[CTQ Smartcast] The Role of Psychological Safety in Teams, with Stephan Wiedner

Stephan Wiedner, CEO of Noomii.com & Zarango.com, is a psychological safety expert, whose career has focussed on developing sustainable, high-growth leaders, teams and organisations.

In this Smartcast, hosted by CTQ co-founder BV Harish Kumar, we talked in-depth about the secret sauce for building great teams, and common mistakes people make in the process.

 
 

Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.

 
 

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(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)

SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

  • Stephan ‘s definition of psychological safety

  • A brief about Project Aristotle by Google

  • The effect of pandemic on teamwork, and leadership

  • The secret sauce of a successful team

  • Is psychological safety a science or an art?

  • Mistakes people make when working in teams in a company

  • The role of team diversity and experimentation

  • Evaluating and measuring psychological safety

  • A decade-long view on businesses, and their trajectories

  • How working in the field of psychological safety has shaped Stephan’s world-view

LINKS TO BOOKS AND PODCASTS MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST

BOOKS

  • The Fearless Organisation: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy Edmondson

  • Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson. Robert Pool

  • The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle

  • No One Wins Alone: A Memoir by Jimmy Roberts and Mark Messier

PODCASTS

ALSO CHECK OUT


TRANSCRIPT TO THE EPISODE

00:00:00 

Harish Bhamidipati: Stephan Wiedner is a psychological safety expert whose career has focused on developing sustainable high performance leaders, teams and organisations. His passion for unleashing the collective potential of people has led him to co-found noomii.com, the web's largest network of independent life coaches, skillsetter.com, the deliberate practice platform for interpersonal skills and zarango.com, the psychological safety training experts. So we talked to Stephan about psychological safety, of course, the secret sauce for great teams and common mistakes that people make while thinking about teams. We also spoke about how things have changed since the pandemic hit, his tips for managers and how to measure psychological safety. This was a wonderful, thought provoking conversation that also got me to apply some ideas immediately and I'm sure you'll love it. If you're curious about what makes teams successful, you'll find this useful. 

00:01:11

Harish: Hi, welcome Stephan, welcome to the CTQ Smartcast. 

00:01:16 

Stephan Wiedner: Well, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to participate. 

00:01:20 

Harish: Yeah. So let's get started with the, probably the most basic question to start this, smartcast with. So how do you really explain psychological safety to entrepreneurs and business owners?

00:01:34 

Stephan: Well, I like to explain it with a situation that most people can relate to. So often start with a classroom setting. So we probably have all experienced being in a classroom unless you've been home schooled or had some sort of other educational background. And in that classroom, we could all relate to moments where a question is being asked and you're not quite sure if you put your hand up to answer it or maybe you're really eager, but let's imagine that you're a little hesitant to put your hand up to answer a question that's posed in the classroom. Why might you be hesitant? I'm asking you that now. Why might you be hesitant, for example, in a classroom to raise your hand?

00:02:16 

Harish: Yeah, because you're not sure what the reaction is going to be, somebody might just rebuke you, somebody might put you down. You may look like a fool out there. 

00:02:26

Stephan: Exactly. Yeah and that's very common. So most people are going to be concerned about how what they say will be perceived by the other people around them. And maybe there's some sort of repercussion, maybe someone's going to laugh at you, maybe someone's going to dispute what you just said, because what you're saying is maybe unconventional, et cetera. So, that is psychological safety. What is it? It's that ability within a group setting to speak up, say what's on your mind, express concerns and it's happening all the time, where we are refraining from or hesitating to speak up because of those interpersonal concerns that we have and that's what psychological safety is. And in a business setting, sure, I just described in a classroom setting, in a business setting, it's the same thing, when you're within a team, you're going to be concerned about what others are going to be thinking about you, especially if there's a difference in hierarchy, right? If so, if there's someone that's higher up in the organisation, someone who's superior to you, maybe upper level, maybe up two levels, you're going to be particularly concerned about what you say and we know psychological safety is a, it's a quality or a characteristic of high performance teams, which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about. Is that helpful? Does that make sense? 

00:03:49 

Harish: Yes. Yes, it does, sub part to that question, there would always be  levels of psychological safety as well, right? Even in a great high performing culture, you might have your immediate team where you feel the safest, but as you keep growing, you know, as you keep going in the organisation right up to say the last level in the organisation, that safety is probably going to not be the same as you feel with your immediate team. So is that something, you know, that is common? Am I interpreting it wrong? Just your comment on that. 

