The Chief Psychology Officer

Ep83 Psychological Safety Revisited

• Dr Amanda Potter CPsychol • Season 4 • Episode 83

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Psychological Safety isn't merely a workplace buzzword—it's the foundation for innovation, authentic collaboration, and organizational success. In this compelling revisit to one of our most downloaded episodes, Dr. Amanda Potter and Psychologist Caitlin Cooper explore how our understanding of psychological safety has evolved dramatically since 2020.

We dive deep into what psychological safety truly is, the sense of security to learn, contribute, take risks and challenge without fear of embarrassment or punishment and importantly, what it isn't. Through years of rigorous research, we've developed a comprehensive model identifying ten distinct aspects of psychological safety, using non-judgmental language that resonates with organisations worldwide.

Perhaps most surprising is our discovery that unsafe environments aren't typically created by poor leaders, but often by the most committed, hardworking individuals whose relentless drive unintentionally stifles open communication. We explore the fascinating neuroscience behind safety and resilience, revealing how our brain chemistry directly influences team dynamics and performance.

The conversation takes us through remarkable success stories across diverse sectors from luxury brands to financial institutions where psychological safety initiatives have transformed team functioning across cultural and geographical boundaries. We also discuss the limitations of standard engagement surveys in capturing true psychological safety and preview our exciting work with Professor Adrian Furnham on developing a more accessible "pulse check" tool.

Whether you're a leader looking to build a more innovative team or someone seeking to contribute more authentically at work, this episode offers practical insights on creating environments where everyone feels secure enough to bring their best thinking forward. Remember, Psychological Safety isn't about culture, it's about climate, and it starts with each of us and the habits we cultivate daily.

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Caitlin Cooper:

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Chief Psychology Officer podcast. I'm Caitlin Cooper, senior Consultant at Zircon B Talent, and I'm here today with Dr Amanda Potter, ceo of Zircon, and today we're going to be discussing our favourite topic psychological safety. So, amanda, I know we had an episode on this topic quite a while ago actually, when we first launched back in 2022. It's actually one of our most downloaded episodes, I believe. So when I saw this recording come into my diary, I was a little bit surprised and a bit curious actually to know what the conversation today is going to be about. So why, from your side, did you think it'd be good to revisit it?

Dr Amanda Potter:

Well, I agree. It's also my favourite topic to talk about with clients and with anyone who will have that conversation with me, and the thinking that we've done and the research that we've done in the last three years has progressed so much that I thought it'd be a really good idea just to go back and revisit. It was Antonia, our colleague, who asked me to consider re-recording this episode so that we can bring all of the latest research and all the latest thinking to the fore. So here we are.

Caitlin Cooper:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and, as I said, I'm excited to talk about it now and basically go, I guess, a bit of a trip down memory lane. But I think, before we dive into that, because we can't assume that everyone listening right now has listened to episode two, they may have just stumbled across the podcast but also might not necessarily know what psychological safety even is. So would you mind just explaining what it is.

Dr Amanda Potter:

So, if we take our definition because we've been working on this for a while it's all about the experience of the environment. So when we feel psychologically safe, we feel that we are secure to learn to contribute, to take risks, to challenge norms, and we can do this without any fear fear of embarrassment, fear of judgment or fear of punishment. So it's very much a belief or it's an experience or a feeling of the environment that you're in and it's about the impact that feeling has on our sense of safety.

Caitlin Cooper:

So when we're also talking to our clients, I often hear you talking about what it's not, so would you mind going into?

Dr Amanda Potter:

that what it's not. It's not about complacency, so it's not feeling so comfortable that we can just sit on our laurels. Nor is it about being nice, so it's not a nice characteristic to feel safe, and it most definitely isn't personality. And, interestingly, a piece of research we've just conducted with Professor Adrian Furnham we actually looked at the relationship between psychological safety and intelligence in order to understand whether there is any relationship, and actually there was no relationship at all between the two, which is what we wanted to find discriminant validity. So psychological safety is not an intelligence.

Caitlin Cooper:

So you mentioned that the thinking has grown, which doesn't surprise me, but how exactly has it evolved since we were first talking about it back in 2022?

Dr Amanda Potter:

For many years now, we've been talking about psychological safety in the language of admitting mistakes, being supportive, being non-judgmental, expressing ideas openly. But actually one of the things that we wanted to do is to build a lexicon of language that clients could really connect with, but really build language which was non-judgmental. So what we've done is, through our research, is we have identified and statistically identified 10 aspects of psychological safety that are descriptive and independent of one another, that really articulate what psychological safety is, and they, too, have two ends of that continuum. So, on the one hand, for example, you might have being consensus driven, which is low psychological safety, and on the other, you might have speak up and share ideas, which refers to high levels of psychological safety.

