The Chief Psychology Officer

Ep. 89 Why Short, Valid Measures Beat Engagement Surveys For Understanding Team Safety

• Dr Amanda Potter CPsychol

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If you’ve ever wondered whether psychological safety is a soft sentiment or a hard performance driver, this conversation brings the receipts. With Professor Adrian Furnham and Dr Amanda Potter, we unpack what psychological safety really means, how to measure it well, and why trust—not cleverness—predicts whether people speak up, challenge ideas, and share hard truths when it counts.

We go beyond the generic “I feel safe” survey item and show how short, validated psychometrics turn a fuzzy concept into a practical dashboard leaders can use. You’ll hear how factor models, convergent and divergent validity, and predictive links tie safety to outcomes like performance, commitment, burnout, and turnover. We explore the human layer too: why secure attachment supports voice, how avoidant and anxious patterns reduce candour, and where personality nudges behaviour without defining destiny. Expect clear answers to tricky questions about anonymity, 360 pitfalls, and how a single leadership change can swing team safety in a week.

We also dive into the traps of groupthink and the quiet tax of imposter moments, drawing lines between silence, poor decisions, and missed ideas from people closest to the work. Then we get practical: why a 20‑item pulse beats two vague questions, how to spot meaningful variance within teams, and what to do when trust is thin. From resilience training to structured dissent (pre‑mortems, red teams, rotating devil’s advocate), we lay out habits that make candour safe and useful.

If you want a culture where people tell you what you need to hear, not what they think you want to hear, this is your playbook. Subscribe, share with a manager who needs it, and leave a review telling us one behaviour that makes you feel safe to speak up.

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Caitlin Cooper:

Hello and welcome to the Chief Psychology Officer Podcast, the show where we dive deep into the psychology behind leadership, business, and success. I'm Caitlin, and today we're joined by our very own Chief Psychology Officer, Dr. Amanda Potter, and our guest today is Professor Adrian Furnham from VI Norwegian Business School. In this episode, you'll learn why we challenge the notion of psychological safety being a fluffy concept and how to think about it more robustly, the role of psychometrics in validity in measuring psychological safety, and how personality and attachment styles connect with psychological safety in teams. But quickly before we jump in, make sure you hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you want to keep the conversation going, connect with us on LinkedIn. Just search for Caitlin and Dr. Amanda Potter. Plus, check out the CPO.co.uk for more resources. Hi Amanda. Hi Adrian. Welcome to the podcast today. Hi Caitlin. Hi Adrian. Hi. Adrian, could you please start by briefly introducing yourself to our listeners?

Adrian Furnham:

Yes, uh, my name is Adrian Furnham. I think of myself as an academic and a consultant. So as an academic, my KPIs are writing books and papers, and I've done a lot of that, which I enjoy. But we academics don't get very well paid, so we have to go out into the real world and do some consulting and to indeed check whether our ideas and theories are true. So I have these two hats, academic and consultant.

Caitlin Cooper:

Thank you. Well, we're both really looking forward to having you on today and picking your brain. Amanda, as always, the golden question: what inspired today's podcast episode?

Dr Amanda Potter:

Adrian is someone that I admire and respect greatly because he's a very well-known author and researcher and publishes a great deal. And I really value his insight and thinking, and he asks questions that are often quite difficult. So a while ago, I approached Adrian at a conference and asked him if he wouldn't mind coming and supporting us within Zircon and Be Talent with two of our products, resilience and psychological safety, to make sure that our thinking was aligned with the academic research, to make sure that our products were truly robust and really to push us to think beyond where we were currently or where we were at the time. So this podcast is really very much talking through some of those conversations that we've had with Adrian since he's been consulting with us and advising us, particularly around the area of psychological safety, because right from the off he challenged us and he asked those tricky questions that we didn't want to answer but realised we had to. So the reason for this podcast is really having a conversation around reliability, validity, utility, and the strength of a concept like psychological safety when it could be seen by some to be quite a woolly concept because it's all about climate.

Caitlin Cooper:

So maybe a nice place to start then is a question around well, how do organizations typically measure psychological safety?

