Trust on Purpose
Are you intentional about building, maintaining or repairing trust with the people in your life? Most of us aren’t, and sometimes important relationships suffer as a result. So much of what is right or amiss in those relationships ties back to trust, whether we realize it or not. We are dedicated to helping you become intentional about cultivating strong trust with everyone important in your life: the people and teams you lead and work with, and your family, friends and community, as well. In the Trust on Purpose podcast, we dive into everything that makes up trust, what supports and damages it. We unpack situations we commonly see with leaders, teams, organizations, and others we work with to show how trust can be strengthened, sustained, and repaired when broken. Listen in for conversations between two pros who care deeply about you being an intentional and masterful trust-builder in your life so you and your relationships flourish. We share pragmatic and actionable takeaways you can use immediately and deepen with practice. If you have questions or situations related to trust that you’d like us to talk about in a future episode, please email charles@insightcoaching.com or ila@bigchangeinc.com.
We'd like to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music that you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for the superpower editing work that he does to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to the smooth and easy to listen to episodes you are all enjoying. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Trust on Purpose
Trust, Safety, and the Power of Failure with Tom Geraghty
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Ila and Charles sit down with Tom Geraghty of Psych Safety - a group that works with organizations around the world to achieve improved innovation, better error-handling and prevention, and more resilience by creating and maintaining an environment of psychological safety.
Tom starts by diving into the differences between trust and psychological safety, then takes a second, deeper dive into the value of experimentation, failure, and learning. He describes how organizations and industries that have a high cost of failure and those that require extreme safety sensitivity have experienced failure (and it hurt!), as well as the learning that comes from failure and how to mitigate or prevent future failures. Organizations and industries that don’t have the same degree of failure consequence haven’t necessarily experienced the benefit of learning from things that don’t go as planned.
Tom shares what it means to be an experimentalist and describes the huge value of focusing the outcome of work on the learning rather than the execution, being less focused on achieving perfection and more concerned with what we can learn.
This is the perfect trio to have a very human conversation about how trust intersects with psychological safety in our every day, and they don’t shy away from discussing the psychological safety “baggage” we all carry, and how it impacts how we experience new situations.
This is Part 1 of a 2 part series with Tom Geraghty. Come back for Part 2 in two weeks, when Tom explains how leaders can achieve psychological safety, taking into account the baggage we all have on our backs.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Hi everyone, my name is Charles Feldman.
Speaker 1:And my name is Ila Edgar, and we're here for another episode of Trust on Purpose, and today we have a special guest with us and we're really excited to dive into this topic. It's been on our radar for quite a while. We're diving into psychological safety and we have Tom Geraghty with us today. Tom, do you want to just like a couple of sentences? Who are you Tell us about you? Oh, welcome. Thanks, ila. Tom, do you want to just like a couple of sentences? Who are you Tell us about you?
Speaker 3:Oh, welcome. Thanks, Tina. Yeah, so my name is Tom Tom Geraghty and I'm a professional psychological safety geek and experimentalist. Love, love.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love this idea of being an experimentalist. So just quickly, tom, what does it mean to you to be an experimentalist?
Speaker 3:Oh, that's a really good question. So it was my first job title and ever since then I've kind of retained it for posterity, and that it means trying to focus the outcome of work on the learning from that endeavor rather than the execution of the thing. We're less focused on achieving perfection or executing perfectly, every time more concerned with what can we learn from doing this, what can we learn to get better next time?
Speaker 2:Which sounds like it's a great kind of segue into the notion of psychological safety, because if you don't feel safe, you can't learn, or it becomes difficult to learn. So that's one of the fundamental requirements for being able to fail and learn, or even succeed and learn, for that matter.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:And, as you were saying that, I thought about immediately the enormous pressure we put on ourselves to figure things out, to get it right, to not make a mistake, and so that internal pressure combined with potentially what, our culture or our environment, and so, yeah, talk a little bit about your perspective on that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we. I think it's interesting to sort of think about how we learn through childhood and then enter our career space. But I've got a two-year-old daughter and she will just try stuff. She just tries stuff and fails and tries again and gets better every time and just does it. So she doesn't have this inbuilt fear that yet and I'm sure this will come because we ought to develop it she doesn't have yet this inbuilt fear of not doing something perfectly or not being able to do something.
Speaker 3:But we, we do develop this and to some degree it's through school and things like that. You know, none of us want to be the person in the classroom putting up a hand saying I don't, I don't understand, or can you repeat that? And so then this, this progresses into our careers and and this pressure to, to succeed every time and and of course then our careers, we realize and we learn often and this is often true that the people who get the promotions, the people that get the interesting projects, are the people that succeeded last time and not the people who failed or didn't do it perfectly but learned a lot in the process. And so we were saying this earlier, weren't we? How, in many ways we should be giving the interesting projects, the challenging work, to the people that have failed before, because they've learned what went wrong and how to improve from that. And if there are a lot of successes, we can learn from successes, but we learn an awful lot more from failure.
