In this episode of Evolve: A New Era of Leadership, I am joined by Vicky Smith, a senior consultant at Working Well in the UK. We delve into the vital topics of wellness and psychological safety in the workplace, exploring what leaders can do to create environments where employees can truly thrive.
Vicky Smith, Senior Consultant at WorkingWell, is passionate about sharing her knowledge and has more than 20 years of consulting, coaching, facilitation and training experience in locations across the globe. She holds an MSc in Organisation Development and Consultancy, an MSc in Psychology and an MSc in Applied Health and Exercise. She is working through a PhD, researching psychological safety in organizations, and is also a qualified NLP trainer, psychotherapist, and executive coach.
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#PsychologicalSafety #Leadership #Wellbeing #TrustInTheWorkplace #BraveNewLeader
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carolyn: Welcome to evolve a new era of leadership. I am Carolyn Swera, your host. And today we will be speaking with Vicky Smith. She is a senior consultant at Working Well, which is an organization in the UK. She has over 20 years of consulting, coaching, facilitation, and training experience. All over the globe.
Now, she not only has this relevant experience being in organizations, she also has a series of credentials that really provides her with some incredible insight. She’s got an MSC in organization development. She’s got an MSC in psychology and an MSC in applied health and exercise, and she’s currently working through a PhD researching psychological safety in organizations.
And to , top that off, she’s also a qualified neuro linguistic processing trainer, NLP. psychotherapist and an executive coach. So I am really excited to have this conversation with Vicki. She’s just got all of this diversity to her approach. That I think is going to be really interesting.
We’re going to talk about wellness. We are going to talk about psychological safety and what can you do? What can we do as leaders to really create these workplaces that can help us thrive? Here we go.
Welcome evolve listeners. We’ve got another fantastic episode ahead for you here. And I am just delighted to welcome our guest today. Vicki Smith. Welcome Vicki.
Vicky: Thank you. It’s lovely to be invited. I really appreciate it.
carolyn: Yeah. Well, I’m really excited to dive into this topic today of leadership in our workplace. It looks like we both share a big passion for helping people really. Try to navigate through the reality of work today. And you have just a phenomenal background in organizational development, psychological safety.
You wrote a book, Brave New Leader. You’ve got NLP training, you’re a psychotherapist. The list goes on on and on. And I would love to know, Vicki, could you just tell us what drives your passion for this work? what personal experiences led you to the place you’re at now?
Vicky: Sure. I mean, I think one of the things is I really love learning. And so I feel the benefits of that learning as I’m talking to people, whether it’s leaders, whether it’s people on the ground. when you hear their stories, stories and you can offer something to them, even if it’s just something very small that lights up their face or a light bulb moment.
I think I could try that. I could do that. That could make a difference. It just becomes really gratifying. And so I think that just motivates me even more to want to learn even more and share even more and just help everyday people in their struggles in the workplace where. Perhaps they haven’t had a voice, or perhaps they just haven’t had the opportunities to learn some of the things that I’ve been very lucky to learn that might be able to help them.
So I think it’s that real sense of being able to share knowledge to give back to people and to just know that in some very, very tiny way, you might be making a difference positively for people.
carolyn: I’m sure you’re making more than just a tiny difference for people. Vicky, in terms of your background, I’ve had a fair number of people recently on the show who’ve got experience in our workplaces, very practical experience. As a psychotherapist, I’m curious what do you see happening in the workplace right now with regards to psychological safety? I know people talk about that word a lot.
I’m curious what your perspective is on what’s really happening.
Vicky: Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, psychological safety is not a new concept and it’s been around since the 70s, but it’s very much of the moment now, you know, it’s it’s the real buzz term that you hear all the time. And I think there are various different understandings of what it actually means. And this is what I’m doing my PhD on for me.
Bottom line. It’s about how do you develop trust within a workplace. There’s a lot of research done in teams and how you create psychological safety in teams. There’s not a lot done in terms of what happens to psychological safety outside of those teams. So one of the things that I was picking up in the work that I do, and I do a lot of research.
team development work. I do a lot of resilience training. I do a lot of one to one stuff. What I was finding was that within teams, you can have fantastic working relationships, you can have a huge amount of trust. And yet, as soon as people from that team start to deal with people outside of the team, the whole psychological safety bubble bursts.
And so people then Yeah, and that’s for me that was the interesting part. It’s like, why is that happening? And why are people not recognizing that? So what I’m finding, in terms of what’s happening in the psychological safety development world at the moment is it’s catching on. Great, fantastic.