Dr Amanda Potter:

So I'll start that one if that's okay with the fact that organizations typically seem to use engagement surveys. They'll ask one or two questions in their engagement survey with a generic question around how safe do you feel, or there'd be a question around how prepared are you to speak up or to challenge or to ask questions. Now, the second question is great out of those two because of course it's asking a specific question around speaking up or asking questions or admitting mistakes. But the first question, when they ask that generic question around how psychologically safe do you feel, it can create problems because some people, not everybody, knows what we mean when we're talking about psychological safety. And so the average employee, either at the top or at the bottom of the organization, may not always know how to define it.

Caitlin Cooper:

So then why do B Talent recommend a psychometric approach, in your opinion, in comparison?

Dr Amanda Potter:

So because of the issue around engagement questions, what we've seen within organisations is that we get an inflated response to the questions in engagement surveys around psychological safety. People are more likely to acquiesce or to rate organizations positively when they answer engagement survey questions and say that everything's fine because they associate poor psychological safety with bullying and harassment very often when they do not understand the definition of it or they're unclear about the concept. So therefore, often we'll go to an organization, they'll say to us, we have an issue with team performance, we think the environment's wrong, but we know it's not an issue with psychological safety because apparently in our engagement survey data, everything's fine.

Caitlin Cooper:

Adrian, what's your perspective on this? Or what's your perspective on assessing things like climate and culture and psychological safety?

Adrian Furnham:

Yes, um, climate and culture are quite difficult to measure. I wrote a book on this 20 years ago and looked at the various measures of corporate culture. They're very different from each other and they're very what one might call high level. I don't know if it's a very useful thing to do. Climate, on the other hand, is again a rather woolly concept. You know, the psychologist wants to say, well, let's have a clear definition of what this is, what are the factors that make this up, and so forth. And the literature with climate never really progressed. It's always been a sort of vague feeling of what it's like to work around here, which is one person's definition of corporate culture. But the work on psychological safety goes back now over 25 years. In fact, there are, I was looking this morning, there's been some meta-analysis of over a hundred studies in the area. At least compared to climate and culture, it's more specific. It's not that specific, but it is much more clearly specific. So the first in 1999, there was the first paper in this area, and there were some definitions of what it meant: a respect for each other, interested in each other, no rejection for honesty. This is workers in a group, have other positive intentions, can get help from others, free to experiment. The idea that when working with uh of other people, you can trust them, you can be honest. I don't want to use the word authentic, but you can say really what you feel without fear of punishment. And that's clearly an important thing to have in any group. I remember some years ago talking to a man and he said he was a very senior military officer, and he said to me, There's only two things I ask in my boss. Is he any good and do you trust him? And this issue of trust, trust with your colleagues. So the early studies involved the seven-item questionnaire, and then others have tried, there are not many other questionnaires in this area. In fact, there are very few. I was surprised by that, where people are trying to say, well, let's understand this concept, let's measure it, and then let's show what it relates to. Because if you're going to make a song and dance about it, then you've got to show it relates to something. Well, you know, what's most interesting about the metro analyses is they've shown that when you measure the person's psychological safety of the group, it is related to performance, commitment, burnout, and so forth. There is a good psychological relationship, as you would expect. And that's what I think is important. Psychological concepts come and go, they come into fashion, they go out of fashion, and people make outlandish statements about them. Well, you know, the academic in me says, Well, I'd like some proof of this. You know, and the way in which you use you measure psychological safety, and you measure some other variables in a group, hopefully sometime later, and show the one is related to the other, and therefore you have some sort of causation. That is, the more psychological safe people feel, the more not only job satisfied they are, but more productive they are, the less they like to burn out, the more commitment they have, the less turnover. It's a good thing to have psychological safety. And as Amanda said, I don't think one or two items in a survey really captures it very well. I think it's more important than that. You don't have to have very long surveys. I think 20 items is good enough, and to have sub-factors. So any concept, it'll have factors associated with it. So I think you know, measuring these in the group is a very important thing to do because it tells you about the dynamic of the group. And one more thing, it can be quite unstable because you and I know that you've got a team leader or a group leader or boss, and he or she leaves and is replaced by somebody else. And there's a very dramatic change in everything. So it could be that you know, today I'm feeling psychologically safe in my work group, but in a week's time, due to one or two big changes, it's quite unsafe. Those consequences can be quite important.

