Ffion Jones

[00:00:12.960] Hi, everybody. Welcome to our session. My name is Ffion Jones. I'm a partner at People Not Tech. I'm also a team coach. I've been working with engineers for over a decade now, and having spent lots of time working on projects with project leadership teams and project teams, what I've really found is that it's in the team that we find the magic, and that's why I do what I do.

[00:00:39.060] Beyond that and further to that, I found out that psychological safety is one of the most important things in building great teams, and that's become a huge passion point for me as a team coach.

Duena Blomstrom

[00:00:52.660] Hi, I'm Duena Blomstrom. I'm an author, a keynote speaker, but more importantly, I am the Chief Product Officer and co-founder of People Not Tech. And what we do is we make the world's first solution that diagnoses and improves psychological safety in teams.

[00:01:09.360] And I personally fell in love with Agile and DevOps many years ago, making all kinds of products for fintech. So our talk today will have a number of examples which come from that world of financial services and banking. So bear with us. Hopefully, they will be helpful to you today.

[00:01:28.320] The topic that we have, as Ffion said, is one that's very near and dear to our heart. This is what we live and breathe. We spend our days figuring out what is it that psychological safety in teams means, and what can we do to get more of it and less of the negative behavior, which we will talk to you about today, called impression management.

Ffion Jones

[00:01:53.640] So we wanted to talk to you, first of all, about what is psychological safety. Now, before we talk about definitions, we want to make it absolutely clear that we are really aware that lots of people watching today and listening today are going to be aware of what psychological safety is. We just want to make sure that we frame it up properly. And for those of you that maybe haven't heard of the term, we can give you a bit of the context and the history.

[00:02:19.820] So psychological safety and the work on psychological safety originated with William Kahn in the 1990s, and then Professor Dr. Amy Edmondson has really done much of the in-depth research over the last 25 to 30 years, amongst others. But she's brought it into the popular consciousness through her research and her writings. And she defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk.

[00:02:47.780] We've taken it to our hearts, and it's become the central passion of our work here at People Not Tech. So our description and definition is around a psychologically safe team being one that feels like family and moves mountains together. So if you think back to the last time you made some magic with a team, how you were open and debated and were vulnerable and learning, creating, and getting stuff done, that was psychologically safe.

Duena Blomstrom

[00:03:20.200] Exactly. And of all these definitions, the one that we feel resonates most when we talk to teams, leaders, and just people in general is these two words in it, essentially. As soon as we say, "You're looking at a team that feels like a family," you get some reaction. Some of this reaction is a slight eye-roll at first because people immediately go to how their family may not be one from "Seventh Heaven" or some other sitcom they've seen in the '80s. But with that said, we all know that we can trust family, we can have fun with them, we can return to them, we can count on them, and that is, to a degree, the type of feeling that we would like to see in teams as well.

[00:04:03.020] So as long as there is a feeling of bubble, a feeling of counting on each other, a feeling of being able to be free and yourself, that is, to a degree, what we're talking about. And when people do connect, that is, without a doubt, when we can bring them along on the journey of getting more psychological safety.

[00:04:22.700] So speaking of the journey of psychological safety, as Ffion was saying earlier, it has been studied by academics over the years, and the vast body of research comes from Professor Dr. Amy Edmondson. And many of you listening to this would have seen her books, would have read her books. To me, they're up there with The Project. Make sure that you have bought and read everything she's written about teams and teaming and "The Fearless Organization."

[00:04:47.800] And once you have done that, consider the fact that there is maybe some gap between the research that Amy was doing, because it was focused primarily on the medical field and a number of other industries, and the way that this reflected to business, in a sense. And to my mind, where the shift has come in and where this has become part of the consciousness of us all, I would say, is when Google started giving us the results of their Project Aristotle. Most of you here obviously know about it. Some of you here may have answered the questionnaire that brought about a result for a report I'm going to talk about later.

[00:05:28.240] But the Google Project Aristotle is what was the turning point in terms of psychological safety and the acceptance of the term, the understanding of what it means, and how important it became to the business world, because who doesn't want to be like Google? Some say they don't, but they still do.

