[00:00:00] Cold Open

[00:00:00] Daniel Greening: In real life, some agile teams decide that the environment around them is not psychologically safe. And so they create a little capsule, you know, that protects itself from the outside world, keeping things within the team secret. Ultimately, that's an indication that agile will likely fail in the organization overall. 

[00:00:24] Introduction

[00:00:24] Daniel Greening: Welcome to the Mindful Agility podcast. I'm Dan Greening.

[00:00:28] Mirela Petalli: I'm Mirela Petalli.

[00:00:30] Daniel Greening: And we're here with a short format to talk about a single topic Psychological Safety. 

[00:00:37] Topic Subtopic Quote

[00:00:37] Daniel Greening: Toxic cultures limit and distort information. Use psychological safety to support high performing teams and families. 

aye, fight, but not your neighbor. Fight rather all the things that cause you and your neighbor to fight. Mikael Namie. 

[00:00:57] Mirela Petalli: I love that quote. I looked it up. And Mikhail Naimy was a very famous Lebanese poet. He also wrote in English and Russian. What I liked about the quote is the shift in attention .

He says, don't fight your neighbor, but move on from the personal, your enemy, but fight the conditions that cause you and your neighbor to fight It is a very Buddhist quote.

[00:01:25] Daniel Greening: I was thinking I fight. it's like that moment where we have rage, , and then it cues us to say, "Hey, wait a minute, before I act, let me think about that."

[00:01:37] Mirela Petalli: Right, and the implications of just that shift in focus and taking into consideration the interdependencies to fight. he's not saying don't fight. He's not saying, oh, be a peaceful person. You know, just give up all the fight. Because it is true that in many instances we do need to fight.

There is lots of injustices out there that we need to take action, but how beautiful it is when we stop fighting against each other and instead fight against injustices and what's causing all of us to suffer.

[00:02:14] Daniel Greening: All right. 

[00:02:16] Mirela Petalli: I'm gonna read the definition, Team Psychological Safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that it's okay to take risks, to express their ideas and concerns, and speak up with questions, and admit mistakes, all without fear or negative consequences. As Edmonton, the person who came up with this put it, it feels like permission for candor.

She was doing her PhD and she found that teams that reported higher psychological safety in hospitals, actually had a higher report of errors as well. So they were reporting more mistakes,

[00:02:59] Daniel Greening: Oh, interesting. 

[00:03:00] Mirela Petalli: She decided to look more into it.

Where there was a lot of psychological safety, people felt safe enough to actually report mistakes. And in teams that did not feel safe, there was a low reporting of mistakes. In healthcare, but in any team out there, this has very important repercussions because when we feel safe enough to report mistakes, to come up and say, "Hey, I made an error," It allows us to learn from those mistakes and it allows us to improve and it allows us to get better. If we're hiding our mistakes, not only are we harming with the consequences of our mistakes , but we are also losing that opportunity to grow and to learn from them.

[00:03:46] Daniel Greening: So, you know, you might think with higher reports of mistakes, that there were more mistakes. What happened with death rates or extra illnesses or stuff like.

[00:04:00] Mirela Petalli: Oh yeah, that has an inverse relationship because the higher the reporting rate the lower the death rates. With time, we see that the healthcare providers are performing better. We're finding ways to do our jobs better, and we are lowering the incidences of mistakes and death rates and everything that comes with it.

[00:04:23] Daniel Greening: So the reported error rate might go up, but at the same time, the actual performance became better. That's an interesting result. 

So we have to be careful. Don't kill the messenger. Right? So psychological safety gives safety for the messenger. The person who is saying, "oh my gosh, we have a problem."

So as long as we don't kill the messenger, we get the message and the message is, "here are some things we need to fix."

[00:04:54] Mirela Petalli: We shift the focus. Instead of saying Mirela made a mistake, we say, " A mistake was made. Why did the mistake happen?" So we do a root cause analysis on the mistake. We do not blame the person, but we try to find where in the system can we intervene so this mistakes doesn't happen again.

[00:05:18] Daniel Greening: I'm going to quote a bit more from our brief, on how to introduce psychological safety. 

To create psychological safety, demonstrate it, be open, approachable, and empathic yourself, and encourage open communication in others, particularly if you are a leader. Share a deeply personal story. Discuss norms, allowing every person to talk, and gently interrupt dominant speakers to make room for quieter members. Encourage members to ask questions, learn from mistakes and seek feedback. 

[00:05:57] Mirela Petalli: There is no psychological safety without the team, so it's a lot about the whole team working together and being cohesive. You cannot have a person feel psychologically safe unless the whole team is working towards creating that safety.

[00:06:14] Case Study

[00:06:14] Daniel Greening: Google has long been interested in team productivity. Big company, lots of expensive engineers. So determining what makes the difference between high productivity and low productivity teams could improve their profitability a lot. A big difference revolved around psychological safety. 

 Psychologically safe teams collaborated more effectively and generated more innovative solutions. In high productivity teams, members spoke more equally and could more accurately tell how others felt by voice or facial expressions. 