Dr Amanda Potter:

So many important points that you've made there, Adrian. I think that firstly, just to confirm that we very much articulate psychological safety as an aspect of climate. And like you say, in fact, my master's thesis was all about climate, which is ironic. We very much articulate psychological safety as climate rather than culture. And we've worked really hard to really try to understand the concept of psychological safety and the each of the different elements that come within it. But I also agree with your point about it not being stable because the team that we're working with, as it alters and changes, as does how we feel ultimately, and therefore, in other words, the environment is changing, the psychological safety is changing. But you've made another really important point, which is in our striving to really design and validate a robust measure. We came to you, didn't we, to say, how can we really prove that this tool is doing the job it's doing? I wonder if you wouldn't mind just talking through the process that we went through together.

Adrian Furnham:

Yes, um, I think the first thing one does is have a model in your head about the components of any variable you're interested in, the components, and then to derive questions that measure those factors. So you've got a questionnaire which has items directly related to the factors that you believe make up psychological safety. You then traditionally give this to a large group of individuals and you do some classic psychometrics. So you do factor analysis or something like that, structural equation modeling, and see if your items, if it fits together as you think. It's a test of your model. Do the items fit together and are they intercorrelated? Because what you're expecting is that you have a measure of psychological safety which has got various components, and they're separate but related. So you and I could have similar total scores, but slightly different subscores, which means I'm seeing the environment in a slightly different way. So what you've got is a clear picture of an individual's perception of his or her environment. So that then you've got your questionnaire. Well, that's quite work to get there, but then the question is: does it relate to other questionnaires? It's called convergent versus divergent validity. You would expect your questionnaire to correlate with other questionnaires measuring psychological safety, and that's what we showed. We showed that our measure is related to other people's measures, as you would expect. That's called convergent validity. But you'd also expect it not to correlate with certain things. So it's different from, let's say, intelligence or something like that. So you start off with deriving your questionnaire, checking its factor structure, then doing convergent, divergent validity. But the one that interests people most is, of course, predictor validity, and that's very important. But what we did was we got our measure, we tightened it up, we showed it was robust and internally consistent, and then correlated with other measures that we thought would be related to it. So it's convergent validity. So we found it related to other measures of psychological safety. But I think the most interesting finding was we looked at psychological attachment. Now, psychological attachment is a very interesting variable. It goes back to the to Bulby and infants and caregivers, the nature of the relationship. Because it seemed to me that, you know, when you're talking about psychological safety, we've all experienced this. You are in a group, you are very dependent on them as sort of caregivers, as friends, as items of support, and particularly with the boss, that you feel he or she is somebody is in loco parentis, is in some sense in of the team, that they are somebody who you can trust. So the the attachment literature talks about affective bonds with others. Now you have affective bonds with your colleagues and you have affective bonds with your boss. So do I like, do I trust, do I feel confident with the people I work with? And the attachment literature, which we put in as an exploratory idea, seemed to work out very well. The idea is that there are three types of attachment. This is a consequence of the way in which you were brought up. There's secure attachment, there's avoidant attachment and anxious attachment. And what we predicted and indeed found that safety was associated with secure attachment, positively and negatively associated with avoidant and anxious attachment. And that I think was it was an interesting finding because it gives some extra insight into this whole issue of what it means to be psychologically safe.

Dr Amanda Potter:

And that begs a whole load of questions around how we show up. And that's the conversation we were having internally after we saw that data, because if it starts very much in terms of our family life, our attachment, whether we're secure, avoidant, or anxious, comes from our history at home and our relationship with our family, then how we show up in the organization can influence how people feel and the psychological safety around us, depending on whether we show up as secure, avoidant, and anxious as well. So not only does the environment influence us, but we also, of course, influence the environment. But attachment appears to have a real impact on it. So we want secure people, don't we? We don't want necessarily anxious and avoidant.

