Psychological Safety and Performance

You're here because you have already achieved some outer success and reached your current executive leadership position. But growth doesn't have to stop here. There is a thrill and satisfaction in challenging yourself, stretching and seeing how much you can achieve. Have an impact and make a contribution.

The talents, skills and tools that have got you to this point will not necessarily take you further. Or the approaches you've used to achieve this success may have been expensive in terms of time, energy, stress and effect on your relationships. You need new or upgraded power tools to make sure you can sustain or advance your position more easily.

The High-Performance Executive Newsletter introduces these tools, so that you can level up, as video-gamers would say. It draws on many areas of solid research into high-performance in business, including neuroscience, psychology, physiology, trauma therapy and flow-state study.

The three essential areas for high performance are neuro-regulation (to get and stay calm), clear the negative self-talk and the beliefs that create them (including imposter syndrome), and create new success habits.

This week we're looking at psychological safety, performance and neuroscience.

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Psychological Safety and Performance

In preparing for this newsletter issue, I came across surprisingly disparate views on psychological safety. The first viewpoint, let's call them Chris, holds that psychological safety is essential for employee wellbeing and engagement. While the second viewpoint, let's call them Sam, asserts that it is coddling and leads to laziness and low productivity.

My college philosophy teacher, Dr Francis, used to say that such a huge gap in agreement is usually a problem of definitions; the two sides referring to different things.

The textbook definition of psychological safety is

… being able to show and employ one's self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career.

Essential for a positive workplace is freedom from persecution, bullying and personal attacks. This is the essence of creating a non-toxic workplace, where people are not subjected to these things. This is Chris's point that psychological safety means a healthy work environment.

Safety, however, is not the same as comfort. Safety doesn't mean that you are never challenged or that nobody disagrees with you.

And this is Sam's concern; that keeping people too comfortable (unchallenged) leads to reduced creativity and innovation. Without cognitive diversity and the creative friction that opposing ideas create, you get group-think and stagnation.

An active learning environment means that we are creating and challenging ideas and having to revise our own opinions and beliefs as we learn more.

It takes a lot of brain energy to do this, and it is often an uncomfortable feeling. It’s often exciting and fun too, but frequently uncomfortable. The best creativity comes from such 'cognitive friction.'

So I'm using psychological safety to mean a healthy work environment but not one of constant comfort. I hope Chris and Sam would both agree to that description.

Psychological safety is important for individual and team performance because of the way the brain responds to perceived danger.

Neuroscience

The brain operates from its model of the environment and attempts to predict what's going to happen next. The better your brain can predict a threat to your survival, the better your chances are of reacting in time to save yourself.

This is great for outdoor survival around animal predators. But the brain also interprets danger as being possible ejection from your tribe, for example. Because in ancient times this would have been almost certain death too.

And it is a natural tendency of the brain to interpret someone disagreeing with you as dangerous. Even more so if the difference of opinion is in the form of a heated argument.

This is the part that can easily catch you out.

As soon as the brain perceives danger, it trips the nervous system into fight, flight or freeze states.

This creates a cascade of physiological changes to heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension, and stress hormones are released.

The changes in the blood flow (more blood to the muscles) mean less blood flow to the prefrontal cortex; the logical thinking and strategic planning part of the brain.

A 2012 Princeton University study showed that a triggered nervous system temporarily lowers your IQ by 13 points due to the reduced oxygen and nutrients going to the prefrontal cortex. You literally do not have the resources to think so well.

The consequences are poor judgment and decision making, riskier behaviour, and emotional reactivity. It can also be your mind going blank suddenly.

These heavy consequences of a triggered nervous system explain why high-performance teams emphasize psychological safety; your brain needs to determine that you are not in danger in order to operate at its best.

Flow State

Studies show that the peak performance flow state occurs when you are operating at 104% of your capacity i.e. a light stretch.

The caveat here is that this flow state only occurs when your nervous system is not triggered at the time.

If it is triggered, then operating at 104% of your capacity can start to feel overwhelming, and your performance falls quickly as your stress increases.

This explains the finding of ESADE Business School that the most transformational leaders are those who can best regulate their nervous systems.

The Team

When a team has psychological safety, it?enables

• Sharing ideas
• Admitting and learning from mistakes
• Highlighting risks
• Challenging and improving how things are done

This is a positive cognitive friction that stimulates the most creative, innovative solutions. This means there is disagreement and sorting out good ideas from bad ones. Ideas need to be talked through, explored and challenged.

How do you manage to explore diverse ideas and opinions without triggering the nervous system?

The secret is to focus on not taking contradiction or opposing ideas personally.

It is the fine art of separating someone's actions from the person.

So in discussing and disagreeing with an idea, keep the focus on the idea and not the person. Never make it a personal attack or criticism.

When having your ideas disagreed with, don't take the feedback personally.

Not taking opposition personally is a superb skill that you can develop.

However, it can be hard to learn simply because our reactions to criticism etc., come from both our conscious rational thoughts and also our unconscious beliefs. This is why working on your self-awareness, EQ and beliefs pay dividends in this arena.

When a team operates from the principle of not making it personal, then they have the freedom to perform as a highly creative, problem-solving team without triggering a danger sense.

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What I've loved this week:

Dream Teams by Shane Snow

Dream Teams is a fascinating exploration into what makes stimulates a team to perform at a high level.

Shane Snow looks at psychological safety, and also cognitive diversity, shared values, play, openness and respect.

Some of the findings were surprising, as the finesse appears to come out of maintaining cognitive friction and balancing it with belonging. Not too little, not too much.

Dream Teams was a little too rich in illustrative stories for me, which made it a longer read than I liked. But overall, worth the read.

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An action step you can do today …

Learn Your Stress Response

The stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline take about 45 minutes to be flushed out of your bloodstream after they have been released when your nervous system is triggered.

This means it can take a long time to get back to calm (and full mental functioning!) once you've gone into fight/flight or freeze.

The first step in regulating your nervous system is to notice when you're triggered. Most people have one type of nervous system state they go into more than others. Mine tends to go into flight, for example.

What does your nervous system most commonly do?

Once you know this, watch out for the merest hints of it. Discover how you notice the change fastest. Maybe you notice a racing heart, a wash of heat, or a tingling in your limbs?

When you become more atuned to it, then you can do exercises to flush the blood stream (by shaking your arms and legs vigorously, jogging on the spot, then doing some deep breathing). This means you can get back to calm more quickly, and get back to the kind of high performance you want.

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We'll cover more on psychological safety, performance and neuroscience in future issues.

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I'm Dr Tara Halliday, Imposter Syndrome Specialist.

I've been a holistic therapist and high-performance coach for over 22 years.

I'm the creator of the premium Inner Success for Execs programme - the fastest and best solution to imposter syndrome.

My book, Unmasking: The Coach's Guide to Imposter Syndrome was an Amazon #1 bestseller in 2018.

Check out the Inner Success for Execs programme for fast 'up levelling' of your internal leadership tools.

https://www.completesuccess.co.uk

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Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend!

Tara