00:00:12

Hi, everybody. Welcome to our session. My name is pheon Jones. I'm a partner at people not tech. Um, I'm also a team coach. I've been working with engineers for over a decade now, and having spent lots of time working on projects with project leadership teams and project teams. What I've really found is that it's in the team that we find the magic and that's why I do what I do beyond that. And further to that, I find that that psychological safety is one of the most important things in building great teams. And that's become a huge passion points for me as a team coach.

00:00:52

Hi, I'm, , I'm an author, a keynote speaker, but more importantly, I'm the chief product officer and co-founder of people know tech. And what we do is we work. We make the world's first solution that diagnosis and improve psychological safety in teams. And I personally fell in love with agile and DevOps many, many years ago, making, um, all kinds of products for fintechs. So our talk today will have a number of examples which come from that world of financial services and banking. So bear with us. Um, hopefully they will be helpful to you today. The topic that we have as fiance is, um, one that's very near and dear to our heart. This is what we live in priests. We spend our days figuring out what is it that psychological safety in teams means? And, um, what can I do to get more of it and less of the negative behavior, which we will talk to you about today called impression management.

00:01:53

So we wanted to talk to you first of all, about what is psychological safety. Now, before we talk about definitions, we want to make it absolutely clear that we are really aware that lots of people watching today and listening today are going to be aware of what psychological safety is. We just want to make sure that we frame it up properly. And for those of you that maybe haven't heard of the term, we can give you a bit of the context and the history. So psychological safety and the work on psychological safety originated with William Conn in the 1990s. And then professor Dr. Amy Edmondson has really done much of the in-depth research over the last 25 to 30 years amongst others, but she's brought it into the popular, conscious through her research and her writings. And she defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk. We've taken it to our hearts and it's become the central passion of our work here at people, not tech. So our description and definition is around psychological, psychologically safe team, being one that feels like family and moves mountains together. So if you think back to the last time you made some magic with the team, how you were open and debated and were vulnerable and learning, creating, and getting stuff done, that was psychologically safe.

00:03:20

Exactly. And I've all these definitions. The one that we feel resonate most when we talk to teams, leaders, and just people in general is these two words in it. Essentially, as soon as we say, you're looking at a team that feels like a family, you get some reactions. Some of this reaction is a slight eye roll at first because people immediately go to how that family may not be one from seven to seven or some other, um, sitcom they've seen in the eight days. But with that said, we all know that we can trust family. We can have fun with them. We can return to them. We can count on them. And that is totally great. That type of feeling that we would like to see in teams as well. So as long as there's a feeling of bubble, a feeling of counting on each other, feeling of being able to be free and yourself, that is to a degree what we're talking about and when people do connect, that is what, um, without a doubt, when we can bring them along on the journey of getting more of psychological safety.

00:04:21

So thinking of the journey of psychological safety as Fiona was saying earlier, it has been studied back then makes over the years. And the vast body of research comes from professor Dr. Amy Edmondson. And many of you listening to this would have seen her books would have read her books to me, that up there with the project, make sure that you have both and read everything she's written about teams and teaming and the fearless organization. And once you have done that, um, consider the fact that there is, um, maybe some gap between the research that Amy was doing, because it was focused primarily on the medical field and the number of other industries and the way that this reflected to business, in a sense, and to my mind where the shift has come in and where this has become part of the consciousness of our soul, I would say is when Google started giving us the results of the project that is total, most of you here, obviously know about it.

00:05:20

Some of you here may have answered the questionnaire that brought about, um, a result, uh, for a report I'm going to talk about later, but the Google project Aristotle is what was the turning point in terms of psychological safety and the acceptance of the term, the understanding of what it means and how important it became to the business world, because who doesn't want to be like Google, um, some, some seated on, but they still do. So essentially when you look at the, um, uh, the, the size of project size, total, the data set is massive. The question was, what is it that we can do to get more, very productive and highly performing teams? What are they made out of? And the number one, um, finding that was, it didn't really matter what type of people they were putting in them beyond a certain level of keywords and, and skills.

