The Leader Factor

In this week's episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior discuss The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety in a way you might not expect. Using social exchange theory, they'll do a deeper dive to add some color to The 4 Stages model and give you additional tools and frames to use when you look at psychological safety.

What is social exchange theory? (01:47) According to social exchange theory, people are motivated to engage in social exchanges that they perceive as beneficial. Tim and Junior discuss four key concepts related to social exchange theory: Costs, benefits, reciprocity, and power. 

What is psychological safety? (13:03) Psychological safety is a culture of rewarded vulnerability and lies at the heart of healthy social exchange. In order for a culture to be truly psychologically safe, the environment must provide something and then the participant must provide something. Tim and Junior explain that each stage within The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety has a social exchange. 

The social exchange for Stage One: Inclusion Safety (16:39) In stage one, we are given inclusion in exchange for lack of harm. Tim and Junior explain how this works and what the difference is between worth and worthiness.

The social exchange for Stage Two: Learner Safety (23:30) In stage two, we are given encouragement to learn in exchange for engagement in the learning process. Tim and Junior explain how this works and who has the first-mover obligation.

The social exchange for Stage Three: Contributor Safety (30:02) In stage three, we are given autonomy with guidance in exchange for results. Tim and Junior explain how this works and the ratio between autonomy and accountability.

The social exchange for Stage Four: Challenger Safety (38:15) In stage four, we are given air cover in exchange for candor. Tim and Junior explain how this works and how to protect our people in their most vulnerable state. 

Today's lesson:
Adversity is an Opportunity for Beauty

Key Points:
There’s tremendous incentive to make things as easy as possible but adversity is a constant. "The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen." -Elisabeth Kubler Ross

Today's key action:
Take five minutes and ask yourself, name 3 people you consider to be beautiful people. Not in looks but in character. Why those three names? What characterizes their experience? Have they had easy lives?

Psychological safety has been found to be the number one variable in team performance, and in recent episodes we've discussed the most important variable for psychological safety was the leader of the team. As a manager, as a leader of people, you either lead the way or you get in the way. Much of what dictates whether you're leading the way or getting in the way is the way in which you integrate or don't integrate psychological safety into your work.

In this episode of Culture by Design, Tim and Junior discuss exactly how to incorporate psychological safety as a manager, and will introduce you to some tools that'll help you along the way.

What makes a manager good or bad? Effective or ineffective? (02:56) Our ability to manage and to lead depends on how well we interact with others. McKinsey has found that only 15% of managers create a psychologically safe work environment. This is the biggest and most chronic deficiency in all of leadership.

Most managers have not been trained to lead. Why? (12:48) Leadership as an investment activity isn’t profitable short-term. Leading teams and businesses requires much more than technical competence, it requires cultural competence, at the heart of which lies psychological safety.

How do you implement psychological safety on your team? (27:47) When sharing the concept of psychological safety with your team you need to define the term, set clear expectations, enforce those expectations, live those expectations yourself, and reward vulnerability.

Important Links:
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/leadership/five-fifty-is-it-safe
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothyclark/2021/06/21/what-psychological-safety-is-not/?sh=72511fc66452
The Ladder of Vulnerability

Today's lesson:
Proximity Prevents Hostility

Key Points:
"There’s a lot of hatred, prejudice, discrimination, and contention between and among people who don’t really even know each other. Humans tend to fear difference, especially at a distance." -James Baldwin 1963 “Many of our society's greatest problems are created by people who don’t feel seen and heard.” -David Brooks “Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction” --Alain de Botton 

Today's key action:
Here it is: Spend time in the same physical space as someone with different bumper stickers than you and make a concerted effort to understand their perspective by asking questions.

Today Tim and Junior will be discussing coaching and accountability. These are two of the most important tactical levers a leader has and they always go together. If we do these things well, we’ll be able to effectively transfer two things to our people: 1) Critical thinking and 2) Ownership. In this conversation, Tim and Junior will reference the coaching and accountability matrix created by Dr. Clark which we have included below.

(01:52) Coaching and accountability are connected. "You can't really separate them. They don't come apart. If you think about what coaching is, coaching is really about a cycle of delegation and then holding someone accountable through the process and then coming back and reporting. It's about that ongoing journey. So coaching cannot be separated from accountability."

(09:41) The pattern of our communication will dictate the quality of our coaching. What is your ask to tell ratio? "What's your pattern of communication? Are you telling people what to do all the time? Are you asking questions? What is your ratio?

(17:55) What are the three levels of accountability and how do they play into our coaching conversations? What level of accountability do the highest performers operate at? When we are coaching, can we help others move up to higher levels of accountability?

(28:12) Introducing the coaching and accountability matrix. This diagram serves as a powerful diagnostic tool for leaders, coaches, and managers. Whatever the position, stewards can look at the people for whom they have responsibility and assess their mode of performance based on the two dimensions: coaching and accountability.

(39:09) Where do you fit on the coaching and accountability matrix? What level of accountability do you operate at? Use this matrix not only in your coaching situations but as a measure of your own performance.

Important Links
The Coaching and Accountability Matrix

Today's lesson:
Urgency is a Catalyst, Seldom A Sustainer

Key Points:
Urgency is good, but only in doses. If we rely consistently on urgency, what do we get? Stress, poor decision-making, and decreased creativity. Urgency has a short shelf-life, it relies heavily on emotion and that emotion dissipates, so in the long run you should rely on vision and discipline to keep you going over a long period of time.

Today's key action:
Here it is: Keep your sustainability/urgency ratio higher than 3:1. For every 1 week that’s absolutely crazy, you need 3 that aren’t. For every piece of messaging you give to your team about pushing harder, send 3 that are about pace, intention, and sustainability.