Speaker 1:Can you imagine how that would exponentially change an organization If, instead of looking at the high potentials and the people that you know, oh, look at their track record of success we actually looked at? Look at the track record of bumps and twists and dumpster fires that they've navigated and what they've learned and can apply because of that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, because if you talk to high performing people or high performing teams and particularly complex domains like technology or aerospace or things like that, they've all got stories of the big tire fires, the big disasters, the times they brought down the entire infrastructure of the company for two days, and they learn so much from it and they're still here to tell the tale and they're so much more experienced and competent because of those failures in the past. It's not. It's not that we want to encourage failures of course we don't, but we really we want to encourage failures. Of course we don't, but we really do want to encourage learning. And, of course, if we suppress the ability to learn from failures, or even the ability to talk about failures, then we're suppressing the ability to learn from them, which of course makes them more likely to happen in the future and the impact of them much greater in the future as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so in your work and in your experience there is sometimes a confusion or a misunderstanding about the differences between trust and psych safety. How do you talk about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so this is really. It's interesting to reflect on psychological safety and how it's sort of. I think because it's become a lot more well known over the past five, six years. I think because it's become a lot more well-known over the past five, six years, there's been a corresponding increase in the misconceptions and misperceptions about what it means and what it means in practice, and one of those is that it's in fact, I've heard people say even oh, it's just the same as trust, isn't it? It's just trust. No, it's not Like A. There are different components of trust. There are different kinds of trust. There are different kinds of trust. So we can't just say trust. What does that mean?
Speaker 3:Trust is fundamentally about what I believe about someone else. Right, this is the way we distinguish it. In some ways, trust is fundamentally about how we believe, what we believe about someone else. Are they competent, are they capable? Do they have our best interests at heart? Are they going to undermine us, or something like that? That's what we believe about someone else.
Speaker 3:Psychological safety is a belief about the group. Psychological safety is about a belief about the group context that we're in and how the people in that group and that group may consist of two people, but how people in that group will respond to things that I do so trust is, if I pass the ball to someone in a soccer game, I might trust that they can take that ball and run with it and score a goal. But psychological safety is about the belief that if I take an interpersonal risk in this group then that will be received positively and I won't be punished, embarrassed, humiliated or suffer some other sort of interpersonal, negative interpersonal consequences as a risk of doing that. And some of those interpersonal risks might be suggesting ideas, asking for help, admitting a mistake, raising a concern, amongst other things. We can trust people. We can deeply, deeply trust people, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we're psychologically safe with them.
Speaker 2:So yeah, and that's where all sorts of questions start coming up. For me, one of the aspects of trust, as I talk about it and work with people around it, is that domain of care, that, yes, you have my interests in mind as well as your own. You intend good for me. You will not undermine me if I say this or share this idea or whatever it is. You're not going to do that. So I trust you in that respect, maybe also along with your competence and your sincerity and reliability. So help me with how that's different from now. Moving to, I feel psychologically. How could I feel? How could I state that, that I trust you in those ways and, at the same time, not feel psychologically safe with you?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So one way to think about that is scale, simply, and knowability and predictability of the space. So if we're in a group of people and some of those people we don't know, so as the group size increases, the sort of predictability of how those people we don't know, so as the group size increases, the sort of predictability of how those people will respond to the things we say or do, decreases. Right, because we've got to make predictions about more and more people and some of those people in the room we won't know, or we won't know as well as others. So in that sense it's kind of like an aggregate score, if you like. I don't really have to use the word score, but it's an aggregate level of that and it's also so. It's so contextual and so cultural as well, because what it means to feel psychologically safe can be very different from one person to the next and the way we communicate, the way we interpret communication and the way we communicate our preferences and how much time we need to or how much time we could better cope with first, say, answer a question.
Speaker 3:So one of the practices we espouse is, if you're in a meeting and you're asking for some ideas, say from the group. One of the things we like to say is that you could try asking that question, asking for those ideas, and having complete silence for a minute before anyone suggests some ideas, and maybe you, you know, maybe then you go for who's got the hand up, or maybe you get some ideas. You maybe go around the table in order or whatever it is. But what we want to avoid is things like where, where you've just got an effect, where you've got the loudest person speaking up first, for example, or those people, those people who just speak up, thinking and just knowing, trusting that whatever they want to say will just eventually make its way out, but they're happy just filling the space while that comes, whereas other people are far, far more comfortable trying to think about what they want to say and how they want to say it and how they want to articulate it first before they talk. Yeah, so that's you, charles.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I'm the classic Jungian introvert Right.
Speaker 1:Well, and for me that feels there's a little bit of nuance. Maybe a little bit different, is that, depending on the topic? So if it's something that I'm very familiar with, very often I will have a question or a thought or idea and I joke about this, that something that's new to me or that I'm still processing or learning. My best questions come three days later when I'm walking the dog, and so what I'm listening is how are we creating space for all of those voices, whether they're in the moment or three days later walking the dog, for those ideas, those voices, those questions, those curiosities to be heard? And that it invites us to be intentional about how we design that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly that intentionality and that design, how we create those environments to work for lots of different kinds of people with different cultures and preferences and experiences and backgrounds.