Adrian Furnham:

The worry I think with the measurement of psychological safety and indeed climate is to what extent it's in the eye of the beholder. So you've got a you've got a little team and you measure everybody about psychological safety. Well, there's rather interesting differences in their perceptions. Now, some groups are very homogeneous and by and large everyone feels much the same. But if you get a relatively large group, some people will feel safe and some will not feel safe. And the question is why? What do they bring to the party? Are psychologically people who score low, are they possibly anxiously attached? And this will apply to all their relationships. So the question is safety in the eye of the beholder? And the answer is the way we measure it, it is in the eye of the beholder. So some people will come to the party frequently anxious, frequently insecure, and they'll be worried about psychological safety all the time, or more than others. And that, you know, I think we have to admit that it's an aggregated variable. We're measuring a team. Now you can say team A is higher than team B, but there's also variability within the teams. What's nice to find is a group who working together, where of course there's variability, but by and large people feel safe, they feel secure, they feel trusted, they feel they can speak up and so forth. That there's some variability, but that's natural. But it's where there's wide variability that one person feels very unsafe, and others feel very safe. And the question is: are they being bullied? Are they a minority group? It's a it becomes an interesting question. And what how do they affect the rest of the group? How does that dynamic change as a function of one or two people feeling very unsafe?

Caitlin Cooper:

I was just reflecting on that. One thing you said was that, you know, how someone might the bonds that they have at home or outside of work, that might be typical in terms of their attachment style when they come into work. And then I was thinking, you know, if I was reflecting on myself, would I think that let's say hypothetically I was more on the anxious side of it, I feel that might come into play more outside of work than inside of work. And I was thinking, you know, can that differ? And then I led to myself to think, could that be because of the trust that we feel at work and that variable that comes into it? So I wondered what your perspective on that was, because when you mentioned at the beginning that trust is a key thing when we think about psychological safety, I think the thing that differentiates an anxious, well, an avoidant versus a secure is a secure individual is more likely to trust their colleagues. Whereas an avoidant values more independence and is more likely to distrust their colleagues.

Adrian Furnham:

No, that's absolutely right. I think trust is a key factor in this whole issue. There's there's speaking up in some way, but there's trust. I mean, the early literature said that, you know, the secure people have positive views about themselves and positive views about others. It's do you remember that I'm okay, you're okay, stuff from years ago. And the avoidant people feel okay about themselves, but not necessarily about others, whereas the anxious people don't feel good about themselves or others. But I think one of the things you notice is that people's attachment in part determines the jobs they look for. So if you are insecurely attached, anxiously attached, avoidantly attached, you by and large know about this in life, that you've had experiences where you've felt marginalized or not listened to or whatever, and therefore you choose jobs that you believe would be supportive. And some organizations spend a lot of time talking about this. Whereas others, you know, it's shape up or ship out, you know, guys, you've got to get on with this stuff. Too bad if you're not feeling that happy, and so forth. So I think I think the attachment start in part determines the way in which you choose jobs, types of jobs, or types of environments which you feel would be safe. And indeed, people do do that. The major concern is imagine I'm a boss and I've got a group working together, and I value one of my staff, but I know that he or she is insecurely attached, is avoided or anxious. The question is, what do I do? How do you deal with this? It's important to know it, it's important to know that they're not feeling safe, but it's an individual or maybe a very small group. And it's helpful because it's diagnostic. So I know who in the group is not feeling good, safe, secure. And then what do I do about this? And you know, I can spend some effort and some time trying to help this individual, trying to understand more the nature of their insecurity, their lack of safety, and trying to do something about it. Maybe it's alerting the others that this person needs a little bit more support, that they need to be encouraged to speak up when it's the right time to do it. So, in that sense, it's quite an interesting diagnostic tool where not only the boss knows, but we all know who is feeling most safe and why not. And let's try and do something about it because we know the consequences of safety are good, are important. The literature is very clear. People are more happy, more productive, more committed, less burn up, blah, blah, blah, when they feel safe. So it's worth putting effort into identifying psychological safety and then doing something about it.