It’s really important that people are able to Work in a team where they can be themselves. They can speak up. If they’ve got an idea, they can challenge things. If they don’t think it’s going to work, they can truly feel comfortable in their own skin and be themselves authentically at work without fear of recrimination or shame or ridicule, I’m finding much, much less. Is the willingness to look at what happens as soon as you open that door outside of the team and start dealing with people from senior management or your clients or other departments and then people become quite insular again, they become quite defensive and the behavior changes because there’s still, I think, a lot of fear outside of their team.
So you can have great trust within the team. You can really reduce fear massively when you’re working with your team colleagues, but , that fear comes back as soon as you break out of that team and have to deal with people outside of it, which of course we all have to do. We can’t just remain in our teams.
carolyn: you mentioned clients people in other departments senior management. Similar to you, I see definitely a behavior shift when people are around others that have titles. And the fear, shame, anxiety, it can be provoking for a lot of places.
So I know, I know that’s where your research is taking you. I’m curious, what type of interventions you use with your clients to help expand the concept outside of psych safety, just in my like one teen.
Vicky: Sure. I mean, One of the things that I think important to get to grips with is what are we actually talking about here? So trying to break down. This whole concept of what does trust look like, feel like, how do you build trust, breaking it down into something really practical, none of this is new, if you look at models of psychological safety, we’ve created our own, the five C’s of psychological safety.
One of them is communicating human to human, you know, this is not, Rocket science. This is not new, but it’s stuff that we don’t often pay attention to. We work really hard in organizations to communicate in lots of different ways. Emails, instant messenger, phone calls, text messages, and yet we don’t actually talk to people.
To the human being. We talk about work stuff and we talk deadlines and targets and KPIs, but we don’t talk to the human being. One of the very basics is learn how to talk to a person, learn how to get interested in them, learn how to read the signs of when perhaps they are struggling, when they might just need someone to say.
Look, it’s okay. You know, I get it. This is tough. It’s okay to speak up about that pressure that we’re all experiencing within the team. So what we try to do is we try to create the base level understanding. What does psychological safety actually mean? How can you develop psychological safety on a practical level?
So if we’re talking about five C’s, for example, of, psychological safety. And one of them is about confidence. How do you build confidence? How do you get people to be confident enough to speak up? Well, real easy thing is look at people’s reactions. When you do speak up, if your team members, when you speak up, are rolling their eyes, looking at each other, sideways, glances, shutting you down, for example, There goes your psychological safety.
It’s destroyed. So get the team together. Look at ways in which you’re working, which are really helping to foster psychological safety. Do more of that. Look at the behavior that really doesn’t help. And how do we create an environment where we gently, but assertively kind of, don’t accept that behavior. It’s about having some honest conversation, some candid conversation, to say what really helps is this, but what really doesn’t help is when that happens, without, blaming, without spotlighting, it’s just, this is reality, this is what’s actually happening in the moment, so some of it’s going to be good, some of it’s not going to be so good, so let’s just agree the stuff that’s not so good.
Do you what? We’re not gonna do it. And if we have a baseline, if we can measure it. Because let’s face it, everyone likes to measure stuff. ’cause we can check progress. If we can get a baseline and then agree, let’s just do a few little things differently. Further down the line, we can measure it again and see if we’re working and say, well actually.
That stuff really helped. What difference has it made in terms of how we are working as a team? If we’re working better together, then surely, as we all know, our performance should go up. It’s also creating that line of sight between, if you create that space where people feel it’s, Okay, to have these candid conversations it’s okay to call out behavior in a, an assertive but nonaggressive way, we’re going to get on better and actually that then has a positive effect on our team’s performance.
So it’s a bit of a no brainer, psychological safety improves performance.
carolyn: Yeah. Well, and I’m with you. I’m with you. It’s a no brainer. and I, I would assume that most people are with the theory of it. What reality, gets in the way? If it was as simple as telling everyone about the benefits of it we wouldn’t have jobs. Or you wouldn’t have anything to study. So like,, what are some breakthrough moments where people are able to take it from their head into their heart or into their body?
Vicky: the breakthrough moments come when people realize that we’re all under pressure and that pressure does have an impact on how we behave and how we react. So if we can look at how we are collectively responding to pressure and do it slightly differently, then we can recognize that the behavior that perhaps isn’t helpful is not personal.
It’s not personal to me. It’s just that particular team member is really struggling because maybe they’ve got pressure, not only at work, they’ve got pressure outside of work. And so, Dealing with pressure in a different way and agreeing how to do that can be really helpful. Of course, what happens in reality, and let’s be really honest, there’s a huge amount of pressure in the workplace, none more so than now.
