Duena Blomstrom

Hello everybody, and thank you for having us back at DOES. We were speaking about the same topic and almost saying the same things, only we hope with a little bit of a slant, at the last DOES in America. We're really, really happy to be part of this one in Europe because it is our home turf. The vast majority of PeopleNotTech is based in the UK. Did I say in Europe, our home turf? That's a little bit contentious of a topic. But in any case, both Ffion and I are really excited.

We're not going to be giving you a long intro about who we are, because you can so easily find this information on LinkedIn. Suffice it to say that we are in love with Agile, in love with DevOps, and are living and breathing psychological safety.

So with that said, let's just get straight into the topic. The topic, as I said, is essentially the same one that we have discussed before: looking at the idea of psychological safety, both from the point of view of good behaviors and from the point of view of negative behaviors, in particular when it comes to impression management and the way that reflects in high-performing teams.

As I said, we're going to be giving you some of the new stuff and some of the stuff that we've discussed before, only we'd like you to stick with us so that we get to those bits of news.

Ffion Jones

Absolutely. We know that in this community, in the DevOps community and at DOES, there are going to be a ton of people who really already know quite a bit about psychological safety. But we wanted to put in at the beginning some of the background.

First of all, the term psychological safety has been around since about the '90s. This quote here you can see from William Kahn. That piece of work and the research around psychological safety has really been brought to the public consciousness by the work of Professor Dr. Amy Edmondson, the Harvard professor of leadership. If you haven't heard of her, go and read her books. She's the place to start.

Psychological safety has been defined by her as a shared belief that the team and the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. As we've already said, we've taken that to heart and made it the core of our work here at PeopleNotTech, and we've come up with our own definition based on what we see in teams that have really high levels of psychological safety. That is to say that a psychologically safe team is one that feels like it moves mountains together. Thinking back to the time when you made magic with the team, when you debated, you were vulnerable and learning, and getting stuff done, that was what we see to be psychologically safe.

Then we boiled it down to something even more simple and human and fundamental, really. That's looking at this idea of team equals family. When we talk to people about that, and when we say, "Think back to the last time you were in a team where it felt like family," that's when people can really think of and hook into a time when they felt psychologically safe in a team. That's how we have found it most impactful and useful to talk to people about psychologically safe teams.

Duena Blomstrom

Right. As Ffion was saying, the concept in itself is not new. It has been going around for quite some time. In fact, I think the very first mention of the concept may have dated back to the '60s, if I remember correctly, but the term hasn't come into consciousness until the '90s, and then obviously with the work of Professor Dr. Amy Edmondson.

In terms of Professor Dr. Amy Edmondson, I'm sure no one listening to this is unfamiliar with her work. But if at all you haven't read it, please read "The Fearless Organization," please read "Teaming." At the very least, those two books will give you a lot better of a perspective. Obviously, everybody listening to us would have at least read "The Phoenix Project" and is very familiar with how Gene and collaborators are defining psychological safety.

We say this over and over again: psychological safety hasn't really gotten to become part of the general idea of the business world until Project Aristotle came back with their findings. What matters is there was this gap between when academia woke up to the importance of dynamic in teams and of teams making this magic together, and the time that the business world has woken up to it.

In terms of Project Aristotle, this has been a very successful slide at the other DOES. What Google's Project Aristotle was, in a nutshell, if you're not familiar with it, is essentially centered around the question of what makes our team super performant. How do we get high performance in teams? What makes our team be magical and run fast?

They ran this study looking at over 100 variables, 180 teams, 50,000 people surveyed. That is immense compared to everybody else. It was over a substantial period of time, those four years. All the data came back to essentially point to, first and foremost, psychological safety. Secondly, whether or not a team has a degree of dependability, whether or not the team has inbuilt structure and clarity, if they have meaning, if they have impact.

All of these mean different things to different people. There have been voices slightly critical of what dependability really means, what it means outside of Google, how to get more meaning, how to get more impact, and what structure and clarity mean in different organizations. All of those things are debatable. What isn't debatable, though, is what psychological safety really means in this context.

To double down on how important it is, what you're looking at is something I'm sure most of you have seen before, which is essentially one of the many diagrams in the State of DevOps DORA report that starts by saying that you have to have a culture of psychological safety. Every one of those diagrams has started with one of these boxes, which I find absolutely remarkable, because if you want regulation, you have to start with a culture of psychological safety. If you want operational excellence, you have to start with this culture of psychological safety. Whatever it is that you want, less technical debt, whether it is to have cleaner code, to run faster, make better technology, the number one thing you need to do is start with a culture of psychological safety.

What I think is really interesting is that one of the premises in this particular report has been to double-check if the findings that Google had were particular and specific to Google only or were actually applicable across the board to other organizations. The survey data here was over, I believe, 3,600 other companies. They have asked them nearly the same things, and every result pointed to psychological safety again. So no, this is not a result that is Google-specific. This is a result that is humans-in-technology-specific.

