The Benefits of Psychological Safety with Nicki Bowman (E16)

Happiness for Cynics podcast

Psychological safety is being able to be your true self around others without being afraid of negative consequences. It has been a hot topic in the corporate world for a number of years, with many HR departments rolling out programs with slogans like “Diversity Matters – You Can be You!”

Slogans aside, psychological safety is critical to mental wellbeing. It’s about employees feeling included and safe to learn, contribute and speak up without fear, and as today’s guest, Nicki Bowman, points out, it can also impact a company’s bottom line. Nicki is a leadership consultant, speaker and author. She joins us today to talk about the importance of psychological safety and how limitless psychological safety can allow teams to thrive.

About Nicki Bowman

Nicki is a leadership consultant, speaker and author. The focus of her work is teaching and inspiring leaders to provide the limitless psychological safety which allows teams to thrive, even as we all face a volatile and uncertain future. This provides the platform for an enviable, adaptable and resilient culture, and a workforce capable of exceptional performance.

Nicki’s leadership career has spanned over 21 years across industries as diverse as mining, finance, sport and manufacturing. It has seen her transition from lawyer to senior executive to professional director, culminating in the establishment of her own leadership practice.

In addition to her corporate career, Nicki has been active for many years in the philanthropic sector. Nicki was a founding director of Football South Coast Limited, is a director of Dress for Success Sydney Inc. and is the founder and Chair of its Illawarra Branch. Nicki has been recognised locally and at State level for her not-for-profit activities, including as the 2019 Australia Day Ambassador for Wollongong.

Find her at www.nickibowman.com.

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast Happiness for Cynics. I’m Marie Skelton, a writer, speaker and change and resilience expert, and my co-host is Pete.

P: Hi there. I’m Peter Furness. I’m a remedial massage therapist, dance and movement practitioner, yoga loving global adventurer. Each week we will bring to you the latest news and research in the world of positive psychology, otherwise known as happiness.

M: You can find our podcast at happinessforcynics.com or visit marieskelton.com for articles and resources on change and resiliency as well as happiness and finding balance in today’s busy world. The site talks about a lot of the same research we talk about here on the podcast and has some really practical tips for bringing joy and happiness into your life.

P: So let’s get into it. Cynics the world over. It’s time to suck it up and get happy.

[Happy intro music]

M: So we’re here with Nicki Bowman and we’re talking about psychological safety. Nicki is a leadership consultant, speaker and author. The focus of her work is teaching and inspiring leaders to provide the limitless psychological safety which allows teams to thrive even as we all face a volatile and uncertain future. This provides the platform for an enviable, adaptable and resilient culture and a work force capable of exceptional performance. Nicki’s leadership career has spanned over 21 years across industries as diverse is mining, finance, sport and manufacturing. It has seen her transition from lawyer to senior executive to professional director, culminating in the establishment of her own leadership practise. In addition to her corporate career, Nicki has been active for many years in the philanthropic sector. Nicki was a founding director of Football, South Coast LTD. Is a director of Dress for Success, Sydney and is the founder and chair of its Illawarra branch. Nicki has been recognised locally and at state level for her not for profit activities, including as the 2019 Australia Day Ambassador for Wollongong.

[Nicki,] Welcome to the show. Can I start by asking you, what is psychological safety?

NB: Thanks, Marie. Well, that’s a big question to launch with psychological safety in the context that I work with it, is the ability for you to be in a place where you are able to access the full limit of your capability. If we’re not in that place, then we can’t be as effective as we would like to be. It’s about feeling like your leader has your back. It’s about knowing with clarity what your role is, what the context in which you are operating is and where you all are trying to go together. So it’s, it’s a big, that’s why I say it’s a big question to start with because it has a lot of the elements.

M: Yeah, and why, why are all those things important for people?