And if I can digress slightly and kind of go back a little bit to Even before the pandemic, before COVID, people were really feeling the They were feeling the pressure and the speed at which people had to work. And it was ramping up massively. the whole mental health awareness, Arena was really starting to come into its own to say actually we need to be careful here people, we’re pushing our workers beyond their limits.
And it was great, you know, in terms of raising awareness and people starting to talk about pressure and the effects on well being. And then came the pandemic and lockdowns, and all of a sudden, it was like the pressure valve just releasing, and people had this time with no pressure, and it’s like, wow, I don’t have to commute, I can take my time to do stuff, I can learn different things, I can spend more time with the family, on my health, and so on.
And it really didn’t last very long because we soon learned how to get online and work work, work. And so what ended up happening was going from this, wow isn’t this refreshing, isn’t this energizing and interesting, this way of working to all of a sudden we’re constantly switched on.
We get up as soon as we get up, we’re on the screen, we’re not taking any breaks. We’re working later and later. We’re constantly switched on. And now. What I’m finding is instead of what I really hoped would happen and which is why I wrote the book, that Brave New Leader, what I was hoping would happen is that people having experienced the difference, knowing that we could still work, we could still get things done, but we could do it in such a way that it was actually quite refreshing and the pressure to some degree was lifted a little bit.
And I really hoped people would wake up and see that we could do it differently. And it was an opportunity to say, let’s put our principles in the center of the business rather than money. And I’m not saying it’s not important to make money. Of course it is. But we were still making money, but we were doing it differently.
So let’s change the model. Let’s just refocus and say, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Let’s put principles and people and what’s really important to them in terms of an enjoyable, healthy, happy life, as well as being really good employees at the center of the business and learn to do it differently.
But actually, what I’m now finding is that it’s gone completely the other way.
And the pressure now is even more intense than it was pre pandemic, to the point where You know, I’m having conversations with people who are saying it just doesn’t feel like the same company anymore. The pressure is so intense.
People have been hospitalized because of stress and it’s relentless.. So then you talk about psychological safety and you think, well, how have people got a chance? In all honesty, when they cannot see it. They know because the pressure is so intense on them that having any kind of conversation with their manager, who is already themselves completely stressed out because they’re just getting the pressure pushed down and down, they don’t want to be a burden to their manager.
If they try and say something, then they’re frowned upon, it’s not acceptable, I think, at the moment, to say, I need to do things differently, I can’t do all of this. And so we’re getting these real mixed messages, where organizations, HR and occupational health professionals are trying their hardest and doing a great job at trying to protect people’s health and well being, but , they’re facing this relentless pressure where it’s all about the individual.
Make the individual more resilient. It’s you, the individual that has to do something differently instead of looking at The environment that’s created, whether it’s the team psychological safety or a wider team, in terms of a division or a department or even the whole organization
is not being addressed in that way.
Because it’s speed at which we have to get the job done, get more, push it out cheaper, reduce costs by reducing people, the workload increases, and I just think this is going to be a big explosion soon where the pressure just, you know, it’s too much for people.
carolyn: It is. Yeah. I really, I think what you said there is very profound is we’re pushing it onto the individuals and I think that’s happening, I’ll say just generally. And also as individuals, I think we carry it like, Oh, why can’t I be doing a better job? I should be doing better than this. I used to be able to do it for those who’ve been in the workplace.
They might be thinking. I used to be able to do this before. Why can’t I handle it now? And then that will just drive us like more into ourselves, thus creating less psychological safety because we’re not able to connect. So it’s like this vicious cycle. It’s interesting. I heard at the beginning of our conversation.
That psychological safety isn’t just for teams and you didn’t say this explicitly, but it sort of came up as you were speaking that psychological safety between individuals or just like creating a space of safe enough can really help foster and add Into like creating an environment for a team, right?
Like we can’t just like walk into a room and expect that to be everything. How do we nurture this connection, this trust with each individual? ,
Vicky: Yeah. I mean, I agree. Absolutely. I think there are multiple layers to creating psychological safety. I think, yeah, absolutely. Individuals need to be aware of what they have to do in terms of their accountability and their role in creating psychological safety, as well as a whole team, as well as a whole organization.
So for individuals, It is about pushing yourself sometimes beyond your comfort zone to be able to have what might feel like an unsafe conversation with someone because you’re worried about how that conversation is going to go. You’re worried about the reaction. And so it’s about helping people to just take small steps, test the waters, whatever’s going on for you.
