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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 - Part 2
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In Part 2 of our conversation with Tom Geraghty, we explore the critical role of psychological safety and how leaders can model it for their teams. He explains how creating a psychologically safe environment isn’t just about good intentions, but about understanding how your team's lived experiences shape their perception of safety. Tom outlines actionable steps for leaders: from openly discussing psychological safety and being aware of power dynamics, to acknowledging and reinforcing behaviors that foster a safe space.
Tom also dives into the cultural and neurodiverse factors that influence how team members perceive psychological safety and why leaders must adapt their approaches to accommodate these differences. Finally, Tom debunks the "reinforcement and punishment" myth, showing how punishing mistakes can silence important feedback and why thanking your team for sharing bad news is crucial. Leadership isn’t about avoiding problems but creating an environment where they can be safely addressed.
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. I want to welcome back our listeners as we dive into part two of our conversation with Tom Garrity, our specialist and very generous, knowledgeable, lovely human being sharing his expertise and knowledge with us around psychological safety. Tom, do you want to just like a couple of sentences? Who are you Tell us about you?
Speaker 3:Oh, welcome. Thanks, Leena.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so my name is Tom Tom Geraghty and I'm a professional psychological safety geek and experimentalist, as we were finishing our part one of the episode, we were talking with Tom about this backpack that we all carry, the life experiences that we have, that shape and impact how we feel, even when, logically, we know we're in a safe environment. But those body sensations, that past experience, our body's telling us like, are you sure Is it really safe? Telling us like, are you sure Is it really safe? And in this part two of our conversation with Tom we want to dive into. So what can we do as leaders, as human beings, to reaffirm, to create the safety to you know, help people know that, even if we feel that feeling, there's still a spot here for you to be included, to raise your voice, to have your questions, to be in learning and all of those things. So let's continue this conversation with Tom.
Speaker 2:So how does a manager, leader, team leader who might recognize that understand that? What can that leader do to encourage or develop even stronger psychological safety and trust for those people not even knowing what they're carrying in their backpacks, but assuming that, oh yeah, maybe they are carrying something? How can they get over that or help their team members get over that?
Speaker 3:So there are loads of things yeah, there's loads of things that we can do right as managers. There's probably an infinite number of things that we can do and practices we can take and behaviors that we can look at, but there are some core. There are some core concepts that we can examine here. So first of all, talk about psychological safety. Like make it, ironically, in some organizations psychological safety isn't even a safe thing to talk about, and kind of at that point you're like good luck, you've got to make that a safe thing to talk about first of all. If you can't even a safe thing to talk about, and kind of at that point you're like good luck, you've got to make that a safe thing to talk about first of all. If you can't even talk about it, like, where are you going to go from there? And so there's another really key part as well. Another key concept comes from aviation. We talked about safety critical domains and things like aviation.
Speaker 3:One of the things that was surfaced very early on in disasters, accidents in aviation, was that power gradients, steep power gradients, really affect psychological safety Although they didn't use the term psychological safety because it wasn't really a known term then but steep power gradients prevent people speaking up against that power gradient. Ie, we are much less likely to speak up to someone of a high status, high power, than we are if that power gradient is non-existent, if it's level and this is known and this is well established in research, and this is something that we can address in our own context. And so, for a manager, we can first of all recognize that we have power, even though we might be like this super progressive, generative manager who's like yeah, just come to me with problems, come to me with solutions, talk to me about everything. Yeah, but you hold some power. You, ultimately, you've got to recognize that there is some power there, whether it's formal power, like hierarchical power, or informal, informal power, like you've been in your organization longer, you're more experienced in this field, or whatever. It is your ultimate power.