Caitlin Cooper:

How have our clients from your perspective? How have they responded to the model?

Dr Amanda Potter:

Do you know what?

Dr Amanda Potter:

That's a really brilliant question because it's the language of the model that they've responded to the most and the non-judgmental language of the model.

Dr Amanda Potter:

That's been really great. So we've got so many client stories and case studies now, which is all about the user acceptance and the team acceptance of the model of psychological safety, because the language of psychological safety in those two words together is a bit of a barrier and we have resistance from some organizations in even having the conversation around it. They often start with resilience instead and we build into psychological safety. But once they understand the 10 scales and they understand the language of them and realize that even the language of the lower end of the scale feels like it's nonjudgmental and very much about leaders, managers, individuals having a positive intention and wanting to do the right thing but actually having a negative impact on environment and feeling, actually what we get is a greater level of acceptance and tolerance for the conversation around psychological safety. So for me that's the coolest thing, I think, is that the model we've created almost opens the door for greater conversation rather than creating a barrier.

Caitlin Cooper:

And you know what, as you were speaking, those two things that are coming to my mind. First thing was I remember when we first started having these conversations, people did have that immediate negative reaction, even at the word psychological pinned with the safety part. They they really didn't like the idea of thinking they're being interrogated almost, which is definitely not the experience that we have now. And the other thing as well is I think people quite like the idea that we're not necessarily saying that you need to be you know top, top psychological safety, because the reality is that when you've got different people joining teams, leaving teams and the fact that it's a climate is it is going to fluctuate, so it's not putting this unrealistic expectation that you need to be getting to you know top scores around being personally connected. Obviously we want to be getting people on that journey, but it's okay if you are on the more negative side.

Dr Amanda Potter:

That's so interesting, isn't it? Because the questionnaire for those of you who aren't yet trained on BeTalent and if you wanted to get trained it's actually a standardized tool and we compare you against a global population, very global population, because it's now in multiple languages You're compared on a standard 10 scale, so it's a normal distribution curve and the population you're compared against is in the thousands. And what's really interesting is a very small percentage will get very high scores of nine and 10. And, again, very small percentage will get scores of one or two at either ends of that continuum, because it's a standardized score and what we find is that there is an expectation within teams that high is good.

Dr Amanda Potter:

And, yes, we do want to create an environment where people feel safe and speak up and challenge and ask questions, but actually the reality is every team that we work with is fundamentally unique and different to each other. They have a very different experience of environment and, to your point, caitlin, as new team members join, as team members leave, that environment fluctuates and it's about the clarity of what could they do, what actions could they take, what habits could they embed in order to put themselves in the best position to feel the safest that they possibly can, and each team is fundamentally different, so the solution for each team is also very different.

Caitlin Cooper:

So what has stood out to you over the last couple of years that surprised you the most about psychological safety, whether that's some of the conversations you've maybe had with some of our clients. Obviously, we talked a lot about the model.

Dr Amanda Potter:

I think the one thing that really stood out was that realization and that was a while ago now that it's not necessarily bad leaders who create unsafe places. Actually, it's some of the hardest working, relentless, committed, driving leaders that create unsafe environments. That, for me, was the massive realisation, because I wondered if it was actually the incompetent or the lazy or the disingenuous who might create unsafe places and I'm sure they would. But we rarely come across those types of individuals or come across the really committed, hard working, prepared to sacrifice their personal life for work that creates an environment. That actually means that you will more like to see that.

Caitlin Cooper:

Deference to leadership, consistency, effects, all those sorts of things so do you say it's almost in some way thinking about strengths approach, having too much of a good thing. You know, people are overly passionate, overly committed and drive kind of those relentless expectations and the intention is good, but too much of a good thing 100% also be a barrier most definitely.

Dr Amanda Potter:

You know I definitely have overused strengths. I overplay them when I'm feeling low on resilience, when I'm depleted. I can really feel myself going towards those positions when I'm tired and when I've worked too hard and therefore I create an environment that's very much being influenced by my driving of those characteristics. So I can absolutely see it in myself and I can see it in the teams and with the leaders that I work with too. As many people listen to the pod know, we conducted a study and we found a positive relationship between resilience and psychological safety. We also found a positive relationship between belief and resilience. So low imposter syndrome equals high resilience. So, in other words, if we come into work resilient, with belief, positive affect, talking positively about what can be achieved in a positive, aspirational way, we're going to create the right environment for success. But if we come in depleted, tired, imposter moments, negative language, then we're going to undermine that environment and it's going to have a really negative impact.