It’s not saying, okay, now you have to tell everybody everything. It’s like, choose one person. One person that you respect, just offer a little bit, see what the reaction is like. If the reaction is okay, offer a little bit more. Be clear in terms of what you’re trying to say, what you need from that relationship in terms of creating that.
it’s safe to speak to that person. So what are you listening for? What are you looking for? What reaction are you expecting? And if you’re getting something that feels favorable, then you can go a little bit further. But of course, it always takes, a minimum of two people. And so each person needs to be accountable for their role when somebody comes to them to talk to them and to not be judgmental, to not show shock or surprise and also interestingly I think not to collude because we all create stories you know we can all create stories Create mountains out of molehills.
We can all blow things out of all proportion. And actually, sometimes the role in creating psychological safety is to help ground people a little bit. It’s to say, okay, yeah, for you, it might feel that way at the moment, but actually let’s look at it slightly differently. Let’s try a different story here.
How would it be if you looked at it from this angle, or if you just focused on that little bit, instead of seeing the whole thing as a problem, let’s drill into some of the detail.
sometimes what can happen is when you have quite vocal people in a team, it can feel quite scary to then speak up or challenge that to even have a voice at all.
And so those people who know they are quite dominant in a conversation or in a team, You know, so raising the level of self awareness, they have to recognize that actually in order for other people to feel heard and valued and to have a voice, they might need to communicate slightly differently as well and to maybe sit on their hands a little bit and, encourage some of that.
Two way dialogue. So it becomes complex, but it’s not insurmountable. You know, I think it’s, it’s people recognizing that I have a role to play. I might need to learn a little bit more in terms of just being. perhaps a little bit more chameleon like in how I communicate. Because let’s face it, when we speak, we open mouth and speak, we don’t often take a step back and think, okay, who am I speaking to?
How do they communicate? What’s the best way for me to get my message across to that individual? And how can I carefully craft that message? We are under pressure. We don’t have time to do that,
carolyn: just, boom.
Vicky: but it’s worth that investment. It’s worth just a couple of minutes to sit and think, okay, what’s the best way to land this message to that particular person?
So we might have, to learn a little bit more, we might need to upskill ourselves a little bit, but it’s really worth it. And I think if everybody individually, can take on board their role in creating psychological safety. It just becomes a lot easier for the whole thing to start gelling, and then for everybody to recognize, well actually that’s not how we do things in this team.
We are respectful, we do value each other’s contribution. We do value different perspectives, just because they have a different perspective doesn’t mean I’m right and they’re wrong and vice versa. We can use that collective information and different ways of looking at things to get better outcomes.
carolyn: I’m curious about how power dynamics fits into that. And I know that there’s been some criticism about psychological safety. concepts that they don’t in, at least when they first, the research first started coming out, it didn’t reflect the reality of power dynamics.
So how would you help people understand that element of psych safety?
Vicky: , power is an interesting concept and I think there is, legitimate power in terms of hierarchy and decision making, but there’s also kind of informal power as well in terms of characters within a team and who dominates and, who actually feels powerless., in all honesty, if you truly want to create psychological safety, everybody’s ego sort of has to be stripped away.
And we all have to recognize that we’re equal human beings in this particular moment. That doesn’t mean to say that you don’t have a leader and you don’t have someone who guides and makes decisions, but it’s about when we have to do things differently, when we need that collective voice, that’s when we have to do it.
actually we’re all equal. And one of the things that I was going to say was, if you think of who does psychological safety really fantastically, it’s Pixar and Ed Catmull. And what does Ed Catmull do? He creates an environment where everyone’s ego is stripped away and they just have candid conversations as human beings to keep pushing the envelope.
It’s not about, well, I’m the boss. So what I say goes, it’s about everybody has an equal voice and at the end of that conversation, Decision making process or the end of that discussion, we’ve all had equal say, then we’ll look at right now. We’ve got all of those opinions out. What would be the best way forward?
Power, I think, has to be in certain situations within a team set aside if you truly want everybody to have a voice that is heard, that everybody feels valued. But it doesn’t mean you have no leadership and it doesn’t mean leadership by consensus either. You sign up to being in that team and that’s the leader of that team.
You need strong leadership and guidance and direction, but it’s a time for everything, .
carolyn: What does Ed do in those situations to create that? Because I’ve, seen a few leaders who don’t understand the power that they hold. So they’re not being jerks about it. But they’re not being proactive to distribute the power more equally.
So I’m curious if you know what Ed does to do that.
