The Chief Psychology Officer

Ep73 Setting High-Performing Teams in Motion with Network Rail

• Dr Amanda Potter CPsychol • Season 4 • Episode 73

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In this episode, Mike Wright from Network Rail joins award-winning Business Psychologist Amanda Potter and co-host Caitlin Cooper to explore what makes high-performing teams thrive. We dive into Project Speed, a post-pandemic initiative that boosted efficiency and reduced costs, saving £1.5 billion! We also examine how cognitive diversity enhances problem-solving when the need to balance essential yet competing priorities is crucial to success.

Additionally, we highlight the vital role of psychological safety—creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up leads to greater innovation and stronger results. 

Discover how our work together helps to drive continuous engagement and open dialogue at Network Rail as we continue to define the factors that inhibit and enable high performance.

Join us as we unpack these key themes and the power of teamwork in driving organisational success. Listen, reflect, and subscribe!

Episodes are available here https://www.thecpo.co.uk/

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For more information about the BeTalent suite of tools and platform please contact: TheCPO@zircon-mc.co.uk

Caitlin Cooper:

Welcome to today's episode of the Chief Psychology Officer podcast. I'm Caitlin and, as always, I'm joined by Amanda Potter, Chartered Psychologist and CEO of Zircon. Today, we are thrilled to welcome another special guest on the podcast, Mike Wright from Network Rail, who will be sharing some great insight into the art of creating a high performance team environment within Network Rail. So why don't we start with you, Mike, by introducing yourself to our listeners?

Mike Wright:

Awesome. Thank you, caitlin. I'm Mike Wright, programme Director at Network Rail. I've been working here for about 15 years. My job's all about how do we deliver infrastructure projects and government investment better. So, process systems capability, systems capability. But, really importantly, how do we really enable our people, our project managers, our sponsors and everyone involved in what we do to deliver projects better?

Caitlin Cooper:

And also hello, Amanda, welcome

Amanda Potter:

Thank you, caitlin, I like going secondary now and then. Thank you.

Caitlin Cooper:

I thought I'd switch it up a bit. But, amanda, when did you first start working with Mike?

Amanda Potter:

So it's been over a year, so not long actually, relatively to the amount of work that we've done and the amount of time that we spent together over the last year. And I particularly like working with Mike because he's curious, he comes to me with ideas and suggestions, he challenges my thinking and he's very brave. Over the last year we've implemented a number of different projects across Network Rail, one in particular with his leadership team, and now we're doing a whole project around high performance, which is research-based, and it's that work that we really want to talk about today.

Caitlin Cooper:

And I'm really looking forward to diving into that with you both later. But I am curious because we are talking about high performing teams and I wanted to know the rationale behind why we're focusing on that as opposed to high performing individuals important to how we do business.

Mike Wright:

But equally, the environment those people exist in is really important as well, because teams provide the context, the structure and the culture that really enables those people to perform well. Without a high performing team around me, how do I sustain that performance, how do I keep going? And teams also bring that cognitive diversity, don't they? That blend of different perspectives and experiences and ways of of thinking which is really important for us at Network Rail when we're solving often really complex and challenging problems. If I contextualize that really into Network Rail project environments, that cognitive diversity, that team aspect, is really important because success can't rely on an individual. Really often we're bringing together quite diverse people, quite diverse thoughts and priorities, and we need to join those together to get the value in what we're doing.

Mike Wright:

On a major project, we'll have the government focused on macroeconomic issues, we've got sponsors concerned about value for money, delivery teams thinking about building an asset, a new bridge engineering teams focused on safety, so on and so forth. It's a bit like the layers of an onion they're all interconnected and dependent on one another, but each layer has its own focus. For the project to succeed, they all need to align, they all need to balance, and that's why the team view is important for us. How do those people come together with quite often competing and different priorities? How do they bring that together? How do they work together? How do they perform? Lots of moving parts, Absolutely.

Amanda Potter:

Mike, would you mind just telling the audience about Project Speed, because it's something that we've been talking about within this high performance arena. But I think it'd be really good to give that context of the ambition of Network Rail.

Mike Wright:

Absolutely so. Project Speed was really the catalyst for the work we're doing now. During Covid the railways were empty. The government were investing significant amounts of money into Network Rail to keep the infrastructure running, to keep trains operable and ready for when people would be back out in the world. We had a great opportunity through the Conservative government at the time.

