an environment of higher psychological safety, we are more able to speak up and say to our friends and colleagues things such as: - I made a mistake. - I need some help. - I can’t take on any more work right now. - I’ve got stuff going on outside work that’s affecting my ability to concentrate. - I’m feeling overwhelmed. - Please be patient with me. And in groups that possess the dynamics that foster psychological safety, team members are much more likely to step in, support, help and discuss these issues, which helps to prevent or recover from burnout. The key message for us? Burnout is not an individual responsibility to manage on our own – it is a symptom, or an outcome, of the way our organisations are designed and how they function, and it is preventable. In part, it can be prevented by fostering an environment of greater psychological safety. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

What are the benefits of psychological safety? Whether your organisation is a startup, a global enterprise, a charity, or governmental body, building psychological safety will reap huge rewards. The tangible benefits of building psychological safety in your organisation range from improved innovation, better ideas, and products that excite your customers, through to reduced risk of failures, breaches, and non-compliance. Psychological safety results in happier teams that take more intelligent risks, raise concerns sooner, stay on the team longer, are more resilient to change and external threats, and ultimately result in a real improvement to the bottom line of your business or organisation. Whether your organisation is more risk-averse and cautious, or fast-moving and innovative, psychological safety will help you achieve your goals and create happier, more engaged teams. Specifically, you’ll see:  1. Improved innovation and more ideas 2. Fewer “real-world” problems. 3. Improved Quality, Health & Safety, and Information Security 4. Higher employee retention and lower churn 5. Improved company reputation 6. Increased profitability and bottom-line improvements 7. More inclusion and diversity 8. Greater employee wellbeing 9. Outperforming competitors 10. Most importantly, happiness Fundamentally, building psychological safety is not only the right thing to do for members of your teams, but it’s the right thing to do for your business or your organisation. High performing teams aren’t happy because they’re high performing, they’re high performing because they’re happy. Psychological safety is important not just because it creates outcomes for your organisation, but because it’s the right, the human, thing to do. Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com

Henry George was an economist who examined the apparent paradox of how the USA could be progressing economically and technologically whilst poverty and inequality were simultaneously increasing. Ultimately, his research concluded that scarcity of natural resources and uneven distribution of land ownership (alongside the enclosure of common land) was the fundamental cause of inequity in society. In his best-known book, “Progress and Poverty”, George argued that rent on land for private use contributed to persistent poverty in spite of technological progress, and caused economies to tend toward boom-and-bust cycles. As such, he proposed a “Land Value Tax” that would fund a Universal Basic Income, alongside the abolition of quotas, tariffs and other perceived barriers to trade. His acolytes included Franklin D. #Roosevelt, Winston #Churchill, Albert #Einstein, Milton Friedman, Helen Keller and Martin Luther King Jr. The meme “Can you see the cat?” is used to represent the idea that once you’ve understood the phenomenon of land inequity, you can’t unsee it. Once you’ve seen the cat and know where to look, you see it everytime you look at the picture. For us, #psychologicalsafety is like “seeing the cat”: there is no realm of human interaction, from disasters to successes, personal relationships to politics, where psychological safety doesn’t play a role. Once you “see” psychological safety, you see it everywhere. And if we can extend the metaphor of seeing the cat further still: it takes quite some time for most of us to see the cat in the meme (though some clever folks spot it straight away!). Similarly, it also takes study and effort to truly understand the depth of psychologically safe dynamics, antecedents and outcomes. When we finally “get” psychological safety we can’t un-see it.  It applies across cultures, domains, industries and contexts. There is not a single human disaster (that I know of) that hasn’t had a lack of psychological safety somewhere in its chain of causal factors. We strongly suspect there is also no collaborative human success that wasn’t in some way enabled by the psychological safety of the people orchestrating it. Since the dawn of humanity when humans began to attempt to communicate with each other in fundamental and rudimentary ways, psychological safety became a thing. We just didn’t have a name for it until recently. Psychological safety is foundational to the quality, strength and effectiveness of human interactions, and it’s ubiquitous. When did you first “see the cat” with psychological safety? Do you see it everywhere now? Invest in psychological safety. Invest in your people. ---------------------- 💥 We're Psych Safety! 🎯 We make psychological safety real. 🎤 We write about psychological safety in practice. Want more? 👉🏽 Sign up for the weekly newsletter. 🙌 Join the psychological safety community. 🔝 Follow us. www.psychsafety.com