Vicky: Yeah, I never met him personally, but from what I read, what he does is he takes on the role of kind of going first in terms of sharing his mistakes, he’s very humble, you will say, this is what I did wrong, this is how I did it wrong, and so he will just kind of lay his cards out on the table, being the role model of it.
We all make mistakes, you know, we’re all human beings. These are the mistakes I make. And one of the things he says is to get to great, and let’s be honest, Pixar have had, what was it, probably over 17 box office hits, one after the other. Very, Very rare. Very rare in the movie industry.
And he says, to get to great, you have to go through the boring, the sappy, the mediocre. You have to keep pushing back. What does that mean? It means we, all of us push back on the ideas that we bring, but we don’t take it as a negative. We don’t take it as a personal insult on us. We take it as we are pushing to get ourselves to greatness.
It’s not a rejection of the human being is not a devaluing of the human being. It’s just keep pushing until we get the great stuff that’s in here out on the table.
So he goes first, he shares his mistakes. And I think this, you know, if you look at Amy Edmondson and her great work in terms of like fearless organization, it’s about understanding that as human beings, we are going to make mistakes.
It’s how we learn. And that’s okay. But still there are so many in that leadership position, regardless of whether they understand their power or not, that do not accept failure, that do not accept mistakes. And so, of course, the wrath then, when there is a mistake, goes to the individuals. which is a real shame because that creates fear.
carolyn: It does. Yeah. You can see how the cycle just spirals. I want to come back to Ed for a second. I’m curious and maybe we just use Ed as a persona, right? There could be lots of listeners out there who are the Ed’s in this situation and recognize the value of openly sharing that things aren’t going perfect.
And Hey, nothing great has ever been innovated. The very first time we know that. You know, if we bring in this concept of wellness and the pressure that you were talking about earlier, kind of what was going through my head is what comes first, the chicken or the egg, like, how can we be showing up and creating these situations like our ed situation or these other leaders who are able to go first, that is going to be seriously compromised if we are not showing up.
In a state of wellness or a state of presence, or if we’re not looking after ourselves, what can you share about that sort of tension that exists between our own wellness and our ability to create psychologically safe relationships?
Vicky: Yeah. One of the things that I talk a lot about in, the training work that I do is, this thing called, the emotional dip. And it’s a bit of a play on the Kubler Ross change curve where, people end up going into this dip of negative emotions, which is quite normal, you know?
So When you’re stuck in that dip for whatever reason, but you know, wellbeing isn’t great. Mental health isn’t great. You’re under a lot of pressure. Those normal negative human emotions will stay around for much, much longer and intensify. And it’s at that point that you really can’t expect as a manager or as a leader, you can’t expect people to go above and beyond without breaking.
These are the people that you’re going to fast track to, to burn out and being off sick with stress. And we’re seeing a lot more of that at the moment, unfortunately. So it’s recognizing that if we truly want the best from our people, if we want to create an environment of psychological safety, we have to accept that we might need to do some remedial work.
We might need to build some bridges. We might need to help and support people. So that they come out of that emotional negative emotional dip in a much better place and I have to say so many organizations do a fantastic job of offering that kind of tertiary level support when people are ill, they will do their utmost to help them get well again.
The problem is, and I use the analogy of the dirty fishpond, if the, if the fishpond is the culture and all the fish are the people working in that organization swimming around and the culture, the fish water, fishpond water is really dark and murky and it’s stagnant and it’s green and slimy. All of these fish are swimming around.
Some of them know where they’re going. Some of them don’t. They’re bashing into each other. They’re bumping into the side. They’re getting injuries and they’re getting sick. So we can take the fish out individually. We can put them in lovely clean isolation tanks. We can make them better over time. And then what do we do?
We put them straight back in that murky fish pond. So what’s going to happen? They’re going to get sick again very quickly. In a way, it is complex, but I think it’s about working in parallel rather than chicken or egg. It’s actually, there are multiple layers that we need to be working in parallel.
Let’s make the individuals better. Let’s train people individually and in teams to work better, to be more resilient, to create psychological safety. Let’s also look at the systemic issues within the organization that might be creating some of the pressure in the first place. One of our images on our website is this whitewater raft where you have these people in a whitewater raft boat.
They’re bobbing around on the water. Some of them look petrified. Some of them are enjoying themselves. Some of them haven’t got a clue what’s going on. And I say to people, what do you see in this image? It’s like, oh, well, you know, no one’s leading in. Yeah, there’s no direction. I said, but what else do you see?