One Google manager converted a team from unsafe to safe by first sharing his recent cancer diagnosis, which was a future fatal diagnosis, and the impacts of that on his family. Of course, this led to others sharing their challenges, including at work, and eventually higher productivity. 

[00:07:11] Mirela Petalli: Yeah, that's like a wake up call about the impermanence of things and life itself I guess the whole team could relate to that and could feel closer.

[00:07:23] Daniel Greening: This was from an article in the New York Times. I read the article and this moment where he shared this diagnosis . First of all, they were stunned because someone very important to them, their leader, was going to die I think six to nine months from then. It made them reflect on what was important right now, you know, this guy's gonna die but they still are a team. They're trying to build some important things. Do they want to fight with each other, or do they want to share important things and get more done?

[00:08:01] Mirela Petalli: In healthcare we say, this is my work family. We rally around each other, especially in these difficult situations when disease or loss of a loved one or difficulties with health and anything like that. Feeling that your team is a second family is very important.

But I'd like to go back to how sharing what's going on at work is also a very important part of psychological safety, because there is a deeper layer of vulnerability there, because it's okay, you share that I have a cancer diagnosis and that's very vulnerable and very difficult to share. I think at some level, sharing that you screwed up at work, you made a mistake, can even be more difficult, especially if you fear that your job is at stake.

So creating a safe environment at work where people feel comfortable to say, "Hey, this is what happened. I made a mistake," and the leader not, punish the person who made a mistake, but say, let's look at this. Let's review what happened, and let's see what can we learn from it?

How can we get a lesson out of this mistake without blaming the person?

[00:09:21] Daniel Greening: Yeah, that's hard. In order to do that, not only does the team have to support psychological safety, but also those outside the team. To give you an example, at one company where I made a decision to use a particular tool, and we worked on it for maybe three or four weeks, and eventually decided that it was going to cost us a tremendous amount in the future if we kept using that tool, and made a decision to switch from that tool. 

 Psychological safety was not present in the outside environment. My teammate and I were good with the outcome, but we got a lot of critique from other people that we had made a stupid decision, but we had to try it first to discover that it was stupid.

And so that critique that came from that. That wasn't a psychologically safe situation. It was used to manipulate the situation by people who were not safety oriented.

[00:10:33] Mirela Petalli: Right

[00:10:34] Daniel Greening: that make sense?

[00:10:35] Mirela Petalli: Yeah. That creates that unsafe environment. Then next time you are not going to try again. You are not going to speak up again. 

Where people's lives are at stake, like in healthcare, it is very, very important that people feel enough psychological safety to speak up and say those things. You have to elevate psychological safety at the level of the whole organization, which means that the whole organization has to implement some tools, and some protocols in place that when a mistake happens, there are not gonna be repercussions to the person who made the mistake.

We're gonna fight the causes and conditions that cause this mistake, rather than fighting the neighbor, the person who made the mistake.

[00:11:24] Daniel Greening: Yeah. But that has to be supported by everyone. 

[00:11:27] Mirela Petalli: Yes. 

[00:11:29] Daniel Greening: or you have to have a very secretive team. 

[00:11:32] Mirela Petalli: Hmm. 

[00:11:33] Daniel Greening: In real life, some agile teams decide that the environment around them is not psychologically safe. They create a little capsule, you know, that protects itself from the outside world, keeping things within the team secret. Ultimately, that's an indication that agile will likely fail in the organization overall. 

[00:11:55] Mirela Petalli: Yeah, If you're keeping that a secret, that means that you are missing the opportunity to learn and to improve processes and to avoid same mistakes happening in the future.

[00:12:06] Daniel Greening: Yeah, exactly. 

 All right. 

[00:12:08] Resources

[00:12:08] Daniel Greening: One of the resources we drew from is an article " what Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team"

[00:12:16] Marker

[00:12:16] Daniel Greening: in the New York Times from 2016. You can get the direct reference if you go to our website or if you subscribe to our newsletter. 

[00:12:27] Mirela Petalli: Oh, The article that I used was from Harvard Business Review and it's called "What is Psychological Safety." it's very recent, actually from February of 2023.

[00:12:38] Daniel Greening: Oh, very recent. Wow. Interesting. 

Okay. 

[00:12:43] Try This

[00:12:43] Daniel Greening: Try this with a trusted friend. Share a deep personal truth, then remain quiet for the other person to speak. Observe how trust and mutual respect shift.

[00:12:56] Mirela Petalli: Hmm. That is very interesting and challenging. As an exercise, so maybe we should try it. You wanna try it?

[00:13:08] Daniel Greening: Like right now on the podcast episode?

[00:13:11] Mirela Petalli: Yeah. Right now.

[00:13:12] Daniel Greening: Hmm. 

 So the challenge that I have with, us revealing a mistake that we made that was profound enough that we need psychological safety to do it. It isn't something we might say publicly in our podcast episode.

