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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
Conversation before the Conversation with Tom Geraghty
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Get a glimpse into our conversation with Tom as we share exclusive snippets from before the actual episode recording. Hear firsthand how Tom’s unique career path has shaped his focus on psychological safety and his passion for creating thriving workplace environments. We dive into the heart of what makes failure a valuable teacher and why understanding what is "safe to fail" is an essential discussion for leaders. This episode isn’t just about work—it's about reshaping how you approach challenges in every aspect of life. Whether you're leading a team or navigating personal growth, Tom's insights are bound to inspire a transformative shift in mindset.
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.
Hello, lovely listeners, this is Ila from Trust on Purpose. You have often heard Charles and I refer to the conversation before the conversation, and so we are going to release a snippet from our conversation before the conversation with Tom Garrity from psychsafetycom. We really appreciated and dove right into a juicy conversation with him and, rather than keep that all to ourselves, we wanted to share some of this with you. The first episode part one of the episode with Tom Garrity was released on September 30th and part two will be released on the 14th of October. We hope you enjoy both of those episodes and this snippet into the behind the scenes. We so appreciate your continued support, your listening, your thoughts, your sharing your communication and we really hope that you enjoy this.
Speaker 1:My name is Tom Tom Geraghty. I'm the founder of a website called psychsafetycom. By training by like original training I was an ecologist, so my first degree was in ecology ecology and I went into ecological research after that and my first job title was experimentalist, which is still by a long way, by coolest job title I've ever had, so I've kind of kept it. I identify as an experimentalist all the way through my career now and um and you can see on my t-shirt, everything is an experiment. Yeah, that's one of my catchphrases, I think, at psychosafetycom.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I started off as an ecologist and then moved into technology and through that started managing teams, teams of software engineers, devops teams, started scaling up and became CIO and CTO of various firms. And it was that journey. It was that journey through ecology and technology and managing teams and people and understanding the wider system of things that I became passionate about creating the conditions in which people can thrive. How do we create conditions in which people can do their best work? And that was what led me to psychological safety and what I do now.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, so fascinating and I love the title. Experimentalist, yeah yeah. If we have that, lens like just everything is an experiment, and I know you're probably familiar with Amy Edmondson's new book.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And that she's got a brilliant like seven minute video on this concept of intentional failing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And she's got. There's a clip about oh shoot, what's her name? Julia Child, Back when she had the TV show, you know in the 50s or 60s, and she flopped an omelet on live tv and it's like it's just an omelet, like yeah why do we get so fussed about like, oh my gosh, everything has to be perfect, or right, or we've got to have it figured out?
Speaker 1:yeah, and this is exactly it right, because because psychological safety in this and this understanding that we are imperfect human beings who are not going to be able to deliver and execute perfectly every single time, like it's fundamentally part of the same dynamic, the same phenomenon, and this recognition is sort of the explicit conversation about running experiments, about how work and life. It should be primarily about the learning as an outcome, rather than delivering the thing that it can completely change the way we approach work and life and the world. Right we, instead of being focused on execution because of course, that's kind of what we're taught a lot of the time through schools and things like that isn't it instead focusing on what? What can we learn from this? It completely changes our perspective.
Speaker 3:And yet, like I think about, actually, I think I have a call with them today. So three members of a senior executive team. I've been working with their organization for a couple of years. They had a recent CEO change, so the VP has moved into the CEO role and the CEO has moved to chair of the board and they're terrified of making mistakes, honestly terrified of making mistakes, because what could happen? But what could happen?
Speaker 1:Exactly right, exactly, and often so in our work, we find that often that comes because there hasn't been a discussion about what is safe to fail. There are some things in life that aren't safe to fail. We ideally don't, we don't want anything to fail, really, but there are some things that have a much higher cost of failure right, and there are some things that have a much higher cost of failure right, and there are some things that have a very low cost of failure. But often in the world of work, in any organization, we don't have that conversation because there's so many leaders you can imagine the sort of leader who is like this mustn't fail and it's just, it's a marketing campaign, yeah, it's all right, it's not like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and yet again I think our more traditional cultures, or if we look at the history of leadership and right that do as I say, not as I do, and you know, nose up, ass down, get your work done and no news is good news to the.
Speaker 3:You know, this is why I'm so interested about how you approach your feedback. Workshop is, like, you know, the days of the shit sandwich, where I'm going to say something insincere, someety, then I'm basically going to punch you in the gut and then I'm going to say something also insincere to make it like you should like this yeah, to kind of make it, make it the acceptable face of feedback.
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I think it's interesting that if and amy reflects, I think in the right Wrong her new book how there are industries and there are domains that are very, very high cost of failure, incredibly high cost of failure, you know space.