Speaker 3:So what can we do to level off that power gradient a bit? What can we do to lower that power gradient? One of those things is simply call each other by by our first names. Learn to pronounce each other's names properly. You make sure we use people's names, and this is something that you see in flight deck and operating theatres when teams come together to, let's say, carry out an operation on someone, they'll introduce each other by their first names to make sure that we're levelling that power gradient. It's much easier to say, oh Jane, you've left the scalpel in than it is to say, excuse me, um, doctor, professor, surgeon, person, you've left that scalpel in. You know, it's much easier. It lowers the power gradient and there are lots of other things we can do to lower the power gradient, including various practices, all sorts of practice, from the hand-on cord to lean coffee and also in retrospectives and all sorts of other things. But yeah, that power gradient is one of the biggest, like most powerful, things that affect psychological safety in any context this is great.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking of the studies of that power gradient. There's a different name to it as well, or a different term, I think a social distance, I think it is, or something like that In different cultures. So some cultures, getting over that is just almost not possible. You can't even imagine yourself saying anything negative about, or to or towards someone of higher status, whereas in other cultures the US, probably Britain we feel much more comfortable doing that. So recognizing, even on a team that's a global team, recognizing that there may be some people well, you probably had this experience. You've been doing some work with a team that's from Korea, for example.
Speaker 3:that's much more pronounced and you talk and you ask a question and there's just silence in the room because you're the expert and you talk and you ask a question and there's just silence in the room because you're the expert and so we don't even want to ask questions of the expert yeah, yeah, exactly, and in fact it's one of the areas in which the field of psychological safety could still do a lot better is that it is currently largely focused on a very westernized sort of Western, white English speaking of a lot of the time sort of context. That's where much of the research and where much of the literature lies. And yeah, it gets very interesting when we, when we look at different cultures Maybe Southeast Asia, japan very different cultures where respect and seniority and status is regarded in very different ways. For example, if you walk into an American boardroom and the CEO is addressing people in there, the CEO would expect everyone around the table to be looking at them, maintaining eye contact, maybe making notes and sort of engaging in an eye contact sort of way. If you do the same in, maybe a Japanese boardroom or similar, that wouldn't be the case. People, the CEO, might be talking and people would be looking down at at their desk as a sign of deference, as a sign of respect, not maintaining eye contact.
Speaker 3:So what looks psychologically safe to one group doesn't look psychologically safe to another doesn't mean that neither could. Neither group is psychologically safe, it just. It's just that it looks different, and the same, of course, applies to many neurodiversities. It's very difficult for many of us neurodiverse not, but particularly for neurodiverse individuals to maintain eye contact, for example, and that can be quite cognitively burdensome, which means we actually can't focus so easily on what is being said and trying to assimilate what's the content of that, because we're expending so much effort on just maintaining eye contact and sort of masking. So we should be really cognizant and we sort of see a lot of these LinkedIn hot takes about body language and psychological safety and things like that, and a lot of it is just not true. In fact, in many cases it's quite damaging. We really need to be careful about some of this stuff.
Speaker 1:So, going back to something you said earlier is knowing that there's all these complexities and the backpack that we bring, different cultural experiences just talking about psychological safety. So how do you even start to talk about it? And maybe let's add the perspective of it's a cross-cultural team yeah, we're from different countries. Like what are some of the basics that a leader could actually do to just start talking about it?
Speaker 3:well, that's a really, really good question. So there's a few things we can do. One so as a leader, as a leader or manager modeling vulnerability. And we can model vulnerability. So in a discussion about psychological safety, we can talk about cases or examples where we've felt unsafe in the past, where we've made mistakes or not suggested an idea or not contributed because we felt unsafe, and that kind of does two things. It helps us to have a discussion about psychological safety and maybe for those who haven't heard of psychological safety, you're unfamiliar with what it is. That helps contextualize it and make it a bit more relatable. But it also for that manager, it gives them an opportunity to model that vulnerability. That is such a part of psychological safety as a manager. If we don't feel comfortable being vulnerable, if we can't be vulnerable with a team, how do we expect them to do the same to us? The power gradient is that way around. So we've got to go first. That's kind of the lesson, that we've got to go first.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, sharing stories from your past is really powerful. Another way is to share and we do this in some of our workshops share stories of disasters or other cases. We might talk about things like the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the Chernobyl, we might talk about the Tenerife disaster of 1977. Other disasters and things like that that help us. We learn so much through stories. We're storytelling beings and so telling stories about this stuff is really powerful and helps us learn and contextualize. You can even watch Netflix documentaries about some of these things and then reflect on that. Let's come together, let's reflect on this and let's talk about psychological safety in the context of this story. So it's kind of a safe way of doing it, because we're not talking about us, we're talking about this case, them, them, yeah. So we're putting it over there and then we can start to sort of draw it closer to us.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:I want to add another question here, because I definitely hear this in the context of psychological safety and actually in being intentional about building trust, is leaders will say we don't have time for that yeah and I'm like okay well, but I want to hear your response to that, yeah, we see, we definitely see this a lot and I can empathize with it, because we are all of us are under a lot of pressure all the time to get it done, deliver. There's never enough time in the day and it feels. It feels like a luxury, it feels like a like an indulgent luxury sometimes to be doing some of this work and I get, I can empathize with that. But it's a bit like have you ever seen a cartoon of the people pushing the wheelbarrow with square wheels? Yeah, so there's a cartoon of two people pushing a wheelbarrow with square wheels.
