12 Ways Leaders Break Psychological Safety Without Realizing

Transcript

0:23 Junior: Imagine that you ask somebody a question and they start responding to you and you look away. Nothing openly hostile happened. You didn’t do anything overtly wrong, but the person can feel your loss of attention. They started to contribute and engage with you and now they’re deflated. And that happens more often than we cared to admit with the energy that we bring, our posture, nonverbal cues, the way we say something. And you might barely notice or not notice that type of interaction with somebody else. The point is that as leaders, we do a lot of things that unknowingly damage culture.

1:08 Tim: Junior, I think I’ve done that.

1:10 Junior: Of course you have.

1:12 Tim: I have too. I think I’ve done that.

1:14 Junior: Probably this morning.

1:16 Tim: Several times. Yeah, probably like 10,000 times. Yeah, maybe.

1:20 Junior: Ordinary interactions, and that’s the point of today’s conversation, ordinary interactions can punish vulnerability and make people less willing to participate the next time around.

1:33 Tim: But I think if you’re a casual observer and you’re watching these normal interactions, I think a lot of times you, so many of these little things you’re talking about are so nuanced and so normalized that we might look at it and say, well, nothing happened. Yeah. Yeah, that’s all normal. Did you see anything? No, I didn’t see anything. Did you see anything? No.

1:57 Junior: But being on the other side of it, you can say, yeah, for sure, I felt something.

2:01 Tim: Exactly. That was weird. I like that very much. Exactly, so for example, I’ve just been thinking about this, in human interaction, the first and most precious thing that we give each other is attention. It’s attention. And then the second is probably the care and concern that follows that, but attention is the first precious thing that we give. So when you ask a question, that person looks away, you can tell attention. It’s divided. You don’t have their undivided attention anymore. They’ve been distracted, diverted, whatever. They’re thinking about something else, whatever. That is not nothing. No, it’s huge. They withdrew that precious thing that they initially gave you. They withdrew their attention and you can perceive that.

2:55 Junior: Yeah, increasingly, I have to tell myself to listen with my eyes, because I might be listening with my ears, but if I’m looking at my phone, that’s a problem. So we’re gonna give you 12 situations that you should be able to recognize that you’re probably in all the time, followed by what to do when you catch yourself doing something that you shouldn’t be. So what happens on the backside of that breach of psychological safety that needs to be there in terms of restitution?

3:23 Tim: Hey, by the way, this just made me think of this. I talked to a CEO the other day and he said that, he said, “Everyone, you have to put your phones away. They cannot even be on the table when we meet together. It’s that big of a problem because people withdraw their attention.” I do, I hate this thing. It’s totally true.

3:50 Junior: Okay, a little bit of setup. Psychological safety is a culture of rewarded vulnerability. Why do we say that? Asking a question or offering an idea, admitting a mistake, challenging the status quo, all expose someone to a response from the other person that they cannot control. That’s what makes it vulnerable. So if I asked Tim a question, I have no control over his response.

4:15 Tim: And so there’s some exposure to some kind of harm.

4:20 Junior: And I experience Tim’s response through words and non-verbals, those two things. And an invitation to contribute, just that pure engagement is just the very first part of the interaction. Everything that happens after that matters very much and will affect the way that I engage with Tim moving forward. Another piece of setup is that every single person is experiencing you and your behavior differently. So we talked about this a few episodes ago in terms of managing a room or reading a room. I think that that’s not the right approach. We need to read the individuals in the room because there are so many experiences that are happening at the same time. And the perception is not shared across everybody in that room. It’s unique to every person based on their history and experience and expectations. We need to acknowledge that.

5:15 Tim: Yeah, and that’s why we’ve established the empirical fact that psychological safety is not a shared understanding or a shared perception that you can take interpersonal risk. It’s individually perceived. It’s individually processed. People are having different experiences.

5:38 Junior: And the last piece of context that can get us in trouble is that we have real work to do. And so in an effort to get that work done, often we don’t control the nuanced things that we’re doing and saying and maybe not doing or not saying that have a real effect on the way that people are experiencing our response to whatever it is that they engaged us for.