Ffion Jones

Definitely. What we came to thinking about, and what we're talking about in this talk and our last talk, is that psychological safety as an idea is pretty straightforward for people to connect with. People really resonate with the idea as well of needing to create a safe-to-speak-up environment. But how do we break it down so that we can do something with it? That's one of the questions we grappled with.

We came up with six components of psychological safety. We'll focus on the positive and negative behaviors of psychological safety for the purposes of this talk, but these are the six components that we believe it breaks down into. Those are flexibility, engagement, how connected you are with your team, openness to the behavior of speaking up, courage, again having the courage to stand up for what you believe in, resilience, and then of course learning, which should always be at the core of a great psychologically safe team.

To come to those positive and negative behaviors that we mentioned a second ago, we know that the positive behavior, the desirable behavior that creates a psychologically safe environment, is speaking up. It's having a voice. It's giving input authentically, openly, and courageously. It's voicing concerns, fears, observed mistakes. It's offering opinions and ideas, no matter how wild and left of field they are, understanding that you're in an environment that will respect and receive all of those ideas and deal with those constructively.

On the flip side of that, whilst that's really easy to understand, it's a little bit more challenging to look at the negative behaviors of psychological safety. But when we do talk about impression management, and we dig into impression management, it really makes it much clearer as to how we can make progress in the space of psychological safety. Impression management is the not speaking up for fear of appearing incompetent, ignorant, negative, disruptive, or intrusive.

The key thing, or one of the other things to think about here, is that impression management is the antithesis of psychological safety, and it also lowers psychological safety. The more we see of that behavior, the lower psychological safety becomes in the team.

Duena Blomstrom

Precisely. Impression management is indeed the devil over there and what we must find ways to avoid.

We'll show you something here which we couldn't have shown you when we talked to you last about this, and we'll try to expand on that because we've learned a lot over the last year, really, and over the last few months even. Those learnings are primarily to do with how teams have embraced these concepts, in particular in terms of good and bad behaviors, through the prism of the fact that we make no secret about it. We make a product that measures and improves psychological safety. By that, I mean we ask and check how people behave, and then we give them ways to improve those behaviors and improve the good ones and diminish the bad ones.

When it comes to impression management in particular, we're forensic in helping teams try to lower it because, as Ffion said, not only does it show itself as a symptom, but it further diminishes whatever psychological safety they had, whatever the engagement. The great news about impression management is that it lends itself to essentially the equivalent of cognitive behavioral therapy, but for teams.

The concept when it comes to individuals is that if you have a behavior that's negative, what you need to do is find the time to understand it, dissect it, think of it in an analytical way, potentially with support and help. After which, once you have understood it, you are a lot more able to reframe around potentially avoiding that behavior from then on. That is the principle behind cognitive behavioral therapy, really, in very simplistic terms. Nonetheless, we realized very soon that there are ways in which we can do that precise same thing, only with teams instead of individuals.

Meaning once we start understanding what the negative behavior is and understand it forensically enough to catch ourselves when we do it, we can start reframing and stop engaging in that behavior. These on your screen are screenshots of some of the questions, of which there are, I believe, close to 100 questions that pertain to the same topic. These are some of the questions that will make people who are using our dashboard realize what their behavior is.

When have they stopped themselves for fear of appearing a certain way, whether that was incompetent, negative, ignorant, disruptive, and so on? We simply ask team members to look inwards and realize that they have, in the last period, in the last sprint, in the last engagement, stopped themselves from saying something. They have bit their lip. They haven't engaged. They haven't spoken up. They stopped short of actually showing their true thoughts. Any time they've done that, they've engaged in impression management. They've done that for fear of appearing a certain way to their colleagues. If they have done so, that is absolutely problematic, and they should know immediately.

What happens further in our software is that they will be told this happened to them with what we call an alert. In this particular team, once someone was afraid of looking dumb, twice someone was afraid of looking negative, or maybe the same person, and then they never were afraid of looking intrusive or overly prying. In that example, that's neither good nor bad. You simply know what has happened in terms of those moments when the team hasn't engaged fully. They will obviously reflect in the score that we're also showing with the components Ffion was speaking about earlier, but by the time they reflect on that score, it will be a little bit late.

What we suggest is a way to reframe around understanding when people have done that behavior, and then a way to change that by asking themselves to stop and reflect on the moment itself. This is an excerpt of one of the plays we have put together called the Catch Yourself Counter. You can do this without our software. Most of the things we're telling you today, obviously we'd like you to talk to us and work with us, but you don't actually need us for this bit. You literally just need to form a practice of catching yourself when you engage in impression management. Ask yourself these questions: Have I stopped myself? Was I afraid of X or Y? Have I been fearing appearing a certain way to my team? Have I seen other people engage in that behavior around me?

