How to Lead a Psychologically Safe Team: 4 Questions to Start With

Transcript

0:11 Junior: Are you prepared to be wrong? What would have to be true for you to change your mind? Put a decision with your name on it in front of that question. You might be willing to hear opinions as many of us are, but the harder test is whether there exists an opinion that could actually get you to change your mind and do something differently.

0:45 Tim: Junior, why are we even talking about this? It’s simple. All you have to do is put new data and new logic in front of me and that’s it. Isn’t that true for all of us?

0:55 Junior: It is. That’s a wrap.

0:56 Tim: That’s a wrap. Thanks for sharing a few minutes with us.

1:00 Junior: Why are we talking about this? We’ll see you next week.

1:02 Tim: Oh, I wish that were true.

1:02 Junior: It’s anything but true. No, it’s anything but true.

1:06 Tim: Oh, do you know what? If you plumb the depths of that question, what would it take to change your mind? It’s incredible. It goes way beyond the cognitive. It’s social. It’s emotional. It’s psychological. It’s political. It’s economic. It’s all of those things. To change your mind is an act of will that depends on all factors in all of those areas.

1:33 Junior: So in order to understand whether we are ready to change our minds and whether we are prepared to be wrong, there are four questions that we’re going to share in today’s conversation that have to do with psychological safety. How you accept someone, how you respond to a mistake, how you grant autonomy, how you receive challenge from others, tells everyone around you, your team, anyone you come in contact with what’s possible around you and in working with you. So we want you to leave with a decision to examine your own tendencies and patterns as it relates to your preparation to be wrong. And that’s very different than just saying that you’re willing to hear other perspective.

2:21 Tim: It’s even funny. It’s awkward. It’s strange to even put the word prepare before in front of being wrong. So prepare to be wrong. What is the preparation to be wrong? We don’t think that way.

2:37 Junior: No. And we conflate preparation to be wrong with hearing other opinions. And I think that that’s where the issue really lives. It’s much easier to say that we will hear somebody out than it is to be clear about what it would take to change our mind. So as part of setup, psychological safety, we define as a culture of rewarded vulnerability. The four questions that we’re going to share have to do with the four stages of psychological safety as laid out in the four stages of psychological safety book. Second edition is out and doing well. Pick up a copy if you don’t have it already. So people need to be accepted. Stage one, they need to learn. Stage two, they need to contribute, which is stage three, and they need to challenge the status quo or improve their situation, which is stage four. They need to do that without feeling embarrassed or feeling like they’re punished in some way for the acts of vulnerability that take place across those four stages. So every stage asks for something a little bit different from the leader, which is why we’ve broken it up into four instead of just the blanket question, are you prepared to be wrong? Are you prepared to reconcile yourself against these four different stages as you field interactions from other people…

3:58 Tim: …and the requirement associated with each stage to you personally.

4:02 Junior: Yep, accepting a person whose opinions differ from yours, responding constructively when somebody gets something wrong, allowing a very capable person to do something differently than you would do, and then considering that a challenge to your own decision might be the right thing to do. In preparation for this, you said, hey, bias affects these decisions and it’s really easy to acquire, including when you’re just trying to go do good work and do your job. Yeah, that’s true. Tell us a little bit about that bias acquisition in the context of this.

4:39 Tim: Bias acquisition is natural because we as humans, we like to use heuristics to make decisions and heuristics are basically mental shortcuts. But what happens is that those heuristics turn into biases. And then we have a problem. Then we have distortion that enters the decision making process, the evaluation process, our analysis, and the way we make up our minds. Right. So then to change our minds, we, that would mean that we would need to dislodge bias. And why do we have that? Because humans, we default to the, to low effort choices. We are economizers, we’re mental economizers. Daniel Kahneman called it the law of least effort. So we apply that in our analysis and our decision making. So that’s another aspect of it. That’s why we use heuristics and then those turn into biases. So there’s some complexity behind this, to say the least. There’s a lot of complexity.