[00:05:47.000] So essentially, when you look at the results of Project Aristotle, the data set is massive. The question was: What is it that we can do to get more very productive and highly performant teams, what are they made out of? And the number one finding there was it did not really matter what type of people they were putting in them beyond a certain level of keywords and skills. What really mattered was whether or not these people were having these things in common in a team, these behaviors, this understanding, these stable types of interactions. And those were, obviously, a number of them you see on the screen, had to do with whether or not they felt they can depend on each other, whether there was structure, clarity, if they made any impact through their work, and if they had purpose. But the number one behavior that was in common to all of the performant teams was psychological safety.

[00:06:38.768] And if that was a big signal, as I said earlier, getting ahead of myself, the biggest signal to my mind came in 2019 when we had the State of DevOps Accelerate report come out, one of my dearest and most beloved pieces of ammunition in the arsenal of explaining to the boards why this matters. Because what the report has managed was to ask other companies whether or not they function the same way as Google. And lo and behold, yes, the same thing was the case, which is you cannot have performance, you can't be a top agile performer, you can't be a digital elite maker, haver, you can't be a winner without starting with psychological safety, and that applies to every technical organization from then on, if you wish.

[00:07:36.308] So the concept is clear, and everybody we work with connects with it really easily. It's something that people really understand on an emotional, on a visceral level. But what it really breaks down to and what it contains is a little bit harder to dissect. So for the rest of our talk, we're going to focus on the two main behaviors that signal and increase psychological safety. But the components are what you see in front of you.

[00:08:02.088] So we spent some time researching in order to be able to split psychological safety down into these components. And what it looks like is whether a team is psychologically safe or not depends on whether they are flexible, whether they are resilient, if they're engaged, if they learn together, and if they are open and courageous.

[00:08:25.428] So before we continue, we want to make sure that we give you crystal clarity on those behaviors. So there's a positive behavior that you see here that is desirable to have psychological safety, and that's the behavior of speaking up and opening up. And then at the opposite end, there's the negative behavior that shows low psychological safety and lowers it even more every time it occurs, and that's impression management. So that's the fear that stops us from engaging in the positive behavior.

[00:08:56.108] So the former is easy to understand. It refers to all the moments when we are our true selves with bravery. When all of our opinions, concerns, ideas, anything and everything that we offer to the team dynamic is out and on the table. The latter is when we have not spoken up and not been open because we were afraid. We were afraid we would appear either negative, incompetent, ignorant, disruptive, or intrusive.

[00:09:31.028] So all those words are essentially vague definitions, if you wish, right? But if you stop to think about it, you'll start relating, because what we're saying is anytime you've bit your lip, anytime you've stopped yourself from speaking up, and that was out of fear because you are afraid to look, quite frankly, stupid, or you are afraid to look like you don't know something, or you are loath to bother someone, or you wanted to keep looking professional, or you didn't want to ask too many personal details. Whatever it is that stopped you from expressing an opinion, asking a question, becoming truly emotionally involved, those are the times when essentially you've done that out of fear of appearing in a negative light.

[00:10:15.968] If you've done that, then most absolutely you should try and get a check on it and see when it happens. Because every time that we believe we would be offering something to the team, and yet we don't do it because we are afraid of something, is essentially the behavior that we are talking about. And today, we're going to give you a number of examples, but what we would like you to do is make sure that these examples relate to your personal situation. And note I say a lot of we.

[00:10:43.568] This is because it's not something that some people do. It's not something that some teams are faced with. It's not they, it's not team members. It's us, all of us. Everyone is in the position of impression managing at one point or another. And if we start noticing these patterns and anti-patterns, we can then start reframing and changing our behavior.

[00:11:07.048] So when you listen to these examples today, I would like you to please remember that, yes, some of them may be general. For instance, we might mention the Boeing situation. We're all familiar with what happened there. As soon as the email chain came out, it became very clear that people had been refraining from commenting on things that they should have done because it would've saved lives. And so what I would like us to do today is to take all of those examples and make them as personal as we can. Instead of leaving them as something we once heard in a talk, try and apply them to ourselves. What would your Nokia moment have been? When have you, like the Apple executive, bit your lip? Or what would have been in your Boeing email chain?

Ffion Jones

[00:11:55.196] So the way we're going to do this is we're going to give you one macro example of a certain behavior or anti-pattern, and then we're going to bring it back to the level of the experience that we've had with our clients, so something a bit more accessible and relatable. And then eventually, we'll come to giving you some suggestions and ideas, which will hopefully really help you on how to do more to build up your people practice, and end up with a focus on eliminating or lowering impression management, raising psychological safety, and therefore performance.