00:06:08

What really mattered was whether or not these people were having these things in common, in a theme, these behaviors, these understanding these, uh, stable types of interactions. And those were obviously a number of them you see on the screen, had to do with whether or not they felt they can depend on each other, where there was structure clarity if they made any impact through their work and if they had purpose. But the number one behavior that wasn't common to all of the performance teams was psychological safety. And if that was a big signal, as I said earlier, getting ahead of myself, the biggest signal to my mind came, um, in 2019, when we had the state of dev ops accelerate reports come out of one of my dearest and most beloved pieces of, uh, of ammunition in the arsenal of explaining to the boards, why this matters, because what the report has managed was to ask other companies whether or not they function the same way as Google and lo and behold. Yes. The same thing, um, was the case, which is you can not have performance. You can not have, um, you can't be a top performer. You can be a digital audit, um, make, or have a, you can't be a winner without starting with psychological safety. And that applies to every technical, um, organization from then on if you wish.

00:07:36

So the concept is clear and everybody, we work with connects with it really easily. It's something that people really understand on an emotional, on a visceral level, but what it really breaks down to and what it contains, is it a little bit harder to dissect? So for the rest of our talk, we're going to focus on the two main behaviors that signal and increase psychological safety, but the components are what you see in front of you. So we spent some time researching in order to be able to split psychological safety down into these components. And what it looks like is whether a team is psychologically safe or not depends on whether they are flexible, whether they are resilient, if they're engaged, if they learn together and if they are open and courageous. So before we continue, we want to make sure that we give you crystal clarity on those behaviors.

00:08:30

So there's a positive behavior that you see here that is desirable to have psychological safety. And that's the behavior of speaking up and opening up. And then at the opposite end, there's the negative behavior that shows low psychological safety and lowers it even more. Every time it occurs and that's impression management. So that's the fear that stops us from engaging in the positive behavior. So the former is easy to understand. It refers to all the moments when we are our true selves with bravery, what all of our opinions, concerns, ideas, anything, and everything that we offer to the team dynamic is out on the table. The latter is when we have not spoken up and not been open because we were afraid, we were afraid we would appear either negative, incompetent, ignorant, disruptive, or intrusive.

00:09:30

So all those words are essentially, um, vague definitions, a few ways, right? But if you stop to think about it, you're start relating. Because what we're saying is anytime you bit your lip, anytime you've stopped yourself from speaking up, and that was out of fear because you were afraid to look quite frankly, stupid, or you're afraid to look like you don't know something, or you are, um, loath to bother someone or you, it to keep looking professional, or you didn't want to ask too many personal details, whatever it is that stops you from expressing an opinion, asking a question, becoming through the emotional involved. Those are the times when essentially you've done that out of fear of appearing in a negative light. If you've done that, then, um, most absolutely you should try and get a check on it and see when it happens. Because every time that we believe we will be offering something to the team, and yet we don't do it because we are afraid of something is essentially the behavior that we are talking about.

00:10:31

And today we're going to give you a number of examples, but what we would like you to do is make sure that these examples relate to your personal situation. And not, I say a lot of we, this is because it's not something that some people do. It's not something that some things um, are faced with. It's not, they, it's not team members. It's us, all of us, everyone, um, is in, in the position of impression of managing that one point or another. And if we start noticing these patterns and anti-patterns, we can then start reframing and changing our behavior. So when you listen to these examples today, I would like you to please remember that. Yes, some of them are maybe general, for instance, where we might mention the brain situation, we're all familiar with what happened there. As soon as, uh, the email chain came out, it became very clear that people had been refraining from commenting or things that they should have done because it would have saved lives. And so what I would like us to do today is to take all of those examples and make them as personal as we can, instead of leaving them as something, we, we want her in a talk try and apply them to ourselves. What would your Nokia moment have been, um, when have you liked the apple executive bit, your lip, or where, what would have been in your brain, email chain?