5:46 Junior: And that complexity often ends in problems, managerialy, when we go out into the world and start behaving. Yes. One of the first things that we run into is that the permission that we give others to engage with us and to share their opinion and to point out where we might be wrong to voice a critique. Anytime we do that as managers, that has to be real. And it’s often not real. If we welcome people socially, but we don’t allow them to participate in that process, do they really feel stage one inclusion safety? Great question. Because often, I mean, I felt that where I’m welcomed socially, but I feel constrained in my ability to contribute or to question. Intellectually. Yeah. And then another problem we run into is that there are different standards of evaluation depending on role. So we give more deference and more leeway to authority than we might if we’re looking farther down the organization. Very true. And then finally, our teams eventually have to execute. So we can’t spend forever in deliberation and in this discovery of whether or not we’re wrong, we have to eventually be decisive and go do something. Yeah. So all of those things are fighting against us, which leads us to.

7:10 Tim: There’s one more, Junior. Tell me. You’re fighting against yourself. In order to change your mind, you have to dissent against yourself. That’s really, really hard. If you think about the process, the cognitive process. So I think there’s, we talk about cognitive dissonance, but I think in order to change your mind, you have to go through emotional dissonance and then cognitive dissonance both. You’re dissenting against yourself. Think about that process to get there is incredibly difficult.

7:44 Junior: It is. I think about my own identity journey managerial, as a leader, as a human. And I think upfront, as we go through school, as we enter our careers, we’re rewarded for being right. And the more right we are, the more often we’re right, the more we’re rewarded and known as a person who’s right. And I think that we can develop an identity that says, I’m a person who’s right. And what I’ve tried to do over time is develop the type of identity that says, not I’m the person who’s right, but I’m the person who’s dedicated to finding the right answer. And those are different things.

8:26 Tim: They are very different things.

8:27 Junior: The former doesn’t allow for being wrong without a ton of dissonance. Whereas the latter allows for exploration and the possibility that you might not be right today. And that allows for you to poke at yourself from yesterday and say that person was dumb. But me today learned something new and we’re going to go a different direction.

8:52 Tim: So then if your identity is tied up in being right, then the prospect of being wrong is existential. Yes. Let me give you an example. So I brought this book, Junior, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn is a very famous book. Page Turner. Yeah. Well, it doesn’t sound like it. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but you just wait. It’s pretty exciting. So I have a good friend who’s a physician and a pioneering physician in pain management here in the United States. And when he went to medical school at Dartmouth, this was required reading. All of the new medical students had to read this book. Why? Because it talks about how science progresses and the way that it progresses, the social psychology of the way that it progresses. And I just want to read a quote out of here. So each of them, he’s talking about scientific revolutions. When we discover new truth, and it replaces the old truth, each of them necessitated the community’s rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it. Okay. How hard is that? Harder. Well, here’s a quote from Max Planck, the great German physicist, that really emphasizes and underscores the existential nature of being able to change your mind and embrace the new answer or the new truth. He says, this is what Max Planck said. He says, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, or rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Wow. That’s how hard it is to change your mind, even when you’re surrounded by empirical evidence that the old truth, the old theory is wrong.

11:09 Junior: She’s got to wait 30 years.

11:11 Tim: It’s tough. Generational replacement. So I think in this podcast episode, we’re trying to help people avoid generational replacement and learn how to be wrong. Totally.

11:22 Junior: Well, our appetite to be wrong has to go up an order of magnitude because we’ll increasingly be wrong as all of these things around us evolve. That’s right. And so the tooling that we have available to us is going to necessitate that. Otherwise, you’re toast. You’re going to be left behind. Totally agree with that. So let’s get into those four questions. Starting with inclusion safety, how do you treat someone whose views differ from yours? How do you treat them? Tim and I talked about separating humanity from human characteristics and that a person’s innate value doesn’t depend on their agreement with your opinions. Sometimes we cast a value judgment based on an opinion where we need to come from zero and say, “No, this person has inherent value regardless of their opinion and start there.” If we go to characteristics first and opinions are characteristics, then we can get in trouble.