00:04:30 

Stephan: Absolutely. Well, a lot of people will think about psychological safety, akin to culture. So intuitively we understand that there's some sort of connection there. And I see culture as being, for example, a weather system, so imagine an entire country, you have a weather system, but then you have pockets of hot and cold in various different cities or regions. Same thing within an organisation, if your culture overall is positive and encouraging, et cetera, you might have pockets where psychological safety is higher and lower, depending on the individuals in those divisions or in those teams. It's also dependent on other factors. It's not just who's in those teams, but perhaps, what those teams are responsible for. So for example, if you're in the legal team, your tolerance for risk might be a lot lower, right? So suggesting new ideas might not be tolerated nearly as much as say a team that's responsible for innovative new technology. 

00:05:32 

Harish: Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the first time I actually heard of the concept of psychological safety was in the context of project Aristotle, that Google had done where they studied a bunch of different kinds of teams and the one thing that they found common among all the high performing teams was psychological safety. And that's what actually led me to go down that rabbit hole, trying to figure out what psychological safety is, probably, I felt it, but didn't have a term for it then. So, what has your experience been with the findings of project Aristotle and what's your take on that?

00:06:13 Stephan Wiedner: 

Well, project Aristotle is a wonderful support structure if you will, for our work because when we go into organisations, often the first thing we need to do is explain what psychological safety is and why it's meaningful or important. And the fact that we can draw upon the research that Google did as you already mentioned, they looked at 180 teams, they looked at 250 factors that might correlate with high performance within those teams and nothing correlated. Then they finally came across the concept of psychological safety and lo and behold, it was the number one factor that correlated with high performance teams, as you already mentioned. So that data driven, evidence based approach that they took to producing their findings, adds a lot of weight. And so when we bring it into organisations, it catches a lot of people's attention. Sometimes psychological safety can be, if you don't know what that term means, it might seem kind of an airy fairy, it might seem a little bit in-concrete, not very substantial, it might seem kind of soft for a business crowd. And so when we can bring in that data and that evidence, it just gives it a whole lot more credence. 

00:07:38 

Harish: Right. And has this been something of a new thing that people have noticed, did teams back in the 1950s also have psychological safety? How has the whole field sort of evolved over the years? 

00:07:56 

Stephan: Well, I think that years ago, say, 50 years ago, if we can go back in time, psychological safety was always present, right? It's a psychological phenomenon. So there were always teams with high psychological safety and some without and I've been often scratching my head saying, okay, why is this now really bubbling to the surface? Because it's becoming a lot more commonplace, a lot more people are discussing it and talking about it. And I believe the reason is because our world is becoming so much more complex. The challenges that we're facing are global, they're ambiguous and so that's forcing teams to have to cooperate because what does psychological safety ultimately facilitate? It ultimately facilitates good decision making because every day we're making lots of small decisions and some big decisions and those decisions rely on objective data and the more people you have in a room, the more opinions that you have and those opinions need to be shared so that the best decisions can be made. And once upon a time, it wasn't nearly as necessary, I'd say 50, 60 years ago, it wasn't nearly as necessary to have interdisciplinary teams coming together to solve complex problems. Now that is commonplace, right? Look at the pandemic and now all the logistics issues that have fallen out of that, technology accelerating, I mean, the workplace is changing so rapidly that psychological safety is absolutely necessary to just even keep up. 

00:09:42 

Harish: Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that brings me to the next question, we spoke about how things have evolved over the last two years with the pandemic, sort of has affected teamwork in all kinds of teams, right? So what should leaders keep in mind when they think about psychological safety? 