00:11:55

So the way we're going to do this is we're going to give you one macro example of a certain behavior or anti-pattern, and then we're going to bring it back to the level of the experience that we've had with our clients. So it was something a bit more accessible and relatable. And then eventually we'll come to giving you some suggestions and ideas, which will hopefully really help you on how to do more, to build up your people practice and end up with a focus on eliminating or lowering impression management, raising psychological safety and therefore performance. So our first example comes from Nakia, which many of you will be completely familiar with this, but if you recall, during the 1990s, they were the top cell phone manufacturer globally by 2012, they'd lost their spots along with over $2 billion and 75% of their market value. Then in 2015, the graduate business school INSEAD did a study of the companies fall.

00:12:53

And from that, we could see really clearly that two things were happening. First of all, that the executives at Nokia, weren't communicating openly about the threats from emerging competitors, Google, and apple. And at the same time at the other organizational level, the managers and executives, weren't telling their bosses that the company's technology couldn't compete in an evolving market. And that's because they were afraid to have that conversation. As a result, Nokia missed the opportunity to innovate and rendered themselves irrelevant. So you see the slide is called, speak up or else. This is relevant to the specific example that I'm going to talk about now. So combating this sort of behavior, can't be done by force or mandate. In one example, we've seen, uh, the HR department had decided vowed that they would make people speak up, um, was there then sending one HR rep to every standup to ask developers, to choose a task, go pick up a ticket. And then they were going to retros to EG those people on, to tell everyone how they felt. So kind of hovering over people saying, no, Sarah, you go ahead. Now everyone, let Sarah tell us exactly how she feels right now, four minutes left go. So as you can imagine, that's, it's tempting to do it that way around, but that's actually creating more fear and more impression management than it would be psychological safety.

00:14:21

Right? And I think it's really important that we realize, as we said earlier, this is a common behavior at every level. It's not only about Sarah. It's not only about developer teams. It's not only about, um, middle management or any type of project teams. It happens at every level. And in fact, we think that one of the most important issues that we need to be honest about it, every level of every enterprise is the fact that it happens at the top as well. In fact, one of the examples where I think it's maybe the most clear is, comes from Amy. Edmondson's fearless. I believe. Where does she mentioned Nilofer merchant was at the time when executive apple hail that's. One of the visionaries seen as one of the top names in the industry and so on, but yet in a Harvard business review article in 2011, she was quoted as saying, I would rather keep my job by staying within the lines, then say something and to risk looking stupid.

00:15:18

So if someone that was at the top of their game, um, was in a position where they would bite the lip and not speak up. Then it's very likely that that happens to all of us. Now, of course, she is brave enough and, and find that are brave enough to admit this, but fuck them as it was. But that doesn't mean that we can all do the same thing. So, and this behavior is actually quite common, the higher off the top of a company you go. And in fact, impression management can be on good is probably increasing towards the boardroom, towards the places where it's a lot more important that you do this peacock then in a sense than it is to collaborate and work in a real team, to give you an example from my many, many years in banking, um, as I was making the switch towards people topics.

00:16:06

And I try when I realized that the only way to really say banking is so to fix the organization and make sure that we reduce the human that, which is this concept of essentially having left topics, having to do with humans on the table, just in the same way that we have left technical, that sometimes we left human that. So as I was making the transition to, uh, solve the human that I asked some of the bankers I was working with, who were having a really important meeting the next morning to, um, tell me to recall, to have a little journal of their thoughts the night before, what were they revolving around and to be as honest as possible, because this was of course, an anonymous study and all seven of them had the vast majority of their preoccupation be around things like that image, what are they going to wear when they, they going to arrive what their phones look like on the day?

00:17:00

Um, and then some part of their, um, their thoughts were around politics for a good 30, 40% was around politics who has spoken to whom, who has, uh, had dinner and golf with who has, what are they going to react like? And the very minute part, if memory serves, I think it was something like under 10% of the results had to do with the content of the, of the meeting whatsoever. So that's a really clear example of nothing but impression management, as you can imagine, that's not the collaborative team right now. How do we find this out right now? What were they thinking of? If we ask people to really record what they're feeling and thinking where they do that for us, very unlikely. And more importantly, we don't, we don't actually ask, um, humans in the enterprise, how they really feel, we don't record their feelings before or a meeting.