Mike Wright:

Boris Johnson was committed to the Build Back Better strategy, the Conservatives' vision for how you rebuild the economy after COVID. But that came with a really big challenge and that challenge is what we called speed. The challenge from the Office of the Prime Minister was to deliver our projects in half the time and half the cost. We have to do things better value for half the cost. We have to do things better value for the taxpayer and we have to do them faster. So off the back of that, we launched what we call Project Speed, which is really about getting under the skin of what drives our industry, challenging legislation, challenging process, challenging governance and critically setting our people up so they challenge ways of working that don't deliver value for money, that they consistently strive to deliver the best possible outcomes.

Amanda Potter:

And that's where we come in, to help challenge the ways of working, which is very cool. But, mike, what sort of numbers are we talking about here? What sort of numbers have you already managed to save through Project Speed?

Mike Wright:

So we monitor this really closely. We have to because that money is efficiency that goes back into reinvesting in other projects. In the last three years of our five-year control period so that takes us up to April this year we saved in the region of £1.5 billion. £1,500 million was taken out of our projects enabling reinvestment in the railways or other government priorities.

Amanda Potter:

That's just amazing numbers, isn't it?

Mike Wright:

It's huge and that's part of our challenge. There's so many zeros on the numbers we deal with. You lose that personal connection with them.

Amanda Potter:

And that's why it's great that, even though you're talking about such massive numbers, that you're prepared to invest in identifying the ways in which people can challenge each other more effectively in order to create those efficiencies. But one of the things that I remember from conducting the interviews as part of the research is the relentlessness of the work that you do. Because your ambition is so big and because the drive is so strong within Network Rail to achieve that ambition, it creates an environment of relentlessness.

Mike Wright:

And I think relentless is absolutely the best word for that. As many organisations will know, when you're looking for efficiencies, one of the first things you look at is how do you put a lean organisation in place. So we've got an organisation that is designed to deliver projects how we have delivered projects for a very long time. How do you create that capacity to challenge, how do you create that capacity to change and how do you take people away from the immediate priority of today to do something that's going to deliver a better outcome in the future, whether that be a month, 12 months or indeed years down the line?

Caitlin Cooper:

And Amanda, you mentioned a moment ago about the fact that we did some interviews. I wondered if you could talk to us or talk through the work we have been doing and a bit more specifically with Mike and his team from our perspective.

Amanda Potter:

So I'm sure many people know that Zircon build blueprints, so we usually build capability models or leadership frameworks potential models, however you want to call them that are really helping to articulate what we need from individuals in order to drive success, given the aspirations and ambition of the organization. Well, this one's quite different because actually this time we're looking at high-performing teams. So what we've been doing is working with existing incumbent high-performing teams that have been faced with significant difficulty and overcome those challenges in a successful way. And that could have been an innovative way. It could be facing up to risk, it could be doing something slightly different than the standard, and so one approach has been that we've been interviewing individuals from those high-performing teams who have overcome adversity.

Amanda Potter:

Another is that we've been taking an outside-in view. We've been looking at the high-performance research, which isn't an obvious for us, and also looking at teams and organizations that we're also working with outside of Network Rail to see what they're saying about their best performing teams. And finally, what we're doing at the moment, and literally we've been on a roadshow around the UK working with an additional set of team leaders and incumbents for engineers and project managers who are from those teams, and to get their insights. We've been running workshops and the idea is all of this data from the outside, in the inside out, top down and potentially bottom up, is going to come together into a big content analysis to understand what are the inhibitors and enablers of performance for those teams and some of the things that are coming out are the inhibitors and enablers of performance for those teams, and some of the things that are coming out are the things you would expect and I'm sure we're going to come into that in this conversation today.

Caitlin Cooper:

And Mike, from your perspective, is there anything you want to add to that in terms of the driving factor?

Mike Wright:

Absolutely.

Mike Wright:

We could have gone out, picked a textbook up, done a Google search on what drives high performing teams and we could have implemented loads of different things on that basis.

Mike Wright:

But we really wanted to get under the DNA of what drives our people in this place in this context, because although the research that's out there is really good, it's often generalized because they've looked at multiple different industries, large stakeholder groups across multiple countries maybe, but actually there are things that make each of our organizations unique. So for us, actually, two of the biggest challenges we've got and two of the biggest places where projects have to come together and challenge each other is on the safety criticality of what we do. If we get it wrong, we put human life at risk, but we've also got to do that cost efficiently. So what, within that environment, really makes us deeper? So for us, it's about digging deeper into make what makes our teams perform better in these specific conditions, not just about innovation or collaboration. It's about taking the sometimes theoretical and saying what does this mean to us? How do we apply it? How do we make it meaningful? How do we make it add value to our people?

