May 23, 2024 • 31 mins
Welcome to another insightful episode of Community Matters, hosted by Tony Campisi, Executive Director of the Keystone Chapter of Community Associations Institute. This podcast is your go-to resource for critical conversations on managing and governing condos, cooperatives, and homeowner associations.
In this episode, Tony sits down with Ryan Skimmons and Brienne Jennings from BR Training and Education to explore the concept of psychological safety. Discover why creating an environment where team members feel safe to share their ideas, thoughts, and concerns without fear of negative consequences is crucial for the well-being of individuals and the overall health of your organization and community.
Ryan and Brianne delve into the benefits of psychological safety, including reduced turnover, improved team performance, and enhanced employee engagement. They also discuss practical ways community managers can foster a culture of psychological safety, such as adopting a coaching mindset, validating successes, and maintaining empathy and clear boundaries.
Tune in for valuable insights into how psychological safety can transform your workplace and positively impact the resident experience in your community.
Special thanks to our sponsor - Hoffman Law, LLC. Visit Hoffman Law online for more information.
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Episode Transcript
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Music.
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A podcast that brings you conversations that are critical to managing and governing
condos, cooperatives, and homeowner associations.
I'm your host, Tony Campisi, Executive Director of the Keystone Chapter of Community
Associations Institute.
Tune in each episode for the insights and information that are key to inspiring
(00:39):
professionalism, effective leadership, and responsible citizenship. and ship.
Ideals reflected in community associations that are preferred places to call home.
I'd never heard the term psychological safety until I read an article by our guests on this topic.
We're going to talk about psychological safety, why it is important in your
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organization and communities, and how it can improve the well-being of you,
your team, and your community.
Today's guests are Ryan Skimmins and Brianne Jennings with BR Training and Education,
a CAI member company that focuses on mental wellness.
Before we get to our topic today, here's a brief word from our sponsor, Hoffman Law, LLC.
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I'm Ed Hoffman with Hoffman Law, LLC.
Hoffman Law, LLC is a recognized leader in community association law.
We're known for our responsiveness, legal acumen, leadership in the association
industry and our unwavering focus and commitment to education.
You can learn more about us at our website, hoffmanhoalaw.com.
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Hoffman Law LLC is proud to sponsor this episode of the Community Matters Podcast.
I'd like to welcome our guests to Community Matters Podcast.
Ryan and Brianne, please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and
what BR training training, and education does.
Oh, yes, indeed. So, hi, everybody. My name is Brianne Jennings.
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Please feel free to call me Bri.
And I am here with Ryan Skimmins, aka Ryan. Hi, Ryan Skimmins.
I'm the other half of BR Training and Education.
And we are a education-based company that focuses on the impact of mental health in the workplace.
We do our very best to offer career and leadership coaching as well as e-learning
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solutions for self-guided learning and onboarding.
And aside from that, Ryan and I both have backgrounds as mental health therapists,
wellness coaches, professionals, and structural designers. We've done pretty much all of it.
And your web address, just in case any of our listeners want to find you. It is...
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Www.vrtrainingandeducation.com. So this podcast is a follow-up to an episode
that we recorded over a year ago in early 2023 on America's mental health crisis.
And you spoke at an event we had last year on this topic and also wrote an article
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just recently for our magazine, Community Assets, about an idea called psychological safety.
I've never heard of that term before, and I'm certain a lot of our listeners haven't either.
So give us an overview of what that is and why it's important for community
managers to understand. Sure.
So psychological safety is not a new concept, but it's getting more and more
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popular because it's so very important to wellness, to building amazing teams,
to having your organization thrive.
So when we talk about psychological safety, it's this shared belief by all the
members of your team that they're in an environment where they feel safe enough,
that they can share their ideas,
their feelings, their thoughts, their concerns, where those people feel like
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they can take a risk, where they can make a mistake or ask questions.
And you don't really have a ton of fear of experiencing any kind of negative consequences.
It just feels like a very safe and open space. If you've ever been in a place
that doesn't have psychological safety, people may be scared to share.
Team members may not bring up bright, new, innovative ideas because they're
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worried about where it's going to land.
You see people kind of having these high turnover rates. So if you're in a psychologically
safe place, it just hits a little bit different.
And the reason that we care so, so much about it, aside from it being really
important to the wellness of all individuals and the health of the overall organization,
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we also see that turnover happens.
Decreases. Once you start to have more psychological safety,
people are less likely to leave their jobs.
You see an increase in team performance.
People are willing to show up and do some amazing work for the teams they're
in, for the community organizations they work with.
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You see this enhanced engagement with your employees.
You see improved overall well-being of your employees.
So there are a lot of reasons that we really want to see psychological safety.
And how does psychological safety impact team performance and ultimately the
experience of community residents, people who live in community associations?
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Yeah. So as Bree kind of touched on a little bit with the overview of psychological
safety, there's a lot of benefits there.
So it impacts the team directly and all of this kind of trickles down to the resident experience.
But through kind of fostering an environment of psychological safety,
you're really improving trust and you're allowing for things like positive conflict
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to happen where, you know, in environments without psychological trust,
there might be this, you know, kind of an inability to deal with problems head on.
And there's kind of, you know, the back channel conversations and all that stuff.
So when there's a really psychologically safe environment, people feel comfortable
in kind of just talking to each other and talking through issues.
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You see a lot of cohesiveness, people working together better,
and even just like diversity of ideas, people feeling comfortable to share,
just say, hey, Brie, I have an idea that we haven't thought of before.
Maybe we can try it, that kind of thing.
Delegation happens a lot easier when there's things like psychological safety
present because people feel comfortable comfortable to kind of make mistakes and learn from them.
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And there's, there's an ability to kind of, you might call it fail forward.
The idea of like, yes, we're going to learn from our mistakes.