00:10:04 

Stephan Wiedner: Well, that takes me back to the beginning of COVID and the global pandemic and I reached out to one of my colleagues that we were doing some work within, he's in the learning and development space, right? So, that's his role within his organisation. They have maybe 1500 people, so not a huge global organisation, but big enough. And what he did is he went out and solicited input from a bunch of different managers within his organisation. And he found that it was very bimodal because the question or one of the questions he was asking them is how is your team doing? So this is 30 days or 60 days into this global pandemic, right? Where there was tons of uncertainty, I think there's still even some uncertainty today, however, back then, if we can all go back in time, remember how much uncertainty there was. And so what he discovered is that there were two pools of managers, there’s one set of managers that when he asked them that question, how's your team doing? They said, I don't know and then the other half of the managers were saying, they're so overwhelmed and concerned and stressed out and I'm stressed out and I don't know what to say to them because I don't know what life's going to look like and they're asking if we're going to work remotely or if we're going to come back to the office and I don't know. So you can see how there were two different camps there and the one camp that didn't know they were clearly not well connected to their team. Their team was guaranteed to feel that anxiety and that stress, but that team did not feel safe. They didn't have the psychological safety to say it, to express their concerns, to ask for input from their leader, instead they just bottled up, they kept it inside. So as managers and as leaders in today's world, I'd say the number one lesson is you need to stay connected with your people, especially if you're working remotely. And, you need to be able to figure out how to connect with them more personally, one on one or maybe within your team, you have informal conversations where people can just share their concerns and it doesn't mean you have to solve all of their concerns all the time. You want to just be able to provide that arena for them to be able to voice their concerns so that you know, that how they're doing legitimately, how they're doing and if you ask them once and they just say, yeah, yeah, I'm good. Good. Yeah, no problem. Maybe stay with it a little bit longer, right? Be a little more patient and ask them a few more poking and prodding questions without being disrespectful. Is that helpful?

00:12:56 

Harish: Yeah. Yeah. It is. And this resonates a lot with us because we do work in this space where we help create some of these platforms for teams to come together, know more about each other at a more human level and not just the deliverable that the other person is sending across to me, but actually understanding who that person is. And yeah, we keep actually having these conversations with leaders that it's not like, yeah, you just say that, yeah, this is a platform to speak up and people are going to line up and just go out. It doesn't happen so easily you have to actually work on that. So yes, it completely resonates with me. We spoke about project Aristotle earlier and now we just spoke about teams. So that brings me to another question that I had, in your opinion, what is the secret source of building a successful team?

00:13:50 

Stephan: Well, I think I alluded to it a little bit there, having the patience to ask the right questions and so the secret sauce for us in order to figure out what that is, we draw upon our experience in counselling, mental health, counselling and therapy. Why would we look at counselling for a business setting? How are those two things relevant? Well, let's look a little closer about what counsellors do? Counsellors and therapists, they work with individuals one on one to support them in their career and their mental health and various other aspects of their lives, right relationships, et cetera. And so the power of the relationship is paramount there. So in order for a counsellor or a therapist, to help their client get better outcomes, they need to form a really strong relationship. And we see a parallel within teams, in teams what are you trying to facilitate? You're still trying to facilitate good, positive outcomes that are in alignment with the organisation's desires and in order to achieve those outcomes, there's this interconnectedness that the members of the team have in order to solve problems together. And so the role of the leader or the manager is to facilitate those connections and those strong relationships in order to produce outcomes. And how do you do that? You do that through really skilful interpersonal skills and we also know that in counselling, there are a set of interpersonal skills that are sometimes called facilitative interpersonal skills that they can be measured and they in the world of counselling have proven to be predictive of client outcomes. So, when a counsellor is, maybe I'll explain it a slightly different way. If you look at all the different types of counsellors out there, career counsellors, some that focus on different methodologies, there's always good ones and bad ones, right? Within every sort of vertical. And so the researchers have asked, well, what's common among all the best. So if we'd look at all the top performing counsellors, what's true among all of them and what characterises the best counsellors in their degree of empathy and how well they can build a bond with their client. And if there's some sort of rupture within the client relationship, they can approach it in a skilful manner to repair it and make it strong again. And it's so sure within school, you have to learn how to be a counsellor? You have to learn what questions to ask? But there's also this, there's the how and the what, so you have to learn what to do? But then there's the, how it's similar in business, where you have to learn to do one-on-one and you have to learn to have various forms of meanings. And in a one on one, for example, you can ask three or four questions and there's a way that you ask it. There's these soft skills, the tone of your voice, how much empathy you exude your emotional expression? Are you happy? Are you sad? Does your emotional expression match the situation? So if someone in your team shares really terrible news, how do you handle that? How do you express empathy? How do you express a sense that they are being cared for? All of that is what we call manager facilitative interpersonal skills and we see that as the secret sauce to teams. So the managers that can model those types of behaviours are the managers that produce high levels of psychological safety. And when teams feel that sense of psychological safety, where they can speak up, express concerns, share what's on their mind, outcomes are going to be better. 