Amanda Potter:

It's a really good point, actually, because when we work with clients, they'll all say they aim to be unique. And then I mentioned it on a podcast I've just recorded with Jig, who's a chief talent officer, the fact that clients will come to us saying that we need to embrace how unique we are. And then they buy an off-the-shelf potential model or talent model. I'm like well, you're not going to be a unique if you do that, or you buy a standardised model from a consulting firm. So I really like the fact that, whilst you want this to be research led and research driven and we are happy for us to validate it through the published models you really want it to be unique to Network Rail 100%.

Mike Wright:

It's important to recognise, I think, the available models, the existing research out there. It's not that that's bad research and bad models they're all really good but it's kind of like getting a cookbook where you've just got the ingredients. This additional research we're doing is helping us understand how we apply those ingredients, which ones are more important to us and which ones are less, so it really helps add colour to what we're doing, I think.

Amanda Potter:

And I think, given the environment that you just talked about, with the safety and the language that people were talking about in the workshops last week, was very much about the complexity which we do. We hear about a lot the safety, but also the constraints that you have as well, the huge number of constraints that you have because of the regulations and the requirements and the standards that you have to meet. So it can actually make it quite challenging and quite stressful, I understand, for people.

Mike Wright:

Yeah, I think so. It is a challenging industry. We are an industry that's split across multiple organisations. So, although Network Rail are often the ones who make front page of the newspaper when we have a cost overrun, when something goes wrong on a project, there are many, many layers government bodies, government departments, ministers. There are many, many layers government bodies, government departments, ministers, supply chain partners, regulatory bodies that all have to come together to deliver a project. Well, each of those similar to what I was talking about, the different roles in the team each one have very different priorities as to defining what good looks like, and for a project manager who's got to deliver their project on time, on cost and to quality, that can be a really challenging environment for working.

Caitlin Cooper:

And I think the approach you took in terms of you know, I conducted some of those, well, a lot of those interviews as well, and what was really nice as well, my observation was that you wanted to hear from the people that were in those high performing teams and hear their voice, because ultimately, they lived through it, and so sharing their experience is going to give you such great insight to the next steps and how to spread that wider across the organization 100%, you know.

Mike Wright:

I mean you can go on google scholar, you can go into an academic journal, you can read some fantastic research, but to hear it from an individual, to hear it from someone's lived experience, where you don't just get words on a page but they help you understand the emotional journey maybe they went on what brought them joy, what energized them, versus actually what put them in a place where actually maybe they felt at risk, that really adds color to what we're doing and that's why it's so important, I think, to do that type of research, to listen to your people and really understand where they are and what works for them.

Caitlin Cooper:

So, amanda, do you want to talk us through the steps?

Amanda Potter:

Well, I wonder. I suppose I've taken us through the steps already, because they're quite simple, because it's very much about agreeing the ultimate objective, clarifying and understanding the aspirations of the organisation and of this work. It's also then agreeing. So where's the data going to come from? We talked about this again in the previous podcast with Jig about the importance of big data. We were saying big data isn't necessarily about volume, it's about richness of data. So that's what we really wanted to do is get really rich data with the work that we're doing with Network Rails, so that when we build hypotheses and when we start to have intuitions about what's actually happening and what actually would potentially work for the future is based on evidence and what actually would potentially work for the future is based on evidence. It's based on a culmination of data, starting to tell a story rather than, oh, I think the world's talking about psych safety, let's focus on psych safety, but actually let's look at what the evidence is saying. And so we've done that through as I've mentioned already research through the interviews, through these workshops and through this content analysis.

Amanda Potter:

And what's great is, mike has invited everybody who's got involved in the interviews and the workshops to continue with the process in staying involved.

Amanda Potter:

So once we finish running them, what we're going to do is we'll build the draft blueprint and then we're going to present that draft blueprint to the hundred or so people who have been at those workshops and in the interviews to validate the ideas with them. So it's partly to check the language and to see if it resonates, but also to say, once we've got it designed, how do we deploy it? Because the feedback that we've got from the people in the workshops is they said that it's they're so happy and so chuffed that they're being invited to that next step. Because they get invited to workshops like this a lot to gather information but they don't know what happens with it and they never get to see the final product. And we actually want them to audit and validate that final product with us and also help us understand how to deploy it further so that it gets embedded into the organization. And, to be fair, that was your idea, mike, not mine yeah, I think that's a really important step.