We don't want to encourage mistakes, but when they happen, because they're going
to happen, how do we learn from it? How do we move forward?
And all of that, as Bree said, leads to better, I mean, we know that it leads
to better staff retention, more, more satisfaction in employees.
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And so people are sticking around. People are happy.
People are doing the work. All of that kind of trickles down to the resident
experience because happy staff make happy residents.
And we know that that's the case.
Let me ask you a follow-up about failure and how this contributes.
Is it the fear of failing or the fear of the consequences of failing?
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Because those are two different things.
Yeah, that's so good. I think it's a little bit of both.
I think in an environment where people don't feel so safe, there can be an unwillingness
to try new things. There can be an unwillingness to communicate.
It's to say like, hey, I'm learning how to do something. And if I don't feel
safe, I might not even feel comfortable to say, hey, Tony, I'm not sure how
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to do this. Can you kind of walk me through the process?
Because I don't want it to seem like I don't belong here or I don't know what I'm talking about.
So yeah, so there's the fear of making the mistake and then the fear of the consequences.
Because if we're in a situation where I've seen management kind of making people
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feel bad about mistakes, or even there's these really heavy consequences.
And I'm not talking about like, HR issues, where we're kind of people are making
mistakes that need to be addressed.
But just the common things that we we might mess up in a job on a daily basis,
if we're seeing like, these really huge reprisals for that,
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I'm going to be saying to myself, I don't I'm terrified of making a mistake
because look what happens to other people that do that So yeah,
that's such a that's such a good kind of clarifying question because I think
it can it can come up in both both ends of that.
So what happens when there's an absence of psychological safety in a community workplace?
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We start to see a change in all of the staff members and how they're showing up.
So we do see that turnover where folks just don't want to work there anymore.
They want to leave because they don't feel safe to talk. Like Rai said,
there's fear of making mistakes.
They're just always worried. We might even see some low morale for folks where
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they may come in, they're going to to do their job, but the morale just doesn't feel the same.
They're not as excited about the work. They're not as happy about what it is that they do.
You might even see some unproductive meetings or some time being wasted because
they're still trying to figure out how to function in a place that just does
not feel safe for them to grow and do different.
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People start calling out. You got the absenteeism because they just don't want to be there.
They just do not want to show up for work that day because why would I want
to show up somewhere where I don't feel safe, where I feel like if I open my
mouth, if I make a mistake,
if I do anything that steps out of line or maybe kind of questions some of the
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processes that we do, I'm going to get in trouble. I don't want to go with that job.
We see some increases in conflict, and that could be conflict between two staff
members that work together.
That could be conflict between supervisors, managers, and the folks who you
report to them, that could even be in with the residents, how they engage with the residents.
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And in all honesty, when there's no safety in an environment, you can tell.
And it won't just be the staff that will feel the difference.
The residents will feel the difference too.
So when you don't have psychological safety, you kind of see it permeate into
all these different arenas, the work that you do.
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Another follow-up here. So
as I'm thinking through this, let's say it's an organization of 10 people.
If there's an absence of psychological safety, should we expect it's going to impact all of them?
Or does this impact different people differently?
Could there be one person who's really negatively impacted and others maybe brush it off?
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I'm trying to get a sense of how this impacts organization-wide, I guess.
Yeah, so that is a great question because both, both is the answer.
Yes, it could impact one person, particularly roughly.
It depends on where they come from, their background, if they've experienced
this before, if they feel that they're being targeted in any way or,
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you know, what's going on with them.
So it could be an individual, but it could also be a larger thing where more
people are noticing it and having responses to it.
Everybody's response may not be the same, but if there is a lack of psychological
safety, you will certainly see it start to crop up in different ways.
It may not be huge major ways, but it'll be in those little things like Bree
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doesn't show up for work a couple of days in a row because she just keeps calling
out. We can't figure out why it is.
Everybody else is good, but Bree just kind of stopped showing up.
You also sometimes hear staff members say, Oh, yeah, it's been this way forever.
And that's because they've learned to get comfortable with the lack of psychological safety.
And so they've built up this wall where they've compartmentalized how they feel.
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I'm just going to go into my job. I'm going to do my thing and I'm going to leave.
I'm not going to suggest anything. I'm not going to add anything.
But they've just gotten so used to it that they're not willing to challenge
it or they're scared to challenge it or they just understand that that's the
culture of the organization.
I think some people, just to build off of that too, I think some people can
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be really resilient to that.
I think some people can just kind of let it brush off their shoulders and it's not that big of a deal.
But I think what we find is that if there's even one or two people that are
not feeling psychologically safe, it's usually a symptom of a larger problem.
So they may be the loudest ones or the most apparent ones that are being affected by that.
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But it makes me and Brie ask the question of what else is going on?
Why are these two, one or two people or like a small part of a whole feeling this?
Where's that coming from? Is it because of the environment that the leader has created?
Is it because of just the environment of the physical environment?
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Are there other things going on? But I think when we start seeing even one person
starting to talk about, like, I don't feel safe, or even describing some of
the things that we're talking about here,
because very rarely people have the language to say, like, I don't feel psychologically
safe, but they start describing all of these things, or you start noticing the
absenteeism, or just people being quiet, or all of that.
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So it, it could be one, it could be a larger issue.
Sometimes people bring stuff from home too. There's, you know,
there, there can be a whole bunch of issues,
but, but for us, I think when we see that it makes us start asking questions of like,
what is this a symptom of, is this a one-off situation or is this a larger environmental
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thing that is just starting to rear its head from like this one or two people?
So what are some ways that community managers can foster a culture of psychological safety?
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Is so important here, but not only just communication, the way in which we communicate.
So how does that look for you as a manager? How are you making yourself available?
So visibility is really important. And that doesn't mean that as a manager,
I need to be walking around all the time and people seeing me.
Yes, that's important too. But.