Caitlin Cooper:

I actually now you've mentioned resilience.

Caitlin Cooper:

I think that's probably one of my favourite things about psychological safety as well is the link between the two and also how you you know when we're talking about psychological safety with individuals and workshops and coaching, whatever the scenario may be is when we dive into the neuroscience.

Caitlin Cooper:

I know we're not intentionally talking about the neuroscience now, but that's the thing I found really interesting. So it's not just conversations at work I'm having where we're talking about you know the brain and how the prefrontal cortex comes into play when we're stressed and how that impacts on psychological safety. But I think the way that we've looked at it from an evolutionary perspective and I find myself chatting to friends on the sofa or even my mum trying to explain how your stress response might cause you to act in a certain way, and then you know that might cause you to show up in a certain way so I think the way that we've managed to kind of connect all the dots has managed to really bring meaning to why it's important. And yeah, it's great that I can have conversations at work but also at home about this topic. So that's a personal reflection for me as well.

Dr Amanda Potter:

Yeah, it's definitely helped me as a human, both personally and professionally.

Dr Amanda Potter:

I think all of this learning that we've done on psychological safety, on resilience and on the neuroscience and funnily enough, I was with Coventry Building Society and Lucy they're a newly formed exec since Coventry Building Society acquired the Co-operative Bank.

Dr Amanda Potter:

We were talking yesterday, we did a resilience and psychological safety refresher and we did a team build and we were talking a lot about the neuroscience and one of the things I was chatting about is slowing down the amygdala response, so the fight or flight response during stress and the activation and the release of those neurotransmitters, and then slowing down that gap between the activation and the release and then the feeling and then the action and behavior, so that we pause and we stop and think before we act. So we acknowledge how we're feeling, we acknowledge how we're experiencing the release of those neurotransmitters whether it's impatience, irritability, anger, hostility, whatever it might be and then actually making a choice about what are we going to do as a result. Interestingly, despite all of the challenges they've been facing within Coventry, they're incredibly resilient and as a team, they've been really working on building and improving their psychological safety Not that it was low, but they are really coming together as a team incredibly well, despite the challenges that they've had, as you would have in the major acquisition, and that's because they're curious.

Caitlin Cooper:

They're really curious about learning, they're curious about're curious about understanding, and it's the neuroscience, once again, that has the greatest impact yeah, I think it's because it's taking something complex which it is but then breaking it down into really small, simple things that anyone can do to help reduce their stress, gain some clarity about a situation before letting it kind of impact.

Caitlin Cooper:

You know, I was even on a coaching course yesterday and in that conversation we would started going down that route of our stress response and then how that impacts. You know how we are as a coach, but even as a leader who's trying to, you know, implement a coaching approach to their leadership, because obviously we know that that's a key thing to be a successful leader. So it's, yeah, I feel like it's always popping up in conversation. So you mentioned earlier that actually, you know, we've had quite a large population of people that have now completed psychological safety and you know we've both worked with a range of our clients and it's being rolled out globally across some of the organizations. With that, obviously there's nuances, there's things we've had to consider. I imagine it's touching different cultures. You know we've got it in different languages.

Dr Amanda Potter:

So what have you learned from that side of the journey? Consistency is absolutely key. That's the first thing making sure that when we translate into Korean or simplified Chinese or Japanese or French which we're doing and now and moving into other languages I know.

Caitlin Cooper:

Amazing, as you're saying that's very cool.

Dr Amanda Potter:

we've got to make sure there's consistency, so that's really having really rigorous methods for our translation processes, which is really important. But the other thing is around that language point that we were talking about before we language and avoidant of others. So we really need to make sure that all of the language we use within the questionnaire and the reports is tolerable or acceptable at both ends of the scale.

Caitlin Cooper:

Sorry, to put you on the spot, but do you have an example of that sort of language that?

Dr Amanda Potter:

we've seen. It's interesting because we were talking about it in the Personality vs Strengths podcast with Stuart Dessen, which has, of course, been already recorded and released. But it's, for example, in our scales we have, on the positive end, we have appreciate each other. On the negative end, we have relentless expectations. Now, some people may see relentless expectations as being a good thing. Again, another one is trust each other. So on the top end of the scale, or positive end of the scale, we have trust each other. On the other end, we have cautious to trust, and so we're not saying that they're mistrusting, we're saying they're cautious. So some people may think that being cautious to trust again is a good thing. So we try to use language that people may not make judgments about.

Caitlin Cooper:

It's really funny.

Caitlin Cooper:

You're saying that because I found, in the conversations or the workshops that I've been part of, the one that people seem to be quite surprised about is the scale that we have professionally focused on one end and we've got personally connected on the other, personally connected being the more psychologically safe side.