Mike Wright:

If I look back at a piece of work we did with another organisation on how we really empower individuals and empower teams to act differently to challenge, we spent a lot of time and effort building up what we thought the key drivers were. It wasn't research led, which means it didn't have that really strong foundation. Importantly, the organisation we work with didn't go out and ask our people how do we embed this, how do we make change happen? Because of this, because it's not an instruction manual, a blueprint, and actually what we ended up with last time was a one-day course, which I can summarise in one sentence the business wants you to feel empowered and act differently. Therefore, please go and do it.

Mike Wright:

By bringing people in, we can actually really understand the levers that will help drive change. Some of that will be things individuals can do themselves. So what are the tools we need to give individuals and project teams to help make local changes? Some of them will be more systemic. So, for example, if we identify certain values or behaviours, how do we make that part of our recruitment process? And indeed, things like our performance management regime. All of these from the micro to the macro. There's lots of different levers we can pull. It's definitely not go on a training course and become high performing overnight, and that's the value our people can add. They really help us understand what's going to work for them in their context.

Amanda Potter:

So they were very much talking in the workshops about some of the inhibitors. They were the questions we were asking. We're asking about the inhibitors, the enablers. We're talking about habits. We were also doing the content analysis piece around what would you expect to see behaviorally within a team and what are the roles that people need to play within a team? So we're asking all the typical questions you would expect around high performing teams.

Amanda Potter:

But one of the things that was coming out in that research was actually some of the blockers that are stopping them from succeeding, and recruitment was one of them. They were saying that, if I may, mike, they were saying that some of the questions are too simplistic at the moment for recruitment and therefore, because people are so practiced in competency-based interviews, you can tell that their answers are very rehearsed. So it's really hard to differentiate between people and to understand if they're actually going to fit in the team and provide diversity and challenge and insight or bring something new to the team that they need. So they end up assessing on the basis of skills and knowledge and experience rather than on the basis of the future capability and fit and strengths and so on, which we try to do.

Mike Wright:

Absolutely and darling. This is a real challenge for many organisations, for publicly funded bodies like ours. I think it takes it to another level of challenge as well. We have to be very clear and transparent in our recruitment processes, where a unionised industry like many others will be as well. So we have to be very clear. We have to be very direct on our recruitment processes. It's important to make sure we're inclusive.

Mike Wright:

When you translate that, though, into an organization of 40 000 people, you have to scale that appropriately, and it's not that our approach to recruitment is bad. We've got a good set of consistent, competency-based interview questions, and we look for behaviors in them. What we haven't got is the in-depth research, like we're doing now, to say actually, these are the questions you need to be asking for these types of roles, for these types of environments, to drive these types of behaviours and outcomes from it, and I think that's where this research will really enrich. It will enable us to have a good process that's transparent and works for all the right reasons, but it'll provide the specificity that we really need to get the right outcomes from it.

Caitlin Cooper:

I'm loving hearing this because I unfortunately wasn't at the workshop, so it's nice to hear kind of the conversations that you've been having. So I wonder, is there anything else that you're able to share at this point in terms of, I guess, some of the, the blockers or you know, the more positives around what you spoke about in terms of highing teams?

Mike Wright:

I think the biggest one that's come out for me and I've not got the blueprint in front of me at the moment, so I'm working for me but the biggest one that's come out for me and I think it's one of our biggest challenges to overcome is nearly everyone who's attended the workshop has recognised the critical importance of building relationships, I think more so than ever. Since COVID, a lot of our relationships have actually become transactional. We engage with people when we need something, not because we want to get to know the person and build a more sustainable relationship with them. Really great that people have recognised that's important. They've linked that to okay, well, how do we get there? Well, we get there.

Mike Wright:

It's water, cooler conversations, it's co-location in offices, it's spending time together. Spending time together, sometimes outside of the immediate work context, as well as how you get to know someone that is offset with. But I don't want to come into the office, or when I do, I want it to be on my terms. I want it to be on a Monday and a Wednesday, because that's what works for me with travel arrangements and childcare arrangements, so on and so forth, and for me that's really great that we've got those insights and it's also really great that they've recognised the challenge. The problem would be how do we overcome that challenge? How do we still build really solid relationships with each other whilst dealing with a much more hybrid workforce? For me, that was the key thing that looked at so far.

