00;00;03;13 Junior: We've had quite a few questions over the last two years about psychological safety and trust. A lot of people confuse the two. They don't understand the differences. They don't understand how they work together. They don't understand the nature of the two and their relationship. So that's our task today is to put forward our opinion about the relationship between psychological safety and trust.

00;00;29;01 Junior: In summary, what we're going to get to is that trust is about getting people to show up. Psych safety is about getting people to speak up. Tim, what do you think about today's conversation?

00;00;41;08 Tim: People have been asking about this for a long time. We get question after question. They are very different things. Let me give you an example. You you can trust but then not have psychological safety. So for example, I know I know employees who work at an organization that they trust. They trust the leaders. They trust the direction of the company.

00;01;07;04 Tim: They trust the vision. They trust the strategy. They trust the way the leaders allocate resources. They trust that the company will continue to be successful. They also trust that the company will do the right thing, because the company has a track record of being honest and ethical. But now here's the irony. When these same employees go into a room for a meeting, they will not speak up.

00;01;39;06 Tim: Now, this this is in the same organization that they trust for all these reasons, but they will not speak up in the meeting. And when I ask them why, they say, well, because it's not safe. Well hang on. You just said all of these glowing things about the company, and you love the company, and you trust company, but you go into a meeting and you will not speak up.

00;01;59;05 Tim: Yeah. That's right. We don't feel safe in the meeting. So clearly there's a distinction between trust and psychological safety. Thus, this conversation today.

00;02;12;02 Junior: Has many prospects. Many clients will come to us. They conflate the two things, or they've gotten far enough to understand that there are differences between the two. And they have very elegant, sophisticated definitions for both. But they have yet to reconcile the differences and figure out how they relate. And so I don't know that there's any content out there on the difference between safety and trust.

00;02;35;26 Junior: Trying to do a literature review on the topic.

00;02;37;23 Tim: There's not much there's.

00;02;38;17 Junior: Nothing out.

00;02;39;12 Tim: There. Yeah.

00;02;40;04 Junior: And so I hope that today's conversation will shed some light on.

00;02;43;24 Tim: I think we can fill that gap.

00;02;45;04 Junior: This is something that we've been wrestling with over time. We have a stance that I think will be pretty straightforward and really useful, and understanding the differences between these two things is a practical thing.

00;02;56;28 Tim: It is.

00;02;57;08 Junior: So it may seem theoretical, definitional. We're just talking about the words no. In practice you're going to behave differently if you understand these these concepts.

00;03;09;19 Tim: If you're a leader in an organization, this is something you need to solve for. Yeah, you need to solve for trust and you need to solve for psychological safety. These are two real leadership imperatives that you have.

00;03;21;24 Junior: Yeah I love this. I love this topic. Okay. So let's define both quickly. It's going to be hard to get a simpler definition than this

one. What is trust. We're going to call it today positive predictability positive predictability. I think that's the essence of what trust is. Trust to me the way I see it is almost amoral.

00;03;45;07 Junior: It doesn't have an opinion related to intent. It's solely about predictability. If you don't trust someone, that informs your behavior in a really objective way, if you do same thing, trust how you build it. It's a function of the quantity of interaction. It's about volume. If I've never had any experience with you before, either directly or indirectly, I don't know of you.

00;04;13;26 Junior: I have no information. Am I going to trust you? Of course not. Because I'm not going to trust you. There is no positive predictability.

There's nothing that tells me that you're going to behave a specific way. Now, we can make some educated guesses because we know what most humans might do. We know what some people might do given a situation, and we can make some guesses.

00;04;36;18 Junior: So it's not like we have zero data. But as far as you personally are concerned, I have no way to differentiate between you and some other stranger and what you're going to do. So am I going to put my stock and weight in my ability to predict what you're going to do?

00;04;50;05 Junior: makes me think of last week I purchased an item from a gentleman in another state. And yeah, it was a it was a it was a case study. It was trust because. Yeah. I said to him, how would you like me to pay you? Can I bring you. And I need you to go pick it up. So I had to drive.