[00:12:28.636] So our first example comes from Nokia, which many of you will be completely familiar with this, but if you recall, during the 1990s, they were the top cellphone manufacturer globally. By 2012, they'd lost their spot, along with over $2 billion and 75% of their market value. Then in 2015, the graduate business school, INSEAD, did a study of the company's fall, and from that, we could see really clearly that two things were happening.

[00:12:57.276] First of all, that the executives at Nokia weren't communicating openly about the threat from emerging competitors, Google and Apple. And at the same time, at the other organizational level, the managers and executives weren't telling their bosses that the company's technology couldn't compete in an evolving market, and that's because they were afraid to have that conversation. As a result, Nokia missed the opportunity to innovate and rendered themselves irrelevant.

[00:13:26.936] So you see this slide is called Speak Up or Else. This is relevant to the specific example that I'm going to talk about now. So combating this sort of behavior can't be done by force or mandate. In one example we've seen, the HR department had decided, vowed, that they would make people speak up, and was then sending one HR rep to every standup to ask developers to choose a task or pick up a ticket, and then they were going to retros to egg those people on to tell everyone how they felt.

[00:13:59.916] So kind of hovering over people saying, "No, Sarah, you go ahead now. Everyone, let Sarah tell us exactly how she feels right now. Four minutes left, go." So as you can imagine, it's tempting to do it that way around, but that's actually creating more fear and more impression management than it would be psychological safety.

Duena Blomstrom

[00:14:22.036] Right. And I think it's really important that we realize, as we said earlier, this is a common behavior at every level. It's not only about Sarah, it's not only about developer teams, it's not only about middle management or any type of project teams. It happens at every level. And in fact, we think that one of the most important issues that we need to be honest about at every level of every enterprise is the fact that it happens at the top as well.

[00:14:48.196] In fact, one of the examples where I think it's maybe the clearest comes from Amy Edmondson's "Fearless," I believe, where she mentioned Nilufer Merchant, who was at the time an exec at Apple, hailed as one of the visionaries, seen as one of the top names in the industry and so on. But yet, in a Harvard Business Review article in 2011, she was quoted as saying, "I would rather keep my job by staying within the lines than say something and risk looking stupid." So if someone that was at the top of their game was in a position where they would bite their lip and not speak up, then it's very likely that that happens to all of us really.

[00:15:29.636] Now, of course, she is brave enough and vulnerable enough to admit this, post-factum as it was, but that doesn't mean that we can all do the same thing. So, and this behavior is actually quite common the higher up the top of a company you go. And in fact, impression management can be argued as probably increasing towards the boardroom, towards the places where it's a lot more important that you do this peacock dance, in a sense, than it is to collaborate and work in a real team.

[00:16:00.136] To give you an example from my many, many years in banking, as I was making the switch towards people topics and Agile, when I realized that the only way to really save banking is to fix the organization and make sure that we reduce the human debt, which is this concept of essentially having left topics having to do with humans on the table, just in the same way that we have left technical debt, sometimes we left human debt. So as I was making the transition to solve the human debt, I asked some of the bankers I was working with, who were having a really important meeting the next morning, to record, to have a little journal of their thoughts the night before. What were they revolving around? And to be as honest as possible, because this was, of course, an anonymous study.

[00:16:46.696] And all seven of them had the vast majority of their preoccupation be around things like their image, what were they going to wear, when were they going to arrive, what their phones look like on the day. And then some part of their thoughts were around politics. A good 30, 40% was around politics, who has spoken to whom, who has had dinner and golf with who else, what are they going to react like? And a very minute part, if memory serves, I think it was something like under 10% of their thoughts had to do with the content of the meeting whatsoever. So that's a really clear example of nothing but impression management. As you can imagine, that's not a collaborative team.

[00:17:31.740] Right. Now, how do we find this out? What were they thinking of? If we ask people to really record what they're feeling and thinking, will they do that for us? Very unlikely, and more importantly, we don't. We don't actually ask humans in the enterprise how they really feel. We don't record their feelings before or after a meeting. We tend to muddle along in enterprise with very little information in terms of what really goes on in the minds and souls of our employees.