What is my schedule like? How's my availability? And are you a person that really
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does well with open door policy?
Great. That's maybe what you should think about doing.
Some other people don't really like some other managers don't really like love an open door policy.
So they may opt for office hours, or just kind of check ins in that way.
So I think things like that can be really important for managers.
We're a big fan of adopting a coaching mindset to in the idea of we're teaching
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you and not punishing you. We want you to grow.
We want you to kind of get better at a skill. So I'm going to try to foster
that. I'm going to try to kind of lead you along in that.
And then I love, this is all Bree. We talk about Vegas rules.
So the idea of it being safe to share without a fear of repercussions,
the idea that whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
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We didn't create that idea. We just love it. But the idea of,
hey, you come into my office and you share something with me.
I'm, as a manager, not going to then immediately turn around and start sharing
that with somebody else.
I think sometimes we can all be guilty of blurring the lines a little bit with
co-workers, and it's important to have a sense of camaraderie.
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But as a manager, sometimes you hear things that shouldn't necessarily be shared with other people.
If I am sharing with my manager and then I find out that somebody found out
the thing that I shared with them that I didn't want anybody to to know,
that's going to make me feel like I can't say anything.
So the idea of, okay, what's important,
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what's kind of, what's to stay behind closed doors, obviously nothing that impacts
safety, obviously nothing that impacts kind of the way that the work happens
necessarily, but that's really important.
So validating and affirming, just celebrating successes are really important
in ways that are meaningful to people.
So yes, pizza parties, yes, things like that are really important,
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but also just the meaningful one-on-one, like, thank you, thank you,
and here's a note or like an email of just like, you did great.
I really appreciate the thing that you did today. That's really impactful for people.
I think also encouraging feedback, even if you don't like it,
is really important too.
I think managers sometimes want to not hear the things that they're not good at.
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And I get it. But also, I think it's important to hear what maybe I could do better at.
How is my leadership landing with my people so that I can get better at it?
I can learn how to do it. But Bree, you want to hop in with these last few?
Yes, indeed. So when we think about what we need to do to help create the psychological
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safety and their piece of empathy, empathy is just not talked about enough.
When we think about sympathy versus empathy, they're used interchangeably,
but they're a little bit different.
Sympathy is feeling badly for somebody.
Empathy is being able to step into that person's shoes. So from this perspective,
we have to think about empathy as something that can grow and grow over time.
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And when we are able to ask folks on our teams questions,
when we're able to connect to them, when we know what's going on in their lives,
when we take the time to understand them and try to imagine,
you know, maybe Ryan's coming in today because something bad happened at home
or something happened on his way into the community.
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And I don't know what it is, but I can certainly have grace for him and I can
certainly be empathic for him to understand that some of our experiences will
impact the way that we show up. And that's OK.
But it's really about giving people grace based on that empathy that we've learned.
And then this is a biggie and this is a hard one.
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As a manager or supervisor, admitting to having made a mistake.
A lot of us don't like to say that we've made mistakes.
We don't like to share that with people, but it's such a wild change when you
have a manager, a supervisor, a director, someone being able to say,
you know what? I'm sorry, Tony.
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I misunderstood this. I made a mistake and I want to figure out how to fix it.
I'm going going to own that.
Because when we see our managers and our supervisors doing that,
they're showing us some vulnerability.
And when you bring vulnerability into the equation, you're A,
showing yourself to be a pretty strong leader because you are able to say,
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I am confident enough in my abilities and who I am as a person who can support
you and care for you as your supervisor manager, managing that I can admit that I have made a mistake.
And that creates a situation where other people are able to come say, I made a mistake too.
I feel safe about saying that because now my supervisor, Ryan,
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has told me that he's made a mistake.
He's willing to own it and he's willing to work on it. And there were no repercussions.
So it is a biggie. And it feels like what I said, it feels like something small
that you've heard of before, but it's such a game It's such a game changer when
you're trying to build this psychological safety within your culture.
Let me pose a scenario and get your impact.
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And let me see if I can properly explain my thought process here.
So Ryan talked about privacy.
Brie, you talked about empathy.
There's a lot of blurred lines today with information and people sharing things on social media.
We're all connected in ways we've never been connected before.
So let's say a manager comes across something they see on social media from
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an employee and it's intended to be not to be shared with work colleagues,
but the manager sees it.
Should you respect the is is it is
it more in terms of psychological uh
safety is it is it better to respect the
privacy or is it better to have the empathy
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and talk with the person and say hey i noticed this you know do you want to
talk about it yeah that's that's so hard because you're right we have we have
more openness i think than we've ever had in the history of just working in
I can see what you're doing on the weekends sometimes now,
and that's not necessarily always conducive to a relationship.
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I, in my experience, if there's something that's concerning or something that's
kind of as a manager, as a leader,
I'm now I'm worried about Brie having that one-on-one conversation and just
opening the door and inviting that kind of conversation,
no pressure kind of, unless there's, unless there's actual safety at play,
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like somebody's kind of talking about something that might harm themselves or harm somebody else.
But if there's something kind of impacting the way that somebody might show
up to work, you might just invite that person to talk about it in a one-on-one
kind of private scenario in whatever way makes sense for them.
That might be met with...
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Appreciation that might be met with leave me alone i don't want to talk about that kind of thing,
but i think that i think that as a leader letting
letting that person know that you
are open to having that conversation is what's important and sometimes people
have it when they're ready to have it so even just us kind of me just saying
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like hey i saw this thing i'm i want to just Just check in and see how that's
going for you or what's coming up for you around that.
And no pressure. If you want to talk about it, great. If not, I understand.
And just leaving it. Sometimes people will take that.
And sometimes people will walk away and then come back in a week and say,
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you know, that thing that I didn't want to talk about last week,
I think I'd like to talk about it now.