Caitlin Cooper:

I think people often think professionally focused I'm at work, I'm meant to be professional, that's part of the whole point. But actually what we're saying is, yes, there's a degree to which you need to be professional and show up, but at the same time, if you're turning up to meetings and you're getting straight down to business, you're not taking the time to do the niceties, ask how someone is and get to know them a bit, then someone else can interpret that as quite cold and you're really missing an opportunity to create that personal connection, which we also know. What we've learned throughout the last couple of years that personal connection is one of the three foundational elements of psychological safety, because without building personal connection, you lose the ability to build trust, and we know that we need trust in order to get on with people and to work more collaboratively.

Dr Amanda Potter:

Such a good point. I think there's two points in there. There's one, just a reminder that the three foundational elements of psych safety from our research are personal connection, trust and purpose. And the second point you're not wrong that we still get a reaction to that language of professionally focused, and I was just talking about evaluative bias. Actually, of all the 10 scales, that's probably the one there is a bit of evaluative bias and it requires us to be really clear, to explain the language. We're not encouraging people to not be professional. Of course we need to be professional, but it's when we take a business first and business only approach, which is what we mean by it, where we therefore forget to be personally connected. So that's a great point and we are constantly evolving and evaluating our language and have been doing for a long time. But we also need to make sure that when we've selected the language that we're going to use with the questionnaire, that we explain why, and that's what we end up doing with that scale.

Caitlin Cooper:

So, reflecting on our customers and our clients and some of the conversations that we've had, one thing I've noticed is that a lot of the work we've been doing recently seems to be starting with you know their engagement data from their engagement surveys that they're sending out and then coming to us and saying you know, can we use the model to delve a bit deeper and, you know, increase the scores here. So I just wanted to hear I thought it'd be nice for you to maybe share some stories around that that you've experienced.

Dr Amanda Potter:

I totally will. The point around looking at engagement data is something we should definitely talk about in this pod, because one of the things I notice when talking to clients is when we talk about the challenges the team are facing it might be a team that is struggling to be productive or they're not gelling They'll say, well, I don't think it's psychological safety, because I've checked our engagement data and everything's fine. We're getting a really high score. We're above the benchmark that we've set. So we'll often go in with resilience as a way of helping to understand how people are feeling. So the balance of positive and negative affect. And very quickly throughout those conversations we'll start to glean that actually there's some potential risks around psychological safety. It might be that they're not challenging one another, they're not speaking up, they're not asking questions or they're deferring to leadership. So I then start to question that engagement percentage on psych safety, on psych safety. So I'll go back to them and say well, I know you were clear in these initial conversations that psych safety is not the agenda for us to be talking about because of your overall engagement data. Let's look at how you got to that conclusion and we realized that actually in that engagement survey, only one or two at the most questions were actually asked about psych safety, and the questions are so generic are? They are things like, do you feel psychologically safe working in your team? And most people say yes, they do. But when you actually go into the detail of what psychological safety is and trying to explore further, then what you see is quite a different response. So for me, what we found through our case study, research and our data now is there is a big mismatch between the generic engagement data and measures of psychological safety Do you feel safe, yes or no and our questionnaire, which gives much more detail across the 10 scales and helps people to understand what psychological safety is and is not.

Dr Amanda Potter:

And that leads me just to another point, which is a client, Sam Theobald, who's the CHRO at Next15. When they ran a psych safety session within the organisation and she trained her senior HR colleagues, one of the things she came to me and said afterwards very much to this point, she said until we started working with you, I didn't completely understand what psychological safety was and what it is not. She said now I get it and now I understand it. I can now see it, and I can see when it's not present in a team and it's much more apparent to me, Whereas in the past I used to have this assumption about what it is, and most people think about it in terms of making mistakes and speaking up and sharing, and that's the problem with engagement data. A very long answer to your question, because it's a brilliant question.

Caitlin Cooper:

It makes a lot of sense, though, but I do think that organizations are maybe it's just because we're talking about it a lot more, but I hope now that organizations are tending to have a little bit of a better understanding around what it is. What would you recommend, then, based off that?

