How to Build Psychological Safety When Your Managers Are Exhausted
Managers are told to build psychological safety by leaders who mostly haven't built it for them, and most weeks there's only energy for the number. Dr. Timothy R. Clark and Junior work through why the exhaustion is real, what it costs an organization in information, and four moves for the leaders above managers that take seconds, not hours.
Psychological safety sounds great, but I’m exhausted. Junior opens with a line he has said himself, and one he and Dr. Timothy R. Clark hear from leaders constantly: they care about their people, and they are tired. Tim’s answer is that empathy requires energy, and by the seventh hour of meetings the energy is gone. You know which path is the better one and you take the other one, because it’s late in the day. The episode takes that admission seriously instead of arguing with it.
The bind managers are in is specific. They are caught between the demands of the organization above them and the needs of the people below them, and the instruction to build psychological safety usually arrives the same way the number does, as a directive with no room for questions. Tim calls it psychological safety by decree. Cascading communication is easy; cascading culture is not, and the two get confused. The cost shows up in what managers report upward. People manage their own risk before they manage the institution’s risk, Tim has yet to see an exception, and a manager who has to protect themselves filters the problems, opportunities, and crises the people above them need to hear about. You are only as good as the information you operate with, and that is the business case.
The back half is what to do. For the leaders above managers: model the vulnerability you are asking for, including admitting what you don’t know and reserving the right to change your mind; reward the manager who brings difficult information, especially in the next one or two moves after they bring it; keep candor and respect together, with one sentence up front that makes a short, blunt conversation safe; and acknowledge the cost of what you are asking, because validation changes everything even when the request doesn’t change. For the managers themselves: the best ones Tim has watched carve out a pocket of high performance and psychological safety regardless of the boss above them, and he has a phrase for it. They create their own weather. And before the hard conversation, humanize yourself for five seconds. It’s been a massive week, hasn’t it.
Transcript
0:00 Junior: Psychological safety sounds great, but I’m exhausted. That’s something that I’ve said a lot of times. It’s something that we’ve heard a lot of times. And it’s a pattern that we see in leaders. They care about their people, but they’re also tired.
0:17 Tim: Yeah.
0:18 Junior: And often they’ll say, well, I’m too tired to care that much because it takes so much effort to do what you’re telling me to do well. I understand culture, I understand-
0:31 Tim: And I don’t disagree with any of it, right? They’re saying that. I don’t disagree with it. I accept it. It’s great. I believe it. I wanna do it.
0:41 Junior: Yeah. But— You understand the argument. You don’t wanna disrespect anybody, but staying attentive to how every single interaction is perceived by other people takes more energy than you might think you have at the end of the day. And I’ve found myself, as I said, in that situation where I’m having a conversation or I’m in a meeting, I know what’s going on, the perceptive capacity’s there, the awareness is there, I know which path is the better path to take, and I take the other path because I’m like, that’s so late in the day. I have had seven hours of meetings already, and I am ready to be done. So don’t care as much as I might about how you feel about what I’m gonna say next. So we’re gonna cut to the chase, we’re gonna do business, and we’re gonna be done.
1:34 Tim: Let’s get it done. Empathy requires energy. Empathy requires energy. It reminds me of being, how was it a few years ago? We were in Sacramento, California, and we were doing training in the law enforcement industry. And I remember the police chief was doing, he was going to school at night, and he was getting like a master’s degree, and I said, great, so what are you doing your thesis on? And he said, compassion fatigue. And he went deep into compassion fatigue, and he helped me understand how it’s a real obstacle and a real problem and challenge in that field. Let’s not unlike what we’re talking about. Empathy requires energy, and sometimes the social and emotional energy is drained. And so, as you said, you don’t wanna go down that road.