So just opening the door and just kind of signaling that you're willing to have
that conversation, I think is important.
Look, if there's something that's really not that impactful on work,
I'm more of the variety of, I'll just let it be and I enjoy your life.
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And I'm not going to necessarily say anything about it.
But I think that we do see things that can cause concern as leaders sometimes
on social media or something that somebody posts.
So it's it's it's worth thinking about
and you know just one last idea here too
is the relationship that you have with that person really
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matters here too so the better you know somebody the
more likely they may be to kind of have that conversation maybe they won't have
it with you but is there somebody else on your management team that they might
be willing to have that conversation with that you can say like hey i know this
person doesn't get along with me that well but they get along with Brie really well.
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So maybe Brie, would you mind just kind of checking in on this person and seeing how they're doing?
Cause I have some concern based on some things that I saw.
I think that that might be a viable option here too.
And to add to that, because Ryan and I are on the same wavelength here.
I agree with everything that you said.
The other piece is this is a good trigger to talk about boundaries with your
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staff members, because my boundaries with Ryan are different than my boundaries
with Tony, than my boundaries with Cicely.
So we have to think about and connect with that person on an individual basis to ask if that's okay.
If I see this on social media, is it okay if I just ask, is everything going okay?
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You don't have to talk to me. I just want to make sure. I just want to check in.
Because then there won't be any questions later about, you know,
how do I approach this? You'll know what boundaries that you have with each member of your team.
And that's another thing that can add to your psychological safety.
You're establishing boundaries and boundaries are nothing but teaching people how to care for us.
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Some people think boundaries are just putting up a wall.
Boundaries are having a wall and showing people where the gate is,
how they're able to kind of to get in and connect with you.
So it's an opportunity to reconnect based on your boundaries and make it an
even safer environment based off of that.
Final question for you. Psychological safety sounds a lot like trust,
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meaning once it's gone, it could be impossible to restore. Is that accurate?
It's interesting. Psychological safety and trust are very deeply interconnected.
I think trust happens through psychological safety.
So when there's really an environment that is feeling very psychologically safe, trust can develop.
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And it can be really hard to rebuild
that if if it's if it's gone
or if it's severely damaged but it's
possible it takes a really mindful concerted effort to do that and i think in
situations like that it requires a bit i might say over communication there
too around the intention to really repair that i think there's there needs to
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come with that needs to come with a lot of owning,
of mistakes that needs to come with a lot of openness of,
hey, our team isn't working the way that we need it to work right now.
What can we do to repair that? I think in situations like that,
there needs to be a lot of deferring to the team to kind of create some of those
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solutions and to hear about, you know, sometimes people just need a venting session.
Sometimes Sometimes people just need to talk about the things that are really
bothering them or the things that they perceive to be not working.
I don't know that continued venting sessions are always the best idea because
sometimes it just turns into like we're talking about the same thing over and
over again and nothing's changing.
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But I think giving space to allow for that to kind of repair is really important
up front along with a concerted effort of, okay, these are the things that we're
going to do and actually following up on them. that accountability of, okay, you,
Our trust, our sense of safety is not great right now. I want to improve it.
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And these are the things we're going to do.
And then actually show people that you're doing it and kind of make that effort.
It takes time. It takes a lot of time, just like any relationship that's really
hurt, you know, even a personal relationship.
You know, we can't, you know, if a person apologizes a million times and then
they never do anything to actually act on that apology, then you're like,
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okay, that doesn't necessarily have meaning anymore.
And it works the same way, I think, when we're trying to repair that sense of
psychological safety and trust.
So yeah, they're really closely related, but I think safety leads to a sense of trust for sure.
And also being in a place where you're going to acknowledge over and over again
that this is not an overnight fix.
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This is going to take, like Ryan says, going to take a long time.
It's going to take a concerted effort. It's going to take consistency.
People are going to have to see you showing up, so it won't be overnight.
It will be you reminding yourself that I'm in this. I'm going to keep showing up consistently.
I'm going to keep doing it. It's going to take a while, but in the end,
it will be worth it to rebuild that psychological safety.
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Well, this has been an interesting conversation. I think I learned a lot during
our conversation. Any final thoughts from either of you?
Just want to kind of give a little plug on some of the things that we offer
that might be helpful for people to kind of think about psychological safety
and kind of, you know, act on trying to get better. with that in their own.
(28:49):
An e-learning catalog that's really customizable to any organization's needs.
So things like onboarding, or just kind of trying to get a better approach to mental health.
For you, we have stuff around fostering psychological safety,
mental health 101, communication, conflict, all that.
We also offer individual or group coaching. We do coaching towards psychological
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safety around creating policies, shifting mindsets, all of that.
And we also love just doing team building activities.
And I think that goes a long way to really trying to establish and foster psychological safety too.
We offer what's called Take Flight with DISC, which is a workshop around improving
communication, helping people understand how they communicate with each other.
(29:32):
And we just love kind of customizing to the needs of the group toward whatever
outcome you're looking to achieve.
You can find all that at www.brtrainingandeducation.com.
And thank you, Tony. We appreciate Appreciate the time. Yeah, thank you, Tony.
And thank you, Ryan and Bree, for joining me today for this episode of Community
Matters podcast to share your thoughts on the importance of psychological safety.
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Thanks for tuning in to Community Matters. We're glad to have your attention for a short time.
And thanks once more to the sponsor of Community Matters podcast, Hoffman Law, LLC.
Find them on the web at hoffmanhoalaw.com.
Interested in being a guest on an upcoming episode of Community Matters?
(30:19):
Reach out to me at tony, T-O-N-Y, at caikeystone.org.
And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you'll get notifications every
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And please share our podcast with your colleagues and friends.
For more resources and and best practices on managing and governing your condominium,
(30:40):
cooperative, or homeowners association, please contact CAI or visit our website
at www.caikeystones.com.