Dr Amanda Potter:

Well, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that people rely on engagement data measures of psychological safety, because they're inflated. That's the first thing. So organizations who are finding that the team effectiveness is not where they need it to be, that the conversations aren't as open, or if there's conflict or distrust in a team, yet the engagement data is saying it's fine and the psych safety results are at the level they would expect, then there's something else that's going on. So I wouldn't overly rely on that type of data. I would want to gather more. Of course I'm going to say we should use a tool like ours. I mean there are other tools in psych safety. There's not many, luckily for us that are robust and valid and we're one of the few that have gone all the way using the BPS verification criteria and we're just about to submit it to the BPS for verification. So I would suggest using a psychometric style questionnaire to really understand psychological safety. But the point that I think is really interesting is that organizations are using those few questions in the engagement data because they want a snapshot. In fact, mike Wright from Network Rail came to us and said he's got 57,000 people. He wants to use our psych safety questionnaire across all of them. But he wants more of a snapshot and our questionnaire is about 90 questions. It takes 15 minutes to answer. He said I can't ask 57,000 people to complete your questionnaire four times a year. It's just, it's not going to happen. So he's come to us and said could we have a shorter version of the questionnaire, a pulse version or pulse check version of the questionnaire, that once people have completed the first full version, that they can complete a shorter version, maybe three times a year, so quarterly. And so I went away thinking, oh my God, that's amazing Love to.

Dr Amanda Potter:

And then, ironically, we're doing, as you know, this incredible validation piece of work with Professor Adrian Furnham. He's actually looking at all of the psychological safety data that we've got. We've actually been collecting more with him and with another colleague of his, george, to do the analysis. And he came back to me and said do you know what we really need to do with site safety? This is too long. You've got 10 factors, 90 questions. What we should do is identify the higher order factor, structure underneath it and the fewest number of items that we can identify. That will help to indicate whether the team is psychologically safe or not.

Dr Amanda Potter:

So it was just serendipitous that Mike, literally at the beginning of the week, said to me Amanda, I really would like you to build a pulse check version. And then, later in the week, adrian said we've got the data. I think we should now be investing the money and the time in building a higher order factor structure. In other words, in my language, the same thing, and that's what we're now doing. So stars align, stars are aligning. We're not there yet, and by the time this podcast episode is published, I'm hoping that we'll be closer, we'll have at least done the analysis, we'll know what it is and be ready for coding. But the great thing is, because we've got thousands and thousands of completions around the world, we can do that with a real degree of robustness and feel really sure that those final fewer items which we're hoping will be less than 20, will be a great indication of psych safety for a team.

Speaker 3:

Do you know if people in your organization feel safe to speak up about their concerns and ideas? We often talk about the importance of psychological safety on this podcast, but did you know we offer a diagnostic tool to help measure the climate of psychological safety within your team. When your people feel empowered to speak up, innovation has the chance to thrive. Visit thecpocouk to learn more about the Be Talent Suite or get in touch with me on LinkedIn. That's Angela Malik M-A-L-I-K. Open the door to the art of the possible today.

Caitlin Cooper:

The other thing I was just thinking there when you're talking was a lot of the conversations we have is, let's say, hypothetically, we go into an organization, we do a psychological safety session, we go through their team results and you have individuals thinking their psychological safety levels. But what's quite nice is them having the opportunity to know that in six months time you can re-complete it to continually track that progress or you know if it's going backwards, because, as we said earlier, it can fluctuate. So having those different moments in time is a really great thing it's so true.

Dr Amanda Potter:

I Again talking about Coventry. Yesterday we had assessed the exec. A year ago. We assessed them again on psych safety and resilience for the event that we ran yesterday. The team has slightly changed. We had two new members with the merger of the cooperative bank and Coventry Building Society. So the team has slightly changed. But we were able to track the increase.

Dr Amanda Potter:

But because we only did it once a year, they didn't mind completing a whole questionnaire again. But if we're wanting to do it quarterly and we want to see that pulse change and how people are feeling, I think Mike's right we don't want lots and lots of questions, we want as few as possible. And Adrian's right as well we want as few as possible. So it's really exciting and you're completely correct. Clients are always saying to us what now? What do we do? And we talk to them about four things when we're trying to build both resilience and psychological safety. We talk about physiological attributes, we talk about behavioral attributes, habits and the connections in the team, the social. So often we go back to the neuroscience, don't we? So that we can influence biology, influence physiology, influence habit and so on. So actually it would be really good if we were able to then track how those habits are actually having an impact on teams and how they're actually interacting and how they're dealing with conflict and so on.

Caitlin Cooper:

I think the whole pulse survey I think is a great example of how the thinking's evolved. I know that was kind of the main point of this podcast is, you know, how has it evolved? And I think that's really. I was just reflecting there and thinking that's a great example. And actually another thing I was thinking when you're saying, well, what next is? We do have the playbook don't know if we mentioned it really in this podcast, but that's another way that you know we've created a, however many I don't know, amanda, how many pages is in it but essentially for all the different elements of psychological safety, we've got a range of activities in there for teams to go away and, I guess, engage with to help them in the interim. So there's different resources. I guess as well there's also helping to challenge people's thinking but also ingrain, you know, habits and new meeting structures and things to help them build that personal connection or whatever it is they're trying to achieve.

