May 22, 2024 • 14 mins
What makes team members feel secure enough to push boundaries? How does leadership style impact a team’s willingness to take risks in the pursuit of progress? A lot of this comes down to “psychological safety,” a term coined by Amy Edmondson. In a recent virtual keynote, after being asked about psychological safety as it relates to team dynamics, Julia had to admit that she hadn’t heard the term before and would have to do research. So in this week’s episode of If I’m Honest, Julia Landauer explains what psychological safety is, how it relates to team member success, and how she’s incorporated the concept into working with racing teams.
Harvard Business Review study referenced: https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety
McKinsey article referenced: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-psychological-safety
Learn more about Julia Landauer at https://julialandauer.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of If
I'm Honest with Julia Landauer. Happy Wednesday. I got to
spend last weekend at North Wilkesboro Speedway for the NASCAR
All Star Race weekend where they had the NASCAR Truck
Series and the NASCAR Cup Series competing. And North Wilkesboro
Speedway has a lot of historical significance. It's one of
(00:26):
those traditional old school racetracks. It got revamped and almost
brought back from the dead to be able to host
this All Star Race. They do other more grassroots level
racing throughout the year and it's a really fun exhibition race.
There are no points for it, but they have a
pit crew challenge and they do interesting qualifying formats and
(00:46):
they have a fun race. I was there for Friday
and Saturday, and on Saturday they had the most torrential
rain in that you could even imagine. I mean, we
had at least four or five inches in the span
of two hours. The track lost power, the generator went out.
The track is on a bit of a slope and
so turn one in two are lower than turns three
(01:09):
and four, and so the cars that were on pit
lane because we had to stop the race for the
trucks about halfway through because it started raining and the
trucks that were pitted further down towards Turn one were
starting to get submerged in water. And it wasn't submerged, sorry,
the water was rising and it was getting too high
that it was going to impact the electronics and the
(01:31):
motor in different parts of the vehicles, and so they
had to move the trucks back out of the water.
And if you think about a pit lane on a racetrack,
there's a two or so foot high wall or three
foot high wall that separates the hot pit from the
cold pit. And the water was up to that wall.
That is how high it was down and turns one
(01:52):
and two because of the drainage system that they had
and how much water was coming down in the fact
that it was sloped, so it was wild. And I
was in the officiating tower for this, and let me
tell you, it was so impressive to see the NASCAR
officials handle this very adverse situation. There were a lot
(02:14):
of discussions about how to best handle it, what we
had to do when we made the call. We were
constantly evaluating all of the different circumstantial things like the
weather and lightning, and what the facility rules were, and
how many people we had involved in, what the scenarios
would be if we had to post bone, what were
the pros, what were the cons There was just so
much that was contemplated and considered, and any decision to
(02:40):
either delay or post bone would have really significant consequences
because fans pay money to be at the track, Teams
and drivers work really hard to get themselves and their
equipment ready for the race, and there are timing issues,
and we have the surrounding area, and then there are
broadcast obligations. So there's so much that's being considered, and
(03:01):
I just have a really new appreciation for how calm,
cool and collected the officials have to be, how collaborative
they are, and how much it's an environment where people
are encouraged to speak up. And that leads me nicely
into the topic for today's episode, which is psychological safety.
(03:22):
Now I had not heard this term before this past
week because I gave a virtual keynote last week in
the evening, and in that keynote I had discussed teamwork
and leadership and managing fear, and one of the audience
member's questions after I was done was whether I use
psychological safety concepts when approaching working with a team and
(03:46):
this problem solving. And I had to be honest with
them that I did not know that term and that
I was going to go look it up. So I
decided to make an episode out of it. Psychological safety
means feeling safe to take interpersonal risks, to speak up,
to openly disagree with the people around you, to give feedback,
and to admit mistakes without fear of negative repercussions or consequences.
(04:11):
And so this is obviously really important for team dynamic.
It's important for personal development and experimenting and overall success
of any projects that any group of people are working on.