Music.
Music.
(00:17):
A podcast that brings you conversations that are critical to managing and governing
condos, cooperatives, and homeowner associations.
I'm your host, Tony Campisi, Executive Director of the Keystone Chapter of Community
Associations Institute.
Tune in each episode for the insights and information that are key to inspiring
(00:39):
professionalism, effective leadership, and responsible citizenship. and ship.
Ideals reflected in community associations that are preferred places to call home.
I'd never heard the term psychological safety until I read an article by our guests on this topic.
We're going to talk about psychological safety, why it is important in your
(01:01):
organization and communities, and how it can improve the well-being of you,
your team, and your community.
Today's guests are Ryan Skimmins and Brianne Jennings with BR Training and Education,
a CAI member company that focuses on mental wellness.
Before we get to our topic today, here's a brief word from our sponsor, Hoffman Law, LLC.
(01:26):
I'm Ed Hoffman with Hoffman Law, LLC.
Hoffman Law, LLC is a recognized leader in community association law.
We're known for our responsiveness, legal acumen, leadership in the association
industry and our unwavering focus and commitment to education.
You can learn more about us at our website, hoffmanhoalaw.com.
(01:51):
Hoffman Law LLC is proud to sponsor this episode of the Community Matters Podcast.
I'd like to welcome our guests to Community Matters Podcast.
Ryan and Brianne, please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and
what BR training training, and education does.
Oh, yes, indeed. So, hi, everybody. My name is Brianne Jennings.
(02:12):
Please feel free to call me Bri.
And I am here with Ryan Skimmins, aka Ryan. Hi, Ryan Skimmins.
I'm the other half of BR Training and Education.
And we are a education-based company that focuses on the impact of mental health in the workplace.
We do our very best to offer career and leadership coaching as well as e-learning
(02:35):
solutions for self-guided learning and onboarding.
And aside from that, Ryan and I both have backgrounds as mental health therapists,
wellness coaches, professionals, and structural designers. We've done pretty much all of it.
And your web address, just in case any of our listeners want to find you. It is...
(02:56):
Www.vrtrainingandeducation.com. So this podcast is a follow-up to an episode
that we recorded over a year ago in early 2023 on America's mental health crisis.
And you spoke at an event we had last year on this topic and also wrote an article
(03:18):
just recently for our magazine, Community Assets, about an idea called psychological safety.
I've never heard of that term before, and I'm certain a lot of our listeners haven't either.
So give us an overview of what that is and why it's important for community
managers to understand. Sure.
So psychological safety is not a new concept, but it's getting more and more
(03:42):
popular because it's so very important to wellness, to building amazing teams,
to having your organization thrive.
So when we talk about psychological safety, it's this shared belief by all the
members of your team that they're in an environment where they feel safe enough,
that they can share their ideas,
their feelings, their thoughts, their concerns, where those people feel like
(04:06):
they can take a risk, where they can make a mistake or ask questions.
And you don't really have a ton of fear of experiencing any kind of negative consequences.
It just feels like a very safe and open space. If you've ever been in a place
that doesn't have psychological safety, people may be scared to share.
Team members may not bring up bright, new, innovative ideas because they're
(04:28):
worried about where it's going to land.
You see people kind of having these high turnover rates. So if you're in a psychologically
safe place, it just hits a little bit different.
And the reason that we care so, so much about it, aside from it being really
important to the wellness of all individuals and the health of the overall organization,
(04:48):
we also see that turnover happens.
Decreases. Once you start to have more psychological safety,
people are less likely to leave their jobs.
You see an increase in team performance.
People are willing to show up and do some amazing work for the teams they're
in, for the community organizations they work with.
(05:09):
You see this enhanced engagement with your employees.
You see improved overall well-being of your employees.
So there are a lot of reasons that we really want to see psychological safety.
And how does psychological safety impact team performance and ultimately the
experience of community residents, people who live in community associations?
(05:34):
Yeah. So as Bree kind of touched on a little bit with the overview of psychological
safety, there's a lot of benefits there.
So it impacts the team directly and all of this kind of trickles down to the resident experience.
But through kind of fostering an environment of psychological safety,
you're really improving trust and you're allowing for things like positive conflict
(05:58):
to happen where, you know, in environments without psychological trust,
there might be this, you know, kind of an inability to deal with problems head on.
And there's kind of, you know, the back channel conversations and all that stuff.
So when there's a really psychologically safe environment, people feel comfortable
in kind of just talking to each other and talking through issues.
(06:18):
You see a lot of cohesiveness, people working together better,
and even just like diversity of ideas, people feeling comfortable to share,
just say, hey, Brie, I have an idea that we haven't thought of before.
Maybe we can try it, that kind of thing.
Delegation happens a lot easier when there's things like psychological safety
present because people feel comfortable comfortable to kind of make mistakes and learn from them.
(06:43):
And there's, there's an ability to kind of, you might call it fail forward.
The idea of like, yes, we're going to learn from our mistakes.
We don't want to encourage mistakes, but when they happen, because they're going
to happen, how do we learn from it? How do we move forward?
And all of that, as Bree said, leads to better, I mean, we know that it leads
to better staff retention, more, more satisfaction in employees.
(07:06):
And so people are sticking around. People are happy.
People are doing the work. All of that kind of trickles down to the resident
experience because happy staff make happy residents.
And we know that that's the case.
Let me ask you a follow-up about failure and how this contributes.
Is it the fear of failing or the fear of the consequences of failing?
(07:28):
Because those are two different things.
Yeah, that's so good. I think it's a little bit of both.
I think in an environment where people don't feel so safe, there can be an unwillingness
to try new things. There can be an unwillingness to communicate.
It's to say like, hey, I'm learning how to do something. And if I don't feel
safe, I might not even feel comfortable to say, hey, Tony, I'm not sure how
(07:52):
to do this. Can you kind of walk me through the process?