6:00 Tim: Junior, I think this is ongoing tension that will never ever be settled, never ever be reconciled. And that is as we’re working in a pressurized environment in the workplace, the tension between the task and the person. We interact, it’s coordinated activity, coordinated action with others to accomplish tasks to get work done. So there’s always this natural tension between the person and the task because we need to acknowledge and validate the person. We need to listen to the person. We need to give the person undivided attention. But in the service of the task, okay, so you can see how easily the person becomes the means. The task becomes the end. And that’s where we get mixed up. They both need to be ends, but it becomes difficult. So we have to remind ourselves, check ourselves, bring ourselves back over and over again so that the person doesn’t become the means and we’re focusing on the task. Because if we do that very easily, very, very easily, we can break psychological safety, we can injure psychological safety. And I think what’s more is, now let’s add to that the fact that we have status differences, we have a hierarchy, we have a power differential. So if you’re at a higher level than say a directory, if you’re a leader and you have a direct report, there’s a power differential, then what you say and do, your verbal and nonverbal, comes under even greater scrutiny. People are hypersensitive to what you say and how you say it. And so it’s so easy for you to injure the psychological safety and you don’t even know what’s happening. No.

8:01 Junior: So let’s talk about the 12 things that we might be doing that unbeknownst to us are damaging psychological safety. Some of these are more overt than others and they happen by degrees, but I think that they’ll be useful because it’ll help us identify them and prevent and then restore when we get them wrong. The first one is leaving somebody out. That’s fairly straightforward. But how tuned in are we to leaving someone out? I’ve been guilty of this so many more times than I can count when I’m just having a conversation with somebody or I’m at lunch and paying attention to something and not another thing and unintentionally leave somebody out. It happens by default, I would say, and it requires active intervention and self-awareness to look at what might be happening that we don’t mean to have happen, but that is. So someone’s outside the conversation or the group and we have to notice who’s been included.

9:04 Tim: We have to notice the people who have been left to themselves and we’ve got to figure out if we’re gonna do anything about that. That’s right. I think you have to become a great dual monitor, Junior. What’s being said, but then also the dynamics in the room, you gotta dual monitor both things.

9:23 Junior: Next, we’ve got making questions feel unwelcome. So if you’re impatient when a question’s being asked or if you move into critique or ridicule when someone asks a question, obviously the person’s gonna feel that now you’re risky. You’re a risky person.

9:42 Tim: You’re a risky person. I don’t know if I wanna bring that to you.

9:46 Junior: So you gotta pay attention to your response and the answer that you get.

9:49 Tim: And how subtle can you signal that the question is not welcome? Oh, it’s so easy. I know I’ve done this.

10:02 Junior: Well, and you think about all of these behaviors being on the other side of them, that’s where our perception is really good. And so it’s not easy to perceive these things when we’re doing them all the time, but it’s very easy to perceive them when we have the short end of the stick.

10:18 Tim: That’s right.

10:20 Junior: Third, making it costly to speak. So someone might know the answer to a question that you’re asking or a problem that you have to solve and they may still stay silent. And so how do you receive participation? Do you punish those acts of vulnerability that make it less likely for that person to participate? If so, you’re subtly making it expensive for that person to speak up and you’re less likely to get their feedback in the future.

10:46 Tim: And every time you do that, Junior, the cost of speaking up goes up. I wonder if it’d be so interesting if we could quantify that, put a number on that. It costs $13 to speak up. And today it costs $17 to speak up based on the perceived cost. Yeah. Right? Yeah. We do a cost benefit analysis, a risk reward analysis. And we don’t know exactly how to quantify it. There’s no algorithm, but it costs something. People perceive that it costs something. And they perceive if it’s low, they perceive if it’s mid-range, they perceive if it’s high. They really do. They do.

11:23 Junior: Next is taking or failing to acknowledge credit. This is an easy one. And again, we have to monitor, we have to be self-aware to be able to look at a situation and make sure we’re giving appropriate credit and acknowledgement to the people who have contributed in that situation. Number five is letting a suggestion go unacknowledged. So if someone brings an idea to you and see that nothing is done with it, they’re less likely to do that again in the future. And that’s a subtle way that we can punish someone’s engagement, their vulnerability.