00:17:54 

Harish: Right. And would you say this has been sort of drilled down into science or is it still an art? Is it only those facilitators who can do this right or are the managers on the ground, can they be taught very easily and quickly on how to do one on ones which will lead to psychological safety in their teams? 

00:18:19 

Stephan Wiedner: Great question. And the answer is yes. What we have found is that we use a lot of video for our training. So demonstrate or we provide stimulus videos for individuals that are all actors depicting challenging situations within a team. And then the participant in the training needs to record a response to those stimuli, think of it kind of like a flight simulator for managers. And when they record a response, they are practising one of those skills that we're teaching them. And so then they get to watch themselves and they can see how they're performing and we can give them very specific critiques on how to improve and okay, that was okay and here's how you could do it better. And so we have skilled facilitators who really understand the skills and can teach them and really more importantly, look for them in those videos. That's how people get better. It's not just the concept, they need to know the concept, sure but they really need to practise. And that's where the concept of deliberate practice comes in. That's something we're really leaning on because we're recognizing that for example, to become better at playing the piano or say some sort of athletic sport, it's not enough to just watch a YouTube video on how to play the piano, right? You have to spend time on the keyboard and yet for when it comes to leadership and management skills, often we're diverting people to YouTube saying, okay, watch this video or maybe go to a workshop and sit in a classroom for four hours or eight hours and absorb information, that's not enough because imagine, if I said, hey, do you want to be a great piano player? Go watch someone play the piano on YouTube or go to a concert of a really great piano player. It's not going to translate into you developing skills, so absolutely people can learn the skills and they have to do it through deliberate practice where they can see themselves, they get feedback, they try something different, they get more feedback, they try again. It's that repetitive process that leads to new behaviours and new skills being developed. 

00:20:46 

Harish: Right. Yeah. And I guess, they have to practise in a safe space as well, which is where these facilitators will probably be the right people to do this. Are you seeing more and more companies and managers willing to go down this path? Are they acknowledging that, yes, this is something which we really need to get our hands dirty with and not just watch some video and try to wing it. Are you seeing that? 

00:21:14 

Stephan: Absolutely. There's certainly some hesitation, right? Because what we find with this process is that it's a little confronting because when you record yourself, it's a little bit like, I don't know if you have the experience of recording your voicemail. Hi, you just left a voicemail. It always sounds so awkward when you listen to yourself again, right? Oh gosh, I'm going to record it again, oh, I'm going to record it again, right? How many people have sat there for a half an hour recording a 30 second voicemail? So it can feel really intimidating and concerning. And I think people, once they get through the first hurdle of discomfort and they love it, then they think, gosh, how would I learn these skills without it? Now, we have to get them there in the first place, we need to get them to actually try it before they can agree and I think, of course there's resistance and yet I think people are starting to recognize more and more that in order to improve skills, they need to practise. They don't want to just do it on an informal basis and so we're seeing a lot of positive reinforcement. Well, people come back to us with our training time and time again as they say, this is so amazing because we learn a skill and then we have to practise it right away. And so that really makes connections for them very quickly. It's not just a concept that they have to remember and then come back to later when they're in a team meeting, they practise that skill right away, 

00:22:57 

Harish: Right. Yeah. Yeah. So we spoke about the secret sauce of great teams, let's look at the other end. What are the common mistakes that people make while thinking about having good successful teams? They want that outcome but what are the things that they end up doing wrong? And some of them might just be because of not knowing that they're actually making that mistake, it's not like a deliberate thing. What do you think are these common pitfalls or common mistakes that people make? 