And according to a Harvard Business Review article which I
will link in the description, Amy Edmondson coined the term
(04:31):
quote team psychological safety quote when she was researching the
relationship between error making and teamwork in hospitals back in
the late nineteen nineties. And when she was doing this research,
she expected to find that more effective teams made fewer
mistakes throughout their working process, But what she actually found
(04:53):
is that teams who reported better teamwork dynamics actually also
reported more mistakes, and when she was thinking about it,
she concluded that it was probably because these teams felt
more secure in their working environment and they felt more
confident in their team's ability to recognize that it's a
(05:14):
learning experience and then to recover from them and move
on and to be supportive of that whole process. This
makes sense to me. Back in Stanford, I took a
class called Fail Faster, and the premise of this class
was that when problem solving or when trying to develop
something new, you have to be comfortable with ideating and
(05:37):
coming up with a bunch of ideas, testing quickly, and
then if it doesn't work, moving on right away. And
I think that was a general ethos for entrepreneurship and
in the Bay Area, and it's also something that's really
relevant in racing because when you are out on track
and let's say you're trying to make the car better
during practice and it's doing something on turnin, and so
(05:58):
you go in you debrief and you have to make
a change, and maybe that change is going to work,
and maybe it's not, and maybe you have to go
through several iterations of changes or several different types of
changes to the equipment, but then also the driver to
try to get to that working rhythm where it's feeling
really good. So the whole process of deep experimentation and
(06:19):
constant iterations is really relevant in a lot of different fields,
and that means that psychological safety becomes really really important
for team dynamics to be able to have a competitive
advantage and get to that good result quicker. And so
for a few other reasons that psychological safety is important
(06:40):
when it comes to any team dynamic is that first,
it helps team members feel more engaged and motivated because
they feel that they're being considered, that their thoughts are important,
that it's a safe space where they can bring ideas
to the table, And if they feel like they're being
listened to and being taken seriously, anyone's going to feel
(07:01):
more engaged in that kind of environment. Another reason that
psychological safety is important is because it can actually help
in better decision making. And I think this is largely
due to the fact that if you're comfortable voicing your
opinions and debating and not feeling like you're being personally
attacked for having a different point of view or maybe
a wrong point of view, it makes more and more
(07:23):
people comfortable doing that, which means you're going to have
more diverse perspectives. And more diverse perspectives typically lead to
better problem solving, and so that will help a team
make better decisions. The last big important reason for having
psychological safety in your teamwork dynamics it is because it
(07:43):
contributes to an environment of continuous learning and improvement. And
if life is not about learning, then I don't know
what it's for. Because we are constantly evolving, improving, our
surroundings are constantly changing. The way the world works is
always changing, and so being comfortable with adapting and iterating
(08:04):
and experimenting becomes critical for any type of success. Moral
of this first part of the story of psychological safety
is that the more psychologically safe people feel on a team,
the more likely they are to perform and engage in
successful manner, and the better the team's going to do. Now,
as a corporate girlie who is in a corporate role,
(08:28):
I'm now also thinking about the other half of that equation,
which is, how can leaders and managers and executives at
companies or just team leaders in general, how can they
help make teams feel that they are psychologically safe There's
an article from McKinsey that I read, which i'll also link,
(08:49):
that actually states that social scientists believe that psychological safety
is a prerequisite for people to live their best, just
like in Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs. So this idea
of psychological safety is so fundamental to people being able
to operate on a great level. There are three prongs
to the type of leadership styles that McKenzie suggests could
(09:13):
be used to help create this environment of psychological safety,
and the first is consultative leadership. So this is where
leaders go to all the other members of a team
and discuss their ideas, ask for feedback, ask for their thoughts,
give their own thoughts, and really have that two way
communication regardless of what level anyone's at. And this shows
(09:36):
that the leader wants to collaborate with everyone else, that
it is a safe space, that no one is above
anyone else in terms of their thought process or their ideas,
and that can help people feel secure in exploring their
own ideas and challenging the status quo. The second type
of leadership is supportive leadership, and that is giving people
(09:58):
what they need in the added help but resources to
be able to make decisions, experiment, support if they need
to learn from mistakes, any number of things that help
show that you are there to aid the people who
are working with you. And this can again lead to
feeling more secure on your team. And doing both of
(10:20):
those types of leadership consultative and supportive mean that you
can then implement challenging leadership. And this is exactly what
it sounds like, which is really pushing the people that
you're working with to think about their ideas, to assess,
to push outside of the box, to maybe tell them
that they're wrong, or to tell them that that might
not work, or to walk through why they might need
(10:43):
to go in a different direction. But because you've done
the consultative and supportive leadership, the people that you're working
with should know on a deep level that just because
their idea is being challenged or it might not be right,
doesn't mean it was bad. It's a step in the
process of getting to the final answers that you need
in order to have the success that you're looking for.