11:54 Tim: It doesn’t mean that we are acting, that we have taken their suggestion and we have adopted it and we have applied it, necessarily. No, they should even know where it is. Yeah, we’ve acknowledged it. We’ve acknowledged it. And acknowledging it validates the human that suggested it.

12:13 Junior: Yep. Six is interrupting rudely. Yeah, we’re all busy. We have to manage time, but we cannot interrupt people rudely and cut them off in a way that punishes vulnerability. That’s one of those areas where I struggle to find the balance between executing on the problem in front of me and giving due, respect, and attention to the person. Because sometimes those things compete harshly and they’re completely at odds. But in the final accounting, how much is 10 seconds gonna matter in my day? Probably not that much.

12:52 Tim: I could lean that way and give a little bit more room for someone.

12:59 Junior: Seven is stereotyping. Just assumption about a group identity that replaces attention to the individual. And again, this is the difference between speaking to a room, managing a room, and managing people. Each one of those people is having a unique experience. They’re their own unique basket of characteristics. And when you run down the road of intersectionality, you always arrive at a single person every single time.

13:26 Tim: You sure do.

13:27 Junior: And so that’s something that we can’t ignore.

13:30 Tim: It’s something that we need to keep top of the mind. Do you know what I think about that? Stereotyping someone, it really, in so many ways, is cognitive laziness. You’re just relying on biases, maybe heuristics that turned into distorted biases, but whatever it is, you’re not doing the work to get to know the person. And so you are cognitively, and maybe even emotionally, lazy and not giving that person their due and the time and attention and investment that they deserve. And so you default to a stereotype assessment. Yep, agree.

14:14 Junior: Penalizing a good faith challenge, this is another way that we damage psychological safety. So someone questions the status quo and they suffer for it. So we have to keep disagreement about the idea itself, separate from punishing the person. Those two things need to not be the same. We need to be able to have high intellectual friction and good debate without sacrificing relationship. Then we have asking for feedback you don’t wanna hear. We talked about this in a recent episode that it’s disingenuous of us to ask for feedback that we are not willing to act on.

14:55 Tim: Mm-hmm.

14:56 Junior: We shouldn’t ask for it at all if we’re not willing to change our minds. People feel that if we say, “Yeah, anybody have a different point of view or anybody disagree with this?” And someone says something, we’re like, “Okay,” and we do the exact same thing we were gonna do anyway.

15:12 Tim: Especially if you do it at the end of the conversation, the end of the discussion that you’ve been having for a while. Okay, the last thing I wanna ask is, does anyone have any different opinion or point of view?

15:27 Junior: After I pitched you for 40 minutes?

15:29 Tim: Yeah, so that’s disingenuous. So if you do it that way, what are people gonna say?

15:36 Junior: 10 is humiliating someone publicly, a joke or a correction that diminishes a person in front of other people. We gotta be very careful about how that type of correction is given and try to do that or just do that in private when warranted. Then we have punishing an honest mistake.

15:56 Tim: Can I just say something about that last one, humiliating someone publicly? There are times, I believe, if that happens publicly, if it happens in an egregious enough manner, that it is justifiable to rebuke the person in public, because if you don’t, then you are normalizing that behavior to some degree. And it’s important that others understand the standard and that the standard has been violated. I think a great example of that has been Nick Saban at Alabama. That is the way that he built that culture over the years. So what he normalized was to call out infractions and violations of the culture code, because it needed to be communicated and reinforced so consistently. So there are times where you gotta call people out in an appropriate way. Yep. Especially we’ve said patrol the boundaries of respect. And so if you have an infraction in stage one, something that’s completely uncalled for, those things have to be dealt with. For sure, they do.

17:25 Junior: Next, we have punishing an honest mistake. So if we make a mistake where there’s an error, there’s some sort of problem that needs to be acknowledged, but there’s a personal element to that that can creep in that shouldn’t. We need to separate the error from the person and correct the thing instead of making the person feel bad such that they don’t bring that around next time or become less likely to get the help that they need to make it better.