00;05;13;12 Tim: Can I bring you a cashier's check from the bank? Which is as good as cash is? Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, you can't do that. I need you to pay me in advance. And I said, okay, well, I will. How about if I wire you the money, I'll send you a wire transfer. Okay. But it's got to get here the day before.

00;05;37;23 Tim: So he had no data on me, right? There's no positive predictability on me. Yeah, but I would be an honest, reliable, ethical human. Yeah, which I understand. Yeah. And so he made sure that there was no way that I could cheat him in any way. And I give him credit for that. That was fine. But it was interesting because when I finally met him face to face and we had a conversation, it was so interesting how he warmed up and and he he gave me the indication that, oh, okay, this is someone that that I can trust.

00;06;16;21 Tim: But he didn't know that before and I get it. So he couldn't have positive predictability because he had no data.

00;06;22;28 Junior: Well, and you couldn't have positive predictability because you didn't know him either. That's true. And so what what is that? Is that just your faith in humanity? Well, is this some signs?

00;06;33;11 Tim: Yeah. Plus I had some evidence that what he was selling was in good shape. Right. So I had more evidence than he had on me. Okay, so there you go.

00;06;42;11 Junior: That's interesting, because that wire was more than $5, I.

00;06;45;04 Tim: Yes, it was.

00;06;45;23 Junior: Okay, let's get into the next definition. What is psychological safety again doesn't get much simpler than this. We're going to call it rewarded vulnerability. Positive predictability is trust rewarded vulnerability is psychological safety. I urge you to go try and find a simpler definition. I think we're getting to the.

00;07;05;19 Tim: Right.

00;07;05;27 Junior: On. I think we're getting to the roots. Just a typo here on the slide just to call that out. Now you're okay. I just want annotate it. We can swap the slide. Psychological safety is a function of the psychological safety as a function of the quality of interaction. So trust is built through volume and quantity. Psych safety is built through quality.

00;07;33;12 Junior: What type of experience have we had with the environment with the person across from us. So those are fundamental distinctions. And I mean, just so far in the however many minutes we've been going, that should give people enough of an idea of the difference. Trust is quantity. So safety is quality. Positive predictability rewarded vulnerability.

00;07;55;03 Tim: I think there's there's one other distinction that we need to make junior, and that is that I can formulate an opinion about trusting you based on positive predictability of you, predictive understanding of you based on the way that you've behaved in the past. I can forecast your behavior in the future. Okay. But when we start to talk about psychological safety so I can do that.

00;08;24;20 Tim: Separate from myself so I can make an assessment of your

trustworthiness. But when we start to talk about psychological safety,

I personally have to get involved. I don't have to get involved to make an assessment of your trustworthiness. Does that make sense? But if psychological safety, if we're talking about that now, I get involved because I what I'm trying to forecast now is if I engage in an act of vulnerability, will you reward that or punish that?

00;09;00;25 Tim: So I have to get involved and I can't make an assessment of that. Generally speaking, unless I've seen you interact with others. And I probably had to have a little bit of interaction with you.

00;09;13;07 Junior: Yeah. Agreed. So on this slide, we see trust is about dependability.

Psychological safety is about permission and respect, which you added the next one. Trust gets people to show up. Psychological safety gets people to speak.

00;09;29;17 Tim: I really like that.

00;09;31;10 Junior: If there's one slide that would help us understand the difference, it's probably this one. Yeah. If the person feels uncertain about a given situation, they're unlikely to even show up. If they don't have

positive predictability about what's going to happen, even mechanically speaking, about a given situation, they won't go. And psychological safety, if they are there, will affect whether or not they speak up.

00;10;01;13 Junior: As you said in the example of the person who trusts the organization but doesn't feel like they can raise their hand in a meeting and ask a penetrating question. That's right. So what? Get what do leaders get wrong? If we conflate those two things, then we're going to try to solve competitive or cultural problems using the wrong tools.