2:41 Junior: If you’re a people leader, right now the situation’s extra precarious because you’re probably receiving a lot of pressure from the organization to create safety for others, and yet you might not be experiencing the level of safety that you want yourself. And so, you’re expected to make your team safe and spend a whole bunch of extra energy making that happen, and yet the only thing you feel from above is just pressure. And so, you’re getting pushed and pulled from both sides, and we’re gonna talk about that and what we might do about it. And at the end, we wanna make sure to make this concrete enough that you can go and do something different. We want you to be able to take some of these points and go practice to experience better outcomes because there are some tips, there are some solutions that we’re going to get into. So, to set the stage, managers are caught between the demands of the organization that are coming from above and the needs of their people that are coming from below. They’re beholden to both parties, and they’re getting spread relief in.
3:54 Tim: They’re in a vice, they feel the pressure. Often, they feel that they’re in a wilderness. They feel very much alone because they’re caught between these two worlds, and they need to be able to manage up, manage down, satisfy all of their constituents, try to keep people happy moving forward, contributing value. That’s a very difficult spot to be in.
4:25 Junior: On another piece of the puzzle, we were talking about this yesterday, that it’s very easy for a directive to travel down through an organization without the behavior that should accompany it. And so, it’s easy for a layer of the organization to just direct that the layer below, institute the type of culture that they’re asking for. And so, they may say, the imperative is that we have high psychological safety in this organization. Go make it happen. (laughing) And the managers left looking up, saying, “Well, I have a question about that.” No, no, no, we don’t have time for questions. Just go make it psychologically safe. Yeah. The edict. Yeah, they don’t have the psychological safety themselves that they are being asked to create.
5:19 Tim: Psychological safety by decree. By decree. Go make it happen.
5:23 Junior: So, in training, managers ask their own leaders to receive the same development. So, you might be required to go through a certain compulsory training, and you’re looking up, like, “Well, why, are you not gonna do the same thing? Do we not have the same requirements?” So, that happens at every layer of the organization. And managers, though, are in this unique, precarious situation. And so, the professed culture that the organization is saying they have or is asking to be built can be very different from the culture they’re actually creating in the way that they’re announcing that requirement.
6:03 Tim: Well, it’s just, you said it, but the distinction between cascading communication, that’s one thing, and that’s not that hard, and cascading culture is a completely different thing. But sometimes we confuse the two, and we think that cascading culture is kinda like just cascading the communications, and it’s a pretty similar thing. It’s not similar at all.
6:31 Junior: There’s a rational reason for that. We’re gonna get into that later in the conversation. But there’s a reason that organizations do this and that leaders do this. There’s a level of detachment that they feel from the organization, even culturally, that results in some of that problem. So, why is this problematic at all? Well, when managers have to protect themselves, when they have to close the gap, the information that they share and that they report back up changes. So, if you’re a manager and you’re getting pinched, we’ve talked about this idea before, that your first instinct is to manage your own personal risk. You’re not going to manage the institutional risk before you manage your own risk.
7:19 Tim: That’s a principle that we share all the time. I’ve yet to see an exception.
7:27 Junior: Yeah, so the manager’s thinking, what is safe to me to report up about what’s going on? Not what would be in the best interest of the organization. And so, as a leader, if you haven’t given psychological safety to that managerial layer, then you have to expect that they’ll act out of self-preservation and filter a lot of the information that would be useful to you, but that you’re just not gonna get because of the nature of the situation.
7:57 Tim: I wouldn’t even say useful, Junior, that is critical to you to be able to do your job.
8:02 Junior: Yeah, because these could be problems. They could be opportunities. It could be a crisis that doesn’t get passed back up because they’re managing personal risk because you haven’t endowed them with the psychological safety that they need.
8:18 Tim: It doesn’t make it to you.
8:20 Junior: So, this is a statement that we’ll come back to over and over again, which is that you’re only as good as the information with which you operate. And this starts to become the real pragmatic angle that we’ll take to make the argument, because you might say, an organization might say, at its top layer, well, that’s too soft. It doesn’t matter. We have businesses to run. We have things that need to get done, and we don’t have time to take the extra steps to make sure that everybody feels nice about it. That’s the way they might characterize the need. And what we would come back with and say is, well, what quality of information do you hope to operate with? And they’re gonna say, well, hi, I mean, we need better intel.