Speaker 3:And this is kind of what's interesting and there's a point here about we sometimes call this a sort of psychological safety baggage, the backpack that we bring with us. So let's say we've had a career, we've had a long career in whatever we're doing and a previous job in a previous company with a different manager. I once spoke up and suggested an idea and that manager just laughed out of the room, humiliated me, rolled their eyes and just responded terribly and I felt awful and embarrassed and humiliated. Now, even in a new team, in a new setting, in a new company with a new manager, if I ostensibly trust the people in that space and I know them fairly well and someone asks me for this idea and I've got an idea that I want to speak up with, there's still, even though I know I can trust the people in that room, there's still that little red light flashing at the back of my head going, ah, but you remember what happened last time, you remember that that was awful, so you're probably best off, just not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah and oh my God, I'm so glad that you brought this forward. I was in a conversation with a leader yesterday and she was talking about how focused she is on creating psychological safety in her team and very open about it. But the yeah, but that you're not remembering is this concept that we're saying right, that it doesn't matter what you're doing right now? Well, it does matter, it is important. It's also the lived experiences that people have had that will impact how they react, and respond in the moment.
Speaker 1:So it's not only about current state.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot to deal with with gut, with experience, with culture and neurodiversity and all sorts of other. I mean, in this sense we're getting kind of into intersectionality and privilege. So we often talk about psychological CVS as a. So one way you can think about it is a cost benefit calculation that we do in our heads, like what's the cost of me saying this thing versus what's the benefit of me saying this thing? And if the benefit outweighs the cost we'll probably say the thing, and if the cost outweighs the benefit, we'll probably stay silent or at least be sort of kind of guarded in how we say it. And of course this is a tiny little calculation we kind of do in our heads every time we say anything, whenever we speak up with anything, even when we're in the pub with our friends or home with our family or a team, a work setting, setting. But of course that calculation is sometimes harder to do than others and what we need to do is so our responsibility as teammates, as colleagues and friends, families, to try to reduce the cost of speaking up and increase the benefit of speaking up. And this is obviously quite a simplistic model of it, but it's a very practical way of thinking about it.
Speaker 3:And another point about that is that the costs of speaking up are higher for some people than others.
Speaker 3:If we come from maybe a lower socioeconomic background and we're experienced, we're used to scarcity, we're used to precarious. You know, we've had a precarious life up until that point and we're going to be pretty careful we're going to maybe over-perceive the costs of speaking up in the workplace because the cost of us losing our job or losing out on our bonus or whatever it is, are so much greater to us than for someone else who's had maybe quite a privileged background, who's got quite a nice safety net behind them and who can take those risks in the workplace. This is shown by academic research where people from greater, more comfortable socioeconomic backgrounds actually can move faster through their careers, primarily, or for at least one reason, because they're able to take greater risks interpersonally in the workplace. They're able to ask for that bigger project that would suggest an idea that's a bit bold to their boss, whereas the people who are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds necessarily, understandably, are somewhat more cautious about taking those risks.
Speaker 2:That's fascinating. I mean, I get that sort of practically speaking. You know, I've experienced it, I've seen it, but I love that there's also research on that that you're talking about. So is that part of psychological safety then? Is that what you're saying? This is what I'm finding interesting. The baggage that we bring is what's going to some degree influence our sense of psychological safety in any setting, even the safest, where we trust these people. We are still bringing something into that in our what do you call it? The psychological safety backpack that we carry with us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and I think so. This is where it's quite interesting and maybe the differences between the practitioner world and the academic world come out at this point. So for a long time the academic approach to psychological safety was that there wasn't much recognition of this sort of past experience and this backpack that we bring with us. It was set primarily in the current context. But there's more recognition now in the academic field of psychological safety that this stuff does matter, our past experiences, even though objectively they probably shouldn't, because we are. If we've got a great team, psychologically safe, ostensibly psychologically safe, with a great manager, people who are right behind us, yeah, arguably what happened to us 10 years ago with that nightmare manager shouldn't matter, but it does because these little calculations that we do in our head is so unconscious and so automatic and so it does. It certainly does from a pragmatic perspective. It has an effect.
Speaker 1:This has been an incredible conversation so far. I really love the analogy that you're using about this backpack that we all carry and logically or academically in past experience. This has not been part of realizing the experience and the impact of psychological safety, but knowing that our bodies carry marks and experiences that definitely impact even environments where we know logically are safe. But we get those feelings in our body and that's so important to pay attention to. So I'm really looking forward to diving into the part two of this episode.
Speaker 1:Tom, thank you so much for what you've shared so far. Thanks so much and, listeners, please tune in in a couple of weeks as we continue our conversation with Tom Garrity. Thank you On behalf of both Charles and myself. We want to say a big thank you to our producer and sound editor, chad Penner, hillary Rideout of Inside Out Branding, who does our promotion, our amazing graphics and marketing for us, and our theme music was composed by Jonah Smith. If you have any questions or comments for us about the podcast, if you have a trust-related situation that you'd like us to take up in one of our episodes, we'd love to hear from you at trust at trustonpurposeorg.
Speaker 2:And we'd also like to thank you, our listeners. Take care and keep building trust on purpose Until next time, until next time, until next time.