00:23:31 

Stephan: Yeah, there's, you're right that many of those pitfalls are unintentional and we see that quite a bit within organisations you get, sometimes they're called toxic leaders or toxic managers and they cause a lot of harm within their team. Of course, that's the opposite end of the spectrum. Those are the teams and the individuals that are really low in psychological safety and what we find there, even with many of those leaders, they don't intend to, they don't recognize that they're causing harm. It's just, these are the skills they've learned and they've developed over years, whatever environments they had been in. A really good example is doctors, doctors are trained to know, to have the knowledge, to be experts, to be convincing in their work environment. And so they can lean towards being kind of disciplinary, micromanaging, not necessarily fostering psychological safety. And again, it's not mean-spirited, they're not trying to be hurtful. So coming back to your question though, what are the common pitfalls? I would say that when it comes to psychological safety and learning psychological safety and starting to appreciate it and try to bring it into their team, one of the most common pitfalls, I'd say there's two, the first one is that individuals will confound the concept of acknowledging someone and agreeing with them. So what we often teach individuals is if someone says something you want to acknowledge it, you want to say, ah, what I'm hearing from you is that you're really frustrated because you're getting all these requests from the other department and you can't seem to handle them on time and it's causing you to be stressed and anxious. Did I get that right? So see how I'm acknowledging the other person, but I'm not necessarily agreeing with them and often when we're speaking with managers and they think, okay, well I've got to get everyone's opinions. They're concerned that an opinion's going to be expressed that they don't agree with and now they're going to have to agree with it. We're not saying you have to agree, we don't all have to agree on everything all the time. However, it's really important that you demonstrate as a leader that you can listen to your team members and you demonstrate that you understand what they're saying. So it's not enough to just say, I understand you have to say, I understand that what you're looking for is “blah”, or I understand that you're frustrated because of fill in the blank and being able to reflect back in that manner demonstrates that you truly understand and you don't have to agree with them. It's okay to say I understand what you're saying and you know what? I don't agree because here's why. So it facilitates conversation and dialogue and you want to make sure that as a leader, you're having those individuals express their concerns again and again today, tomorrow, next week and if you just shut them down, they're not going to do that in the future. So that's the first pitfall. The second pitfall that we see is that within a team, sometimes as the leader, as a manager, two people might be sparring, if you will, there's disagreement over here with these two individuals within the team. And often what we as managers want to do is take that conversation offline. So when we see a bit of a dispute, we want to talk to person A and person B and take it outside of the team's scenario, but the team's being affected by those two individuals and the team needs to know what the resolution is and the team needs to know how that issue is going to be addressed in the moment, in the future. And so there's a hesitation among managers to want to address it within the team, because they feel like they're potentially throwing someone under the bus, they're potentially harming someone within a public setting. And there's a very skilful way to be able to address those kinds of concerns in a way that keeps everyone whole, so, you're not criticising anyone, you're not demeaning anybody and you're addressing the issue in the moment so that everybody can see that as a leader, you have the courage to address those issues and you have the skills to address them in a way that facilitates psychological safety. Because if it's just being taken offline, all the other team members are going to go - “I wonder what's going on there, that was really awkward,” and “I wonder if it's getting resolved.” So there's going to be all these question marks in people's heads that are going to cause them to be hesitant in the future, 

00:28:30 

Harish: Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the lack of transparency sometimes hurts a lot more because you're not sure and then that opens up Pandora's box because then it is open for interpretation. 

00:28:42 

Stephan: Absolutely. You're totally right. That Pandora's box just opens right up and people are going to make all sorts of assumptions. And they're not going to know how it's being dealt with. And as a manager and a leader, you have to deal with it in a public way and not diminish anybody that's present either. 

00:29:03 

Harish: Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And in terms of building great teams, what do you think is the role of diversity, diversity of thought? And we've had this discussion in previous episodes of smart cast where people have said that, yes, I don't necessarily agree with this notion of having a quota for diversity but then the flip side of it is, only what gets measured gets done. So because I have to meet a certain quota, if it comes to maybe, women in leadership teams or whatever, that's when women do get promoted to leadership. So, this is from a woman leader who said, yeah, that this was my thought earlier, but then, my boss actually told me that this is how he thinks and she sort of agreed with that. So what's your take on building the whole diversity of thought and this sort of diversity by numbers.

00:30:03 

Stephan: It's definitely a hot topic these days, right? We've seen that a lot with the pandemic. People are speaking up and expressing concerns about diversity and wanting to feel included. And the way I look at it is through the lens of psychological safety. Psychological safety can be measured, that's the first thing, which is really nice about it as a concept, it can be measured and it's measured relatively easily seven questions and those seven questions are robustly validated over years of research, right? So we know those seven questions are measuring this concept of psychological safety. And one of those questions is all about, are your differences appreciated within this team? And so I think it's absolutely critical. I see diversity in psychological safety as hand in glove. They fit together so nicely because in order to have a team that experiences psychological safety, everyone needs to be recognized for being different and how they're different and those differences are appreciated. And so, also see the benefit with respected decision making. Remember I mentioned psychological safety, what does it facilitate? It facilitates decision making. And if everybody is kind of the same, of the same opinion, has the same worldview, suddenly your decision making is perhaps less effective because you have less data. You're just going to have a bunch of people seeing things through the same lens and that's going to produce less good outcomes. So I think diversity is not only important, it's critical for maintaining psychological safety and having that, as you mentioned, diversity of thought, diversity of opinions. The critical factor there is that for the leader and the manager, to be able to have those different points of view be expressed, especially the one dissenter. So if there are six or seven people that all think one way and they're all in agreement, you want to make sure that eighth person in the room has the ability to speak up and say, you know what guys, I don't agree, I simply don't agree with all seven of you and here's why, that is so valuable. 