Oh, the water’s choppy. Why is the water choppy? Who’s further upstream making that water choppy? What don’t you see? Well, we don’t see the people have already fallen in that are under the water, might be drowning. So there’s a whole complexity within an organization that creates a lack of psychological safety.
And bit by bit, if we unpick it, we can get there, but everyone has to play their part. Individuals. teams, HR and occupational health departments, leaders, people who actually drive from the top the culture of the organization. And as well, the bit that I think often gets missed are the kind of procedures and systems that are set
carolyn: I was going to
Vicky: the organization that actually really work against the natural evolution of psychological safety.
carolyn: Yeah. And that’s a fine balance too, because we want to be compliant and we want to have rigor in our systems and also have an ease of use so that they don’t sort of prevent people. Yeah. I’m really glad , you identified that last piece. It’s hard, isn’t it?
Vicky: It is hard, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable because, and I think this is the bit that maybe leaders, because the pressure they’re under, may be too scared to kind of lift that Pandora’s box. The answers that More often than not lie within, you only have to ask the people that are doing the job.
What’s the solution here? What is it you actually need? Rather than, think it’s just an insurmountable problem because it’s too big. The company’s too big or it’s going to take too long and too expensive. Actually, if you just Ask the people that are getting affected the most. They have that in here very often.
The answers, the solutions. We just haven’t created an environment where we can tap into that. Either because We haven’t thought about asking them or because maybe at the moment they’re not feeling confident enough to actually share what they think is the solution. Because maybe perhaps in the past whenever they have tried to share, It’s been shut down.
So I don’t think it’s a difficult problem to get to the solution. I think you just need to be a brave enough leader to say, actually, let’s just talk to our people and find out what they think the solution might be.
carolyn: That’s a great segue, Kaviki. I wanted to ask, about your book, Brave New Leader. Is there, I’m guessing we can find it on all major platforms to purchase. Maybe a little bit of perspective that could encourage some of our listeners to consider picking it up.
What are they going to find in this book that’s going to be really helpful for them?
Vicky: I think what they’ll find helpful is the level of practicality. So it breaks down, some of the rationales to what the problem is and why the problems exist. But then importantly, what it does is it says exactly what is psychological safety and what are the five steps that you can do to create psychological safety.
So let’s just break it down in practical terms. And it’s aimed really for everybody, whether you are a leader of a big multinational corporation or whether you are a leader of yourself, because as you said, at an individual level, we have to do our part in terms of, creating psychological safety.
It’s called brave new leader because I do think. people need to step out of their comfort zone. But there’s a section in the book that actually helps you work through how to do that, how to develop your confidence enough to push yourself into doing the right thing for you as an individual, the right thing for your team, the right thing, for your organization.
So they’re going to find Quite a few practical models in there that help people to understand what happens when the pressure is too much, what happens to your performance, what happens when you’re in that emotional dip, what happens to your well being. But importantly, they’ll find the five C’s of psychological safety and very practical things under each of those.
sees in terms of this is what you can do to actually create psychological safety. And then once you get that, it’s a real kind of journey of self confidence to help you step out of old patterns of behavior that have maybe stopped you doing what you know you really should be doing and want to do, but have maybe stopped yourself because perhaps you’re not confident enough yet, that helps you to take that brave step into doing what you know is the right thing to do. A really kind of good example that I picked up very recently of somebody who did that is in the fashion industry. Where they literally, just were one or two people brave enough to say, we want to do things differently. We want to see, you know, Sustainable clothing, we don’t want this throw away concept of clothing anymore.
And so they literally pushed the envelope to find a whole new way of creating clothes that was sustainable that had never ever been done before. Everybody poo pooed them. Everybody said it wasn’t doable, it wasn’t possible. And the whole system didn’t work in the way that was practical, and yet they kept pushing.
They believed so much in what they were trying to do that they just stepped into new territory. They’d never been there before. So it took a huge amount of courage and bravery. And guess what? It’s kinda like the biggest thing in the fashion industry at the moment, how they have re-engineered the whole structure of how to produce sustainable garments.
So there are lots of examples like that, but that’s the one I heard recently. So it’s doable and we just have to start small with ourselves, if we can make a change for us, for our teammates, that’s fantastic. And who knows if you’re a leader, you could actually make a change for a wider audience as well.
carolyn: Absolutely. Now, Vicki, one last thing before we wrap up, this time has flown by. You’ve mentioned the five C’s a few times. I think you mentioned two elements of it, communication and confidence. are those two part of the five C’s and then what are the other three?
Vicky: So we have, communicating on a human to human level, we have confidence in your ability to, understand what’s going on, to be able to look at yourself and also how you inter relate with other people. , When you do become more confident, it enables you to collaborate more effectively with people.