Dr Amanda Potter:

That's what's great about it, I think, is that we now have a robust measure. And just for those people who are listening, because of Adrian's insight, we all now have the full B Talent psychological safety questionnaire, which is about 80 items, takes about 12 minutes to complete with full reports. But because of the intervention from Adrian and the challenge and the probes that he gave Caitlin and myself and Jess and the team, we now have a shorter version which we're calling Pulse, and is only 20 items, and instead of 10 scales, there's five. So this is a much quicker way of just having a snapshot of how people feel. There's still a report and there's still development actions, but the key really is the so what. So, what do you do with that information, both at an individual level with the team members and but collectively with the team? And that's really where we invest quite a lot of our time and effort within Zircon, the consulting part of our business, to really help those organizations, help those teams move forward once they've got that insight from the data. So we don't just kind of assess and run. Adrian, you mentioned the divergent validity. Would you mind just sharing with us some of that divergent validity data? Because we looked at the relationship between psych safety and intelligence, for example, didn't we?

Adrian Furnham:

Yes. You would expect there to be very little relationship and there wasn't any relationship. So it's not clever people feel more safe or clever people feel they can speak up more often. It's it's unrelated. And there'd be a number of other variables which we didn't test, which you say psychological safety is not related to this. Interestingly, we looked at personality, of course, which you would expect to be related. And indeed, there's quite a lot of literature on this. So, you know, of the big five personality variables, agreeableness is more correlated with psychological safety, both givers and receivers of the safety, and emotional stability or what we used to call neuroticism is not. So a disagreeable neurotic is not likely to feel safe in any particular environment. But the question is about the amount of variance accounted for. So could you use a personality test and infer psychological safety from that? And the answer is in part, yes, the less emotionally stable the person is, the more likely they are to feel unsafe. I think there's no denying that. That's exactly what you'd expect. The question is how much of the variance you can account for by just knowing that somebody's not emotionally stable, as opposed to extroversion, introversion. It's moderately correlated. Why? You would expect that. Extroverts are more sociable, sociable people get on with others, they make friends, friends are part of being safe, etc. So you'd expect these correlations, but you wouldn't expect them to be terribly high, which they weren't. So the, you know, it was the attachment factors that showed the clearest insight into the whole business of psychological safety.

Dr Amanda Potter:

Interestingly, when we do our training around psychological safety, we say quite clearly psychological safety is not an aspect of personality. We've now proven that there are some connections and that personality does influence psychological safety or influences you were the use the word variance because we're talking about statistics. But in my language, then the personality of a team member can influence the psychological safety and how people feel within that team, which you would expect, wouldn't you? But you wouldn't expect to be it to be the only thing that influences.

Adrian Furnham:

Yes, it it it plays a part, of course it plays a part. It's very difficult to find personality cannot correlate with almost everything. I've spent my life looking at this. But the question is how much of the variance does it account for? And the question becomes: is it worth measuring psychological safety in a team? Particularly, I think, when there's changes going on, which is happens all the time, when there's major changes in personnel and that sort of thing. You want to know how how people are responding to that. You'd expect safety to go down. People are more worried, you know, not open until they get the feeling for trust in the group. But over time, you'd expect those safety levels to come back because you need them to be in place, which is why I think it's important to test it relatively frequently. Now, if you have a short measure like a 20-item measure, it's quite easy to do. Uh the Gallup 12 is a very famous measure of job engagement. And they recommend people take this four times a year. Uh, well, they used to, I don't know if they still do, because it's very quick to do, and you want to see the changes in the engagement level. So I think what's interesting about psychological safety, it might be stable within an individual, but not stable within the group, because the organizations change. You know, there's mergers and acquisitions, and you change head of department. I'm doing some work before we came on this call with a group, and they've had three major changes in the hierarchy. And of course, everybody is a bit, you know, what's going to happen? How can we proceed? And you would expect the psychological safety to go down. I'm sure it will. The question is, how quickly will it come back up? Because if people are not going to be feel safe, then they're not going to help these new individuals come up with good ideas, you know, trust each other with speaking truth to power, I think, is one of the most interesting aspects of all psychological safety. Do you feel you can tell powerful people what you genuinely think or feel? I've worked in organizations, you've worked in organizations where it's been very easy to do, and some where it's absolutely impossible to do. And you can see the consequences, you can see the consequences with all our many of our politicians, that you cannot tell them how you feel, how you feel about each other, how you feel about the group. And they don't get feedback. You know, there's no feedback, and as a consequence, they get deluded. So I think, you know, to monitor psychological safety with its various factors and trust and contact with each other, confident in the ability to share knowledge, is seriously important to understand team dynamics and group efficacy over time.