[00:18:01.900] So one of the biggest things that needs solving is this conversation on measurement and the anti-pattern of measuring like we did 20 years ago, meaning with some type of big organizational once-a-year 360 or employee survey or NPS score. Some of which may be decent, but most of which are either useless or punitive or really irritating to the vast majority of our employees. So the number one thing that needs doing, and we'll talk about what needs doing later, but what you'll see around you is this pattern of semi-asking, of on-paper caring, where there's a survey going out, that must be good enough. We've asked, we've cared.

[00:18:43.440] When realistically, that is not a dialogue venue. That is not a real conversation. That's not an open, "Tell us how you feel so we give you something back." And when it comes to the loop of the feedback, there's very little you can do that's more important in terms of open communication with your employees than to demonstrate that they have been heard and that there's something that's being done or reflected back to them in terms of what they said.

[00:19:12.140] So good examples of that for one are, for instance, what Zappos does, who is obsessed with customers, what, of course, Atlassian does in terms of asking people how they felt about various things. But one physical example we have from back in the day that there were offices from one of our clients is when they've decided to essentially ask people to pop a differently colored ball into a transparent plastic container by the door when they left the day, depending on how they felt that day.

[00:19:41.019] And by the next morning, these containers would be filled with different colors, and you'd have a very clear visual representation as to how that office felt the day before. So in that case, it wasn't genius in any way, shape, but it did close the feedback loop in a way that made people feel heard and important. So we think that that's really, really important.

Ffion Jones

[00:20:04.520] So we've talked to you a bit through theory and some living examples in order to bring the concept of psychological safety to life for you. But the next question is: how do we really make that work for our own teams? So we've picked out some of the priorities based on our experience, and we wanted to share those with you.

[00:20:26.860] So first of all, number one, focus on team and psychological safety. Sounds straightforward, but what we mean is, first things first, begin your journey. Read, watch, understand about psychological safety. Take that a step further to make it part of your team's development to do that as well, and then you'll all know and understand that this is part of your toolkit.

[00:20:48.080] Number two is train emotional intelligence for leaders. So emotional intelligence is often overlooked for tech team leaders as an essential skill in leading great teams. So it's a great gift that you can give yourself and your team if you get some good-quality training and learning in the area of EQ.

[00:21:09.560] Number three is measurement and actions. So we've talked about measurements a bit already. Make psychological safety one of your OKRs, KPIs, whatever it is that you're using to measure, put psychological safety and teams right next to the most important customer satisfaction and financial goals that you have. It needs to be as tangible as those things.

[00:21:32.860] And then number four here is give organizational permission. So you do this by role modeling permission to be vulnerable at the highest levels of the organization. Have CEOs, COOs, CIOs, CTOs that say, "I don't know," and are comfortable saying that and making it okay for other people to say, "I don't know." Talk openly about the importance of a speak-up culture where people don't feel the need to impression manage.

[00:22:05.660] So we also wanted to talk to you about some of the actions that you can take, our best in-team actions for psychological safety. So first of all here, make the human tasks tickets in the sprint. So take your new, I hope new or maybe the existing OKR, KPI on psychological safety, create a collective team action for that. So psychological safety is a group behavioral norm. It's all about the team bubble, which I'll talk about in a second as well. But create that action together and then put it straight into a ticket in your sprint. Make it immediate and real to work on it.

[00:22:41.960] Measure for the good. So when you do measure, make sure it isn't punitive. Keep the measurement constructive and keep it a way for the team to look forward and not a way to create more fear.

[00:22:54.660] Protect the bubble. So we've mentioned the bubble a couple of times. The magic happens in your team. Psychological safety, it can be encouraged at a macro level, at an organizational level, and it's really great to see the focus and strategy on psychological safety. But it's the permission that you give to your teams to work on psychological safety in the team that is important.

[00:23:18.800] And the final one is obsess with the psychological safety conversation space. So make this something that you talk about. Every team get-together, whatever your regular kind of catch-up and check-in is, put this on your agenda. Make it the first thing that you talk about, the cornerstone of your team conversations. It will open up everything else that you do.

Duena Blomstrom

[00:23:43.210] Exactly. And we have a habit of bringing things back to action. We're very big believers in doing something and not just talking about it. It's one of the reasons why we've chosen to make software instead of have a consultancy that just tells you about this.