00;10;24;21 Junior: We're going to expect that people engage in a conversation, ask questions, challenge the status quo. Just because we've had a lot of quantity of interaction and we might say, and misconstrue the whole idea, well, we've engaged a lot over time. You should be able to predict my behavior. Therefore you should be able to ask a question. Well, you're talking about trust.

00;10;50;21 Junior: We're talking about psychological safety. Those are not the same thing. So we have to use the appropriate tool for the appropriate situation. And if it's a quantity issue, we need to make sure we have the volume so that people can trust. And if it's a quality issue, we need to make sure that they've had the types of interactions that would help them feel comfortable asking a question, giving an answer, making a mistake, admitting something.

00;11;14;21 Junior: And so those are really, really important distinctions. Now we want to move into a piece of the conversation where we talk about building walls, and we want to start with trust. So how do we create positive predictability if we're starting with not, you know, the amount that we want, what do we do? It's not about grand gestures. It's about steady signals.

00;11;37;02 Tim: JR this reminds me of a CEO that I know right now, the CEO of a fortune 500 company. This gentleman is not flashy, not charismatic. Not charming, does not have personal magnetism or dash or style is, very understated in is, personal demeanor. Very humble disposition. So there's nothing grand about him. Nothing. But people trust him implicitly.

00;12;28;03 Tim: Isn't that interesting?

00;12;29;15 Junior: It is interesting. And it speaks to the show consistency. The first bullet in show consistency. What we're saying is don't make people guess which version of you they'll get today. You want to have enough volume and steadiness. Yeah, such that people know and can predict with a ton of confidence exactly how you will react to a given scenario.

00;12;53;06 Tim: Well, and I'm troubled by the very fact that there might be more than one version of you in the first place.

00;12;59;26 Junior: How many of you have been to work right? How many versions of people might there be?

00;13;04;14 Tim: Who's going to show really, really right?

00;13;06;23 Junior: That same person can walk through the door and you might get seven different people that depending on what.

00;13;11;11 Tim: Happened, that is no basis for trust.

00;13;13;19 Junior: No it's not, it's not if you especially as a leader, if you're unpredictable as a leader, people are going to have a hard time showing up consistently for you. Number two is deliver on commitments. Delivering on commitments is an important one with trust because every commitment matters. And we're talking about volume once again. And so if you have a high volume of commitments made and commitments kept, your ratios really good, that signals positive predictability to the person on the other side.

00;13;46;21 Junior: And so you have to be careful because it's not just about the ratio, it's about the volume. You need both. So if you have low volume and you've made, you know, 1 or 2 commitments with someone and you've kept 1 or 2, that's great. You've got good ratio, but you don't have volume. And so be committed to keeping those little commitments every single time and create opportunities to make a commitment and keep a commitment even when you don't have to.

00;14;15;12 Junior: And that's that's non-obvious. So if you're in a meeting and you have an opportunity to make a commitment, be more formal about it, I'll have that to you by tomorrow at 4 p.m.. And then if you do it early, get it over early. Right? We we met the commitment. Instead of saying, oh yeah, like I'll, I'll get to that and I'll get it to you.

00;14;37;20 Junior: Even if you do, it carries way more weight. If it's time bound and it feels like a thing.

00;14;42;23 Junior:, think about the role that ratings play in our society today. Ratings. Yeah. So if I if if, if we're in a, if we're in a new city, say we're traveling and we want to go out to eat, we're going to check ratings. Good point. Ratings is a quantitative data set that helps us understand trustworthiness and reliability. Could be a restaurant.

00;15;13;18 Tim: I remember a friend telling me, if you book a hotel or if you book, an

Airbnb or whatever, if you're on a five point scale, he told me, he said, it's got to be at least 4.7. If it's on a ten point scale, it's got to be at least a 9.1, he said. There's a threshold there.

00;15;38;29 Tim: And if you hit that threshold at least, or cross over, the predictability is really good. If there's volume, if there's volume, that's that's the other thing. There's got to be volume. But this is the world that we live in. So we use those we use that quantitative data to, assess trustworthiness. Yeah. This is a part of our, our lives.