Speaker 3:They're obviously not making great progress, right, and someone's standing there offering them round wheels. Here you go, have some round wheels, it'll make you faster. And they're like no, no, no, no, we haven't got time to fit them, we haven't got time to. No, take a moment now, take some time now and you'll go much faster soon. Yes, you've got to take the time now, but, yeah, slow down to speed up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great. I love that. Square wheels on a wheelbarrow. The other question or comment that I have and I view a lot of my work as a behavioralist I look for behaviors, and when I talk about trust or psychological safety with leaders, it's also reinforcing the behaviors that we want to see more of. So when someone has been courageous or vulnerable that there's an acknowledgement about that, took courage to say that, or I'm so glad that you put that idea on the table, or?
Speaker 1:that's a really great question. I didn't think of that. I'm so right. And so talk a little bit about how leaders can also reinforce more behaviors around psychological safety.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So this is super powerful and this is such a good point. You know, we get more of the behavior that we reward and less of the behavior that we punish, or do we? Because, in fact, for example, if we punish, even if we don't intend to, if we punish mistakes, we punish mistakes. We're not actually punishing mistakes, we're punishing hearing about mistakes. So we're very, very likely to experience more mistakes. We just won't hear about them. So we think we're successful as a manager because we've well, ever since I started punishing people for mistakes, hardly any mistakes are being made. So go me. No, in fact, there's like a whole load of fires going on that you don't know about, but you think you're doing a great job. So it's confirming your bias, it's confirming that approach.
Speaker 3:So we need to make sure that we are actually rewarding the right things and I don't really like to use the word punishing, but you know, holding people accountable for the right behaviors, to use the word punishing, but you know, holding people accountable for the right behaviors, and this is key. We definitely want to praise people, thank people, reward people for speaking up, and a lot of that is just interpersonal reward, like you were just saying, saying thank you responding productively when someone gives us news? No one wants to tell the boss bad news, right? None of us like giving the boss bad news. But as a boss or as a manager or as a leader, we need to hear the bad news. The bad news exists whether we hear about it or not. So responding productively when someone gives us bad news is really, really powerful. It's a sort of encouragement of that behavior. Again, we're not encouraging the bad thing that led to that bad news, we're encouraging hearing about it.
Speaker 3:And that can be challenging for many leaders and it can be. It's instinctively and it's naturally quite challenging for all of us. When someone tells us bad news, none of us sort of light up like going, oh brilliant, thank you. We instinctively and probably naturally, maybe shrug our shoulders, sigh while I rise a little bit. But we need to be really cognizant of some of that stuff and maybe even practice in the mirror. Okay, if someone told me bad news, how am I going to respond? What do I say next? And how you respond matters, really matters, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it really matters. I'm thinking of the first time that I knew that my son lied to me.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 1:And in the moment, of course, you're like, oh my God, he just lied to me and he was, I don't know, like four or five young, young, young, and in the moment it was a gut punch and I went to what have I done?