Because I don't want it to seem like I don't belong here or I don't know what I'm talking about.
So yeah, so there's the fear of making the mistake and then the fear of the consequences.
Because if we're in a situation where I've seen management kind of making people
(08:14):
feel bad about mistakes, or even there's these really heavy consequences.
And I'm not talking about like, HR issues, where we're kind of people are making
mistakes that need to be addressed.
But just the common things that we we might mess up in a job on a daily basis,
if we're seeing like, these really huge reprisals for that,
(08:36):
I'm going to be saying to myself, I don't I'm terrified of making a mistake
because look what happens to other people that do that So yeah,
that's such a that's such a good kind of clarifying question because I think
it can it can come up in both both ends of that.
So what happens when there's an absence of psychological safety in a community workplace?
(08:56):
We start to see a change in all of the staff members and how they're showing up.
So we do see that turnover where folks just don't want to work there anymore.
They want to leave because they don't feel safe to talk. Like Rai said,
there's fear of making mistakes.
They're just always worried. We might even see some low morale for folks where
(09:16):
they may come in, they're going to to do their job, but the morale just doesn't feel the same.
They're not as excited about the work. They're not as happy about what it is that they do.
You might even see some unproductive meetings or some time being wasted because
they're still trying to figure out how to function in a place that just does
not feel safe for them to grow and do different.
(09:40):
People start calling out. You got the absenteeism because they just don't want to be there.
They just do not want to show up for work that day because why would I want
to show up somewhere where I don't feel safe, where I feel like if I open my
mouth, if I make a mistake,
if I do anything that steps out of line or maybe kind of questions some of the
(10:00):
processes that we do, I'm going to get in trouble. I don't want to go with that job.
We see some increases in conflict, and that could be conflict between two staff
members that work together.
That could be conflict between supervisors, managers, and the folks who you
report to them, that could even be in with the residents, how they engage with the residents.
(10:22):
And in all honesty, when there's no safety in an environment, you can tell.
And it won't just be the staff that will feel the difference.
The residents will feel the difference too.
So when you don't have psychological safety, you kind of see it permeate into
all these different arenas, the work that you do.
(10:43):
Another follow-up here. So
as I'm thinking through this, let's say it's an organization of 10 people.
If there's an absence of psychological safety, should we expect it's going to impact all of them?
Or does this impact different people differently?
Could there be one person who's really negatively impacted and others maybe brush it off?
(11:07):
I'm trying to get a sense of how this impacts organization-wide, I guess.
Yeah, so that is a great question because both, both is the answer.
Yes, it could impact one person, particularly roughly.
It depends on where they come from, their background, if they've experienced
this before, if they feel that they're being targeted in any way or,
(11:29):
you know, what's going on with them.
So it could be an individual, but it could also be a larger thing where more
people are noticing it and having responses to it.
Everybody's response may not be the same, but if there is a lack of psychological
safety, you will certainly see it start to crop up in different ways.
It may not be huge major ways, but it'll be in those little things like Bree
(11:53):
doesn't show up for work a couple of days in a row because she just keeps calling
out. We can't figure out why it is.
Everybody else is good, but Bree just kind of stopped showing up.
You also sometimes hear staff members say, Oh, yeah, it's been this way forever.
And that's because they've learned to get comfortable with the lack of psychological safety.
And so they've built up this wall where they've compartmentalized how they feel.
(12:18):
I'm just going to go into my job. I'm going to do my thing and I'm going to leave.
I'm not going to suggest anything. I'm not going to add anything.
But they've just gotten so used to it that they're not willing to challenge
it or they're scared to challenge it or they just understand that that's the
culture of the organization.
I think some people, just to build off of that too, I think some people can
(12:39):
be really resilient to that.
I think some people can just kind of let it brush off their shoulders and it's not that big of a deal.
But I think what we find is that if there's even one or two people that are
not feeling psychologically safe, it's usually a symptom of a larger problem.
So they may be the loudest ones or the most apparent ones that are being affected by that.
(13:04):
But it makes me and Brie ask the question of what else is going on?
Why are these two, one or two people or like a small part of a whole feeling this?
Where's that coming from? Is it because of the environment that the leader has created?
Is it because of just the environment of the physical environment?
(13:26):
Are there other things going on? But I think when we start seeing even one person
starting to talk about, like, I don't feel safe, or even describing some of
the things that we're talking about here,
because very rarely people have the language to say, like, I don't feel psychologically
safe, but they start describing all of these things, or you start noticing the
absenteeism, or just people being quiet, or all of that.
(13:48):
So it, it could be one, it could be a larger issue.
Sometimes people bring stuff from home too. There's, you know,
there, there can be a whole bunch of issues,
but, but for us, I think when we see that it makes us start asking questions of like,
what is this a symptom of, is this a one-off situation or is this a larger environmental
(14:09):
thing that is just starting to rear its head from like this one or two people?
So what are some ways that community managers can foster a culture of psychological safety?
(14:45):
Is so important here, but not only just communication, the way in which we communicate.
So how does that look for you as a manager? How are you making yourself available?
So visibility is really important. And that doesn't mean that as a manager,
I need to be walking around all the time and people seeing me.
Yes, that's important too. But.
What is my schedule like? How's my availability? And are you a person that really
(15:09):
does well with open door policy?
Great. That's maybe what you should think about doing.
Some other people don't really like some other managers don't really like love an open door policy.
So they may opt for office hours, or just kind of check ins in that way.
So I think things like that can be really important for managers.
We're a big fan of adopting a coaching mindset to in the idea of we're teaching
(15:32):
you and not punishing you. We want you to grow.
We want you to kind of get better at a skill. So I'm going to try to foster
that. I'm going to try to kind of lead you along in that.