NB: Interestingly, my leadership career has spanned over two decades and instinctively when I started to look at this work in more detail instinctively the word safe kept coming up to me. I kept thinking to myself, what my goal is as a leader and now as a leadership consultant is to figure out how leaders create the conditions for people to do their best work. And the word that kept coming up over and over again was that can only happen when people are safe, and now we have a lot more understanding of why that is. And the reason is this. The way that we’re wired our lizard brain, so to speak, is that when we are in a state of psychological safety there are things happening neuro scientifically and chemically in our brains that are enabling us to access the tools, the creativity, collaboration and innovation.

When we are thrust into a position where we do not feel safe and that can run the gamut from working for say an actively toxic organisation where people are yelling and screaming and harassing and bullying. That’s one extreme. But it can also occur in an environment where leaders are just not sure about how to lead us with certainty. They just don’t have the tools to put us in that place. What we now know is our bodies can’t tell the difference between essentially being chased by a sabre toothed tiger and being in a workplace where our psychological safety is compromised. So what happens is our fight, flight or freeze response kicks in, and when that kicks in, it automatically stops us being able to access so much of what our brains would otherwise have to offer.

So in other words, the cortisol rushes in, and it dampens down the good chemicals like dopamine and serotonin and all the things that make us want to succeed and collaborate and praise others and be praised, and instead we go back into survival mode. And when we’re in survival mode, we’re just thinking about what’s happening in the next five minutes and making sure that we’re not getting our heads bitten off metaphorically or actually on. We’re not actually thinking creatively unable to access all of those amazing capabilities that we have.

M: There’s so much in there that I would love to unpack.

NB: Yes

M: [Laugh] So I guess, is this something that for humans is a bit newer because of the shift in how we traditionally have worked in an industrial era to now the skill sets that we’re encouraging in the workplace and you mentioned quite a few of them: creativity, collaboration, all of those things, is this indicative of how the world is changing? This new foc[us] –is it a new focus? Or has it always been there?

NB: Look, my belief is that it is. It is very much a new focus for the broader community at large. I agree with you 100%. I think in the days when things were… look the whole environment has changed. Not only has the nature of work that humans do changed we’re increasingly [changing], robotics, automation and AI are taking over what we used to think of as the mundane tasks right, the task that didn’t require you to apply a lot of intellectual horsepower, the tasks that didn’t require you to have to collaborate directly with people that didn’t require a lot of creativity, those tasks are increasingly being automated. So that’s one thing.

M: uh huh

NB: So now where people are in the workplace, we actually are looking to them to be at their most human. I think that’s a reason why leaders are now looking for new tools, because back in the day when command control was the preferred style of leadership. The other reason that it remained relatively effective as a modality in those days was that people obtained a lot of certainty and security elsewhere in their life. So, for example, jobs used to be almost for life maybe if not for life. But people entered the workforce with an expectation that if they went into a good job, say at a bank or it somewhere like BHP or one of the big industrial companies that they would enter and they would stay in that job for decades. Yeah?

M: Yeah

NB: The outside world also moved along relatively slowly. There weren’t great disruptive changes to technology and if there were, they were coming at a pace that was slow enough for people to absorb. So now that we live in a world where things are changing so rapidly, it’s almost exhausting to keep up where we are constantly bombarded day in, day out, with so many sources of information about so many different things, we don’t even know where to look. And the economy is shifting towards a far less stable model of employment. It’s become much more critical that leaders create a safe, stable place in the workplace even if that, they can’t fix the problem that the economy has shifted or that the world is much faster and that the rate of change is picking up. They can’t change that, but what they now need to do to enable people to perform effectively is we need to work a lot harder as leaders to create that safety for our people because once again to go back to my original point, if you’re not in that place of psychological safety, you cannot access the tools that you need to succeed in the next economy and in fact, the next economy is already here so that’s why it’s become much more critical that leaders learn to provide that sense of security because in previous times first the jobs were different, but also the surrounding world was different. So we were able to access that security in a number of different places where now it just simply doesn’t exist.

