HERBISM #130 – Great Leaders THINK Psychological SAFETY

When people don’t feel safe they go into self-protection mode, which results in them holding back and avoiding learning, while becoming reactive and defensive.

Safety is not just about avoiding physical danger, but psychological danger as well.

People function at their best when they feel safe and can take risks without fear of blame, repercussion, admonishment, humiliation, or shame.

Taking risks and trying new things is necessary for innovation, collaboration, learning, and continuous improvement.

Amy Edmondson, author of Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete, says that, “Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.”

Google did a two year study, code named Project Aristotle, to better understand what makes some teams better than others and found that psychological safety was the number one determining factor. 

“There’s no team without trust,” says Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google. The tech giant’s massive two-year study on team performance revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. 

Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off.

What Amy Edmonson and Google both found in their separate studies, is that teams which made more mistakes were actually more successful than others. Why? Because creating an environment in which people feel comfortable to take risks is key to fostering innovation in the workplace.

So, how does a leader create a psychologically safe environment? 

According to a Harvard Business Review article by Laura Delizonna, High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It, leaders can replicate the steps that Santagata took with his team at Google:

1. Approach conflict as a collaborator, not an adversary. We humans hate losing even more than we love winning. A perceived loss triggers attempts to reestablish fairness through competition, criticism, or disengagement, which is a form of workplace-learned helplessness. Santagata knows that true success is a win-win outcome, so when conflicts come up, he avoids triggering a fight-or-flight reaction by asking, “How could we achieve a mutually desirable outcome?”

2. Speak human to human. Underlying every team’s who-did-what confrontation are universal needs such as respect, competence, social status, and autonomy. Recognizing these deeper needs naturally elicits trust and promotes positive language and behaviors. Santagata reminded his team that even in the most contentious negotiations, the other party is just like them and aims to walk away happy. He led them through a reflection called “Just Like Me,” which asks you to consider:

  • This person has beliefs, perspectives, and opinions, just like me.
  • This person has hopes, anxieties, and vulnerabilities, just like me.
  • This person has friends, family, and perhaps children who love them, just like me.
  • This person wants to feel respected, appreciated, and competent, just like me.
  • This person wishes for peace, joy, and happiness, just like me.

3. Anticipate reactions and plan countermoves. “Thinking through in advance how your audience will react to your messaging helps ensure your content will be heard, versus your audience hearing an attack on their identity or ego,” explains Santagata.

Skillfully confront difficult conversations head-on by preparing for likely reactions. For example, you may need to gather concrete evidence to counter defensiveness when discussing hot-button issues. Santagata asks himself, “If I position my point in this manner, what are the possible objections, and how would I respond to those counterarguments?” He says, “Looking at the discussion from this third-party perspective exposes weaknesses in my positions and encourages me to rethink my argument.”

Specifically, he asks:

  • What are my main points?
  • What are three ways my listeners are likely to respond?
  • How will I respond to each of those scenarios?

4. Replace blame with curiosity. If team members sense that you’re trying to blame them for something, you become their saber-toothed tiger. John Gottman’s research at the University of Washington shows that blame and criticism reliably escalate conflict, leading to defensiveness and — eventually — to disengagement. The alternative to blame is curiosity. If you believe you already know what the other person is thinking, then you’re not ready to have a conversation. Instead, adopt a learning mindset, knowing you don’t have all the facts. Here’s how:

  • State the problematic behavior or outcome as an observation, and use factual, neutral language. For example, “In the past two months there’s been a noticeable drop in your participation during meetings and progress appears to be slowing on your project.”
  • Engage them in an exploration. For example, “I imagine there are multiple factors at play. Perhaps we could uncover what they are together?”
  • Ask for solutions. The people who are responsible for creating a problem often hold the keys to solving it. That’s why a positive outcome typically depends on their input and buy-in. Ask directly, “What do you think needs to happen here?” Or, “What would be your ideal scenario?” Another question leading to solutions is: “How could I support you?”

5. Ask for feedback on delivery. Asking for feedback on how you delivered your message disarms your opponent, illuminates blind spots in communication skills, and models fallibility, which increases trust in leaders. Santagata closes difficult conversations with these questions:

  • What worked and what didn’t work in my delivery?
  • How did it feel to hear this message?
  • How could I have presented it more effectively?

For example, Santagata asked about his delivery after giving his senior manager tough feedback. His manager replied, “This could have felt like a punch in the stomach, but you presented reasonable evidence and that made me want to hear more. You were also eager to discuss the challenges I had, which led to solutions.”