Dr Amanda Potter:

I think it's a good point that these are tried and tested activities. There's about 30 in the playbook that teams can play with and use in order to build their site safety. Depending on what the risk is that they've identified within the team, there's options. So the things that they can do to start to build that conversation, that connection and that safety.

Caitlin Cooper:

So I wanted to hear from you, I guess, some of your favorite success stories. I feel you you mentioned Network Rail, and I know that there's a lot of great things that have come from working with with Mike, but do you have any others that you think is worth sharing with our listeners that you're particularly proud of.

Dr Amanda Potter:

I think there's three. There's the luxury brand I can't mention the name. That's massive. They've been rolling out globally and they've been instrumental in helping us with the translations as well. So they are co-translating, co-supporting us with the rollout of the translations for psych safety around the world. And the reason why that's great is because they're truly invested in psychological safety across the whole organization. It's come from the CEO down. Psychological safety across the whole organization. It's come from the CEO down. They are making it part of their key agenda to help people feel safe and secure to speak up, whether they are in distribution, manufacturing, perfume, whatever department they're from. If they're retail, they as invested at every level of the organization in this and it's part of everyday language and what they're seeing is they're seeing the psychological safety scores gradually move up in the right direction.

Dr Amanda Potter:

Another great one is Bourne Leisure. They own Haven Holiday Parks. They are also rolling out psychological safety at both a head office and at the park level and once again, they're really just trying to make it usable and friendly and they've taken our facilitation materials and our sometimes quite corporate approach and they've made it a much lighter and much more theirs. So it's the application is completely different to that luxury brand, but actually the impact is the same. It's about creating that connection, creating conversation, building trust, creating clarity. And then another one might be Santander. So Santander we've had some real champions in Santander and we've talked about in the past.

Dr Amanda Potter:

Laura came on the pod and we talked about the ambassador program. That's been a major success. But once again we've got some real people in the business who really believe in the differences it's going to make. And that's the thing across all of those organizations, whether it's Next15, coventry I've mentioned Each of the clients I've mentioned on this pod today. They've all given us permission to either use or not use their names. Each of them have someone who's in that organization who recognizes the importance of psychological safety for success, for driving a high performance environment, and that's what makes the difference yeah, I totally agree with everything you've just said.

Caitlin Cooper:

I've loved seeing how it's been applied across different countries too. Also, I think the thing that stood out for me is that ambassador model and the whole, as you were saying. So not to repeat what you were just saying, but the fact that there are many leaders I've seen that have just been so bought into it but passionate about it, about the difference it can make and the fact that for some it's it's really not been part of their day job, but ultimately, they're invested in becoming trained, becoming an ambassador and helping the organization and helping teams and individuals be more psychologically safe. So, yeah, it's been a great thing to experience and to watch. When you first built the model, if you could take yourself back to the first kind of thinking you did around it, where did you envision it going? If we revert back to 2022, when it was first just a little thought in your brain where did you want it to go and where is it in comparison to that?

Dr Amanda Potter:

I had no idea how much this was going to grow. Actually, we've built so many models and so many products over the past 20 plus years, some of which have been incredibly successful Resilience strengths, as an example and others we've stopped selling because the market had moved on, the thinking had moved on, my thinking had moved on. So I think this started with just a really keen curiosity and interest. I was just listening to as much as I could, I read as much as I could, and as I was reading and as I was listening, the model was forming in my head of all the different aspects. I just think, in that very linear way, I started to identify, from all of that research, from all of the academic papers that I read as well, the aspects of psych safety, and I started just literally doing what I always do I started writing out the model that we've, of course, now we've validated and validated through all the different stages over the last five plus more than that, isn't it?

Dr Amanda Potter:

But however many years? So I had no idea. That's what I'm the most proud of is knowing that this questionnaire, this tool, is making such a difference for teams in so many places around the world and clients are choosing it as their preferred approach. And then also sorry, I'm just going to say one more exciting thing is the fact that Adrian Furnham has come in, has agreed to partner with us. He then ran the discriminability and convergent validity analysis for us to make sure it is actually a psychological safety measure and we proved it's not an intelligence measure. And actually we looked at it in comparison to another published validated model of psychological safety and the stats were fantastic. So it is that as well.

Caitlin Cooper:

I actually, before you just mentioned that last bit, I wanted to say that I love how your ideas come from usually, you know, sat on a cruise or something like that, writing it down, and how it evolves from that. That's what I was thinking of, and I was thinking about some of the other podcasts we've done, and then we talk about, you know, our DMN, our default mode network and our daydream and how that all comes into play.