And collaboration isn’t just, you do this for me, I’ll do that for you. It’s that true meeting of minds where, you know, if there is a problem, if we get our heads together respectfully and value our different perspectives, we can come up with something even greater. But what that creates is that creates an emotional bond between you and those people.
And so you feel safe, you feel safe with those people, you feel that level of trust. We have changing your perspective, which is really important because very often what happens is you look at a situation from your own fixed viewpoint, Which may or may not be helpful, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong, doesn’t mean it’s right.
Wisdom comes from multiple perspectives. So if you can look at things from different perspectives, you broaden your way of thinking, which makes you more adaptable and more flexible in how you do things, because you’re able to Hold, and this is where it becomes, really interesting. If you can hold opposing perspectives together, and kind of take the best of both and move forward, rather than what normally happens, and this goes back to your power dynamics, what normally happens is, well, actually I’m the boss, so I’ll just push my perspective onto you.
And actually, , That’s not psychologically safe at all. What’s psychologically safe is how do we get the best from everybody’s perspective. So the last one is curiosity.
And what that means is instead of just shutting down other people’s ideas or views or seeing change as a negative, it’s about taking a step back and saying, well, I wonder what if, if I was to get on board or what if I was to buy into that bit, or how can I help with this? Very often, if we don’t instigate change, if it’s imposed on us, if things come from left field, we shut down, you know, we shut down the possibilities.
And what we’re saying is actually take the blinkers off. Get really curious when people behave in a certain way that is not helpful. Don’t take it personally and then just react. Get underneath that and think, well, I wonder what’s driving that behavior. I wonder what’s driving that decision. I wonder what’s driving that change.
So the more curious you can get, the better understanding you have. And that all of these five C’s, they’re all linked, as you know, to wellbeing. If we can deal with situations differently, we don’t get stuck in that negative emotional dip. And that means. We can climb out much quicker, much more effectively, and, just get on with doing stuff that we can feel pride in rather than getting bogged down in this mindset of that’s a negative, or I don’t like that, or why are you doing it that way, so getting curious is really important.
But all of these five C’s, they all link together. Yeah, they complement each other and they all work in harmony with each other. And there will be aspects within a team where you’re doing some of them fantastically. And so it’s not about you have to do everything, it’s just maybe there’s a few tweaks in one or two of these C’s.
carolyn: Yeah. And that’s such a great way to end off the conversation, Vicki, cause we’re not saying things are completely broken with how we’re interacting it’s kind of like an Olympic athlete since we’re in the year of Olympics. few milliseconds can be the difference between, a metal or not a metal.
And so I’m guessing that with those five C’s, it gives teams kind of like a framework or individuals to see where could they tweak things? And really create more connection.
Vicky: Absolutely. And, one of the things that we help to do, I might mentioned earlier, measuring psychological safety, measuring where you’re at. The reason why that’s important is because, as you said, it’s not broken. In actual fact, what you’ll find is teams are doing a lot of really great stuff that very often, is not recognized.
And so it’s an opportunity to celebrate the really good stuff and very importantly, protect the good stuff as well as okay, how can we tweak some of the stuff that’s not so great.
carolyn: Yeah. Oh, that’s such a great way to end this conversation. Thank you so much, Vicki. Where could our listeners find more of your work, your organization?
Vicky: We are working well, so you can find us at workingwell. co. uk. You can find the book Brave New Leader, on Amazon. You can email me, vicky. smith, at workingwell. co. uk. So, We’re easy to find and we’re always very, very happy to answer any questions.
carolyn: Perfect. Well, we will make sure to have those links in the show notes for folks. Now, before we close off, I ask our guests typically three questions. how ready are you for those three questions?
Vicky: Go for it, Carolyn.
carolyn: All right. So these three questions are based out of my book, Evolve, and the first one has to do with self awareness.
And, we learn from hearing other people’s stories. So I wondered if you could share with us a short story or an anecdote, something you’re comfortable sharing where your self awareness went from here to here. Hmm.
Vicky: Very first management role, I was the youngest member of the team, managing a team of people who had been there for many years, all quite a lot older than me. And of course, coming in thinking, wow, look at me being promoted to manager. I can do anything. Anything about really what I was doing made so many mistakes.