M: OK, all right, I’m going to come to how to do that in a little bit. But can you share some example? So you’ve been working as a leadership consultant and talking to companies about how to do this. Can you share some examples of changes you’ve seen in work cultures and how this is positively impacted people and teams?

NB: Yes, I can. So one of the more extreme examples that I saw and I saw this when I was still working in a leadership role was a particular, it was a factory an industrial site, and I met with the person who had been the leader of that site. Now, when he came into that site, the relationship between union and unions and management was so bad that literally the union leaders had taken to the manager’s cars with baseball bats.

M: Oh, wow.

NB: Management required security to even enter the workplace. So this, people jump to that and they jumped to ‘Oh, Unions [versus] Management, you’re not talking about psychological safety’, but in fact what happened was a complete transformation in that relationship occurred, and it occurred because this particular leader was able to implement a number of changes in the way that the plant was run, which effectively provided the psychological safety that these people needed. So if you think about what they were acting out against, they were acting out against the fact that they were being kept in the dark by management. They were acting out against the fact that they were not being given a clear direction and clear instructions. They were acting out against the fact that the lines of communication between Union and Management, well, employees and management, I should say, almost didn’t exist outside of the adversarial union environment. So when people were entering that workplace, they entered it immediately feeling that they were in a hostile environment. So when that happens, what immediately happens, of course, is our cortisol is surging, and once again, our brains are not behaving in the way that they should behave and they’re not looking for collaboration. They’re not looking for ways to work together. They’re not looking for accessing creativity and problem solving.

So this particular leader, started to work with the existing people. So it’s really important to note this. This was a plant in quite a remote part off the country. Where it was not an option to change out the work force, okay. So, so often the solution that people see is ‘Oh well, obviously those people are all horrible and they’ve got baseball bats, and they just need to be gotten rid of.’ No, that wasn’t an option. So this, this leader had to work with who was there. And so what he did was he started with some very simple things. He started with understanding, how is the plant structured? Is it structured in the right way? Do we have the right people doing the right work at the right levels, in the company? Are there people who are perhaps in roles that aren’t quite the right fit for them and therefore they’re, they’re completely stressed in their roles, not because they’re not good people, but just because they’re in the wrong job. Then, once we’ve looked at that, let’s look at the lines of communication, obviously setting up a two way street of communication which is, which is a direct employer employee conversation, not an adversarial thing that’s in with the baggage of decades of antiquity. Let’s talk about how we are very clear about people’s roles and giving them the maximum possible discretion in their roles. Yes, so not trying to shut them down, but actually going what are their capabilities and let’s let the work to those capabilities. So that’s just an example of some of the things that he did overtime, and I visited that plant with him, and it was extraordinary to see the relationship that he had with the workers and how freely they spoke about the absolutely dramatic transformation that occurred under his leadership and the results of that plant. The proof was in the pudding in terms of the improvements that they had had in safety as in physical safety. So there was a direct relationship in terms of their physical safety outcomes, in terms of their productivity, in terms of their ability to ride out some very, very significant economic disturbances and industrial, industry-wide downturns. Their ability to navigate that successfully and continue to operate as a profitable entity was quite remarkable.

M: What I’m hearing and this might be because of my background in communications. [Laugh]

NB: Yep

M: But what I’m hearing is in a time of huge change, people are looking for certainty and you might not be able to give them complete certainty. But if you communicate really well and open up those lines of communication, it goes a long way. Am I paraphrasing and oversimplifying too much?

NB: No, you’re taking part of it, though. Maybe part of it. A big part of it is being really improving the lines of communication, but also the way that you communicate. So, for example, a really important piece of helping people feel tethered is purpose and purpose operates at sort of two levels.

One, it operates at a higher level in terms of what is the purpose of our whole organisation, right? Why are we here? Why do we come to work? Because if we can give people a tether to purpose that they believe in, then they will be less likely to get attached to the way they do things. If they don’t feel like they’re attached to the way they do things and believe, and remember people needing to feel safe. So they’re trying to attach themselves to something right? So if they can’t attach themselves to a job for life because that’s gone, then they’ll attach themselves to the way they do things in the job unless there’s something higher that they can attach themselves to.

