mmended reading
Listen to the episode
Read the Transcript
I’m moved through the backstage area, and while I accept that I’ll need to wing it and hope for the best, inside my head, I’m screaming. Adrenaline is pumping, and I’m panicking like never before.
Intro
Welcome to Lead It Better, the podcast made to help you become a more impactful leader.
Whether you have years of experience or just getting started on your leadership journey, you’re in the right place to pick up practical, actionable advice. We’re gonna discuss not only how to best deal with leadership-related questions and situations but explore why a particular approach might work better than others.
My name’s Marton, and for the better part of a decade, I’ve been helping aspiring, new and experienced leaders develop their skills and leadership strategies.
This is episode 3, and this week we’re gonna talk about psychological safety, about what happens when there’s not enough of it, and what you can do about it as a leader.
The Red Dot
If you ever had a call with me, chances are, you also had a call with my assistant, Mephisto – although you probably didn’t realize it. Mephisto’s my furry ninja – an 18-pound black tomcat. And while he’s completely blind in one eye and has severely limited vision in the other, I’m sure he’s the most capable cat you’ve ever seen. He knows four tricks – more than some of the dogs I know – and while I keep trying to convince him to take meeting minutes for me, he usually just turns to his other side and sleeps through the day.
He does get active around 8pm, and despite being legally blind, he’s happy enough to chase after my ankles and even fetch his favorite toy mouse. Yes, he does tricks and fetches – he might think he’s a dog. I don’t know what to tell you. He has an entire box of cat toys to keep him entertained, but there’s one type that we banned pretty early on: laser pointers.
For whatever reason, and despite his minimal eyesight, he went crazy as soon as he saw that red dot. He chased after it with breakneck speed, and he didn’t stop running when he got tired. He was panting like a dog; his heart almost jumped out of his chest. He was not ok, and we got really scared for him. Even after we turned the thing off, he kept running around the house erratically, looking for that red dot.
So why am I telling you about my cat and his experience with the laser pointer?
Because when you’re a leader, you’re the one with the laser pointer. And the more senior you are, the brighter the red dot. You focus your team members’ attention and determine their priorities – whether you intend to do that or not.
If that seems like a stretch at first, just think of how you react when your boss pings you or approaches you with a request. Now think if it were your boss’ boss. Or their boss. Let’s be honest; if your boss’ boss’ boss asks you to do something, you will jump on that red dot even if they tell you it’s not urgent.
Now, what happens when that laser pointer gets yanked around? I’m sure you’ve seen videos where the cat tries to chase after it with such enthusiasm that it trashes half the room, or if the red dot is moved quickly right in front of it, it just shakes and wiggles. Admittedly, these videos tickle the funny bone – but they become suddenly horrifying if you imagine you or your team doing the same thing.
An ever-shifting, unreachable goal and endless uncertainty create really high stress levels – try doing that for an extended period and see what that does to you or your team.
The most dangerous thing about this is that many leaders don’t realize the effect they’re having on their team. I’ve seen executives being completely oblivious to the fact that their idea of the day, which they mentioned only in passing while sipping their morning coffee – really just to through out some food for thought -, well, that idea sent their middle management team into a frenzy of execution and reprioritization. Just to do the same thing again the next day. But since the business was taken care of and no one complained, everything was fine from the exec’s perspective.
If you’re ever unsure whether your intentions are misconstrued, you need to be on the lookout for telltale signs of your impact.
When your team members feel uncertain about the expectations of their leadership, the direction of the team, or their role in it, it’s not long until they start to withdraw and get demotivated. People who don’t feel safe are not likely to share their opinions, voice their concerns, or even ask questions. This can contribute to various manifestations of a toxic work environment, leaving your team members feeling stressed, anxious, unsupported, and wanting to flee.
In contrast, when team members feel psychologically safe, they’re more willing to take risks, even fail and own their failures, share ideas, cheer each other on, and give constructive feedback, because they know implicitly that they won’t be punished or ridiculed, or demoralized.
Psychological safety fosters a positive work environment, reducing stress and attrition and increasing job satisfaction. Everyone wins. If you’re steady and reliable, people will trust you with their authentic selves.
The top 3 things you can do
So here are the top 3 things that you can do to increase your team’s sense of psychological safety:
- be consistent
- share your vulnerabilities
- speak up against disrespect
1. Be consistent
Acting consistently means that you’re reliable, that your team can feel reasonably confident that similar circumstances will lead you to similar reactions. We talked a lot about this when discussing your leadership philosophy in the last episode. Once understood, your team can feel safe not to ask for your guidance or approval for specific topics.
The kind of consistency that relaxes people into a sense of psychological safety is made up of many small bits and behavioral patterns.
Returning to my earlier metaphor, if you’re the one using the laser pointer, displaying consistency would mean that you’re pointing in the same direction. Your goals, your vision, they don’t change frequently or on a whim.
It also means that you practice what you preach. If you declare that your number one priority is your people, well, you better back it up – and not just with a few grand gestures every few months, but on a daily basis.