And the first time I had to fire somebody very reluctantly was a massive wake up call for me. And, I actually felt myself trembling and the guy was so sweet. He said, look, don’t worry, I know what’s coming. I can see you’re really worried about this. And it was a real kind of juxtaposition of how I normally get feedback because the normal feedback I used to get was I’m very direct and it wasn’t until somebody actually pinpointed what that really meant for me was that then I was able to do something about it and the feedback I got was actually during my NLP training and it was you have a very pointy voice. And since that moment, it’s like, I now understand what you mean, because for years I’ve been told I was really direct and quite blunt and like, kind of, I understood it conceptually, but I didn’t understand how it was landing with people. So it was the moment where someone said, you have a very pointy voice.
My self awareness went from kind of here to up here and I was able to actually, work really hard at changing my voice when giving different messages. So that with hypnotherapy training really helped to develop a range in voice because voice qualities are so important when you’re delivering a
carolyn: it really is. Yeah. Oh, wow. That’s really, thank you for sharing that Vicki. That’s really interesting. Yeah. So my second question has to do with strategies or tactics or routines that you rely on to help you find a place of presence or a place of calm amongst so much stress in our world.
Vicky: Well, that’s an interesting one. Yeah, I think I’ve always found myself to be the kind of person who doesn’t particularly get stressed as such. However, what I do notice is that there are certain times when I will become a little bit shorter with people and very, myopically focused. And so that for me, it kind of links a little bit to the self awareness.
That’s my indicator that actually I’m probably getting a bit to near the edge of stress. So what I always try and do is look at situations where that could push me to that kind of behavior with other people. And of course we all know it’s normally the people that matter most in a life, isn’t it? I look at the situations that might push me to that and my default pretty much, although I have two defaults, one of them is an internal question that I ask myself, which is what’s the worst that could happen?
So if I’m anxious about a particular meeting or something I have to do, it’s like, what’s the worst that could happen? My second go to, and it’s a very powerful tool, is mental rehearsal. So I will actually The whole video clip exercise with the association, dissociation and kind of get myself into that mental readiness, having already trained my brain how to do something successfully, created those new neurological pathways.
So yeah, those are my kind of two go tos.
carolyn: Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. That visualization. so, so Helpful. So last question, and this is my favorite this one has to do with music. I believe that music is something that makes us feel connected and when really good music when we feel that it makes us feel connected to something bigger than ourself.
So i’m curious. What is a song or genre of music that does that for you that makes you feel connected to something bigger than yourself?
Vicky: Oh, wow. I have such an eclectic range of music that I like. my initial thought is to kind of go back to my running playlist, because I hate running. I do it. I do do it. And I found that when I do run with music, I definitely go faster and I don’t stop as much.
So I have Fighter by Christina Aguilera. The Dark End of the Street by The Commitments. Take Me to the River by The Commitments. Sound of the Underground by Girls Aloud. Walking on Sunshine, Katrina and the Waves.
carolyn: Yep.
Vicky: by Pink. Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke. Car Wash by Rose Royce.
carolyn: you’ve got a whole blend of like 70s and 90s and 2000s in there.
Vicky: Yeah, and a few other bits and pieces as well. Yeah, it’s quite eclectic. I like upbeat stuff that makes me feel happy. And, yeah, so that’s pretty much me.
carolyn: Well, Vicki, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your vast insights.
I can hear and feel the passion in your voice, which by the way, it was not pointy from my perspective. It was it was just really wonderful having you on the show.
Vicky: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you, Caroline. It’s been really nice to be invited to share what I’m really passionate about. Thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed myself. Thank you.
carolyn: Oh, one of the things that I was reminded of in this conversation with Vicki, and I think it’s really important to state, is that we can very easily put all the onus on individuals. when it comes to wellbeing. And yes, we have a role to play in how we look after ourselves. And as leaders, as organizations, as people who are building systems and structures to work within, we also need to look at the role that processes and structures play on our own wellbeing.
I think when we can expand our perception of what contributes to wellbeing, it allows us to make more intentional decisions. And integrating in with that was this notion of psychological safety and we heard Vicki talk in essence that it comes down to trust and it’s going to be really hard to build trust and create psychological safety if we aren’t looking after ourselves and we’re not paying attention to the things that are causing us to not be ourselves and not be well at work.
I hope you found this. Conversation helpful for you as a leader. Perhaps it gave you pause for thought on a few things. If so, I’d love to hear, please reach out. You can reach me at hello at carolynswara. com or you can leave a comment on whatever platform that you listen to our show on. And while you’re there, we’d love it.
If you could leave a review, a rating that would really, really help us out. Thanks so much for tuning in. And Hey, if you want to learn more about me and my work, you can find it more at Carolyn Swara. com. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you on our next episode.
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