9:04 Tim: So, that’s the business case.
9:06 Junior: Exactly.
9:07 Tim: That’s the rationale that you can give the manager that should be compelling enough. What more do you need to know?
9:14 Junior: Yeah. And you can paint a pretty dire picture if you help them understand just how poor the quality of information could be if they do this wrong.
9:28 Tim: That’s right.
9:30 Junior: Okay, two, exhaustion helps explain the gap between intention and behavior. So, that’s the biggest explanatory variable for me if we assume good intent, which I think is a safe assumption, working with a number of leaders that we have. Most people are well-intended, and they mean no one any harm most, and they’re trying to do a good job, but they’re getting pinched. We had an episode just a few weeks ago on the engagement levels of the managerial population. They’re double digits lower than they were last year, and the rest of the organization has stayed relatively normal.
10:05 Tim: So— Something’s going on.
10:07 Junior: As a cohort, they’re hurting. Yeah. And the numbers are screaming. Organizations haven’t responded with the level of intervention that we think they probably need to, but you can look at that population and see very clearly that they’re so tired.
10:27 Tim: They are. The pace of change, the complexity, the pressure, all of those things combined right now.
10:34 Junior: And so sometimes when you look at that population, you say, well, these people are just indifferent. Well, maybe they’re not. Maybe their indifference is just exhaustion. Okay, so what do we do about this? The first thing that we have to do is model the vulnerability that we expect from our managers. That’s number one. If there was one thing that would help solve this problem, it would be that. You are asking your managers to go and do really vulnerable things, change business processes, move org charts around. You’re asking them to reconcile their career of 20 years with the new tooling available through AI. There’s massive— That alone. Yeah, there’s massive disruption. And yet there’s this feeling often of certainty that comes from above that manager that really shouldn’t be there. There’s a level of uncertainty that needs to be admitted by the organization so that the manager feels a little bit more comfortable admitting the fact that it is uncertain and foggy for them. And so if we go to that managerial population and say, look, here’s the information we have. These are the facts as we know them today. We don’t have all of the information. It’s probably going to be painful. We reserve the right to change our mind in five days. So please, we’re all trying to do our best and we don’t have a perfect answer. That’s going to get a lot, you’re gonna get more mileage out of that than you would with this feigned certainty.
12:11 Tim: It is delicate though, Junior, to communicate the uncertainty and the unknowns and the dynamism, the reality, getting reality on the table, yet you’ve got to also communicate confidence and the confidence that you have that you can achieve your destination, that you can navigate the uncertainty, that there is a path to growth, to profitability, to success, you have to be able to do that in the midst of that uncertainty.
12:48 Junior: Well, we talked a couple episodes ago about the difference between certainty in knowing the answer and certainty in your ability to learn what the answer is. And that’s what I would point people toward. You need to lean on that side of learning. Learning is the only thing that is going to get an organization to the other side. That’s very true. And maybe not other side, because I don’t know that there’s a chasm to cross, it’s just a perpetual state of dynamism. And so learning is the only thing that will allow you to stay afloat. So that’s number one, model the vulnerability that you expect from your managers. Number two is reward the manager who brings difficult information. If you get a manager who’s willing to raise their hand and come back up the chain and say, hey, I have a question, or hey, I think there’s an opportunity, or hey, there’s an imminent threat, then you need to be very careful with what you do in the next one or two moves from there.
13:47 Tim: Very intentional in your response, especially your emotional response. You’ve got to validate the person, you’ve got to acknowledge what they’re saying, you have to appreciate the personal risk that it took for them to do what they’re doing. And it means that they care enough about institutional risk that they are taking personal risk. And so we’ve got to acknowledge that and reward that immediately.