Dr Amanda Potter:

So rather than the Gallup 12, we've got the B Talent 20. It doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?

Adrian Furnham:

But yes. I think it would do better. Yes, the Gallup 12's been very, very famous. And the reason why it's so famous is very short. You know, they claim um I think it's two minutes. I'm sure that's right. I've done it many times, it takes two minutes. And why not? There's one interesting feature, I think, that we haven't spoken about, and that's the extent to which people trust that you are gonna get anonymized results of necessary. You know, the great problem with 360-degree feedback, it seriously should work very well, but it doesn't work for two reasons. One is people don't trust that the things they're gonna say about their boss are really anonymous and not traceable to them. So you know as well as I do that if we play around with my computer and I send you off my email, you can find out I'm the one who thinks that the boss is no good and so forth. The second reason is that they don't ask the appropriate questions. But that's a very interesting issue in and of itself. So if I do not feel very safe, do I feel safe enough to say I don't feel I'm very safe? In other words, the reporting, the questionnaire I'm sending. Now, it's not quite the same as saying I think my boss is an idiot, but do I feel confident enough to report that I am worried about speaking up in groups and so forth? And that's an issue. My feeling is by and large, that's not such a big problem, although there will be those in certain environments who think that you know only wimps feel unsafe. I've worked in, you know, tough guy environments where only wimps complain and only wimps feel they don't say. You speak up and you and so forth. That's a very particular type of environment. It can work, you know. I find it in the financial industry quite a lot. It can work quite well, but I'm interested in the extent to which people can feel confident in saying they don't feel confident in speaking up and challenging people and coming up with their interesting ideas. Because over time, you and I have recognized this many times, you'll find somebody in an organization in a rather lowly position who's got amazing insight and amazing contributions to make, but they've never been really asked, they've never been really challenged, and they felt overlooked, not so much unsafe, but overlooked, that they don't feel speaking up is there is is what they should be doing, and they feel they'll be put down or so forth. And as I say, it's nearly always people quite lowly in organizations who've been there a long time, who really understand what's going on, and the idea of them giving some insight into the process they see, I think that's terribly important. You can get it through the psychological safety measure.

Dr Amanda Potter:

That's such an interesting point, actually. And we have to work very hard with our clients to make sure that the people we're working with know that there's the highest level of security and that their names will not be identified. So the size of the team or the size of the population will make a big difference and how honest somebody will be in that questionnaire. Because if it's three people, then it's likely that they'll be able to work out who said what. But unlike 360, because we're not looking at the difference between direct reports. Or peers or manager and so on. It's just everybody's in a team, everybody's clumped together. Actually, it's much harder to work out who said what. So we do see a range of scores, don't we, Caitlin? And we often get an outlier. There'll often be one person who's very low, or it maybe even be very high, who is really truly prepared to use the extreme scores. And then of course you do get a lot of people clumping around a similar line. So we do look at the distribution of scores within each team. But I think what's really interesting about psychological safety is it's a window. It's another way of getting an insight into a team so that we can ask good questions, so that we can draw on all of that brilliant work around the neuroscience. We can help them build some great habits, we can talk about development priorities, all of those things. So it's purely just a window and a way of changing the conversation, creating a new conversation. But what's so brilliant about this conversation today is the point that you've made that is how people show up truly impacts the psychological safety. And that leads me to the next question, which was about imposter syndrome or imposter moments, because we also looked at that.