Amanda Potter:

It really did. I think relationships was definitely one People really feeling the need to be more personally connected absolutely thing that, looked at so far, it really did. I think relationships was definitely one people really feeling the need personally connect, to be more personally connected absolutely. Yet there is that drawback, that pull to have the work-life balance. I completely heard that. That's a really key point.

Amanda Potter:

The other debate which was a really interesting one for me was the word disruption.

Amanda Potter:

When caitlin and I built the draft model from the first stage, from the interviews and from the external research, one of the words that I used for one of the categories was the word disruption and the point of it being around challenging the status quo, being bold, being much more open to free thinking what if?

Amanda Potter:

Thinking in order to have that very open debate about possibilities. And of course, I didn't even think this is just so silly about the words rail and disruption come up together in people's conversation quite a lot and in the news, and so there was a very strong reaction from a number of people that the word disruption would certainly not work in a positive context within Network Rail, would certainly not work in the positive context within Network Rail. But then there were a few people saying actually no, I disagree. We really do need to disrupt what we're doing now in order to be different, and actually maybe we should embrace disruption and realise the positive impact it could have. Unfortunately, that was a very small percentage, but it was very interesting. Some words really had a really negative connotation for some.

Mike Wright:

It's really interesting how we receive that and hear those and interpret those words, isn't it? So our chief executive, andrew Haynes, is, I mean, phenomenally engaged with the work we're doing on speed. It's really important to him. He's very supportive of it. He doesn't use the word disruption. He asks us to be revolting. I remember the first time I'm sat in a meeting and I've heard him ask me to be revolting, I think do I shower less this week or something? But it's not. It's to revolt, it's to do differently. So disruption does have connotations and we will often make the front page of a newspaper when we've caused actual train disruption or there's issues on the network. But to be disruptive, to revolt, to challenge, to really do things differently and make people feel uncomfortable, I think that's so important. So disruption might not be the right word, but the intent behind it is absolutely right.

Amanda Potter:

Yeah, and it's great because people were embracing the meaning behind it, but of course they didn't like the word and another one that was coming up I mean I'm not trying to preempt because we're still running workshops at the moment. We've got Kristian and Emily and Abby out there at the moment running a fantastic workshop is the one around being decisive and decision making, and so that, for me, is I'm delighted that has come up and is getting replicated through the data that we're gathering, because we know from the harvard research and from our research using our decision questionnaire, that teams or individuals that are decisive or feel, most importantly, feel empowered to make decisions, are more likely to create high performance environments. And there's a link there with risk and I wouldn't necessarily put network rail and word risk together either Because of the safety yes, because of safety, and so on.

Mike Wright:

It's a really difficult one for us to overcome that. So we are naturally very risk averse. We touched on earlier. If things go wrong, we make front pages of newspapers. Actually, that has a massive impact on network rail's reputation and future funding. In a much more real way, when things go wrong, people's lives are in danger and sadly, people do die on the railways when things go wrong.

Mike Wright:

So over years we've built a way of working, has been very prescriptive and that's important. One of the clearest ways or easiest ways to manage risk is to recognize it, describe a process to mitigate it and avoid it and make sure everyone follows it. But in an environment that's being challenged to also deliver value for money and value to the taxpayer. Importantly, sometimes you have to make decisions and that's not about doing things which aren't as safe I want to be really clear on that but it is about making proportionate decisions. So, for example, I was involved in a project recently where, if you'd followed all the standards and controls to deliver the new train station, the new train station would be economically non-viable to deliver. No one would invest in it, you wouldn't get it. So you have to look at what's appropriate. Now that requires an individual and the team to make conscious decisions, to challenge the prescribed ways of working, to think differently and to look at how they can mitigate that risk in a very different way.

Mike Wright:

Something that really struck me when I was rolling out some of the process changes that we did about 18 months two years ago now, and I did training for about 6,000 people across the business and industry a lot of training and briefing events and one of our very senior sponsors someone I've known for a very long time, who I have a massive amount of respect for their knowledge and experience said to me this isn't what I'm paid for. I've spent my career being told follow the rules, dot the i's, cross the t's, do it this way. Now you're asking me not to disregard those, but you're taking away the guardrails. You're asking me to challenge them. You're asking me to put my professional judgment on the line, to take accountability personally for a decision, and that's really hard for people because it's easy to fall back and blame a process or a piece of governance.