Speaker 3:Aviation, right Aviation, right Aviation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if we're sending spaceships, rockets to the moon and stuff, the cost of failure is huge, it's in the millions each time and potentially the cost of failure is huge, it's in the millions each time and and potentially the cost of human lives. And yet they have more discussions about failure and they're more willing to embrace the cost and learning from failure in those organizations than in many organizations where you think this is just a, an iphone app. Of course this can fail, it doesn't matter. Yes, it would be nice if it was a wild success, and it's interesting to see that dichotomy where sometimes the higher the price of failure, the more willing we are to address the learning from failure.
Speaker 2:I wonder, though, if there's something about people's inability I don't know if inability is the right word but that the notion of learning has been lost. People aren't thinking about it as oh, I can learn from this, I can learn from a failure. It's all about simply avoiding the failure, and maybe there's an underlying assumption that, learning we're all at the top of our game. We can't learn anything new anyway, so let's not fail.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And and also I think I mean you mentioned aviation a minute ago and aviation has gone through this very painful journey of failure through much of the 20th century and has learned through painful lessons that when things go wrong and things do go wrong we have to learn from it. We have to put in practices, techniques, behaviors, cultures and beliefs that enable us to learn from this failure and prevent it or mitigate it happening in the future. And some of these less safety critical, less high cost of failure industries haven't had to go through those painful lessons and so they haven't been learned.
Speaker 3:That's so fat, like I'm thinking. Okay, so another client that I work with is in higher education. There are painfully very apparent things that are absolutely not working. Yeah, and this is interesting because it's just coming into my mind as a higher ed institution. Well, of course we're very smart, we know what we're doing. Is there's zero tolerance? Right, because there's this persona or this facade about. We know how to do everything. We're a higher ed institution.
Speaker 3:Of course we're not going to fail, but what would be possible if they gave themselves permission and actually intentionally designed a failure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's interesting you bring in higher ed and academia and stuff, because we work a fair bit with a number of higher educational academic institutions and almost entirely there are some very difficult, problematic, risk-averse and unpsychologically safe cultures in those organizations and it's somewhat embedded within the academic domain Because we defend our PhDs, we defend stuff, and it's very adversarial and if there's a weakness then we exploit it and we attack other people's research and we try to pick holes in everything, and so of course everything becomes very defensive and we don't want to expose our mistakes or flaws or vulnerabilities because inherently we feel they'll be exploited, and so that doesn't lead to that sort of quite progressive, generative sort of culture. I want to understand it.
Speaker 2:It's, as you say, Tom, much more about defending it and not acknowledging even to myself that there are any flaws? Possible flaws, whatever it is that.
Speaker 1:I'm doing. We talk about the different kinds of trust, don't we? And I think in these sorts of environments, in these sorts of domains, there is high cognitive trust. We trust generally that people are very, very competent. Well, they do. They're smart people, like you just said, child, they've got phds. So they're smart people, they know what they're doing. But we don't necessarily trust that other people have our best interests at heart. We can't trust that they won't use something against us if they find out a flaw or vulnerability or weakness. So that's where these different kinds of trusts diverge.
Speaker 3:Yes exactly we're going to have such a good conversation. I love this. I love this. Well, so, speaking of the conversation, Should we shift into like let's actually start.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now that we know that Tom is an experimentalist, which is fantastic, that's a great place to start.
Speaker 3:Is that whole conversation about experimenting and failing and learning and all that kind of Well, and I think, talking about the intersection and how trust and psychological safety, how they intersect, the differences, the importances it has been on our radar to talk about probably since the very beginning.
Speaker 2:One of the questions that I get most often from people is help me understand the difference between trust and psychological safety, so this is perfect.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think I'm speaking on behalf of you, charles, and please chime in if you have a different or a plus. Also, we're really looking for and I think you came across our path. I don't believe in coincidence in in a way that we can really talk about this. That's not. I don't want to. This doesn't sound right overly academic, like let's talk about this like humans yeah, yeah, let's let's make this practical, relatable, everyday stuff that we all bump into, and I think you're the perfect one to have this conversation with.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, we're really excited that you're here I'm, I'm really excited to be here and I also I really like that approach because we psych safetycom and and I guess I've always employed myself we certainly identify and pride ourselves on the fact that we are practitioners. I appreciate and I very much and I love getting geeky and nerdy about theory and research and diving into that, but fundamentally we're practitioners, we do this work, we do the work, we're in organizations, we're doing this with people, with human beings, and so that's the kind of approach we take and, yeah, fundamentally as practitioners of this stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah, boots on the ground, let's bump into the same stuff that everyone else does because we're all human.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. Yeah, yeah. I'm really looking forward to diving into this episode. Tom, thank you so much for what you've shared so far and, listeners, please tune in as we continue our conversation with Tom Garrity. Thanks so much. 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.