12:25 Tim: We can easily be guilty of devaluing them based on that.

12:30 Junior: Yeah. And it’s possible to disagree with a position while still valuing the person. And separating those two things is really difficult for a lot of people to do. As we get better at doing that, I think that that’s what helps the social friction go down. If you have two people who both value each other, who have differing opinions, you can have high intellectual friction, keep the social friction low. You can really go at it and it can be toothy, but it can be productive.

13:05 Tim: But you can do it and you can maintain it and you maintain the relationship.

13:07 Junior: So that’s the first question that we have to ask ourselves. And we have to be really open and honest about that. How do I treat people whose opinions differ from mine?

13:19 Tim: A marvelous example of that, Junior, was a few years ago on the Supreme Court. We had Antonin Scalia and we had Ruth Bader Ginsburg at basically polar opposite ends of the political spectrum and philosophy. And yet they had this wonderful friendship that endured. Pretty neat.

13:42 Junior: Very neat. Two, learner safety. What did your response to the last mistake you saw make possible next? In other words, what happened after the last time someone messed up? Our response to that mistake made certain paths more or less likely. Let’s say that someone brought an error to us and said, “Hey, there was a problem that happened here.” If we responded in a way that punished that person’s vulnerability of bringing that to us, what’s the likelihood that they bring the next thing to us? Well, it went down. It didn’t go up. If we respond to that mistake or question with something like, “Thank you so much for bringing that to me. I realized that that was probably a difficult thing to do. I really appreciate that you did that. Let’s work through it.” The likelihood that they do that again the next time goes up. And so we have to be very introspective as we look at our response to those types of things, the acts of vulnerability that happen inside learning, which are often mistakes and questions, and see if we can get that into questions and see what’s our pattern. How do people respond after we respond to a mistake or a question? Third, contributor safety. Can a capable person do the work differently from you? In other words, if I’m sitting across from someone else and they’re competent, but they want to approach the problem differently than I want to approach it, is that okay with me or do I have a fundamental problem with that? Is it more about my methodology or more about the objective and the output? If it’s more about my methodology, my approach, then we’re going to have a problem.

15:26 Tim: I think your ego invested. If the approach has to be your approach, I think you got to keep thinking about that. Why is that bothering you so much?

15:35 Junior: You brought up a point which was that if we grant the latitude or the autonomy for someone to go and choose the means, then we have to mean it. If they go off and start approaching the problem in a way that we wouldn’t, that is not the time to go in there and harangue them about how they have to go and do it your way. Then it’s precisely the time to step back and say, “I gave the autonomy. They had demonstrated an ability to go and do this thing, and so I’m going to leave them alone.”

16:09 Tim: If you gave them outcome accountability in the first place and the level of autonomy for that, then you have to be true to that. You got to maintain that.

16:20 Junior: For Challenger Safety, how would someone know you are prepared to change your mind? I like this question a lot because a lot of people have to divine that about us. They have to make guesses. We make it hard. A lot of what I would recommend in this category is to make that explicit and say, “Here’s what I think. Here’s why I think that. Here are the alternate points of view, and here’s what it would take for me to abandon my position and endorse one of these other paths.” It gives people a clear view of the evidence required to get you to shift. Because if you said, “Oh, I’ll just be convincing,” or if you have a better idea, and oftentimes that’s flippant, but if you can say, “No, really, I’m genuinely interested in finding the best answer, and here’s why I think what I think and what would have to be different in order for me to change my mind,” that becomes powerful and operational for people. They can do something with that.

17:24 Tim: Again, Junior, I think it’s hard to do because once you state a position initially, I think people perceive that there’s so much reputation at stake when they stake out a position to begin with, and they don’t want to abandon that. And that is why we see so frequently people demonstrating what they say in decision science and escalating commitment to a failing course of action. So even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they double down.