[00:23:58.250] We are absolutely, as we said, focused on action, not only in what we say, but also in what we do. For instance, one of the most important work parts, workspaces, of our software, for instance, is a very simple box in the very middle of it, Set Team Action. All it does is it allows you and the team collectively to come up with some type of human intervention that will make a difference to one of these components. So all of a sudden, you'll be having growth and change in some of these very clear components that Ffion was talking about earlier.

[00:24:34.160] And these are some examples of that. I'll go through some of them in short, but there are videos of them on our YouTube channel. We have explained how they worked for other teams in various articles. Happy to tell you more. Again, we're not a consultancy. We don't charge for this. We make software. We just want you to be in a place where you can actually start doing the people work.

[00:24:57.970] So some of these interventions, the number one that we keep repeating over and over again, is team relaunches. Whether it's a really big historical moment like this COVID situation, or you have a big restructure, or the team has changed significantly, you absolutely need a team relaunch. In this team relaunch, you're talking about a couple of hours to half a day of throwing everything up in the air, discussing, having a culture canvas in the middle of it, discussing the way you work, contracting and negotiating what type of communication you all expect, just going through everything as if you are a brand new team.

[00:25:30.930] And do that, if you wish, regularly. You don't need to wait for a big event. You can do it every three months, every six months. Every time that you feel your team could benefit from a new moment of forming and of storming, do it in that particular space, so they don't have to take it in other places and impact psychological safety and productivity.

[00:25:49.610] Another thing you can and should be doing is a courage hackathon. When you see the indicators drop down in terms of courage and speaking up, and you will in our software, but I'm sure maybe you can figure it out some other way as well, the thing to do is to sit people down and remind them that they have the reserves to be brave. Read some Brene Brown if you must. Have them bring their favorite character from childhood to the table. Whatever it is that will remind them that they have both permission from the organization and the ability to be themselves and be brave.

[00:26:22.870] Then one that is very dear to my heart is a humor workshop, and you probably should do this once in a while anyways. It's not just for engagement, it's because it bonds teams. The laughter, the connection, that's the glue that's going to keep them resilient. In fact, we advise it as an intervention for resilience and not an intervention for engagement. But what it is, is sit them down, have them each come up with their favorite jokes, tell you what their favorite comedy is, what their memes that they care about are. Have them share what they find funny and important, and then have them listen to everyone else and have just a good session of getting a laughter on.

[00:27:05.190] Then another thing that is very useful is a team bitch fest. What happens is we all work in really tight environments with really long backlogs. What we need is some time from time to time where we can release these emotional blockers, where we can talk to each other and say, "Well, what I found impossible to stomach was..." or "What made me look for another job was..." and just get it out there in a safe space, be done with it.

[00:27:28.370] Last one is an impression management catch-yourself counter. The more you hear us talk about it, the more you understand impression management, the more likely you are to start figuring out when that happens and stop yourself from it. Reframe. Either be courageous or at least know that you're doing this.

[00:27:47.150] So you can find a lot more about these examples in my upcoming book. It's mid-year for Americans, and it's slightly May, I believe, for us in Europe. But what it is, it's essentially, if you wish, a spot of popularized science at the intersection of Agile and psychology, and it attempts to bridge that gap so that we make sure that both business, HR, technology, and whoever else gets that we have human debt we have to work on.

[00:28:18.530] We also write a newsletter twice a week. Well, two different newsletters. One of them is called "Chasing Psychological Safety," and the other one is called "The Future is Agile." Same thing. It's right at the intersection, and we're discussing how Agile is essentially what is going to help us reduce the human debt in the future.

[00:28:39.770] And at the center of all this is what we really make, which is a piece of software. So this is the first solution focusing exclusively on measuring psychological safety and creating a space for that by looking at behavior as well as declarative answers and displaying it in a people action-driven way. So beyond engagement and trust, we look at how flexible a team is, how resilient, whether they learn together, if they're courageous, and we send out alarms when impression management happens, so teams have a chance to keep up the positive behavior of speaking up.

[00:29:16.570] So come and speak to us so we can share some of the lessons that we've learned with you. And if you don't have one, we can give you a space to look after this, this most important indicator of your future success, all of our future success, which is having psychologically safe people in your teams.

[00:29:34.750] Thank you very much for listening to us today, and we are genuinely looking forward to working with you to start reducing this human debt and making our teams happier and a lot more productive, performant, and exceptional. Have a nice day. Thank you.

Ffion Jones

[00:29:50.990] Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Bye.