00:32:24 

Harish: Right. Yeah. And, when we talk about principles of psychological safety, how can an individual apply some of these principles in various kinds of settings? I know you also coach teams playing hockey, so do you sort of apply these principles in those teams as well at home, family, maybe group of friends? How can an individual sort of apply these principles in different settings?

00:33:01 

Stephan: Great question. So for me, I'm trying to apply the interpersonal skills that I learn and teach and train all the time, whether it's with my family, whether it's coaching youth and sports or et cetera. So I'm constantly using those skills. And I'm also thinking about those skills with respect to psychological safety. That's the whole point, the whole point of using those skills is to foster psychological safety in teams and I'd say there's one practical, much more practical consideration for any individual. And that is I'd offer that in order to foster psychological safety or leverage it, perhaps it's leveraging psychological safety. I'd invite everybody to go to their team members or colleagues or people around them and pull them aside and ‘Hey, can I just talk to you for 10 or 15 minutes? I'm working on improving as a leader or manager as whatever your role is and what's one thing I could do better?’ And demonstrate that you're open to their input and also by saying, I'm working on improving X, you're demonstrating some vulnerability there, right? You're saying I know I'm not perfect, I know I have flaws and I want to get better. And then you seek their input. And then what's really critical thereafter is to have the discipline to start to put it into practice. And so you're not just shaping and changing your behaviours and learning new skills, you're also simultaneously changing how people perceive you, because if you demonstrate that vulnerability, if you ask for their input and you do something about it and they can see that that's going to build a lot of followership. People are going to start to really look up to you and go, wow. I want to work with that person because they're humble enough to ask for my input and then they use it. I think if there's one practice that you can try to put into your professional work, it would be that it would be to reach out to the people around you and ask for their input on how you can get better. Ideally, you don't just leave it wide open like I want to get better, say I want to be better at communicating one on one or I want to get better at giving feedback or I want to get better at something to fill in the blank, you determine what you're trying to work on.

00:35:35 

Harish: Yeah. Yeah, that brings me to an interesting next question. With the GPT-3 and Tally and all these things, machines doing so much of our work now it's becoming even more important to do what humans do well, to be better at that. So how do you see probably the next decade shaping up in terms of work, business and how do you see that the role of psychological safety among teams and maybe we may have to redefine teams as our teams might be a combination of humans and algorithms for all, how do you see this shaping up in the next decade?

00:36:24 

Stephan: Well, we're definitely seeing a lot more technology, infiltrating everything, and that is definitely true. And the thing we've always tried to hang our hat on is what does software or technology do well and what do humans do well? And I think there is always going to be room or there's definitely going to be room in the next 10, 20 years for us as humans to become more skillful. We need to get more skilful at being able to manage other humans, talk to other humans, get their input, because again, that technology is going to accelerate and the issues that we're dealing with are going to become more global and so the need for humans to be innovative is going up and the amount of stress and anxiety that is being produced is going up because we as humans, if things change, there's naturally going to be stress and anxiety there. And so that technology curve is going to go up. There's no question there. It's going to continue to accelerate and that's going to cause us to be anxious. That's going to cause us to need to be innovative. And so psychological safety is the tool for supporting humans in overcoming that anxiety. So that we can face the fears and innovate anyway. And so it's going to be absolutely necessary for leaders and managers to master those skills within those team environments. I think that's absolutely critical. The other shift that we're seeing is that right now, the younger generation is coming up and entering the workforce and they're looking for more value driven work. They don't want to just show up to work and punch the clock, even if they can get paid a lot of money, that's not necessarily what's driving them and motivating them. They're wanting and needing meaningful and impactful work. And back to Google's project Aristotle, the five factors that they identified the first one of course, was psychological safety that characterise high performance teams and I think number four and five were that the individuals within the team have meaningful work and they feel like their work is impactful. So that is going to be really critical that we as managers and leaders within organisations that we're showing and demonstrating to the up and coming generation that their work is meaningful and impactful and that's a communication skill, 

00:39:04 

Harish: Yeah. Yeah. And in your work, how have you been using technology in maybe, measuring psychological safety? What are the tools that you've used in your work where you leverage technology?