So this is where we get into trouble, for example, with a lot of change initiatives where people [are] like all we have to change. But if people are buying into the purpose of the organisation in the first place and therefore buying into the fact that the change is being driven to enhance that purpose, then what are they going to cling to? The thing that gives them security and the thing that gives them security is the way they do stuff. So that’s purpose at one level, it’s, it’s about allowing people to buy into a higher order of purpose around what they do.

And the second way that purpose comes into it in terms of communication, as a leader, is to give people context. So when you are assigning tasks when you are talking about events that are occurring within the firm or the organisation. When you are developing new projects, if you’re just lobbing them into these people out of thin air, it’s much harder to get their engagement. And it’s much harder to therefore get them to feel safe and secure in what they’re doing. If you can centre it by giving them the bigger picture and saying, OK, here’s the context in which I’m asking you to do this task. And here’s how it plugs into the business plan, the strategic plan, the overall purpose of the organisation. Once again, that’s giving people a sense of security that is going to enable them to perform a lot better when they are discharging that task.

M: Okay, so it seems to make sense. [Laughter] You take it one step further, though, and you talk about your limitless safety.

NB: Yep, I do.

M: What’s that about?

NB: The reason I like to call it limitless safety is that sometimes the word safety implies to people that there is a restraint, if you know what I mean. The word safe tends to make people think of cocoons, and it sometimes makes them think of the rules and regulations that stop you doing things and in fact the opposite is true. It’s only when you’ve got limitless safety that you can start to move towards limitless creativity, limitless results, limitless performance. So it’s the convergence of a world where everything is changing faster than we can make out where the nature of all the workplaces are changing. In order to allow people to navigate that successfully and to unleash their creativity we actually have to give them limitless safety. It sounds very counterintuitive, but it’s a way of showing people that, in fact, safety is the starting point from which you can launch your full capability. If you cannot step into safety first, then you will never be able to reach the limits of your capability.

NB: I love it. Okay, so we’re running up to the 20 minutes that we set aside for the show. Can we, maybe finish with some tips, obviously we’ll put a link to your site so people can contact you if they’re interested in reaching out to you. But can you leave them with just a little bit of what it is you do? And maybe some tips on how they can develop a limitless safety culture in their organisation or teams?

M: Sure. Thank you. Yes, so what I do now? As I said, I spent more than two decades in leadership and what I’ve done now is set up a leadership consultant, consultancy and I work with predominantly organisations, occasionally individuals around the principles that found that sense of limitless safety. So the framework I’ve developed her seven elements, two of them are organisational. And that is something that’s often missed from discussions around psychological safety and culture in the workplace. It’s about getting the structure of the organisation right and the fit of the rolls right before you then turn to the individual behaviours. And so there are five individual behaviours around conveying purpose, enforcing standards, setting boundaries, maintaining awareness and making decisions that are critical for leaders to be able to understand and adequately exercise so that they can give their people the absolute best chance of achieving limitless performance.

M: Okay, and they’re going to have to go to your website to find out more I think. [Laugh]

NB: I run coaching, I run workshops and I run much more immersive programmes for organisations across the number of months for people that really want to get it to the next level.

M: Absolutely, and I think again coming back to Happiness for cynics. The podcast that we’re on right now. If you’re not safe, feeling safe at work, you’re not going to be happy and living your best life. So really important topic. And thank you so much for talking to us.

NB: You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me on. And yes, I think ah, lot of people are extremely cynical about the workplace and about what’s happening in the workplace. But I’m all about the fact that limitless safety is what’s going to drive them away from their cynicism and into the happiness space.

M: I love it. Okay. Well, thank you so much.

NB: Thanks, Marie. I appreciate the chance to talk too.