(11:06):
I know that a lot of this is astounding a
little more vague, but in thinking about how this could
relate to any team that you're working on, I'm trying
to keep it as vague as possible, because it really
is super applicable whether you are a restaurant manager, or
you are at a Fortune five hundred company, or you're
on a race team, or you're a teacher in a classroom.
(11:28):
I think this idea of psychological safety and the different
ways that you can lead are really really valuable. To
go back to my audience member's question on if I
use psychological safety on my teams, the answer has to
be yes. I unknowingly implemented some of these strategies, but
when I look back after doing this initial reading on
(11:48):
psychological safety, I think that was innate to how I
interacted with a lot of my team members. When I
join a team, I have always told the folks on
my team from the start that I want feedback from them.
I want them to tell me if they see something
I can do to improve, if there's something that they
need in a working style that I can better help,
(12:09):
to let me know. And then I also want to
feel free to give them feedback if I need something
different from them, and to approach both of those giving
feedback and receiving feedback in equal ways. I think proves
just how committed you are to working through problems and
trying to get to that common goal that we're all
going for. I also always ask a lot of questions,
(12:31):
and regardless if they would be perceived as silly or not,
I would ask them because I really wanted definitive answers.
And I would have to assume that me asking a
wide range of questions probably helped other people feel more
comfortable in asking questions as well. The last thing that
I've noticed on not only teams that I've been on,
(12:54):
but team owners that I've met, or other teams that
I've seen in racing, is that there's a really big,
very vocal focus on looking forward and moving forward and improving.
You know, you're only as good as your last race,
and so you constantly need to be proving yourself. There
was a team that has the slogan on the wall,
(13:14):
we're either winning or we're learning. You know, there's this
can do proactive attitude to a lot of teams because
you're constantly having to prove yourself and evolve and adapt
and try to go win the race. And the more
secure people feel in their working environment, the better they
(13:35):
are to perform. All is being said, I do think
there has to be a culture of accountability. I think
that you need to learn from your mistakes, you need
to take responsibility. But all of that is easier to
do if you feel psychologically safe. Everyone. That is our episode.
Thank you to my speaking client and the audience member
who brought up this topic that I otherwise had not
(13:57):
heard about. Really excited to learn about this new comp
If you enjoyed this episode, I hope that you will
share it with someone who you think might also want
to learn a bit about psychological safety, maybe a leader
in your life, someone who's trying to shape how a
group works. I do hope that you'll rate the podcast,
leave a review, share it with people that you care about,
and as always, thank you for letting me be honest
(14:18):
with you, and I look forward to seeing you next week.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of If
I'm Honest with Julia Landauer. Happy Wednesday. I got to
spend last weekend at North Wilkesboro Speedway for the NASCAR
All Star Race weekend where they had the NASCAR Truck
Series and the NASCAR Cup Series competing. And North Wilkesboro
Speedway has a lot of historical significance. It's one of
(00:26):
those traditional old school racetracks. It got revamped and almost
brought back from the dead to be able to host
this All Star Race. They do other more grassroots level
racing throughout the year and it's a really fun exhibition race.
There are no points for it, but they have a
pit crew challenge and they do interesting qualifying formats and
(00:46):
they have a fun race. I was there for Friday
and Saturday, and on Saturday they had the most torrential
rain in that you could even imagine. I mean, we
had at least four or five inches in the span
of two hours. The track lost power, the generator went out.
The track is on a bit of a slope and
so turn one in two are lower than turns three
(01:09):
and four, and so the cars that were on pit
lane because we had to stop the race for the
trucks about halfway through because it started raining and the
trucks that were pitted further down towards Turn one were
starting to get submerged in water. And it wasn't submerged, sorry,
the water was rising and it was getting too high
that it was going to impact the electronics and the
(01:31):
motor in different parts of the vehicles, and so they
had to move the trucks back out of the water.
And if you think about a pit lane on a racetrack,
there's a two or so foot high wall or three
foot high wall that separates the hot pit from the
cold pit. And the water was up to that wall.