6. Measure psychological safety. Santagata periodically asks his team how safe they feel and what could enhance their feeling of safety. In addition, his team routinely takes surveys on psychological safety and other team dynamics. Some teams at Google include questions such as, “How confident are you that you won’t receive retaliation or criticism if you admit an error or make a mistake?”

Great leaders who take these steps to increase the sense of psychological safety of their people can expect to see increased levels of engagement and collaboration on their teams, along with higher motivation, more learning, and better performance.

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.

HERBISM #129 – Great Leaders Are Shame Resilient

Shame is the fear of disconnection. 

In order to live happy, healthy, and productive lives we all need to experience authentic connection with those with whom we need to interact.

Shame resilience is the ability to practice authenticity when we experience shame, to move through the experience without sacrificing our values, and to come out on the other side of the shame experience with more courage, compassion, and connection than we had going into it (Brene Brown, Author and Internationally acclaimed shame researcher).

Empathy is considered to be the only antidote to shame. So, another way of looking at shame resilience is the ability to move from shame to empathy. But, for most people that is hard, because empathy requires being vulnerable and taking off our armor.

Brown ensures that when talking about shame, she emphasizes:

  • Shame is universal and one of the most primitive human emotions that we experience. We all have it. The only people who don’t experience shame are those who lack the capacity for empathy and human connection.
  • We’re all afraid to talk about shame. Just the word is uncomfortable.
  • The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives.

This is a very important, but deep subject, which unfortunately most people do not want to deal with. Not dealing with it won’t make it go away, but usually results in a higher incidence of unproductive behaviors, which take more time and effort to resolve than establishing a shame resilient culture in the first place.

The good news is that shame resilience is possible, teachable, and accessible for leaders and their teams. 

The following resources from Brene Brown provide insights into courage, shame, vulnerability, and empathy:

Dare to Lead

Braving The Wilderness

Rising Strong

Daring Greatly

The Gifts of Imperfection

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.

HERBISM #128 – Great Leaders Have GRIT

What is GRIT?

A word that seems not widely understood nor used in speech, but packs a punch for leaders and other achievers.

GRIT comes down to a combination of passion and perseverance [and resilience]. Pursuing a dream, goal, or vision with uncommon commitment and stamina.

GRIT is less about talent and more about the amount of effort put into pursuing something believed in while overcoming obstacles and setbacks.

GRIT has been found to be one of the best predictors of who will succeed and who won’t—not only in business, but in the military, and in our schools.

Angela Duckworth did some of the most widely acclaimed research and found that two traits seem to predict achievement: grit and self-control. 

Duckworth states that, Grit is the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals (Duckworth et al., 2007). Self-control is the voluntary regulation of impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005; Duckworth & Steinberg, 2015). On average, individuals who are gritty are more self-controlled, but the correlation between these two traits is not perfect: Some individuals are paragons of grit but not self-control, and some exceptionally well-regulated individuals are not especially gritty (Duckworth & Gross, 2014).

A study done of 11,258 cadets at West Point over a 10 year period (Duckworth and Matthews) found that grit provided the best predictor of which cadets would succeed or fail at the challenging academy. Click to read more: Inc.

Deliberate practice, operationally defined as studying and memorizing words while alone, better predicted performance in the National Spelling Bee than being quizzed by others or reading for pleasure. 

Deliberate practice mediated the prediction of final performance by the personality trait of grit, suggesting that perseverance and passion for long-term goals enable spellers to persist with practice activities that are less intrinsically rewarding—but more effective—than other types of preparation. Click to read more: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee.

Duckworth also researched the role of talent and found that effort played as big a role in a person’s achievement as did their inherent talent. She explains it in her book, GRIT: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, as follows: 

Duckworth asserts, “Where talent counts once, effort counts twice. Consistency of effort, through time, is the key ingredient to success.

Some of the best [and considered to be the most talented] achieving athletes in the world, like Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Tiger Woods are also known to some of the hardest working.

Put another way, the success formula is described, as follows:

Click to read the article: Grit…The Official Formula for Success.

What does this mean for leaders? I believe it suggests two things:

  • To become a great leader, add effort and perseverance to passion and talent.
  • To assemble a high performing team, look for people who display great GRIT.

You cannot change the talent you have been born with, but you can surely increase your effort!

Show more GRIT and watch what happens.

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.