In today's episode Tim and Junior define culture and explain the three levels at which it lives. They explain the most important level of culture: the micro-culture & the single most important variable for influencing psychological safety on a team. Today's conversations includes a peek into some of our survey data that’s brand new coming out of LeaderFactor’s Psychological Safety Survey Tools.

(02:06) What is culture? In short, culture is the way we interact. Culture is in and around us. Fish have water and humans have culture.

(04:26) How does culture form? Tim and Junior discuss the three levels of culture. 1) A pattern of thought or behavior in an individual is a habit. 2) A pattern of thought or behavior in an individual is a habit. 3) A collection of norms in an organization is a culture.

(08:21) What is a sub-culture or micro-culture? A sub-culture is a smaller, distinct group within a larger society that shares unique beliefs, values, practices, norms, and behaviors that set them apart from the dominant or mainstream culture. These subcultures can form based on various factors, such as shared interests, hobbies, profession, ethnicity, religion, generation, or geographical location. In an organization there are many micro-cultures.

(15:13) What does the data say? Team assignment is by far a more powerful variable in understanding variants, in understanding the nature of the culture and the nature of the experience that you'll have.

(25:05) Team leaders have the single biggest influence on culture formation. Leaders are the cultural bottleneck for positive the experiences of their team members. The leader has the single biggest influence on the micro-culture of the team. This is more important than any single demographic variable.

(32:58) How do we build better leaders through cultural accountability? "We have these, these KPIs, we have these numbers. And what is that? It's almost all going to be technical. Having that layer of cultural accountability becomes very important, which is why it's a big reason we measure psychological safety, we have quantifiable evidence of how we're doing in cultural accountability."

(38:49) Culture by design or by default?  "If you're gonna try and go affect the opinion, the prevailing norms at the top of an organization, you better come with some data, and we've seen this over and over again. We won't go to the top of an institution and attempt to do this without some data, it's important that you can back up what you're saying."

(45:13) Cultural accountability can help you in your planning. "We're starting to see this more and more in organizations where they are incorporating psychological safety as a selection criterion for promotion to management"

Important Links
The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety™ Survey

Today's lesson:
Mistakes Are Not the Exception, They Are the Expectation

Key Points:
Do we want more mistakes, or fewer mistakes? We want the right kind of mistakes. We need to distinguish between an operating environment and a test or experimental environment. It’s the difference between practice and the game. Each time we make a mistake, we learn about a cause and effect relationship. We learn what causes what. We learn what doesn’t work. That’s experimentation, that’s  discovery, that’s exploration, that’s problem solving. We are expected to fail and learn when we experiment and practice. We can't be afraid to do so.

Today's key action:
Share your next mistake.

What happens when you don't have psychological safety, and how does it affect your bottom line? In this episode of the Culture by Design podcast, Tim and Junior share some of the research behind the need for psychological safety at work. You can't fully understand these costs and not walk away with a renewed conviction to foster an environment of psychological safety. Our suggestion? Take this data to your teams and start the conversation around how psychological safety impacts you and your organization.

Seven questions to assess your personal impact on psychological safety (01:56). Tim and Junior open the episode with several self-reflection questions. When asked in a survey environment, 60% of respondents said that at least one of these things had happened to them during the prior 24 hours.

How cultures are formed (10:12). The way that we either interact, either healthily or pathologically, makes a difference. Any time humans interact, cultures are created, which means that cultures are constantly created because we're constantly interacting. This means that cultural quality, like interaction, runs along a spectrum from pathology to health.

Consequences of punished vulnerability (17:15). Junior shares some stats from Christine Porath's work on the costs of workplace incivility.

Cost 1: Bleeding out your best talent (19:47). An environment that fosters psychological safety is very quickly becoming a requirement for top performers. These employees know what kind of environment they need to do their best work. They won't tolerate unsafe environments where
they can't contribute meaningfully, they can't make things better, and they can't challenge the status quo.

Cost 2: Failure to innovate (24:52). Companies with a strong culture of psychological safety are 4.5 times more likely to be innovative than companies with weak cultures. When employees feel safe to take risks and share ideas, they're more likely to come up with new and innovative solutions.

Cost 3: Hostile work environment (30:31). Cultures of punished vulnerability can very quickly turn hostile, and there are very significant liabilities and exposure that we incur as organizations that come with hostile work environments.

Cost 4: Low-velocity decision-making (39:39). Low psychological safety makes the necessary discussion for analysis and decision-making shallow and slow. But having it allows you to do the most thorough analysis and assessment of risk.

Cost 5: Learned helplessness (44:50). A lack of psychological safety can induce conformity, passivity, and learned helplessness which lowers
the bar of performance.

Rewarding vulnerability and investing in its benefits (47:57). Tim and Junior explain the LIVE model (look, identify, validate, encourage), a tool to help individuals actively reward acts of vulnerability in their workplace.

Mentioned Links:
Christine Porath | Workplace Incivility
Psychological Safety Behavioral Guide
The 4 Stages Culture Diagnostic

Today's lesson:
Leaders Get Paid for Judgment

Key Points:
Judgment is the correct application of your expertise but just because you’re an expert doesn’t mean you have good judgment. Quality judgment is a skill that must be developed. Not everyone is born with it. We can think about the decision making process the same way we think about physical production. If the quality of your raw materials and your inputs is poor, then your outputs will be poor.

Today's key action:
Identify an area of your professional life that you feel would benefit from some deliberate, aggressive, self-directed learning. And then book a 20 minute slot on your calendar within the next two days to do some intentional learning.