That is how high it was down and turns one
(01:52):
and two because of the drainage system that they had
and how much water was coming down in the fact
that it was sloped, so it was wild. And I
was in the officiating tower for this, and let me
tell you, it was so impressive to see the NASCAR
officials handle this very adverse situation. There were a lot
(02:14):
of discussions about how to best handle it, what we
had to do when we made the call. We were
constantly evaluating all of the different circumstantial things like the
weather and lightning, and what the facility rules were, and
how many people we had involved in, what the scenarios
would be if we had to post bone, what were
the pros, what were the cons There was just so
much that was contemplated and considered, and any decision to
(02:40):
either delay or post bone would have really significant consequences
because fans pay money to be at the track, Teams
and drivers work really hard to get themselves and their
equipment ready for the race, and there are timing issues,
and we have the surrounding area, and then there are
broadcast obligations. So there's so much that's being considered, and
(03:01):
I just have a really new appreciation for how calm,
cool and collected the officials have to be, how collaborative
they are, and how much it's an environment where people
are encouraged to speak up. And that leads me nicely
into the topic for today's episode, which is psychological safety.
(03:22):
Now I had not heard this term before this past
week because I gave a virtual keynote last week in
the evening, and in that keynote I had discussed teamwork
and leadership and managing fear, and one of the audience
member's questions after I was done was whether I use
psychological safety concepts when approaching working with a team and
(03:46):
this problem solving. And I had to be honest with
them that I did not know that term and that
I was going to go look it up. So I
decided to make an episode out of it. Psychological safety
means feeling safe to take interpersonal risks, to speak up,
to openly disagree with the people around you, to give feedback,
and to admit mistakes without fear of negative repercussions or consequences.
(04:11):
And so this is obviously really important for team dynamic.
It's important for personal development and experimenting and overall success
of any projects that any group of people are working on.
And according to a Harvard Business Review article which I
will link in the description, Amy Edmondson coined the term
(04:31):
quote team psychological safety quote when she was researching the
relationship between error making and teamwork in hospitals back in
the late nineteen nineties. And when she was doing this research,
she expected to find that more effective teams made fewer
mistakes throughout their working process, But what she actually found
(04:53):
is that teams who reported better teamwork dynamics actually also
reported more mistakes, and when she was thinking about it,
she concluded that it was probably because these teams felt
more secure in their working environment and they felt more
confident in their team's ability to recognize that it's a
(05:14):
learning experience and then to recover from them and move
on and to be supportive of that whole process. This
makes sense to me. Back in Stanford, I took a
class called Fail Faster, and the premise of this class
was that when problem solving or when trying to develop
something new, you have to be comfortable with ideating and
(05:37):
coming up with a bunch of ideas, testing quickly, and
then if it doesn't work, moving on right away. And
I think that was a general ethos for entrepreneurship and
in the Bay Area, and it's also something that's really
relevant in racing because when you are out on track
and let's say you're trying to make the car better
during practice and it's doing something on turnin, and so
(05:58):
you go in you debrief and you have to make
a change, and maybe that change is going to work,
and maybe it's not, and maybe you have to go
through several iterations of changes or several different types of
changes to the equipment, but then also the driver to
try to get to that working rhythm where it's feeling
really good. So the whole process of deep experimentation and
(06:19):
constant iterations is really relevant in a lot of different fields,
and that means that psychological safety becomes really really important
for team dynamics to be able to have a competitive
advantage and get to that good result quicker. And so
for a few other reasons that psychological safety is important
(06:40):
when it comes to any team dynamic is that first,
it helps team members feel more engaged and motivated because
they feel that they're being considered, that their thoughts are important,
that it's a safe space where they can bring ideas
to the table, And if they feel like they're being
listened to and being taken seriously, anyone's going to feel
(07:01):
more engaged in that kind of environment. Another reason that
psychological safety is important is because it can actually help
in better decision making. And I think this is largely
due to the fact that if you're comfortable voicing your
opinions and debating and not feeling like you're being personally
attacked for having a different point of view or maybe
a wrong point of view, it makes more and more
(07:23):
people comfortable doing that, which means you're going to have
more diverse perspectives. And more diverse perspectives typically lead to
better problem solving, and so that will help a team
make better decisions. The last big important reason for having
psychological safety in your teamwork dynamics it is because it
(07:43):
contributes to an environment of continuous learning and improvement. And
if life is not about learning, then I don't know
what it's for. Because we are constantly evolving, improving, our
surroundings are constantly changing. The way the world works is
always changing, and so being comfortable with adapting and iterating
(08:04):
and experimenting becomes critical for any type of success. Moral
of this first part of the story of psychological safety