00;16;06;00 Tim: Think about, the consumer purchases that you make. Think about looking at ratings. Think about looking at the comments that support the ratings. This is how we measure trustworthiness today.

00;16;18;17 Junior: It's a perfect example because it speaks to both ratio and volume. So if you're going to go out to eat, are you going to choose the restaurant with three five star reviews for the restaurant with 761 reviews, that has a 4.2 exactly. You're going to go to the 4.2. Yeah. Every single time. Yeah. So volume matters. The last bullet on this slide is create routine interactions.

00;16;45;02 Junior: If you're not there, how are people going to have enough exposure to get the quantity they need to make a prediction about your behavior. So if you're an absentee landlord style manager, let's say you're full remote and your team sees you in person once. Never. How in the world are you going to create the type of positive predictability?

00;17;07;18 Junior: If you just have a five minute virtual meeting once a week as a basic check in.

00;17;12;17 Tim: So the frequency matters, the frequency matters.

00;17;15;05 Junior: And that's not to say that your work, the actual competitive work requires more than that. It's not what we're saying. Maybe it does only require five minutes a week. Yeah, but is that going to get you where you need to be culturally from the perspective of trust? No. So what does that mean? Create it. You have to create the interaction.

00;17;35;13 Junior: It has to be done artificially. Not that the experience has to be artificial, but maybe you're imposing some more interaction because you're more concerned about volume. You have to pay attention to it. 00;17;45;17 Tim: So that says that the data set that you have for positive predictability has to be refreshed. There's an expiration date on it. You got to refresh that. It's not going to last forever.

00;17;56;22 Junior: Yeah. Unless it's really bad right.

00;18;00;11 Tim: Then it.

00;18;00;20 Junior: Will. Then it will last.

00;18;02;00 Tim: That's a good point.

00;18;02;18 Junior: And so I would say that the shelf life is the thing. And it's actually pretty long I think, especially when it's bad.

00;18;10;28 Tim: Yeah.

00;18;11;08 Junior: So you got to be careful with that. When it happens. Does matter.

Okay. Number two, build psychological safety. It's not about being present. It's about engaging fully. What do we mean by that? Okay. You're there. Maybe there's enough quantity. But now we're talking about quality. Now we have to see is this person really engaging me with what's going on?

00;18;33;04 Junior: Do they care about me? Is there a level of respect? Do I feel safe to ask questions? Do I feel safe to speak up? How have they rewarded my vulnerability in the past? Are they quick to shut me down because, hey, maybe there's high trust in that. I trust that you're going to do the wrong thing every time, and if we don't have psych safety, then we're also not there.

00;18;54;19 Junior: So we could have high trust, low psych safety. And that's a problem.

00;18;59;12 Tim: It it seems to me that in most cases, the psychological safety junior builds on the trust that it's another layer because the trust has to be there is the foundation. But then we need the psychological safety in addition to that. And that requires that the person does engages with you and validates you, sees you, hears you, acknowledges you.

00;19;25;25 Tim: That's built on top of a foundation of trust. If there's no foundation of trust, that could happen with someone that you don't know. You don't have the data set. And so that is possible. The data is there, you just don't have it. But typically I think trust is about basic reliability. And then you can build on it.

00;19;47;26 Junior: Wouldn't you say though, that you can have a high psychological safety experience out the gate without high volume?

00;19;54;25 Tim: Yes you can. And that's what I was saying, is that there are times where you don't have data on someone. Yeah. You don't have positive predictability, and it may even be the first interaction. Right. And you walk away and say, that was wonderful. Yeah. What a fantastic human being.

00;20;11;26 Junior: Yeah.

00;20;12;21 Tim: That that is absolutely possible.

00;20;14;08 Junior: And I think it's also true that if you have an experience like that, it's highly unlikely that the person come back and be something completely different the next time. And so there is something to be said about the impression that comes with high psych safety in that first interaction. And maybe that's the point of this piece of the exchange, is that pay attention to that.