00:39:19 

Stephan: Yeah. Well, a couple of ways, the first, as you said, is we measure psychological safety. So that's relatively straightforward technology, right survey technology, that will administer the assessments. And that's one way to measure psychological safety and we know that there's a robot, there's good evidence that works and in the future, I think there's going to be other ways of measuring psychological safety that doesn't require someone to answer a question. We might be able to just for example, record a meeting and be able to measure the different interpersonal interactions that are going on to be able to assess the psychological safety of those teams just by purely recording meetings that are happening on an everyday basis. So that's reams and reams of data and the second way that we use technology that I mentioned is this flight simulator technology. So our sister company Skillsetter, their whole purpose is to develop this flight simulator environment for people to practice interpersonal skills. So we're leveraging technology there to be able to record people and have them see themselves and evaluate themselves, et cetera. The third way is through artificial intelligence, we're exploring and looking at how we can use artificial intelligence to provide people with more feedback on how they're doing with respect to their interpersonal skills. So the future being one where you can get real time feedback, perhaps in a meeting. So when you're speaking, you might get little cues, let's say, Hey, wait a minute you're not asking enough questions or the software might recognize that other people are starting to tune out in the meetings, how do you then respond in a productive way right there in the moment? So that is potentially where the future is and right now we're working on AI projects, we're not getting that close yet for that real time feedback, but instead having feedback that would occur within minutes or after a recording is made. So that's what we're working on and what the AI is doing, it's picking up on verbal cues, it's picking up on nonverbal cues to help understand how that leader or manager is using the interpersonal skills that we're teaching them. 

00:41:52 

Harish: Right, Yeah. Yeah. And this is more of a personal question, your work, how has that sort of shaped the way you look at life in general and all your other interests from sports to family to friends? Has your exposure to this field played a role in changing the way you look at other things?

00:42:15 

Stephan: Yes, I would say it has, of course. So I look at the world and I see lots of problems, there's still a lot of famine, there's parts of the world that don't have fresh water, we have climate issues, et cetera, et cetera. And that weighs on me, I'm concerned about that and I think it probably weighs on a lot of people out there. And when we put people through our training program, one of the first things we do is we ask them, how do you want to be perceived as a leader? And when I talk to people within industry, often I hear such jaded perspectives about, there's so many toxic leaders out there and managers don't know how to listen and when we put people through our training, we ask them, how do you want to be perceived as a leader and time and time again, we see things like, I want to be perceived as someone who's empathetic, someone who's caring, someone that people can come to because I'm a good listener or I want to be seen as someone who can make good solid decisions weighing in all the data that's surrounding me, et cetera. So I see such positive comments. People have such wonderful aspirations in terms of how they want to be perceived as managers and leaders. And that gives me a lot of hope, I think if we could just level up every single manager and leader within the world, even just by a small percentage, I think that will breed a whole lot more solutions and outcomes for the world, because remember psychological safety is not just about feeling good, holding hands and singing kumbaya it's about producing results. And having people feel like when they show up at work, they can be fully engaged, I can be myself, my differences are appreciated and I can lean into this work and really do my best. And that really inspires me and excites me about the work that we're doing and it's changed my worldview to one being much more filled with hope.

00:44:27 

Harish: Yeah. That's great. One final question before we move to the last section. So any books, people to follow podcasts that you would recommend, who have inspired you in your journey and that you would recommend to the audience to start following reading, listening, watching.

00:44:48 

Stephan: The fearless organisation by Amy Edmondson, it's the foundational book of psychological safety. So everyone needs to read that one just to get introduced to the concept. Amy Edmondson, if you're not familiar, is a Harvard professor and so she's really the thought leader. I would say the number one thought leader around the concept of psychological safety globally. There’s another book that is really foundational to our work, which is. Peak by Andrew Erickson, are you familiar with that one? 

00:45:16 

Harish: Yes. Yes. Yeah. 