17:56 Tim: And that reminds me of the story, and there’s more than one floating around, but the employee that made a $10 million mistake and the employee comes into the boss and says, are you gonna fire me now? And the boss says, no, we just spent $10 million in your training and development. (laughing) Golly. So no. It’s expensive. We want you to stay. We’ve invested in you. Expensive.

18:21 Junior: And then 12 is making someone feel inferior. Now, again, with all 12 of these, it’s easy to say when it’s put that overtly, make someone feel inferior, I don’t do that, right? I would never go out and try to make someone feel inferior.

18:38 Tim: Consciously, deliberately.

18:40 Junior: But that’s done through even tone, right? Status, expertise, those things can be weaponized to make someone feel inferior. And they can be just there and if not diffused, can make someone feel inferior. So you’ve said previously that you have to fight against your position sometimes, or often when you’re in a position of authority, and that you come in in a deficit position. And so you need to overcome the authority discrepancy by being offensive about it. You have to go in and diffuse it before it becomes a problem.

19:21 Tim: Well, what if you started with a premise, Junior, that by virtue of your position, you already do make some others feel inferior. You already are in a deficit position that you need to overcome. Just by having a title. And so you need to overcome the liability of your own position to get to level ground. Yep, yep, love it.

19:47 Junior: So those are the 12. We would leave you with a few suggestions as to how to avoid these things and then make things better when you fall into the trap. First is notice your nonverbal behavior. Many of these 12 traps that we fall into, the ways that we break psychological safety, are not because we said something wrong.

20:07 Tim: It’s because we had a poor nonverbal cue that was interpreted a certain way that damaged psychological safety.

20:14 Junior: Next is apologize when you catch yourself. And that can happen, often should happen in the same conversation. As soon as you see, oh, that wasn’t right, right? Sorry that I was looking away for the last 30 seconds as you were talking to me.

20:28 Tim: I was distracted, right, my fault.

20:31 Junior: And in preparation, you said, “The salve has to match the wound.” So if we do something egregious, it’s not enough to just be like, “Ooh, sorry, my bad.”

20:39 Tim: Yeah, sorry.

20:42 Junior: And move on.

20:42 Tim: No, it’s not proportionate. So what would be proportionate?

20:46 Junior: They have to see it in behavior, right?

20:48 Tim: They do, yeah.

20:50 Junior: And then the last thing is to make room for an informal weekly review. It’s useful for us to take a step back, pause, and evaluate our behavior. To look at the last few interactions we’ve had, the last few meetings, to look at the week and say, “How did I do? “Did I fall into any one of these 12 traps? “How did I do with my nonverbals? “How do I think that other people perceived me “and experienced me? “How do I think that on Tuesday morning’s all-hand meeting “that I was viewed?”

21:24 Tim: Yes.

21:26 Junior: Because the more awareness we can build, the better we’ll become at dual monitoring, as you said in the beginning, and being able to see what we are doing and how other people are responding to us. And that’s where a lot of the art of leadership lives is in making those decisions moment to moment about the tone, the words we’re using, the nonverbal cues, and that needs to become second nature so that we don’t fall into these traps.

21:51 Tim: That’s true.

21:53 Junior: Tim, what would you leave us with as we wrap up?

21:55 Tim: I would say I would add one more, which is we’re talking about injuring or breaking psychological safety. We’re talking about what we can do to get better, not do this, repair. I think when we say that we need to self-diagnose and self-correct, I think that’s great. I think it’s a misnomer a little bit. I think the last thing that I would say is you’ve got to ask for feedback from others. There will still be gaps in your ability to self-examine and self-evaluate. You really have got to ask people, how am I doing, get some feedback. You’re still gonna have gaps. You’re still going to have blind spots.

22:41 Junior: I’m glad you brought that up. I think you’re absolutely right. Okay, everybody, hopefully that was valuable. Psychological safety is a delicate thing and it goes up and down by degrees across the four stages. We need to be conscious of our behavior the way that we influence other people. So hopefully that was useful. If it was, we would ask that you subscribe, share with somebody else that you think might find it useful, and join us in the next episode. Take care, everybody. We’ll see you in the next one.