00;20;33;07 Junior: When you're having a first encounter, right. Try to reward the vulnerability. And how do we do that? These are the four bullets. We're going to go over the live model.

00;20;41;22 Tim: Look.

00;20;42;14 Junior: Identify validate and encourage. We've gone over this before. But this is how we prescribe modeling vulnerability for other people. So if we're going to teach you how to do it, this is what we're going to say. Look that's number one. Look at the interactions and social dynamics around you. You have to be paying attention to what's going on.

00;21;02;07 Junior: If your awareness is low, you're not going to do well. Two is identify identify an act of vulnerability that should be rewarded. So if someone asks a question, maybe they introduce themselves. They share something personal. They challenge something that's going on. You want to key in on that and identify it as an act of vulnerability. Three is validate.

00;21;21;21 Junior: Hey, I so appreciate that question. I had the same question too, and I was feeling a little bit wary of asking it. So thank you for doing that. Hey, I agree, you're kind of putting yourself out there by criticizing what's going on, and seems like a lot of people think differently than you. So thank you for speaking up.

00;21;37;18 Junior: Let's talk more about that and then finally encourage what you did. That act of vulnerability, that question asserting yourself into the conversation was super valuable. I really hope that we can continue to get that type of behavior out of you, because that's what helps our team get better. So please, next time you have something on your mind, raise that hand.

00;21;56;06 Tim: Yeah. All right.

00;21;57;01 Junior: If we can do those four things in repetition, if we can become, if that can become habitual, then we're going to build that psych safety really fast.

00;22;09;14 Tim: That becomes the norm, right? A pattern of shared behavior with the team. And then the psychological safety, is going to grow from level to level. And so you will not only have positive predictability of the team, but you'll have rewarded vulnerability. And you'll know that going in.

00;22;27;29 Junior: So how do these principles interact with each other? This is our final slide people. We have behavioral consistency at high volume. So the consistency and the volume give us positive predictability which allow people to show up. They're going to continue to show up if they if the environment is predictable, if after they show up, you reward their vulnerability at high quality, meaning your social dynamics are there, they're good.

00;23;00;02 Junior: You're keying in on that person's vulnerability. You're rewarding it. You're making sure that they're comfortable. Then they're going to speak up. As they do that, we get this flywheel effect of cultural momentum. And that's the interplay. Psych Safety Trust two very different things to different levels that you levers that you have to pull and pay attention to. If you want the type of cultural outcomes that you probably want, which is a high performing, highly innovative, highly enjoyable team.

00;23;33;09 Tim: It makes me think junior of many teams and organizations that are getting half the job done, but not the whole job done. So there's a basis for trust. So people are showing up, but there is not a consistent pattern of rewarding vulnerability. And so people are not speaking up. And so they're not really unleashing the full potential of their people.

00;23;58;11 Tim: They got half the job done. They need to get the whole job done.

00;24;02;00 Junior: Yeah, that's an interesting conversation. Trust and psych safety. As we said at the beginning, a lot of people have asked us our perspective on this. They've come to us asking for a solution. And we've built training around trust and psychological safety, help people navigate the landscape. So hopefully this helps you understand our perspective, how we see the world, the way that we look at trust, the way that we look at psychological safety.

00;24;29;07 Junior: Hopefully there's a nugget in there for you that you can take away and use to become a better leader. Tim, any final thoughts as we wrap up today?

00;24;36;12 Tim: Well, I just hope that people understand the complementary nature of trust and psychological safety and how every team and every organization needs both and it's the leader's responsibility to nurture both in the organization.

00;24;50;14 Junior: However, if you like today's episode, give us a like share. And please subscribe if you haven't already. We've noticed a lot of people who watch the content have yet to subscribe, so please do that. You'll be notified of our next release. And we put out a lot of content, especially the downloadable. If that's something that you have yet to see, go ahead and go to the page, put your info in, download it so that you can get a summary.

00;25;16;11 Junior: A super valuable toolkit, from today's conversation and from others. I think that's it for today, everybody. So we will see you next episode.

Take care. Bye bye.

‍