Speaker 1:How have I behaved? That he thought it was better to not tell me the truth, and I think that's a powerful reflection as leaders today, when we are interacting with our teams right and talking about how we're responding, that there's an ownership and accountability to us as leaders, as self-leaders accountability to us as leaders as self-leaders and how am I behaving in a way that makes it safe, okay, normalized, that these things in life happen and that we can. Everything is figureoutable, right, Everything is. It may seem like a massive dumpster fire, but how we respond and how we encourage that receiving of the bad news is so incredibly important and I think that's something that I see a lot of leaders struggle with is they think they're doing all the right things but not having that self-reflection about how are my behaviors impacting, what am I doing that may be getting in the way, or what am I doing that's actually working so that I can do more of that?
Speaker 3:yeah, and it extends even to things like metrics and targets and goals and all of that sort of stuff as well. Because a lot of that stuff either actually incentivizes slightly problematic things where we don't want to, we don't want to tell the past bad news, or we don't want to say we don't want to tell the past bad news, or we don't want to say, oh, we're not going to hit that target, or we might overemphasize, we might over accentuate the good results and sort of try to like just hide the bad bits over here and all of that sort of stuff, all of that, even if we don't mean to incentivize those sorts of behaviors, they do, and we see this in. Do you know about RAG status reports? Red, amber, green status reports?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yes.
Speaker 3:Right. So where you've got sort of a big spreadsheet and you've got a load of tasks and deliverables and things on a big spreadsheet on a big project program and every couple of weeks or whatever, some project manager marks these Like the red one's at risk. Well, the red one's sort have like already beyond, yeah, that's already on fire, the amber's at risk and the green is on track. And actually what happens is that that report then gets passed up to one manager and then from that manager to the next one, and that manager to the next one, until it gets to the ceo and the ceo just sees a sea of green, but at the sharp end there's a lot of red and amber, because each manager just like turns an amber to a green because they're thinking I can get in front of that, I can change that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can fix that before. Or change the red to an amber because I can do something about that. We can get back on track. And of course every manager does a slightly similar thing because, again, we don't want to give the boss bad news. We dilute bad news, we dilute the stuff.
Speaker 2:And not only that, but I'm like the third person up the ladder or fourth person up the ladder and I look at it because people have changed it on the way up. I'm looking at it going whoa my situation. The ones that I'm responsible for are you know, everybody else has got stuff under control and mine are all red. Oh my God, I got to fix that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, you're comparing your real world to their manipulated world. And yeah, yeah, exactly, You're comparing your real world to their manipulated world. And yeah, yeah, yeah. So that, of course, then leads to the same thing. And, yeah, this like behaviors and our practices and our interpersonal communication matter a lot, but in organizations and in teams, everything from the targets we set to how we measure people, to the performance reviews and how often we hold one-to-ones and how we report status all of this contributes to organizational culture and this underlying fabric of psychological safety in our teams.
Speaker 2:And I would say trust as well, which actually brings me to a question. So often when people do ask me because I'm asked a lot what's the difference between trust and psychological safety, and is there a difference? Is one more important than the other? Whatever, one of the things that I say, based on a reading that I've done, is that trust is kind of a precursor or precondition for psychological safety, in other words, that I trust the individuals on this team or I trust my manager. Therefore, I can feel psychologically safe in this environment. How do you talk about that or think about that?
Speaker 3:That's to some degree fair to say. I think, in the sense that we need to have some degree of knowing the individuals, the people in this group, before we feel psychologically safe. If we walk into a group online or in person or whatever it is, if we enter a group and we don't know anyone there, we don't feel psychologically safe because we can't know. Again, back to this mental calculation, we can't do that calculation, we don't know the costs of speaking up in this context. So we need to know the people to a degree before we can feel psychologically safe. So in that sense and trust being a part of knowing, in that sense it is a precursor I think we probably need to be careful that we don't sort of frame trust as a sort of binary, like on off, you have it or you don't think, but yeah, You're talking our language here, because that's one of the big learnings that people that I work with and hopefully go away with is it's not pioneering.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the things that I end up working with people on in terms of trust is the propensity to trust right. So some people will extend trust easily and naturally and they only kind of go back, you know, fall back to distrust if they see signs that they shouldn't be trusting. The other end of that range and that's a range there are people who say you really have to earn my trust and you're going to have to jump through five flaming hoops and I'm not even going to tell you what those hoops are, but you have to really earn my trust. Is there that kind of range in terms of risking and psychological safety there, that kind of range in terms of risking and psychological safety? So I was thinking you know I'll often speak up in groups that I don't know anybody and even though I'm a, you know, tend to be an introvert if I have something that I think is worth putting out there, I'll try it out, whereas I think other people may hold back.