This is just an example of one of the plays, a play that you can start doing as of today, where you will notice impression management around you, even in this conference. Once you see it, you can no longer unsee it, and it's a really healthy habit to have to look around.

Speaking of plays, we have a number of them in the software that will address a certain type of behavior. Remember the components that Ffion was talking about. When you see that those behaviors are flagging in any way, when you see that you're not doing great in any of those categories, then you can go ahead and address that by using one of the plays that we have crowdsourced from the many astoundingly wonderful teams that we have worked with over the last year, year and a half, and we are now giving them back to all the other teams that are working with us.

Ffion Jones

Going into what can we do with those different areas of psychological safety, some of the pieces of advice and knowledge, and as Duena said, we've picked these up over working with teams for the last little while.

One of these is to continue looking out for impression management. Really important to remember when you're looking out for impression management, and you're starting on that journey, that when we talk about impression management, we always talk about we and not they, because it is common to us all. One of the first things you'll find is that you notice it in yourself, and you realize that actually there are lots of occasions on which you don't speak up. Even if there are only a few occasions, they will be important ones.

The behavior of impression managing is dangerous and risky from the point of view of the way Amy Edmondson describes it in her book "The Fearless Organization," when she says, "You can mitigate for what you hear, but you can't mitigate for what you don't hear." So when you or anybody in your team is impression managing, you're missing out on some really important information, insights, challenges, whatever it might be. Our advice is to look for it in all corners, in your team, in yourself, outside your team, and definitely upwards in the leaders that are above you as well.

The next piece of advice, the next thing that we'd really like you to be thinking about doing, is being courageous. That courage element of psychological safety is something that if you as an organization want to stay relevant, you want to stay competitive, you're looking for innovation, you're looking for new ideas, this idea of having courage and being safe to speak up and feeling that stepping into that vulnerability in order to be able to speak up, then that's what's going to get you into that space of being able to innovate and being able to stay relevant and stay ahead of the marketplace.

Brene Brown is a fantastic source of all kinds of tips and knowledge and thinking around vulnerability. Referring back to her work at any time is really, really valuable in this space. The sorts of things that we think about when we think about courage are, for example, the Nokia example. Nokia had impression management and lack of courage at three different levels of their organization. They didn't listen to advice or communicate openly about threats from competitors. They weren't able to tell bosses that the company's technology couldn't compete in evolving markets. As a result of that impression management and low-level courage across the organization, they became irrelevant and lost billions of dollars. We're looking to avoid those kinds of instances and those kinds of results by working on psychological safety and specifically working on that courage to speak up in difficult situations.

Next, always be learning. I think many organizations and many teams really value learning as part of their culture, but do we really value learning? We say we do. We provide opportunities for people to learn. We talk about learning on the job. We talk about making people development opportunities. But where do we really see organizations putting their money on the line when it comes to learning and really making it one of the most important things people in their teams can do?

What's been really interesting for us in the last 12 months has been speaking to a particular large pharmaceutical company that's actually taken the step of not just talking about doing this. They've taken the step of rewarding people on their time spent on learning. Imagine that. You've got people being bonused for their achievements in terms of technical delivery or their achievements in terms of what they've actually delivered on the job. This organization has said, "No, we value your learning as much as or more than that level of performance because we see the long-term contribution to our organization and to your motivation and to that psychologically safe environment that we really, really value creating in this organization." It kind of knocked our socks off when we heard about it. I think it's definitely one to take away and think hard about: what do we really reward in terms of learning in our teams?

Duena Blomstrom

Precisely. Other things that are obviously not new to anyone here that we have to keep focused on are: are we able to stay flexible and are there things that we can be doing so that we increase that? With the period we've just crossed, we're more aware than ever of the need for flexibility and of the need for resilience, that they're connected.

The way that we look at it, you can very well be flexible and yet break at some point, so you don't have long-term resilience. They are interconnected, but they're not one and the same thing. So we measure them both in the software. The way we measure flexibility is through a couple of things that are declarative, what people have told us: how excited they were about change, how unbothered they were about things that have come and been above what they were expecting to happen, how willing they are to see directions be muddled and ideas be iffy, and so on. We're asking those, but we're also looking at the way they're using the software to see if they indeed are flexible, and they change times they meet, they change times that they react with the software, and so on.

If you go a step further, flexibility will then eventually, ideally, over time, transform into resilience, not on its own. If anything, we believe that resilience also has a component of engagement in it. If you stop to think about it, the tighter you are, the more empathy you have, the more of a foundation you have of enough of emotional bond to be resilient by using your flexibility.