14:20 Junior: Number three is to keep candor and respect together. These are not mutually exclusive. We can have candor and we can have respect at the same time. So one of the things that we often think is that, well, empathy does take energy, it also takes time. And maybe if I treat this person with the level of respect that I showed this conversation is gonna have to take four times longer than it otherwise would, it’s not necessarily true. I think that there is some power in an admission on the front end and saying, look, I’m feeling spread really thin. I think you are too. We’re in a tough environment. And so just know I’m gonna share some candid information with you and just know I have deep respect for you and I have confidence that we’re gonna be able to work through this. Then I have much more freedom to share something short and sweet and candid because I qualified just a little bit at the front end.
15:22 Tim: Well, you set the table in a really good way. You are building confidence and you’re signaling that I’m ready to receive what you’re gonna communicate.
15:34 Junior: And I guess that also what we’re saying is that psychological safety doesn’t mean that you have to dance all the time and you have to just walk on eggshells and take forever and be completely tuned into every single emotional outcome.
15:49 Tim: It’s impossible.
15:50 Junior: You can’t do that. We understand that. There’s too much going on. Yeah, that’s really true. Which brings us to number four, address the manager’s capacity to keep doing the work. What this means to me is acknowledge that whatever request you make of your people requires resource. You might know that intellectually, but communicating that to the person on the other side, I think goes a long way. So let’s say that we have a change in the revenue model or the product mix. Let’s say that there’s a process change or a reorg. I might go to my team and say, hey, here’s this new information. This is what we need to do differently. Go do it.
16:28 Tim: Yeah.
16:29 Junior: It’s different if I show up and say, hey, I know that we’re already spread really thin. What I’m about to ask of you is going to require even more. I’m dedicated to figuring out how we make it through with an appropriate amount of effort. I don’t wanna kill y’all. I don’t wanna burn the midnight oil for too long. I want to appropriately resource this with an understanding that it might stretch us a little bit. Here’s the thing.
16:56 Tim: An acknowledgement of the cost.
16:58 Junior: Yeah, because if you don’t do that, those people will feel, I’m already working as hard as I think I could be working. There’s no flex anywhere that I can see. And so if you go in ignorant to that, at least perceptually ignorant to that, people are gonna have a problem. Oh yeah. And so it goes so far to just say, hey, I know that this request came through, maybe from another department or whatever it was. That’s a lot of work. I just want you to know that I see that.
17:31 Tim: Yeah.
17:32 Junior: That could be all that it takes to put that person at ease.
17:36 Tim: Just validate sometimes.
17:38 Junior: Hey, it’s a lot.
17:39 Tim: Even if you don’t change anything substantive about what is required, the validation just changes everything.
17:48 Junior: So here’s the next one inside number four. Managers need a pressure relief valve. And this is where I think we can become really artful when we’re talking about management because everyone in the hierarchy can raise their hand and say, it’s so stressful. It’s so stressful and no one creates psychological safety for me. And so why are you expecting me to pass it down the organization and buffer and do all of this?
18:23 Tim: You need to be coddled.
18:24 Junior: But there’s something that I think’s really laudable in being a leader who’s willing to absorb some of that stuff from other people, even if you don’t have someone above you that you can go and release to and just say, ah, this is why it’s so hard and this is everything that’s on my plate. And so I think a lot of what a good leader develops capacity for is to absorb that stuff from other people. And so if you don’t have it above you, well, at least you can be that for the people who are underneath you.
18:59 Tim: I think that’s a pattern that we see across organizations, Jr. where the best managers, they do that. They carve out an enclave, a pocket of high performance and high psychological safety and human validation. And they may even be surrounded by other teams that are toxic. They may have a boss them themselves that is not a good boss, but they take it upon themselves to nurture and cultivate an environment of high performance that validates the human beings that are part of the team, regardless of what’s going on outside. I see that pattern everywhere. That’s what they do. They create their own weather. They just, what are you going to do? I often say to people in the course of your professional life, you’re going to have the opportunity to have a really good boss and you’re going to have the opportunity to have a really lousy boss. Just know that’s part of the curriculum, it’s coming. And so take advantage of all of those. The first boss will mentor you. The second boss will reverse mentor you. You are learning all along the way. If you take that kind of approach, that kind of attitude, when you become a leader, when you become a manager, that’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to carve out some space and you’re going to create a high performing team and a culture that is a fantastic culture that enriches everyone. You don’t have control beyond that. So focus on that.
