273. Create Psychological Safety (Plus an Announcement)

The New Manager Podcast

The episode explores practical methods for fostering psychological safety in the workplace, centered on a leadership exercise from Amy Edmon

Key takeaways

• Amy Edmondson's book, 'The Right Kind of Wrong,' provides a framework for learning from mistakes and failing well.
• A powerful leadership exercise involves managers asking themselves three questions from the perspective of their team members.

Main topics

• Psychological safety
• Empathetic leadership

Notable quotes

The Right Kind of Wrong

Conclusion

The episode serves as both a practical guide for empathetic management

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) You are listening to The New Manager Podcast. I am your host, Kim Nichol. Speaker 1 (0:09) Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well. I have talked about psychological safety in the past and I've referenced Amy Edmondson as the go-to resource to learn more about this. And one of her more recent books is called The Right Kind of Wrong. And there's one passage in it that really stood out to me and I wanted to bring and share it with you today. Now, the context is, you know, the book itself is about making mistakes. It's about failing well. And one of the ideas is it's not about doing everything perfectly, but there are different kinds of mistakes that we make and we want to make the right kind. of errors. So not the careless ones, but the ones that will help us grow, help us learn. And within this idea of psychological safety is that at work, we can create an environment where we work with others, where it feels okay to make mistakes, where it feels okay to have conflict and friction. because there's enough trust built into the relationships. And so there's this one section I wanted to share. It's a story about this new leader who came into an organization, and he wanted to help managers build psychologically safe environments. And I love this because it sounds great. Of course, we should definitely have psychological safety. But how do you do it? What do you actually do to create that in the workplace? And the way that this leader approached it is he told all of his managers, he said, I want you to ask yourself three questions every day. And when you ask yourself this, imagine that every single person on your team can say yes to these questions. Okay, so let me say that again because it might be a little bit confusing. There's the leader. He goes to his managers. Hey, managers, here are three questions. Ask yourself these questions every day and whether each individual person on your team would say yes. Question number one. Am I treated with dignity and respect by everyone, every day, in each encounter, without regard to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religious belief, sexual orientation, title, pay grade, or number of degrees? Speaker 1 (3:19) Question two, do I have the resources I need, education, training, tools, financial support, or encouragement, so I can make a contribution to this organization that gives meaning to my life? Question three. Am I recognized and thanked for what I do? Now, if you love those questions and you want to go back and actually read the whole story, they are on page 108 in the hardbound edition of Amy's book, The Right Kind of Wrong. And when I read through them, one of the things that stood out to me is the framing of the ask is not, do you as a manager do these things? You know, do you treat everyone with dignity? Do you treat everyone with respect? Do you recognize and thank everybody? Do you ensure that people have the