Mike Wright:

I followed the rules. It wasn't my fault. It's very different to. I looked at the situation, I used mine and my team's judgment. I made a decision and it worked fantastic. Well done, amanda, or it didn't work. Amanda, amanda, what's the consequence? Yeah, and it's a real challenging change for people.

Amanda Potter:

I think, given the concept of cognitive dissonance that we talk about, when you have two competing thoughts or two conflicting ideas or approaches, what happens is our brain will tell us to stick with the tried tested, and so it's very difficult for us to veer away from what we know and what we feel comfortable and safe doing.

Amanda Potter:

And in an organization like Network Rail, where that governance and those guardrails have been so important for so long and they still important for our safety yet, we're trying to get people to challenge, to take accountability, to feel empowered not to take risk necessarily I don't think that's necessarily the right word but to look at the problem in a different way and see if there's a new way of solving it.

Amanda Potter:

One of the things that I talked about in the workshops that I've run for you so far is the concept of functional stupidity, and you can see people just absolutely acknowledging the issue of functional stupidity. And you can see people just absolutely acknowledging the issue of functional stupidity because I know, having spoken to a few people, they were saying they have to do three weeks worth of paper filling and form filling in order to do one week's worth of work, because there's so much procedural work to do within the organization. So how can we create greater simplicity? Which of those processes are absolutely critical and do drive performance? Which of those are legacy, historical processes that no longer are needed, but nobody is prepared to acknowledge the need to change it? So that's what we're trying to do with you, isn't it?

Mike Wright:

to help to create even more efficiencies and all that work that we've already been doing in speed, alongside the work we're doing on people and high performing teams.

Mike Wright:

It needs to go hand in hand with the people stuff as well, because reality is I look at a piece of governance I changed a few years ago now. It was very prescriptive, very linear, there wasn't any. Do I turn this way or do I turn that way? It was a bit like if you used to maybe travel from London to Birmingham on your AA route map that was a book in your car. You'd plot a journey and that was your journey, whereas actually the new process now is a bit more like Apple Maps, where you go into it and it'll give you three different routes to driving to Birmingham and if you click walking, it'll offer you a 16 hour route.

Mike Wright:

You can walk there, probably three of them. What that means is now you've got to make the decision which one's right for you in our context, which one's right for your project. Again, we need that cognitive diversity that high performing teams bring. We need that level of challenge that good psychological safety brings to make sure we are picking the right route to deliver our projects, because you can't fall back on. This is the one way to do it and there's no other way anymore, absolutely.

Amanda Potter:

So it's been a great project and one of the things that we're trying to do is kind of bridge the science and the psychology and the neuroscience with the industry expertise and knowledge that you and your team and each of these leaders and engineers have of.

Amanda Potter:

We're actually doing the job in the role and the aspiration because we haven't got there yet, to be fair is to build a model that will be really helpful and can help to inform the whole of that talent lifecycle. Now I think this, for me, has so much potential because we're talking at the team level. We've done a lot of research with our team questionnaires. You know, mike, around high performing teams in a VUCA or BANI world, you know what do we need from individuals needed to drive success, and all of the research that we have identified is the fact that everybody needs to play a different role in those teams, so it needs to have agility. So our challenge will be when we're applying this model in the future is how do we get the standardization, yet agility, in order to account for both the base level of what we need within a team, but yet we need to dial it up or dial it down, depending on the challenges at that point, so I'm excited about it and I think technology is going to help.

Mike Wright:

I should mention that yeah, I think so too. That point you made about not just applying the blueprint in a one size fits all approach. Actually, how do we still make sure we use that agile, that kind of links back to where we started the question why look at teams and not high performing individuals? I think natural progression is we need to look at those individuals. So we've looked at a diverse group of key roles that make up our project teams. I think when we then dip another layer deeper and look at each of those individually, we can start understanding what balance each of those can best play in delivering the blueprint as a whole.

Amanda Potter:

Absolutely so. No, it's been brilliant and I mean we're very lucky, mike, because this is just one of the projects that we've been working on.