00:17:50

We tend to kind of muddle along the enterprise with very little information in terms of what really goes on in the minds and source of our employees. So one of the biggest things that needs solving is the, um, this conversation on measurement and the anti-pattern of measuring like we did 20 years ago, meaning with some type of bigger organizational, once a year, 360, or employee survey or MPS score, you know, some of which may be decent, but most of which are either users or punitive or really irritating to the vast majority of our employees. So the number one thing that needs doing, and we'll talk about what needs doing later, but what you see around you is this pattern of semi asking of on paper caring where, um, that there's a survey going out. That must be good enough. We've asked, we've cared when realistically that is not a dialogue venue.

00:18:47

That is not a real conversation. That's not an open. That is how you feel. So we give you something back. And when it comes to the, um, to the loop of the feedbacks, there's very little, you can do. Um, that's more important in terms of open communication with your employees than to demonstrate that they have been heard and that there's something that's being done or reflected back to them in terms of what they said. So example, good example of that, um, for one's art, for instance, what Zappos does, who is obsessed with customers? What, of course, a class CN does in terms of asking people how they felt about various things. But one physical example we have from back in the day that there were offices from one of our clients, is when they've decided to essentially ask people to pop a differently colored bowl into a transparent plastic container by the door when they left the day, depending on how they felt that day. And by the next morning, these containers would be filled with different colors. And you'd have a very clear visual representation as to how that office felt the day before. So in that case, it wasn't genius in any which way, but it did close the feedback loop in a way that makes people feel heard and important. So we think that that's really, really important.

00:20:04

So we've talked to you a bit through theory and some living examples, um, do in order to bring the concept of psychological safety to life for you. But the next question is how do we really make that work for our own teams? So we picked out some of the priorities based on our experience. Um, and we wanted to share those with you. So, first of all, number one, focus on team and psychological safety sounds straightforward, but what we mean is first things first begin your journey, read, watch, understand about psychological safety, take that a step further to make it part of your team's development, to do that as well. And then you'll all know and understand that this is part of your toolkit. Number two is trained emotional intelligence for leaders. So emotional intelligence is often overlooked for tech team leaders as an essential skill in leading great teams.

00:20:58

So it's a great gift that you can give yourself and your team if you get some good quality training and learning in the area of IQ, number three is measurement and actions. So we've talked about measurements a bit already make psychological safety, one of your OKR KPIs, whatever it is that you're using to measure, put psychological safety in teams right next to the most important customer satisfaction and financial goals that you have, it needs to be as tangible as those things. And then number four here is give organizational permission. So you do this by role modeling permission to be vulnerable at the highest levels of the organization. I have CEO CEOs, CIOs, CTOs that say, I don't know, and are comfortable saying that and making it okay for other people to say, I don't know, talk openly about the importance of a speak up culture, where people don't feel the need to impression manage.

00:22:05

So we also wanted to talk to you about some of the actions that you can take our best in team actions for psychological safety. So first of all, here make the human tasks tickets in the sprint. So take your new hope new, or maybe the existing OKR KPI on psychological safety create a collective team action for that. So psychological safety is a group behavioral norm. It's all about the team bubble, which I'll talk about in a second as well, but create that action together and then put it straight into your intro ticket in your sprint, make it immediate and real to work on it, measure for the good. So when you do measure, make sure it isn't punitive, keep the measurement constructive and keep it away for the team to look forward and not a way to create more fear protects the bubble. So we've mentioned the bubble a couple of times, the magic happens in your team, psychological safety.

00:23:01

It can be encouraged at a macro level at an organizational level, and it's really great to see the focus and strategy on psychological safety, but it's the permission that you give to your teams to work on psychological safety in the team that is important. And the final one is obsessed with the psychological safety conversation space. So make this something that you talk about, every team get together, whatever your regular kind of catch up and check in is put this on your agenda, make it the first thing that you talk about the cornerstone of your team conversations. It will open up everything else that you do

00:23:43

Exactly. And we have a habit of bringing things back to action. We're very big believers in doing something and not just talking about it. It's one of the reasons why we've chosen to make software instead of have a consultancy that just tells you about this. Um, we are absolutely as excited, focused on action, not only in what we say, but in also in what we do for instance, there's, um, one of the most important work parts workspaces of our software for instance is a very simple box in the very middle of it. Sec team action. All it does is it allows you and the team collectively to come up with some type of human intervention that will make a difference to one of these components. So all of a sudden you'd be having growth and change in some of these very clear components that Fiona was talking about earlier.