18:04 Junior: That’s why the identity piece is so important, because if you see yourself as right, then yeah, you will increasingly adhere to your original position even when it is a failing course of action. And if you think about yourself and who you might want to choose to work with on a team, would you rather work with the person who is right or the person who figures out what is right? And is committed to find out. If they’re committed to the discovery and the exploration and the adventure, that’s the person who I want to go down the road with. For sure.

18:37 Tim: And from time to time, they’re going to be wrong.

18:41 Junior: Yeah, and then their willingness to admit that will be higher than the other person who’s built their identity on just being right. Okay, next piece is that we evaluate your idea the same way we evaluate my idea. I like this because it takes away that difference to authority if we can be explicit about the process of evaluation. So we’ve done this recently at Leader Factor as we’re looking to 2027 and the growth path for some of the products and features that we’re going after. And up front, we’ve put together an evaluation process for the ideas that are going to be put on the table, which means that your idea has to go through the same process as someone else’s idea in the organization who sits in a different role and has a different level of organizational authority.

19:38 Tim: So such a beautiful benefit of that, Jr., is you do neutralize hierarchy. You do neutralize the undue influence of status or a power differential. And so the asymmetrical relationships that exist based on hierarchy, it doesn’t matter anymore. You have to go through the same gauntlet. You’ve got to meet the same criteria. You’ve got to undergo the same scrutiny and the rigor of the process.

20:04 Junior: One of the things that stood out to me, Drew, our chief product officer, we were talking about pitching. And he said that pitch as part of this process must be done with an audience that has a really good reason to say no. And I like that because if we’re going to be prepared to be wrong, then we need to have a lot of appetite to go and get input from people who don’t already agree with us. If people around us have incentive to agree, then we need to get out of that and go find somebody else or something else. Maybe it’s data that gives a contrarian perspective. Maybe it’s a person who’s just naturally antagonistic about the thing that we’re exploring. Those things and our ability to explore them, that shows me your appetite or your willingness rather to be wrong. If that’s not there and I see that you’re cherry picking all of the data and the perspectives that align with you, then I know that you’re probably not that willing to be wrong. That’s right. Okay, last thing is to name the condition or evidence that would cause you to think differently. So if there’s a specific number that would need to change, I was having a conversation with marketing about this, about a specific idea, should we go down this road and change this webpage or open up this new channel? Well, if this number moves to this place, then yes.

21:36 Tim: At some point, the answer is yes. Yeah. Where is it? Exactly.

21:39 Junior: If no, then well, we’re not going to pursue that course. And so not everything can be quantified where it can be, it should be, and that should be part of the criteria as we’re evaluating where to go and what would have to be true in order to change our minds.

21:59 Tim: So we have to be more explicit. And this goes back into critical thinking and decision making junior, which we train on in this area. But you have to identify your decision making criteria. And then you have to prioritize or weight them. And so at some point, you’ve got to, you got to do that here too. You yourself, when will you be convinced that you need to abandon your position? Well, it’s got, it’s got to be based on decision criteria and in a specific weighting of those criteria.

22:36 Junior: So when we pose the question to all of you listening and watching, are you prepared to be wrong? We would encourage you to carry those four questions into the future and allow yourself to be introspective enough to answer them. Frequently, we would say accept the person, even when you disagree with their position, respond to mistakes in a way that leaves room for that person to learn, honor the autonomy that someone has earned, and apply the same criteria to your ideas and the ideas that challenge your ideas. So Tim, as we wrap up, what are your final thoughts?

23:16 Tim: That being willing and prepared to be wrong is much harder than people think. And it really deserves some reflection. It deserves practice. It’s going to deserve, it’s going to require both character and competence to be able to do it.

23:33 Junior: The last thing that I would emphasize is to not conflate that willingness to be wrong with a willingness to hear a contrary opinion. If you’re going to open it up and say, I’m willing to listen, then you have to be willing to behave differently based on what you hear. So hopefully that was valuable to you all. If you haven’t picked up the latest version of the four stages of psychological safety, do that and learn more about each of the four. If you liked today’s episode, share with a friend and we will see you in the next episode. Take care, everybody.