Adrian Furnham:

Yes. What we know about the imposter syndrome is that some people deliberately, because they feel they they're not worthy, they prove to others that they aren't worthy. They do things which are stupid or whatever to confirm their theory that they are not as good as they are. I will answer that question, but one thing's just come to the back of my mind, and that's the idea of groupthink. I think, you know, the issue about groupthink, and there's many, many studies of this. I I think Mrs. Thatcher went out of power because of groupthink. And that what it means is that you've got a group of individuals together, and one of the criteria of groupthink is this ability not to speak up, to go along with what everybody else has been saying, and you nod wisely, and everybody disagrees, but nobody stands up to say what they do think. So I think that's why this leads to bad decision making. That if you don't speak up when you feel you should speak up, then people think that you agree that you know, does everyone agree? And everyone nods, and paradoxically, nobody agrees because they don't have this confidence that I think you know, lack of safety leads to group think.

Dr Amanda Potter:

I can I just say before you go into imposter syndrome, 100% agree. And we see that in case studies in organizations. We talk about the downside of poor psychological safety is deference to leadership, just following commands. We talk about functional stupidity and we talk about groupthink. So I couldn't agree more, but we can move on to imposter.

Adrian Furnham:

The imposter syndrome, I've been looking into it recently, and you know, the issue is why do people feel the definition is people who have achieved something deservedly, they've got talent or whatever, feel that they're not worthy, that you know, I don't feel good enough to have been nominated for, or that it was an accident that I did as well as I did. Therefore, what will people do? They'll self-handicap to prove them right. I'm not really as clever as people think. So I say something stupid to prove I'm not as clever as people think, which is, you know, not very healthy. I think we all at various stages in our life have gone through the imposter syndrome. I certainly have. You know, sometimes people will help you to see that you're not an imposter, that you do have some contribution, some talent in this area. Of course, sometimes you have good enough friends who will tell you that you are an imposter, that's a fruit or whatever.

Dr Amanda Potter:

You're much worse than you thought.

Adrian Furnham:

Yes. You know, dare I go there, but I think it's more common among women than among men. This is possibly changing. I think it's true in the arts more than in the sciences and so forth, and you know, in in some types of businesses rather than others. Of course, narcissists don't feel the imposter syndrome at all because they don't feel they're imposters. We can be very difficult individuals. We looked at the imposter syndrome, didn't we? And we showed it was negatively related. Negatively related, as you would expect. That's what we you know, that imposters feel unsafe in environments.

Dr Amanda Potter:

Yeah, we would expect that, wouldn't we? And we did another study, so Emily led a study smaller than yours that we ran with you, Adrian, and we looked at the relationship between imposter syndrome and resilience, and we found as we would expect, that resilient individuals are less likely to experience imposter moments or imposter syndrome, that which you would expect. And another study again is we've looked at the relationship between psychological safety and resilience, which of course are both of our products. You did point out which is a bit of a flaw when we do research using only our own products, that we need to use other people's products too. Um that we have, with our own products, looked at the relationship between resilience and psych safety and found that there is a positive correlation between the two. Yes, as you would expect. I like it when we get what we expect.

Adrian Furnham:

Yes, confirm your hyperpathy. I mean, I think resilience is a very important thing to measure in the workplace. I think it's absolutely fundamental. It's related to emotional stability, it's related to coping strategies, it's tough at the top. Work is not easy, there's a lot of change going on, and resilient people cope better. It's a sort of a personality coping variable. How do you, when things go wrong, when you're put under pressure, how do you bounce back? And I think it's pretty fundamental. I think you can teach people to be more resilient. You know, if you went to a clinical psychologist, they talk about helping you with your coping strategies. You know, resilient people have bad coping strategies. And you do better if you learn to cope better, and you can learn to cope better. So resilience, I think, can be taught. Can be taught. I think you can also teach groups more about how to be safer, how to work with each other, ensuring psychological safety. So I think these things are a movable piece. I think there are levels people will come to the party with a level of resilience, they will be not very emotionally stable, they will be not very open to experience, and those people will be much more likely to have lower resilience. But that doesn't mean you can help them with some strategies. And I think you can teach groups how to be resilient. I remember working with some emergency services, and you know, they go to the scene of a horrendous accident, and they come out of it, and you, you know, they are you you are mortified. You're big, strong chaps of one sort or another, but they learn how to deal with their emotions, they talk to each other about it, they can be weak with each other about it. It helps the strength. So I think once you've diagnosed it correctly in an individual in a group, you can work on it.