Amanda Potter:

Of course, we've been working with your leadership team as well, and I have to do a bit of a shout-out for Dulcy, who came on the podcast twice and also came and supported it, network Rail, and helped to run a three-day event with myself and Antonia and yourself, mike and your team, and what I loved about that piece of work kind of doing a bit of a sidestep now is the extent to which you help to really embrace, bringing in new ideas and new things, for example, trying new things like free writing so that we can access the default mode network, and we did the walk of no shame under the psychological safety part and talking about areas in which we might have failed, and we just used lots and lots of different new exercises and tried them out with each of your colleagues and team members in a really fun and engaging few days. So I just wanted to say thank you, mike, thanks for the opportunities and thanks for all of the great days we've had together.

Mike Wright:

Pleasure and reciprocated as well. I mean, you've added so much value to us. But I think that point you make about trying new things is worth touching on a second as well, because how many of us have come into work and done the same thing in the same way 10, 20, 100 times and wondered why the outcome isn't different? Like when I watched my kids when they were younger trying to do a puzzle and they will put the wrong piece in the hole, take it out and put it straight back in, take it out and put it in and there comes a point where they try a different puzzle piece and it helps them progress. If we keep doing things the same way, if we don't try new things, we're never going to improve. Some of it won't work, and that's okay. We need to embrace that. Failure is okay and we learn from it.

Mike Wright:

And the other side of what I really love about trying new things is how it can help promote creativity. One of our big challenges in challenging existing ways of working is actually that propensity to innovate, that need to be creative. For me it comes relatively naturally. I like to think I look at things with a childlike wonder. I want to poke, prod and play, but for some people that's really challenging. So trying new things, trying new exercises, trying new approaches helps us think differently, helps us gain new experiences, and that's so important to helping people look at the day job differently and make different decisions based on a wider set of experiences.

Amanda Potter:

It's an interesting one, isn't it? Because free writing is the one I mentioned. That was one which was a new exercise and we first tried it with your team. We were trialling the instructions and Antonia, who was with me, didn't like it at all interestingly, not comfortable with the free writing process and two of your team Mike, if you remember, were fidgeting, moving up out the room, coming back in again, sitting down, talking, and we had to quietly encourage them just to do the free writing exercise and they just need to write.

Amanda Potter:

And after we ran the three days away and went back and looked at each of the segments because there were eight segments in total over the three days and asked people what did they love the most? It was amazing because most people loved that exercise and found it the most powerful in creating insight for them and helping them understand how they felt about the problem that we posed. Yet there were a couple who just didn't get it. They were shocked that other people had got so much from it, and so the point here is really that each individual within a team enjoy different aspects and approach topics and subjects in different ways, and it just helps to illuminate even further that actually we need to not go in with a high performing team approach in a single way, but actually make sure that we consider that every single person is different and has different needs, and so that's my agenda for next year working with you to build that model. So thank you.

Mike Wright:

And we still look forward to working on it together. Yeah amazing.

Caitlin Cooper:

One thing my observation from this conversation today that we've been having is you mentioned earlier on around personal connection, or people feeling like they needed to be personally connected. That was one of the things coming out of the workshops. But also you're talking a lot about trying new things and challenging, and to me that all comes under the concept of psychological safety. So I just wanted to ask you both your reflections on psychological safety and how you feel that's come across through the research you've been doing.

Mike Wright:

I think, in simple terms, psychological safety is absolutely critical and has to be one of the foundational elements of whatever model we come up with. If teams aren't in an environment where they feel safe to contribute, to learn, to challenge, then arguably we're not working as a team anyway. I think one of my concerns with psychological safety is, so often I get involved in conversations about it and people see it as a once and done type and thing. I've delivered it. I think what's really important for people to think about is actually it's a journey we have to take people on. It's not an overnight fix. It's not a training course. It starts with feeling included, doesn't it? How do I get welcomed into a team and made to feel a valued member of it? Building on that, how do I learn it's that feeling safe to ask questions, to make those small mistakes and then to contribute where I feel comfortable sharing my thoughts.

Mike Wright:

I think what's sad? Sometimes a lot of teams stop there and I kind of see why because that's the easy place to get to, isn't it? I feel welcomed, I'm sharing, I'm asking questions. We can do all of that by being polite and nice and friendly and getting on really quite superficially, can't we. One of the things Gartner talks about quite a lot in this is actually to get to that next step, which is true psychological safety is that courageous exchange. How do you move from just being polite and friendly, getting rid of that superficial niceness, to really getting to an environment where people are willing to ask the hard questions, to challenge ideas, to focus on solving the problem rather than just protecting themselves or others egos? It's really not easy and it can feel quite uncomfortable, but it's absolutely necessary if we want to get the best out of our teams. It's really important. I think all the work we're doing here and yeah, my takeaway from that is it's got to be a journey and we've got to be prepared to work at it and make a difference.