is that the more psychologically safe people feel on a team,
the more likely they are to perform and engage in
successful manner, and the better the team's going to do. Now,
as a corporate girlie who is in a corporate role,
(08:28):
I'm now also thinking about the other half of that equation,
which is, how can leaders and managers and executives at
companies or just team leaders in general, how can they
help make teams feel that they are psychologically safe There's
an article from McKinsey that I read, which i'll also link,
(08:49):
that actually states that social scientists believe that psychological safety
is a prerequisite for people to live their best, just
like in Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs. So this idea
of psychological safety is so fundamental to people being able
to operate on a great level. There are three prongs
to the type of leadership styles that McKenzie suggests could
(09:13):
be used to help create this environment of psychological safety,
and the first is consultative leadership. So this is where
leaders go to all the other members of a team
and discuss their ideas, ask for feedback, ask for their thoughts,
give their own thoughts, and really have that two way
communication regardless of what level anyone's at. And this shows
(09:36):
that the leader wants to collaborate with everyone else, that
it is a safe space, that no one is above
anyone else in terms of their thought process or their ideas,
and that can help people feel secure in exploring their
own ideas and challenging the status quo. The second type
of leadership is supportive leadership, and that is giving people
(09:58):
what they need in the added help but resources to
be able to make decisions, experiment, support if they need
to learn from mistakes, any number of things that help
show that you are there to aid the people who
are working with you. And this can again lead to
feeling more secure on your team. And doing both of
(10:20):
those types of leadership consultative and supportive mean that you
can then implement challenging leadership. And this is exactly what
it sounds like, which is really pushing the people that
you're working with to think about their ideas, to assess,
to push outside of the box, to maybe tell them
that they're wrong, or to tell them that that might
not work, or to walk through why they might need
(10:43):
to go in a different direction. But because you've done
the consultative and supportive leadership, the people that you're working
with should know on a deep level that just because
their idea is being challenged or it might not be right,
doesn't mean it was bad. It's a step in the
process of getting to the final answers that you need
in order to have the success that you're looking for.
(11:06):
I know that a lot of this is astounding a
little more vague, but in thinking about how this could
relate to any team that you're working on, I'm trying
to keep it as vague as possible, because it really
is super applicable whether you are a restaurant manager, or
you are at a Fortune five hundred company, or you're
on a race team, or you're a teacher in a classroom.
(11:28):
I think this idea of psychological safety and the different
ways that you can lead are really really valuable. To
go back to my audience member's question on if I
use psychological safety on my teams, the answer has to
be yes. I unknowingly implemented some of these strategies, but
when I look back after doing this initial reading on
(11:48):
psychological safety, I think that was innate to how I
interacted with a lot of my team members. When I
join a team, I have always told the folks on
my team from the start that I want feedback from them.
I want them to tell me if they see something
I can do to improve, if there's something that they
need in a working style that I can better help,
(12:09):
to let me know. And then I also want to
feel free to give them feedback if I need something
different from them, and to approach both of those giving
feedback and receiving feedback in equal ways. I think proves
just how committed you are to working through problems and
trying to get to that common goal that we're all
going for. I also always ask a lot of questions,
(12:31):
and regardless if they would be perceived as silly or not,
I would ask them because I really wanted definitive answers.
And I would have to assume that me asking a
wide range of questions probably helped other people feel more
comfortable in asking questions as well. The last thing that
I've noticed on not only teams that I've been on,
(12:54):
but team owners that I've met, or other teams that
I've seen in racing, is that there's a really big,
very vocal focus on looking forward and moving forward and improving.
You know, you're only as good as your last race,
and so you constantly need to be proving yourself. There
was a team that has the slogan on the wall,
(13:14):
we're either winning or we're learning. You know, there's this
can do proactive attitude to a lot of teams because
you're constantly having to prove yourself and evolve and adapt
and try to go win the race. And the more
secure people feel in their working environment, the better they
(13:35):
are to perform. All is being said, I do think
there has to be a culture of accountability. I think
that you need to learn from your mistakes, you need
to take responsibility. But all of that is easier to
do if you feel psychologically safe. Everyone. That is our episode.
Thank you to my speaking client and the audience member
who brought up this topic that I otherwise had not
(13:57):
heard about. Really excited to learn about this new comp
If you enjoyed this episode, I hope that you will
share it with someone who you think might also want
to learn a bit about psychological safety, maybe a leader
in your life, someone who's trying to shape how a
group works. I do hope that you'll rate the podcast,
leave a review, share it with people that you care about,
and as always, thank you for letting me be honest
(14:18):
with you, and I look forward to seeing you next week.
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