On both of those things, we have developed various plays that you can find in the playbook. We also send out about a video or two a week that describe these plays with the same attitude of, "Please just learn from us and do these things with pen and paper. You don't necessarily have to use our software for it." In those explanations, if you dig through our YouTube channel, you're going to be able to see us talk about resilience plays that increase your ability to be resilient over time. God knows we've been very tested on resilience in the pandemic that just passed.

There are also flexibility plays and ways to keep you agile enough in terms of thinking. I don't mean that agile, I mean able to do sprints, and I don't mean those sprints, but just able to move between one idea and another, be excited about change, and herald transformation in ways that are enthusiastic. To do those things, there are exercises you can actually apply where you put yourself in new situations, where you think of alternative endings, where you create scenarios, where you together think of things that you have actually avoided, and then appreciate and be grateful for the resilience that you have built together.

I'm going to speed it up a little bit over here and not preach on servant leadership, but give you a fun bit of information. We have been contacted not long ago by a company that wanted to use our product, not to measure psychological safety, not to increase psychological safety, but to train servant leaders, as a mini leadership product. That is because when people are using our playbook, they don't actually need a team leader to be running the play, the session. That can be run by anyone. Essentially, the team decides together on next actions; the facilitator could be anybody of them. That person becomes a servant leader for that particular action. This company was interested in getting many, many servant leaders within one team, which is a lovely idea. Being a servant leader just means being able to facilitate, taking obstacles out, and any one of us can do it if we have the right picture of the dynamic that we're trying to construct.

Ffion Jones

Absolutely. Speaking of leadership, I think it's always worth us talking about psychological safety in leadership teams. In our hearts of hearts, we all acknowledge that the higher up an organization we go into those executive leadership teams, the lower the levels of psychological safety, the higher the levels of impression management. There's no getting away from that. That is where a good body of the work needs to be done in terms of psychological safety and building that kind of culture.

We always think of one standout example, which was from Emily Evans' book "The Lilac Merchants," you might have heard of. She had worked at Apple for a period of time, but it was only after she left Apple that she was quoted as saying that in that job, she would rather have kept her job by staying within the lines than saying something and risk looking stupid. She had been in a really senior role, widely respected for her work, and yet was still experiencing that level of impression management because of the level of role that she was in. So something to reflect on in terms of senior teams and psychological safety.

Finally, not finally, but how do we measure and improve psychological safety? One of the key things here is understanding how we are engaging people in psychological safety and impression management, how we are surveying people, how we are talking to them about it. We want to measure and improve psychological safety. Survey fatigue is one of the barriers that we need to get over. Our tool is not a survey tool, to be clear. But when it comes to surveys, what we have found is that the most successful survey tools out there are the ones that close the feedback loop.

Nobody wants to continually answer questions that are not relevant and questions where their answers just don't go anywhere; they're just rolled up into a corporate metric. When you give people the opportunity to close that feedback loop, then people can see the value, and they're willing to give of their time and their energy to those surveys and answering those questions.

Duena Blomstrom

Exactly. What that results in is practically empowered teams. We have been incredibly humbled and fortunate to see teams that went from disengaged, not quite interested, with low levels of psychological safety, and they have transformed themselves into empowered, powerful, excited mini psychology teams that were now in an enthusiasm loop of doing something about their well-being and then seeing the results of it. It's been truly an honor. For those of you that are watching this and are clients, watching your teams grow has made our year and made everything we're doing worth it. We'd like to thank you for that.

What we see and what we advise that everyone does is, again, our software or not, just work on reducing something we call the human debt. That's one for maybe the next DOES, but what it is essentially is finding ways to focus on the team bubble, obsess about psychological safety, make sure that you do measurement and action truly and honestly and openly, and that you get organizational permission for all this if you actually are trying to lower that human debt.

Speaking of human debt, I actually have a book coming out. I'm not going to talk about it for very long, but there's going to be a discount code, which you can see in the Slack channel so that you guys can get it for cheaper than the rest of the universe, although it's not a very expensive book in general. What it attempts to do is essentially make that connection between HR and business and IT and DevOps and bridge that gap, because I feel like it's in the middle of that gap that we have dropped all of the knowledge and the goodness about people. If we do want to start sorting that human debt, we have to come together and fix it from both sides of the equation.

There are a couple of newsletters you can find on LinkedIn, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. We talk either about Agile or psychological safety. As Ffion said, you can come to us and talk to us about this as well.

Ffion Jones

If you are ready to do something about psychological safety, and we know that this community is, from our experience last time and our experience working with you, already elbows deep in psychological safety, if you want to use a software solution, come to us. We're really ready to talk to you. We love working with people and using this solution.

But if you're not, and you just want to get started, then please take some of the advice we've given you today. Just get started. Take some practical steps in the right direction. It will make the difference for your teams, and that is what we want to see happen. Thank you very much for listening to us.

Duena Blomstrom

Thank you. Bye.

Ffion Jones

Bye.