When It Comes to Psychological Safety - Talk Is Cheap

In today’s video , we speak about what appears to be a tricky phase when it comes to Psychological Safety - when organisations find themselves trapped in an awareness-raising-only cycle. How can it be broken and when can the people work begin in earnest??

As Ffion points out, it isn’t unusual, that is what usually happens with “big meaty topics” in the realm of humans in the workplace - they all take a long time to land and then a longer time to build a base of true awareness. We are certainly not saying we are against the learning, far be it from us, -we even measure “learning” as one of the behaviours that define the health of the team in our software!-?we are simply saying most of the companies we are speaking to are overdoing it on this topic and it is so that they postpone the execution.?

In the case of Psychological Safety, it is the ultimate “meaty topic” as it encompasses so many aspects of all our emotional lives but it also has a deeply personal impact dimension to it as people do truly, deeply resonate as soon as they hear about it. It either reminds them of the happiest or the unhappiest they’ve ever been in a team.?

Let’s consider how does the topic of PS enter an organisation? Typically it does so at a team level first, -likely via the repositories of modern knowledge industry work culture beacons that are the DevOps/Agile communities - and then they spread it, find a sponsor/advocate/Superhero leader and they in turn run with it for a while and that’s when the topic of PS becomes an organisational topic in terms of awareness.?

With every one of these topics, the flurry of activity that colludes to create the awareness cycle is almost the same - emails get sent around, the discussion starts in some pockets, maybe a steering group gets involved, some memo/programme proposal is created, some course is offered to everyone, some groups may get coaching, materials are being circulated, etc. And people are typically very excited about the early phases of this flurry of activity on the topic and then everyone’s interest seems to dip. Contrary to what you may be tempted to believe if you see people seemingly dipping in motivation that isn’t about the topic, but about how they feel they are stuck in the cycle of just learning and discussing with no true follow-up and action and that has a supremely disheartening effect that often breaks the trust in the organisation even more.?

This “becoming stuck” in a seemingly-learning cycle becomes paralysing so why does it happen? It is because of our collective history of doing business in a certain way - no history of discussing emotions and bettering EQ, command and control, organisational level programmes being funnelled down, the theory being favoured over hands-on change - all of these habits line up for it becoming a sterile academic-only exercise. If you further lay over it the fact that the “human work” is hardly ever prioritised and that tools to aid in the human work are few and far between it’s no surprise that so many organisations are trapped in the cycle of contracting yet another course or set of workshops.?

Staying at the theory-only?level is also, in a sense, a mass procrastination exercise of avoiding the harder bit which is the people work.?

This is what has happened in the past in the same pattern when HumanDebt accumulated on all the other topics as well but the chief difference is that if the conversations on culture are hard to follow with tickets on a board, or the topic of D&I is too complex to translate it to immediate action, the idea of having high-performing and innovating teams thanks to making them feel safe with each other by affecting their behaviours is lending itself by contrast to direct to-dos and hands-on execution of said behavioural change.

What we find is that most organisations and individuals stuck in an awareness-only cycle do feel that it is unnatural and they know in their hearts of heart that on this particular topic talk is extremely cheap and postponing the work means not having happy and high performing teams but they simply don’t know how to escape it.?

So what we advise to break it, is to do away with the noise and instead help boil down what has truly been learned so far: What IS Psychological Safety? Why is it good for you as a team? Why is it good for you as an organisation? What are the behaviours we need more of and which should we minimise? And, most importantly, how do we accomplish that as a team through our own work??

It is that simple and clear-cut, nothing else matters. Any one of you reading this can build this deck today. If you start now, in just a few hours you’ll have a definitive and worthwhile “Psychological Safety Basics” deck you haven’t paid the McKinsey’s of the world to pad out. You’ll have the foundation clear and you’ll be able to summarise, wrap up all this learning and awareness and move on to the part that really matters - the doing.?

And once you do, measurement and action distributed to the team is the way to go -?either read and watch our videos to piece together your own version of a Playbook -and ensure you found some type of marker/measurement you can track as well!- or just come talk to us so we help you build a business case and you can get proper tools doing both the measuring and offering the team actions you need to keep moving forward in building Psychological Safety.?

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The 3 “commandments of Psychological Safety” to build high performing teams are:?Understand,?Measure?and?Improve

At?PeopleNotTech ?we make?software ?that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us?about a demo?at?[email protected] ??

To order the "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age" book go to this Amazon?link