[00:13:33] Mirela Petalli: Oh, I see. But I think we can use an example that shows how we do things to foster psychological safety in our team.

[00:13:43] Daniel Greening: Oh,

[00:13:44] Mirela Petalli: my idea.

[00:13:45] Daniel Greening: Okay, so,

[00:13:47] Mirela Petalli: It could be anything that relates to our interactions within the team and how we feel about certain things.

We tend to assume that we know what our team members are expecting from us or how they're feeling about the work. And it's a very human quality to kind of assume what the response is going to be from the other person. And that often prevents us from communicating, from being vulnerable and from sharing.

This one example was about stand-ups. Being in Mindful Agility, we are an agile team, so we have this rule or habit that, actually it was me who suggested that we start, which is to have a stand-up every morning. Every morning we use Slack, which is a texting platform where you can share stuff during your workday.

And so every day we're supposed to put in there, what did we do the day before? What we plan to do on this day? And what are our impediments? What are things that we know that might prevent us from doing what we plan to do?

Although I was the one to suggest that we make this as a practice to help me with my procrastination and my being inconsistent, I was the one that wasn't actually doing it consistently, and I did not know that, Dan, you were feeling anxious about it because it was creating some issues with your workflow and how things are going. Can you tell us more about that?

[00:15:17] Daniel Greening: Yeah. Communication is really important and knowing where people are is important. When you know someone's not available to work on something, that's cool because you can fill in for them. The whole idea is that the team works together to get the team's work done. And if someone isn't available, you go, "Okay, well we know that person's not available and we're gonna figure out how to fill in for that." But I wasn't getting any information about your availability or whether you were gonna work on anything or anything like that. And that created this enormous anxiety because I'm going like, "I don't wanna step on Mirela's toes, but we gotta get this thing done. So, I don't know what to do". Does that make sense?

[00:16:07] Mirela Petalli: Yeah, it does. And for my part, first, I really wasn't aware I thought you were just annoyed or something, but I hadn't stopped to see things from your perspective. So I wasn't aware about the anxiety that was causing you. On the other hand, I felt uncomfortable going to Slack and saying, "oh, I didn't do anything yesterday," or "I am not available to do things today." So that felt really uncomfortable for me. And when we actually had that conversation and you shared, not only that you were feeling anxious because I wasn't being consistent in informing the team what I was up to and what my plan for the day were. But you also shared what you just said right now, which was really helpful. The fact that what was needed for me is just to let know the team what I was doing, whether I was available or not, and you reassured me that there was not gonna be any judgment if I wasn't doing anything . So that level of safety that you gave oh, it's okay. I can say, Hey, I'm not able to do anything this week or today. And that really helped and I think I've been doing a little better with the standups.

[00:17:21] Daniel Greening: Yeah. And it's very handy, right? For one thing, this whole group is a bunch of volunteers, right? Nobody gets paid. So I'm very respectful of other people's time, and I, I think all of us are grateful for everybody else's contribution. So that gratitude needs to extend to just communicating well, 

I'm much less anxious now that I know who's gonna be there, what's gonna happen, knowing what I can focus on. And if we're not gonna be able to get something done because somebody's not available, that's actually great information because I can prioritize. I can say, " I'm not gonna work on this thing because we won't be able to get it done anyway." And that is good, right? It just frees me up for other things. And I think that's the same for any team. Knowing what, you're able to do as a team means you can prioritize better. 

So anyway, I really appreciate it and I appreciate you and, I hope we have psychological safety in our team.

[00:18:28] Mirela Petalli: Yeah, I think we do. 

[00:18:30] Daniel Greening: Do you feel better now? Or how do you feel about, not just reporting what you're up to or your availability, but in general, do you feel better after that discussion?

[00:18:43] Mirela Petalli: I do, I feel better because I can do that reporting piece every day, which is fulfilling what my intention to start with , to keep me on track and to help me be more productive and everything. But from the psychological safety point of view, I feel better because now I can feel more at ease and actually use my availability more efficiently and rather than trying to avoid thinking about, "oh, I have to do this, or I have to do that," now I know that, you know, I am able to carve some time here and there, and I don't have the pressure of feeling judged. So that gives me the freedom to actually enjoy what I do with the time that I can put in it.

[00:19:32] Daniel Greening: Okay.

[00:19:35] Closing

[00:19:35] Daniel Greening: So that was commentary around our latest newsletter, Psychological Safety. Let us know what you think of this format. 

Many thanks to beta reviewers, Amelia Hambrecht, and Divya Mays. 

You can go deeper by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, The Mindful Sprint. The link to that is in the show notes. 

We also discuss topics with like-minded peers at something called the Mindful Agility Community. That meeting happens every other Sunday at 1:00 PM. Mountain daylight time. If you look at the show notes, you'll see a link to that to register an advance or receive a video recording afterwards. 

Thank you for listening. 

And thank you Mirela Petalli for your participation .

[00:20:22] Mirela Petalli: Thank you. This was fun. Let's do it again.

I'm Dan Greening. Have a great week.