And then I love, this is all Bree. We talk about Vegas rules.
So the idea of it being safe to share without a fear of repercussions,
the idea that whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
(15:54):
We didn't create that idea. We just love it. But the idea of,
hey, you come into my office and you share something with me.
I'm, as a manager, not going to then immediately turn around and start sharing
that with somebody else.
I think sometimes we can all be guilty of blurring the lines a little bit with
co-workers, and it's important to have a sense of camaraderie.
(16:17):
But as a manager, sometimes you hear things that shouldn't necessarily be shared with other people.
If I am sharing with my manager and then I find out that somebody found out
the thing that I shared with them that I didn't want anybody to to know,
that's going to make me feel like I can't say anything.
So the idea of, okay, what's important,
(16:37):
what's kind of, what's to stay behind closed doors, obviously nothing that impacts
safety, obviously nothing that impacts kind of the way that the work happens
necessarily, but that's really important.
So validating and affirming, just celebrating successes are really important
in ways that are meaningful to people.
So yes, pizza parties, yes, things like that are really important,
(17:01):
but also just the meaningful one-on-one, like, thank you, thank you,
and here's a note or like an email of just like, you did great.
I really appreciate the thing that you did today. That's really impactful for people.
I think also encouraging feedback, even if you don't like it,
is really important too.
I think managers sometimes want to not hear the things that they're not good at.
(17:24):
And I get it. But also, I think it's important to hear what maybe I could do better at.
How is my leadership landing with my people so that I can get better at it?
I can learn how to do it. But Bree, you want to hop in with these last few?
Yes, indeed. So when we think about what we need to do to help create the psychological
(17:48):
safety and their piece of empathy, empathy is just not talked about enough.
When we think about sympathy versus empathy, they're used interchangeably,
but they're a little bit different.
Sympathy is feeling badly for somebody.
Empathy is being able to step into that person's shoes. So from this perspective,
we have to think about empathy as something that can grow and grow over time.
(18:11):
And when we are able to ask folks on our teams questions,
when we're able to connect to them, when we know what's going on in their lives,
when we take the time to understand them and try to imagine,
you know, maybe Ryan's coming in today because something bad happened at home
or something happened on his way into the community.
(18:31):
And I don't know what it is, but I can certainly have grace for him and I can
certainly be empathic for him to understand that some of our experiences will
impact the way that we show up. And that's OK.
But it's really about giving people grace based on that empathy that we've learned.
And then this is a biggie and this is a hard one.
(18:52):
As a manager or supervisor, admitting to having made a mistake.
A lot of us don't like to say that we've made mistakes.
We don't like to share that with people, but it's such a wild change when you
have a manager, a supervisor, a director, someone being able to say,
you know what? I'm sorry, Tony.
(19:13):
I misunderstood this. I made a mistake and I want to figure out how to fix it.
I'm going going to own that.
Because when we see our managers and our supervisors doing that,
they're showing us some vulnerability.
And when you bring vulnerability into the equation, you're A,
showing yourself to be a pretty strong leader because you are able to say,
(19:36):
I am confident enough in my abilities and who I am as a person who can support
you and care for you as your supervisor manager, managing that I can admit that I have made a mistake.
And that creates a situation where other people are able to come say, I made a mistake too.
I feel safe about saying that because now my supervisor, Ryan,
(19:57):
has told me that he's made a mistake.
He's willing to own it and he's willing to work on it. And there were no repercussions.
So it is a biggie. And it feels like what I said, it feels like something small
that you've heard of before, but it's such a game It's such a game changer when
you're trying to build this psychological safety within your culture.
Let me pose a scenario and get your impact.
(20:20):
And let me see if I can properly explain my thought process here.
So Ryan talked about privacy.
Brie, you talked about empathy.
There's a lot of blurred lines today with information and people sharing things on social media.
We're all connected in ways we've never been connected before.
So let's say a manager comes across something they see on social media from
(20:45):
an employee and it's intended to be not to be shared with work colleagues,
but the manager sees it.
Should you respect the is is it is
it more in terms of psychological uh
safety is it is it better to respect the
privacy or is it better to have the empathy
(21:06):
and talk with the person and say hey i noticed this you know do you want to
talk about it yeah that's that's so hard because you're right we have we have
more openness i think than we've ever had in the history of just working in
I can see what you're doing on the weekends sometimes now,
and that's not necessarily always conducive to a relationship.
(21:30):
I, in my experience, if there's something that's concerning or something that's
kind of as a manager, as a leader,
I'm now I'm worried about Brie having that one-on-one conversation and just
opening the door and inviting that kind of conversation,
no pressure kind of, unless there's, unless there's actual safety at play,
(21:52):
like somebody's kind of talking about something that might harm themselves or harm somebody else.
But if there's something kind of impacting the way that somebody might show
up to work, you might just invite that person to talk about it in a one-on-one
kind of private scenario in whatever way makes sense for them.
That might be met with...
(22:15):
Appreciation that might be met with leave me alone i don't want to talk about that kind of thing,
but i think that i think that as a leader letting
letting that person know that you
are open to having that conversation is what's important and sometimes people
have it when they're ready to have it so even just us kind of me just saying
(22:37):
like hey i saw this thing i'm i want to just Just check in and see how that's
going for you or what's coming up for you around that.
And no pressure. If you want to talk about it, great. If not, I understand.
And just leaving it. Sometimes people will take that.
And sometimes people will walk away and then come back in a week and say,
(22:58):
you know, that thing that I didn't want to talk about last week,
I think I'd like to talk about it now.
So just opening the door and just kind of signaling that you're willing to have
that conversation, I think is important.
Look, if there's something that's really not that impactful on work,
I'm more of the variety of, I'll just let it be and I enjoy your life.
(23:21):
And I'm not going to necessarily say anything about it.