00:24:34

And these are some examples of that. I'll go through some of them in short, but there are videos of them on our YouTube channel. We have explained how they worked for other teams in various articles. Happy to tell you more. Again, we don't, this is not, we're not consultants. We don't charge for this. We make software. We just want you to be in a place where you can actually start doing the people work. So some of these interventions, the number one that we keep repeating over and over again is team relaunches. Whether it's a really big historical moment like this COVID situation, or you have a big restructure or the team has changed significantly, you absolutely need the team relaunch in this team relaunch. You're talking about a couple of hours to half a day of throwing everything up in the air, discussing having a culture canvas in the middle of it, discussing the way you work, contracting and negotiating.

00:25:25

What type of communication you all expect, just going through everything as if you are a brand new team and do that. If you wish regularly, you don't need to wait for a big event. You can do it every three months, every six months, every time that you feel your team could benefit from a moment of a new moment of forming and storming to it in that particular space. So they don't have to take it in other places and impact psychological safety and productivity. Another thing you can and should be doing is a cottage hackathon. When you see the indicators dropped down in terms of courage and speaking up, and you will announce of the brochure, maybe you can figure it out some other way as well. The thing to do is to sit people down and remind them that they have the reserves to be brave, read some Burnett brown.

00:26:09

If you must have them bring their favorite character from childhood to the table, whatever it is that will remind them that they have both permission from the organization and the ability to be themselves and be brave. Then one that is very dear to my heart is a humor workshop. And you probably should do this once in a while. Anyways, it's not just for engagement it's because it bonds themes, the laughter, the connection, that's the glue. That's going to keep them resilient. In fact, we advise it as an intervention for resilience and not an for engage, but what it is is sit them down, have them each come up with their favorite jokes that you, what their favorite comedy is, whether means that they care about our, have them share what they find funny and important, and then have them listen to everyone else and have just a good session of getting a laughter on.

00:27:05

Then another thing that, um, is very useful is a team bitch Fest. What happens is we all work in really tight environments with three long backlogs. What we need is sometime from time to time where we can release this emotional blockers, where we can talk to each other and say, well, what I found impossible to stomach was, or what made me look for another job was, and just get it out there in a safe space, be done with it. Last one is own impression management, catch yourself counter. The more you hear us talk about it, the more you understand the pressure management, the more likely you are to start figuring out when that happens and stop yourself from it to reframe either be courageous or at least know that you're doing this. So you can find a lot more about these, um, these examples in my upcoming book, it's media for, um, Americans.

00:27:56

And it's a slightly may I believe for us in Europe. Um, but what it is it's essentially, if you wish a spot of popularized science at the intersection of agile and psychology, and it attends to bridge that gap so that we make sure that both business HR technology and whoever else gets that we have humans that we have to work on. We also write a newsletter twice a week or two different newsletters. One of them is called chasing psychological safety. And the other one is called the future is agile. Same thing, it's right at the intersection. And we're discussing how agile is essentially what is going to help us reduce the human that in the future

00:28:39

And at the center of all, this is what we really make, which is a piece of software. So this is the first solution focusing exclusively on measuring psychological safety and creating a space for that by looking at behavior as well as declarative answers and displaying it in a people action driven way. So beyond engagement and trust, we look at how flexibility is how resilient, whether they learn together. If they're courageous and we send out alarms when impression management happens. So teams have a chance to keep up the positive behavior of speaking up. So come and speak to us so we can share some of the lessons that we've learned with you. And if you don't have one, we can give you a space to look after this, this most important indicator of your future success, all of our future success, which is having psychologically safe people in your teams.

00:29:34

Thank you very much for listening to us today. And we are genuinely looking forward to working with you to started using this human that, and making our team's happier and more productive performance and exceptional. Have a nice day. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Bye.