Caitlin Cooper:

I think, especially as when we talk about psychological safety, it's a climate right, so it does change when you have new people joining teams, people leaving, that's ultimately going to shift the dynamics. So actually you almost need to constantly be reassessing the psychological safety of the team in order to keep going.

Mike Wright:

And 100% worth it as well, because that's where magic happens, isn't it? The other things we've spoken about recruiting people with the right values and behaviours, having a team that's got really good cognitive diversity we only get the value out of those things when we've got that level of psychological safety. Where we've got that level of psychological safety where we can challenge. That's where the magic happens. That's where high performing teams, I think, really move from being a good team to an exceptional team it's interesting from being at the workshops.

Amanda Potter:

I agree psychological safety is one of the areas that is absolutely front and center in our research, which is great, and I also agree that radical candour so the courageous conversations, but with compassion is absolutely front and centre also as part of it. Yet when I asked everybody who are at the workshops and I've asked the interviewees have you ever heard of the term psychological safety? Many of the Network Rail colleagues hadn't heard of the term because they're so focused on safety safety rather than psych safety.

Amanda Potter:

But once they hear about it, there's such an aha moment and there's such a realization of the importance that they get it. As soon as they know what it is, they prioritize it.

Caitlin Cooper:

But I would just like to say thank you so much for sharing everything that you have shared, because obviously I was involved in a lot of the starting points of the research. It's been really fascinating for me to hear how it's developing. So I'm very interested to continue this conversation and thank you, Mike, as well, for being here today.

Mike Wright:

Thank you very much. It's been wonderful to be on, it's wonderful to share the work we're doing and hopefully it resonates with some of the people listening as well.

Caitlin Cooper:

And thank you, Amanda. Any final thoughts that either of you want to share with our listeners?

Amanda Potter:

For me, I think it's the fact that this process is bringing the best of psychology, the best of neuroscience. We're using some really old methodologies like rep grids and strategy-based interviews and workshops and card sorts. We're using a whole variety of approaches, kind of standard psychological approaches. We're actually sharing neuroscience in the workshops about why these things are important as well, and we're bringing in concepts like functional stupidity and so on. So what's really good about it is we're bringing some really kind of core psychology into it. Yet we're really challenging our thinking and Network Rail's thinking about the future. So I'm really excited about that approach.

Mike Wright:

You're right. I think it's been a fantastic journey. I look forward to whatever we do next in looking at how we deploy the research, how we make it practical. I think the one key thing for me having spent 15 years nearly at Network Rail, looking at everything as we've touched on, from legislation to governance to systems is we can make huge changes across how we do business in so many different areas.

Mike Wright:

In all of those areas I've just mentioned, the most important one that consistently drives the best results is when we invest in understanding our people and helping them to perform better. Sadly, I think it's also the one that is the most difficult and challenging to get the real value from. A lot of organisations, us included, could invest more time and effort into understanding our people, undertaking work like we've done, really listening to their voice, and that would be my big encouragement. When we've got these big challenges, it's our people that can help us overcome them. So spend the time, listen to your people, add colour to the challenge, add their voice to the mix, and that's really what will drive business success.

Amanda Potter:

Amazing.

Caitlin Cooper:

Thank you, mike, and I think what this means is that we'll just have to do another episode next year so we can find out how things have been going. So looking forward to that.

Mike Wright:

What I'd like to do next year is it should be a video recorded, one around a fireplace, and it's going to be called fireside chats with dr amanda potter love.

Caitlin Cooper:

That is this part of the uh, the new ways of doing things absolutely.

Mike Wright:

It can be streamed as a podcast, but people can also watch it and really come into our environment love that idea.

Amanda Potter:

My house might be ready by then. That sounds like a very good plan.

Caitlin Cooper:

Thank you, I'll have to have my hair done though if you like listening to us talk all things psychology, neuroscience and business then do please hit the follow button wherever you're listening so you don't miss out on future episodes such as the one we have just mentioned. So thank you very much for listening thank you, caitlin, and thank you everybody.

Amanda Potter:

I hope you have a wonderful and successful day.

People on this episode

Contributor

Dr Amanda Potter

Host
Contributor

Tim Hepworth

Host
Contributor

Caitlin Cooper

Co-host