20:49 Junior: Yeah. There’s a tip that I want to get into before we wrap up, which is this idea of humanizing yourself a little bit to your team. I think there’s a tendency in managerial roles to feel pressure, to show up stoic in every single conversation, regardless of what’s going on. There’s a level of that that is useful. We should be steady. We should have an even keel. However, there is a lot of utility because we don’t have unlimited energy in humanizing yourself by saying something like, before a big conversation, hey, just so you’re aware, it’s been a massive week, hasn’t it?
21:38 Tim: And then you can just sigh, smile, and get on with it.
21:43 Junior: And you can say, hey, so in that, I’m feeling pretty tapped out. I think you are too. And so just a whole little bit of grace for me as we get through this next half day, this next meeting or this conversation. I’ll do the same for you, because I know we’re both taxed. Yeah. That goes a long way.
22:05 Tim: It does, Junior, but it flies in the face a little bit of a school of thought that’s been around for a long time, which sees leadership as a performance. Okay, I get that you have to perform, but this framing leadership as a performance moves us into a place where things get really artificial and you become staged and scripted and rehearsed, and you lose your authenticity as a leader and you can’t connect at a real human level. That’s a liability. People can smell that. They can sniff that out in a hurry. That’s the surface acting.
22:56 Junior: Well, I’ve felt this in myself sometimes when I’d be having a conversation with someone and they’re passing on some feedback, maybe a critique or something, and I find myself saying, well, if they had any idea what was actually going on, then this would go a lot easier. And so maybe in that situation, just give them 1%, 2%, let them in just a little bit, because that can help everybody feel like, okay, we’re all human, we’re all seeing the same thing, and it’ll give them space to give you a little space and you can have a better outcome. So the reason I share that as a tip is because that takes like five seconds to do. That doesn’t take a lot of energy, and it can reduce the need for you to be high, highest energy in the rest of that conversation and get everything right because you’ve diffused it on the front end. And so if something happens three quarters of the way through the conversation, they’re thinking like, oh, yeah, it’s because all this other stuff’s going on. So I think that can help us a lot. So three points that we want you to keep in mind as a takeaways from this conversation. One, exhaustion can coexist with care for people. So even though we’re tired-
24:13 Tim: It has to. Yeah, it has to.
24:15 Junior: Even though we’re tired, we still have a duty and an obligation to care for the people in front of us.
24:20 Tim: We do.
24:21 Junior: Two, leaders have to model the culture they ask managers to create. So if we’re gonna speak to senior leaders, we’re gonna speak to executives, that’s our imperative. You must model the vulnerability that you are asking of your managers. And then three, when managers can’t speak candidly, you lose information that you need to run the organization. So the information quality that you act on will be entirely correlated to the psychological safety that you’re creating underneath you. So if you want good intel, you have to have good psychological safety.
24:55 Tim: That’s a good point.
24:56 Junior: What would you leave us with, Tim?
24:57 Tim: I would just underscore the point that you just made, which is you absolutely need good intel. So do everything that you can to make sure that you’ve got it. Which means, as we like to say so often, you gotta continue to neutralize the liability of your own position. And then you’ve got to empathize even when you’re tired. And there are ways to economize the way that you empathize. That’s very possible.
25:28 Junior: So two things that I would point you to, we will have a downloadable for this episode. We gotta come up with a good title for that. Maybe it’ll be something like Five Tools of Psychological Safety for Exhausted Managers. Something like that.
25:40 Tim: We’ll have it downloadable.
25:42 Junior: So if you’re an exhausted manager, go look at that. You can relate to this. Yeah, go check that out. And then second would be the events that we put on just about every single week. So if you would like to learn more about our training offerings in this category, go look at our events to be able to experience one live, which would get you full access to one of our courses. So go check those out and we’ll see you in the next episode. Take care, everybody.