Speaker 3:So I'm wondering if you, if you, see that as a range of feeling psychologically safe enough enough to risk yeah, yeah, that's, and there are various things that affect that, and it is certainly a range, and it's a very, very wide range and it can change through all sorts of things, from the you know, from from the context we're in to, to what's going on in the data subject we're talking about, to the people in the room. One you know you can be in a group and one person can come and join that group and it suddenly can make that group unsafe. You know there could be 10 people in a group. One more person joins and it changes the degree of psychological safety completely and it changes with as group size increases as well. But there's also this backpack that we're talking of, this, this what's our experience been in the past, what's our experience and whatever we've been taught as well, of how safe it is to speak up in these different contexts.
Speaker 3:So in the UK we have state schools and private schools and there's a lot of evidence to show that the people who go to private schools are much, much more confident in speaking up and speaking out and being bold and courageous in their discourse and things than people in state schools.
Speaker 3:And a lot of that comes from some of the often the implicit the underlying messages that we receive through our childhood and through our schooling and education. Then there's all the cultural stuff as well, and there's a great website called our world in data, which is sort of a website all about data related to public health and demographics and geopolitics and other things. There's a chart that you can access on there which is about the percentage of people that agree with the statement. Most people can be trusted and that range is dramatically different for different countries, for different cultures and countries. And in fact there's a saying in Spain, I think, which is translated to something like don't trust even your own father, and this speaks to power, distance and social distance and other things as well. But loads of this stuff influences both trust and psychological safety.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am looking at our time and, as much as I hate to end this conversation, I want to be respectful, Tom, of what you've been so generous in your sharing and conversation Before we just wrap up here. How can people learn more about psychological safety? How can they connect with you? How can they find you?
Speaker 3:Brilliant. Well, thanks for asking. Yeah, and so we have a website, psychsafetycom. If you head over there, we've got something like. We've got a few hundred articles on psychological safety, everything from measuring psychological safety to leadership, to geopolitics and everything else in between resources that you can take away and run with your teams, do with your teams, use as practices. There are playbooks, action packs. There's a community, an online community you can join. We run regular open, lean coffee events and meetups that you can join and sign up to for free and get get involved with. We have at 3am, at at all sorts of times during the day, all around the world, and there's there's online workshops and we work with organizations and day all around the world and there's online workshops and we work with organizations and people all over the world as well. So there's a vast range of resources you can use there and, of course, I'm always up for hearing from people. So if you email tomatslikesafetycom, I'd love to hear from folks who are doing this and practicing it in the real world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, showing up and being real humans, because we are.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the permission that none of us know everything about everything and we're not supposed to.
Speaker 3:And we never will. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we never will, and we never will we never will.
Speaker 2:But we'll know less and be able to do less if we don't experiment and allow ourselves to fail and learn from those failures.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's one of the things that I'm taking away from this conversation is reinforcement of that. That's really cool, so thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Wonderful, rich conversation. Really appreciate your time and just joining us and talking about this stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's been wonderful. I've really, really enjoyed it, like you. I could geek out about this stuff forever, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we will. Well, I know I will continue to follow. I love your newsletters. It's one of the ones that I actually read, so thank you for the good work that you're doing and again thank you for your time today, yeah we really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Thanks so much. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:On behalf of both Charles and myself, we want to say a big thank you to our producer and sound editor, chad Penner. Hilary Rideout of Inside Out Branding, who does our promotion, our amazing graphics and marketing for us, and our theme music was composed by Jonas 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.