Caitlin Cooper:

So sorry, I kind of digressed a bit there, but as you were saying that and you mentioned that, you know you just started by writing the model I was just envisioning you on a cruise ship.

Dr Amanda Potter:

Well, that was team questionnaire. That did come on as you know that came literally me on a cruise ship with too much downtime and thinking, oh, do you know what? I think there's something else we can do here. But this one actually was dog walking.

Dr Amanda Potter:

This one was listening to tons and tons of podcasts on site safety and then me thinking do you know what? There's a theme. I had to keep stopping and then dictating into my phone and then carrying on, and then I'd get back and then find all these random dictated badly messages to myself.

Caitlin Cooper:

I love that, though, because it connects really well with when we talk about resilience and, you know, going for walks and taking those breaks and how. That's a prime example of how it's going to help you be more innovative and people feeling psychologically safe to be able to go for a walk without feeling like they're going to be judged for, you know, taking a step away from their computer and not relentlessly working so, yeah, you know what, in the in the event we ran yesterday, I sent them on two walks.

Dr Amanda Potter:

I got them sit in the sun and do a free writing exercise. So there I am with the most senior team of a bank and I'm asking to go for walks twice and go outside and sit in the sunshine and just do some free writing. And there were a couple of people looked a bit hesitant about it, but they all came back and they loved it.

Caitlin Cooper:

So yeah, yeah, yeah, but anyway. And then that goes back to the neuroscience, and actually there's a lot of robust neuroscience that connects well to the topic.

Dr Amanda Potter:

So and actually when we did the debrief, because I'd posed the questions for them to talk about on the walk and in the free writing the creativity was incredible and actually they were all really surprised by what had come back when they've done both exercises. So very cool.

Caitlin Cooper:

So what are the precursors to psychological safety?

Dr Amanda Potter:

So I'm doing a big piece of research on this at the moment because I'm doing some fun writing in this space and there are a whole load from the research which are really important to create the right environment for safety, so the right climate or environment. So they're things like trust, which, of course, is one of our scales. Purpose, which is again another one of our scales. Diversity, so cognitive diversity in particular. Decisiveness, having a team where people are prepared to make decisions and take accountability and ownership of decisions. Fairness, kindness, belief, inclusion I'm going to keep going. There's so many actually or belonging, and that's a really important one as well Feeling like you belong to a team, to an organisation. All of these are really important precursors to creating the environment for site safety. But of course, we're not going to get them all.

Caitlin Cooper:

Yeah, I think it definitely gives a lot of food for thought, though, for a lot of leaders and people in this space that are looking to build people's capability but also, obviously, create psychological safety. I think it gives a lot of food for thought around some of the topics they can be thinking about and whether they're even talking about it, doing anything about it in their organisations.

Dr Amanda Potter:

So then, what might the barriers be to creating a psychological safe environment? Many of the things are the lower end of the scale in our questionnaire. So relentlessness, groupthink, consensus-driven cultures, bias, all of those things will inhibit psychological safety. Poor communication it's the opposite actually to the ones I was just saying are the precursors, silos, hybrid working.

Dr Amanda Potter:

that's a big one, especially when the hybrid working isn't organised so that when you are in the office you don't know where anyone is, what floor they're on or what desk they're sitting at or what day they're in. So if you are hybrid, you do need to have that structure around how to make the best use of that hybrid environment and that situation.

Caitlin Cooper:

So then, I guess, word of advice then for people listening how can we create a psychologically safe environment? What are the key things that you would say for people to walk away, considering that they can do?

Dr Amanda Potter:

So the first thing is create the clarity, make sure that when you're talking about psychological safety, everyone's talking about the same thing. So which definition are you going to use and what tool or what approach are you going to use to help understand how safe the team actually feel and potentially be careful about overly relying, be careful about overly relying on engagement-based measures of psychological safety? So the first one is be clear and potentially assess or measure how safe people feel. The next one is to really have a conversation, to really raise the awareness of that feeling, of that environment, and to gain agreement that something potentially needs to change.

Dr Amanda Potter:

And if people feel like things need to change, then the real message that we always have in our workshops is that it starts with each individual member of that team, because it's the habits that people have in both work and at home that change the brain chemistry, that change the neuroscience, that changes physiology, changes attitude and behaviour and therefore has such a significant impact on environment. So if you go in to work with like a bear, with a sore head, being all grumpy and grumbly, it's going to definitely change the atmosphere of the team. If you go in all sunny and bright in your disposition, then again, it's going to have a lovely positive impact on the team. So each of us have a real role to play in creating either a safe or unsafe environment, because it is about how we feel. So it's really truly about create the clarity, understand the level, create the awareness and the conversation with the team and then create that action.

