When It Comes to Psychological Safety - Talk Is Cheap

In today’s video, we speak about what appears to be a tricky phase when it comes to Psychological Safety - when organisations find themselves trapped in an awareness-raising-only cycle. How can it be broken and when can the people work begin in earnest?

As Ffion points out, it isn’t unusual, that is what usually happens with “big meaty topics” in the realm of humans in the workplace - they all take a long time to land and then a longer time to build a base of true awareness. We are certainly not saying we are against the learning, far be it from us, -we even measure “learning” as one of the behaviours that define the health of the team in our software!- we are simply saying most of the companies we are speaking to are overdoing it on this topic and it is so that they postpone the execution.

In the case of Psychological Safety, it is the ultimate “meaty topic” as it encompasses so many aspects of all our emotional lives but it also has a deeply personal impact dimension to it as people do truly, deeply resonate as soon as they hear about it. It either reminds them of the happiest or the unhappiest they’ve ever been in a team.

Let’s consider how does the topic of PS enter an organisation? Typically it does so at a team level first, -likely via the repositories of modern knowledge industry work culture beacons that are the DevOps/Agile communities - and then they spread it, find a sponsor/advocate/Superhero leader and they in turn run with it for a while and that’s when the topic of PS becomes an organisational topic in terms of awareness.

With every one of these topics, the flurry of activity that colludes to create the awareness cycle is almost the same - emails get sent around, the discussion starts in some pockets, maybe a steering group gets involved, some memo/programme proposal is created, some course is offered to everyone, some groups may get coaching, materials are being circulated, etc. And people are typically very excited about the early phases of this flurry of activity on the topic and then everyone’s interest seems to dip. Contrary to what you may be tempted to believe if you see people seemingly dipping in motivation that isn’t about the topic, but about how they feel they are stuck in the cycle of just learning and discussing with no true follow-up and action and that has a supremely disheartening effect that often breaks the trust in the organisation even more.