00:45:18 

Stephan: Yeah. So he talks all about how he's explored 30 or 40 years, how individuals get really masterful at various psychological based skills. So not really looking at say sports, but looking at other arenas, sports being much more of a physical endeavour. So it's more of a psychological one and he has, from his observations, come up with these principles of deliberate practice, which I think are just fantastic and then as far as, so you asked about what books, podcasts. 

00:45:56 Harish: People to follow on social media, Twitter. 

00:46:00 

Stephan: Yeah. Yeah. So then the other podcast is Adam Grant's podcast and in particular, one of the most inspiring interviews that he's done is with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, what a gem. He is such a gem; I can't speak highly enough about it. So if you haven't listened to Adam Grant Podcast yet, especially that one with Satya Nadella, do it now, he's just a wonderful human being. I'm so excited that an individual at that calibre is leading one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Microsoft. So, yeah, I'd say those are my top picks. Another book that I really enjoyed was The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. It's somewhere on your shelf, but fantastic. It's a really good read. I'm a Canadian kid, so, in Canada we have a lot of ice hockey and I've read a number of biographies of various players, great leaders. The most recent one is the book written by Mark Messier, he's one of the greatest hockey players ever. And it's called ‘You Never Win Alone’. He is a really fantastic leader, always recognizing how important it is for the team to feel part of a team. And so he really created an environment where the team comes first and he has the results to show for many championships and awards et cetera. So those are a few of my recommendations. Yeah. 

00:47:52 

Harish: I think great picks, all of them. We will include all of them in the show notes with links. So let's move to the last section, which is, where we ask you for your hot takes on some things that I will ask you about, it could be an idea, it could be a thing, it could be a topic. So what do you think is the future relevance of coaching and life coaches?

00:48:19

Stephan: Well, life coaching is becoming a lot more popular and I think people are recognizing that it's okay to have someone in their life, support them and help them in achieving their goals and to not be doing it on their own. So, I see a significant trend there, especially globally. We were very familiar with the coaching industry. We've been in the coaching industry for almost 20 years and initially I think it was much more focused in the United States and in Canada, but now we're seeing proliferation of coaching all over the world in India and the Middle East and Europe all over the place. So, I think it's here to stay. 

00:49:05 

Harish: Okay. What do you think is the future relevance of remote working and work from home? 

00:49:12 

Stephan: Well, we've certainly had a lot of experience with remote working and there's tons of benefits. So I think it's not going anywhere and so I think as leaders and managers, we need to be able to work remotely. And ideally bring people together as well, I think it's going to be a hybrid solution in most situations, of course, some companies are going to say, no, let's all work together in the office. And then others are going to say, let's work a hundred percent remotely and then there's going to be everything in between. So, I just think it's a lot more fluid now, the future is that it's going to be a lot more fluid and open to discussion. Let's do it this way, let's try that way. There's going to be a lot more experimentation, I think, going on to help organisations figure out what's the best solution for us, for our people, because different people have different needs and so let's try to accommodate all of them. 

00:50:03 

Harish: Yeah. Okay. And the final one, what do you think is the future relevance of organised amateur sports? 

00:50:10 

Stephan: Organised amateur sports. Oh, wow. Well, I just think about what I'm seeing and I don't know if this is everywhere. What I'm seeing is that kids don't play outside nearly as much as they used to. And so I think organised sports are growing in that kids need to play. They need to get together. They need to play. It's part of a healthy child's upbringing. And so I think organised sports is likely to become more and more popular so that we can get kids to be moving their bodies and playing with one another and I also see that it's rising in prominence because of technology. Kids are on their devices at younger and younger and younger and younger ages and parents are just trying to get any means to have their children not be on a device for a few hours. So organised sports seem like a really good way to do it. It's like, Okay, little fella, your daughter or your son, whoever it is, you got a commitment at four o'clock on Monday and let's go, get in the car, let's go and so people are going to play these organised sports. 

00:51:32 

Harish: Yeah. Okay. On that note, I think this is a great chat, I think we covered a whole range of topics. There are a lot of things that we are going to take away from here. We will also be posting all the show notes from this conversation, including the transcript. So, people can actually take readymade takeaways as well from this conversation, really helpful. I think this is a great conversation, thanks a lot. 

00:52:05 

Stephan: Thank you, Harish. It was a pleasure. And you came up with some really great questions. I had a lot of fun. It was a joy. Thank you.


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