But I think that we do see things that can cause concern as leaders sometimes
on social media or something that somebody posts.
So it's it's it's worth thinking about
and you know just one last idea here too
is the relationship that you have with that person really
(23:42):
matters here too so the better you know somebody the
more likely they may be to kind of have that conversation maybe they won't have
it with you but is there somebody else on your management team that they might
be willing to have that conversation with that you can say like hey i know this
person doesn't get along with me that well but they get along with Brie really well.
(24:02):
So maybe Brie, would you mind just kind of checking in on this person and seeing how they're doing?
Cause I have some concern based on some things that I saw.
I think that that might be a viable option here too.
And to add to that, because Ryan and I are on the same wavelength here.
I agree with everything that you said.
The other piece is this is a good trigger to talk about boundaries with your
(24:25):
staff members, because my boundaries with Ryan are different than my boundaries
with Tony, than my boundaries with Cicely.
So we have to think about and connect with that person on an individual basis to ask if that's okay.
If I see this on social media, is it okay if I just ask, is everything going okay?
(24:46):
You don't have to talk to me. I just want to make sure. I just want to check in.
Because then there won't be any questions later about, you know,
how do I approach this? You'll know what boundaries that you have with each member of your team.
And that's another thing that can add to your psychological safety.
You're establishing boundaries and boundaries are nothing but teaching people how to care for us.
(25:07):
Some people think boundaries are just putting up a wall.
Boundaries are having a wall and showing people where the gate is,
how they're able to kind of to get in and connect with you.
So it's an opportunity to reconnect based on your boundaries and make it an
even safer environment based off of that.
Final question for you. Psychological safety sounds a lot like trust,
(25:27):
meaning once it's gone, it could be impossible to restore. Is that accurate?
It's interesting. Psychological safety and trust are very deeply interconnected.
I think trust happens through psychological safety.
So when there's really an environment that is feeling very psychologically safe, trust can develop.
(25:53):
And it can be really hard to rebuild
that if if it's if it's gone
or if it's severely damaged but it's
possible it takes a really mindful concerted effort to do that and i think in
situations like that it requires a bit i might say over communication there
too around the intention to really repair that i think there's there needs to
(26:18):
come with that needs to come with a lot of owning,
of mistakes that needs to come with a lot of openness of,
hey, our team isn't working the way that we need it to work right now.
What can we do to repair that? I think in situations like that,
there needs to be a lot of deferring to the team to kind of create some of those
(26:40):
solutions and to hear about, you know, sometimes people just need a venting session.
Sometimes Sometimes people just need to talk about the things that are really
bothering them or the things that they perceive to be not working.
I don't know that continued venting sessions are always the best idea because
sometimes it just turns into like we're talking about the same thing over and
over again and nothing's changing.
(27:02):
But I think giving space to allow for that to kind of repair is really important
up front along with a concerted effort of, okay, these are the things that we're
going to do and actually following up on them. that accountability of, okay, you,
Our trust, our sense of safety is not great right now. I want to improve it.
(27:23):
And these are the things we're going to do.
And then actually show people that you're doing it and kind of make that effort.
It takes time. It takes a lot of time, just like any relationship that's really
hurt, you know, even a personal relationship.
You know, we can't, you know, if a person apologizes a million times and then
they never do anything to actually act on that apology, then you're like,
(27:45):
okay, that doesn't necessarily have meaning anymore.
And it works the same way, I think, when we're trying to repair that sense of
psychological safety and trust.
So yeah, they're really closely related, but I think safety leads to a sense of trust for sure.
And also being in a place where you're going to acknowledge over and over again
that this is not an overnight fix.
(28:07):
This is going to take, like Ryan says, going to take a long time.
It's going to take a concerted effort. It's going to take consistency.
People are going to have to see you showing up, so it won't be overnight.
It will be you reminding yourself that I'm in this. I'm going to keep showing up consistently.
I'm going to keep doing it. It's going to take a while, but in the end,
it will be worth it to rebuild that psychological safety.
(28:29):
Well, this has been an interesting conversation. I think I learned a lot during
our conversation. Any final thoughts from either of you?
Just want to kind of give a little plug on some of the things that we offer
that might be helpful for people to kind of think about psychological safety
and kind of, you know, act on trying to get better. with that in their own.
(28:49):
An e-learning catalog that's really customizable to any organization's needs.
So things like onboarding, or just kind of trying to get a better approach to mental health.
For you, we have stuff around fostering psychological safety,
mental health 101, communication, conflict, all that.
We also offer individual or group coaching. We do coaching towards psychological
(29:12):
safety around creating policies, shifting mindsets, all of that.
And we also love just doing team building activities.
And I think that goes a long way to really trying to establish and foster psychological safety too.
We offer what's called Take Flight with DISC, which is a workshop around improving
communication, helping people understand how they communicate with each other.
(29:32):
And we just love kind of customizing to the needs of the group toward whatever
outcome you're looking to achieve.
You can find all that at www.brtrainingandeducation.com.
And thank you, Tony. We appreciate Appreciate the time. Yeah, thank you, Tony.
And thank you, Ryan and Bree, for joining me today for this episode of Community
Matters podcast to share your thoughts on the importance of psychological safety.
(29:58):
Thanks for tuning in to Community Matters. We're glad to have your attention for a short time.
And thanks once more to the sponsor of Community Matters podcast, Hoffman Law, LLC.
Find them on the web at hoffmanhoalaw.com.
Interested in being a guest on an upcoming episode of Community Matters?
(30:19):
Reach out to me at tony, T-O-N-Y, at caikeystone.org.
And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you'll get notifications every
time we post a new episode.
And please share our podcast with your colleagues and friends.
For more resources and and best practices on managing and governing your condominium,
(30:40):
cooperative, or homeowners association, please contact CAI or visit our website
at www.caikeystones.com.
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