Caitlin Cooper:

I feel as though a lot of people listening might have had a bit of an aha moment there and thinking about oh yeah, actually, when I turn up to work and I'm not in the best mood, actually what impact does that have on people?

Dr Amanda Potter:

around me and so definitely pull my head in sometimes when I'm tired and grumpy like no.

Caitlin Cooper:

I need to actually have a positive impact you know what, even if you do turn up to work feeling grumpy, I think, as you said, if you feel safe to say to people look guys, I'm feeling grumpy today, bear with me. That's one step to it, rather than just pretending, you know, being authentic completely and I think there's.

Dr Amanda Potter:

I know this, I'm going segue off track now, but it's just one of the things we haven't said, because this whole podcast has been about.

Dr Amanda Potter:

What have we learned? One of the big things we've learned is that psychological safety is climate, not culture. And it's made me think of professor rob Briner, who was at the ABP conference just a couple of weeks ago and the thing he said there was culture does not eat strategy for breakfast, and he was talking about the fact that there is an over-reliance on culture questionnaires and actually how much more powerful climate questionnaires are than culture, because climate questionnaires are much more psychological. They assess how people are feeling and interacting with the environment and with each other and the impact of that on behaviour, whereas culture is this kind of ethereal thing of the values, the standards, the norms, the expectations of an organisation, but it's not as psychological as climate, and I thought that's such a good point. And psychological safety is climate and it's incredible to have the gift of a psychometric product that can get to it at the moment in 90 or so questions, but in the future, very shortly, thank you to professor asia and fernum and colleagues.

Dr Amanda Potter:

We'll be able to get there in a really small number of items I'd agree.

Caitlin Cooper:

I definitely say I've been in a lot of conversations where people are. I think they have that question around the climate versus culture, so I think it's really great that you've just explained it there. So we thought it might be nice to ask some of our team around their experience around psychological safety. We asked them the following question and this is our internal team, but also some of the associates that we work with what are clients asking for when it comes to psychological safety? So, Amanda, I don't know if you want to answer that.

Dr Amanda Potter:

So what they said is that clients are asking for a quick, simple, robust and valid way of understanding how safe a team or a population are feeling, and once they understand that, what do they do about it?

Caitlin Cooper:

The second question was what are the challenges they are facing around it?

Dr Amanda Potter:

The challenges are from their side. It's usually around how can they communicate more effectively and speak up and be more honest and authentic in their communication rather than tiptoeing around each other? The challenges we find that we have with psychological safety is the language and acceptability point, about getting beyond the barrier of the language of psychological safety.

Caitlin Cooper:

And the last question was what have they learned since rolling out the model with clients?

Dr Amanda Potter:

So that one I probably answered already, which was the culture versus climate one, that they come into it thinking that psychological safety is a part of culture and then they leave from working with us recognizing that it's all about psychology and feeling and experience and environment and that actually each of the individuals can have a big part to play in creating the right atmosphere and environment so that psychological safety is climate brilliant.

Caitlin Cooper:

Well, I was just looking at the time there and I was thinking we could continue talking, because obviously we know we've got lots to say around this topic, but unfortunately that does come to the end of the podcast. So perhaps a parting thought for our listeners is to think about what you can do to improve the experience of working in your team, particularly around psychological safety, amanda. Anything else from you that you want to leave our listeners thinking about?

Dr Amanda Potter:

I think really the point that we said that it starts with you. So what habits could you put into place on a daily basis that would help you to experience more positive affect? That means that you show up in the best way possible, and for me it's a dog walk every morning Before work. I always go for a walk with my dog, and that, for me, is fundamental for releasing the neurotransmitters and hormones that make me feel good. And if I don't do that, then I feel out of sorts. And so I know, sometimes when I go to London and the dog's with the dog sitter and I haven't had my early morning walk, I'm a bit like I know I've walked the station, but that's not enough. I need to be outside in the countryside. So find what works for you.

Caitlin Cooper:

You know, I love that example also because of the fact that you know when you first built the model, it was on a dog walk and now you're telling everyone that actually that's really worked. So I love that, thank you. So thank you to our listeners for listening. If you would like to recommend this podcast to one friend, please do, and if you like listening to us talk all things psychology and business then do feel free also to hit the follow button.

Dr Amanda Potter:

Thank you caitlin, thank you, that was great, and thank you everyone for listening and for following our pod. I hope you have a wonderful and successful day.

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Dr Amanda Potter

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Tim Hepworth

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Caitlin Cooper

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