Dr Amanda Potter:

I have a client who works in the Met, and she headed up the child death department and very successfully for a number of years. And you know, she just amazes me. And before that, she was with another force and worked in an equally traumatic division of that police force as well. And she's just so admirable what she has faced and has walked into, yet remained courageous. So I just find it fascinating how some people manage to find so much resilience. But I'm so delighted, moving on to a more positive note, which is the fact that A, you think resilience is trainable because that we do all the time. Yeah, we say that and that you can create good habits. But Adrian, we're um in the process of working with you to collect data and to do a similar study for resilience that we've just done with psychological safety. So watch this space. Hopefully, we'll have another podcast episode coming soon, which will be talking about resilience and the convergent and divergent validity, which would be great as well.

Caitlin Cooper:

So I guess kind of tying that all together, what would you say, Adrian, in summary, should organizations and should leaders really be thinking about? What are kind of three takeaways you'd say?

Adrian Furnham:

Well, with regard to psychological safety, do you mean?

Caitlin Cooper:

Yes, and just the conversation we've had today.

Adrian Furnham:

Okay, I I think I think we can define and measure psychological safety reasonably well. I think there are good measures. What you need is a short measure, perhaps used once or twice a year to measure the psychological safety of the team, from which you can identify pockets or individuals who need some assistance. So measure, identify, and then try and do something about it. You need some intervention whereby if a group is by and large fairly psychologically safe, well, let's rejoice. They do exist, but if not, I think some effort should be put into helping the leader of the TEEP or the organization increase the psychological safety of the individuals in the group. I think it's a good investment. It pays.

Caitlin Cooper:

Thank you. And Amanda, what would you add to that?

Dr Amanda Potter:

I think it's been a great experience working with Adrian. I didn't say at the beginning that Adrian was my PhD examiner, so he put me through the ring many years ago, 20 years ago, made me fight for my PhD. Thank you very much. And he made us fight for this one too. I think I was quite shocked when Adrian came in and said 10 scales is too much, 80 questions are too many, because I actually thought it was okay. Um, and it is okay, it is a robust questionnaire, it's valid, but actually the point was that organizations are much more likely to use it multiple times over a year in order to gauge how people are feeling if it's a much shorter questionnaire that they can complete in two or three minutes. And you gave us the limit of about 20, 25 questions max, didn't you? Yeah. And we managed to get psychological safety down to 20 and resilience down to 22, which is brilliant. We're rolling out those two questionnaires very soon. They're just being coded at the moment. Now we know they're robust and valid. So it's been great because it's really challenged. I didn't know we were going to do that. When we started talking to Adrian, I thought all we were going to do was look at convergent and divergent validity and we were going to publish some great papers, publish a podcast. I didn't know we were going to be going and building a whole product, much to everyone else's disgust. So thank you. You created loads of work for us, Adrian, frankly.

Adrian Furnham:

Excellent. That's my job.

Dr Amanda Potter:

Yes, thanks.

Adrian Furnham:

It's been a pleasure working with you, Amanda.

Dr Amanda Potter:

No, it's been amazing. So, Adrian, thank you so much. Thank you for your advice. Thank you for pushing us in the right direction and helping us prove that the tool works and that it's aligned with the thinking of other researchers and theorists, and also that it is not an intelligence, but it is related to a number of really important constructs.

Adrian Furnham:

Excellent. Thank you very much.

Caitlin Cooper:

Great. Well, thank you, Adrian. Thank you, Amanda. That brings us to the end of the episode. So, for our listeners, if you liked what you heard, then please do give us a rating so more people can tune in, and more importantly, they can learn and discover like we do every day. So, thank you very much. Thank you, Caitlin, and thank you, Adrian, and to everyone who's listening.

Dr Amanda Potter:

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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