For example, your calendar might be messy and changing throughout the day, but if you put in a 1:1 with someone – or even better, if someone decided to trust you and invite you to a 1:1 -there shouldn’t be a reason for you not to show up. Ok, something catastrophic might happen, and you need to reschedule – once. But suppose you do that constantly to accommodate the needs of the business. In that case, you’re consistently communicating to your team members that they come second, at best.
Another example would be that if you set expectations, you follow through with them, even if it requires a difficult, uncomfortable discussion. And on the other hand, if you commit to something, you follow through with that, and should you not, you apply the same consequences to yourself as you would to your team. This, in turn, brings us to being fair and impartial with all of your team members – supporting them, recognizing them, and providing them with timely feedback.
You’re there to be the rock-solid foundation upon which the team can rely and build. But don’t mistake that for being some kind of superhero, doing everything and doing everything perfectly. Being consistent includes being consistently open and brave to share your vulnerabilities.
2. Share your vulnerabilities
In my experience, this is something that most new leaders find counterintuitive, and most good leaders learn to lean into it.
When you come into leadership, you might feel a certain pressure to be perfect, to know everything or some other variation of being a superhero. Especially if it’s your first team, this feeling might be inflated by your wanting to prove yourself – to your team, your leadership, and maybe even yourself.
The thing is, while you’re pursuing perfection, trying to hide any mistakes you made, you’re communicating to everyone that you think messing up is unacceptable. Even if you tell your team with your words that failing is not a bad thing, it’s a learning experience; what you tell them with your actions will always be much louder. And to make things worse, this superhero mask that you put on actually dehumanizes you and makes a genuine human connection and trust that much more difficult.
But if you’re brave enough to open up about the things you messed up, if you treat it as an opportunity for connection, a chance to show your mistakes to your team (and maybe even ask for some help), it makes you that much more human. Believe me, no one’s gonna think less of you. If anything, you’ll gain respect for being confident enough to fess up to your mistakes, failures, and weaknesses.
What’s more, you don’t have to spend energy trying to be someone you’re not. You can be authentic and open and, in the process, show everyone that you’d treat others the way you hope to be treated: getting some support and bonding over the experience.
This way, you’ll foster open communication and enable people to speak up, make decisions, and yes, make mistakes. But instead of a paralyzing fear of being blamed, pointed at, and made uncomfortable, what you’re cultivating is a mindset of taking ownership. If people feel safe, worst case, they tell you something’s wrong; best case, they feel encouraged to speak up, ask for help and go solve the problem they caused.
If you’re willing to be vulnerable first, others will have an easier time doing the same. You need to lead by example, just like when you speak up against disrespect.
3. Speak up against disrespect
I do believe that much of what goes into a team’s sense of psychological safety depends directly on the leader or leadership team. One thing you might consider an indirect result of leadership is the relationships and emotional connections of the team members. Basically, how they treat each other.
Obviously, you can’t make people like each other. But that’s ok because feeling safe doesn’t depend on being liked but rather on being treated with respect.
So what you can do is speak up against disrespect, set the tone for your team, and be clear about what you find acceptable and what you don’t.
No surprise; you should never badmouth or gossip about one of your people. What seems to be less obvious is what you should do when team members talk ill about someone not present.
As a leader, you shouldn’t have any choice but to speak up. And not even because it’s the right thing to do. I mean, it is, but if you don’t speak up and let it slide, what you’re saying implicitly is that you think this kind of behavior is acceptable.
There are always gonna be people on your team who you like more than others. But to ensure that everyone feels safe, you need to be impartial and fair – consistently. You no longer have the luxury of taking the easy way out and staying silent. You need to be explicit about the fact that your support and loyalty extend to everyone on your team equally.
There’s one situation I see a lot where people think this doesn’t apply to them. And actually, it’s the one situation where it applies the most. When they become the team leader or manager of the team they were previously part of, and there’s a work bestie with whom they continue to gossip – not to endanger that friendship. But they do so at their own peril.
Don’t get me wrong, it is difficult to change such relationships and add new boundaries. But if you’re not the same leader to everyone in your team, if there are people who don’t get the same amount of support and safety from you… what kind of relationship do you hope to have with them?
Recap
At the end of the day, psychological safety is an infinitely complex topic to tackle. Still, it’s something every leader needs to address for the benefit of their team and, as a consequence, for their own success.
To sum up what we discussed: what helps you move in the right direction is providing stability and reliability through consistency, building trust and understanding by opening up and sharing your vulnerabilities, and allowing everyone to be their authentic self by speaking up against disrespect and leading by example.
What’s next?
Ok, so what’s next? Where do we go from here?
Well, I’d love to say that if you’re intentional about all this, everything will turn out just fine. But as you saw from some of my examples, even the best intentions can have unintended consequences. Casual conversations turn into middle management nightmares, and superheroes will keep on their mask while they’re trying to save people instead of leading them.
Psychological safety – or the lack of it – is something everyone feels. And even if it becomes a conscious thought, what makes this topic so tricky is that you’re not a mind reader.
But the good news is, there’s one way to get your people’s thoughts into your head: and that’s requesting and properly receiving feedback.
This is what I’d like to discuss with you next time.
If you’re interested, make sure you hit subscribe and share this episode if you think it would benefit someone you know.
Thanks for listening; I’m truly grateful for your time and attention.
Talk to you soon.