635: Shifting Your Team from Survival to Performance through Psychological Safety with Dr. Timothy Clark

Pete Mockaitis
Tim, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Timothy Clark
Thanks, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom. First, could you tell us about your experience growing up with the Navajo. That’s kind of interesting.

Timothy Clark
It’s kind of a unique thing, isn’t it? Yeah, so I spent my early boyhood in southern Colorado, kind of in the Durango area, and the reason that we were there is that my dad, out of college, he took a job as a teacher among the Navajo, and so I kind of grew up with them, which is, you may know, or some of your listeners may know, it’s a big tribe. It’s the second largest tribe next to the Cherokee. And, yet, as a child, I mean, that was pretty natural, normal environment for me. I didn’t know anything different. But it turned out that that became kind of a defining experience in my life as it relates to differences and inclusion and things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re going to talk about some of that when it comes to psychology safety. First, can you define that term and tell us why it matters?

Timothy Clark
Sure. So, psychological safety, I can define in five words. It means an environment of rewarded vulnerability.

Pete Mockaitis
Well done.

Timothy Clark
So, think about that. You’re in any social environment, social collective, organization, do you feel that, if you’re vulnerable in some way, that that’s going to be rewarded or punished? That’s the difference. That’s really what we’re talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so that sounds like a pleasant thing to have. Can you share some of the hardest-hitting research that really shows that that’s important for teams? Like, what do we have to gain or lose when we have it or don’t have it? And if you could put some numbers to it, that’d be awesome.

Timothy Clark
Yes. So, the difference between having it, Pete, and not having it is profound. Think about it as if you’re a player on a team, you’re playing offense or defense. If you’re playing defense, then what that means is that you’re managing personal risks, you’re in a mode of loss prevention, self-preservation, and so you’re taking a certain amount of your productive capacity and you’re using it to protect yourself.

So, that means that you’re going to offer a survival response instead of a performance response. If the psychological safety is there, if you feel safe in that environment, then you’re going to offer performance response, which is a very, very different thing. So, the difference is profound and what that translates into is productivity, it translates into innovation, it translates into business impact. So, that’s kind of a short way of describing the difference.

Pete Mockaitis
And I suppose there’s a whole continuum associated with, it’s not just binary, “Yup, psychologically safe,” or, “No, not psychologically safe.” But I imagine there’s kind of like tiers, levels, or a gradient there. And so, I guess one story that comes to mind for me is I remember one of my first jobs, I was an intern, and my buddy Dan and I, we kept writing emails that somehow seem to like tick people off or offend them accidentally without us intending to.

And so, we would spend a fair bit of time doing what we joked around, we call it PCS, political consulting solutions, and we’re just like, “Hey, could you read this email and see every way that you could conceivably take it the wrong way, and help me change my words so that I don’t do that?” And so, we spent a fair bit of time doing this. And I guess we’re kind of newer to the professional workforce, and maybe some of that is a skill you need. But there’s a part of me thought, “You know, maybe if we could all just chill and assume positive intention on the other part, we could skip a lot of this time that’s not really productive.”

Timothy Clark
Well, that’s true and so we have to think of it on a continuum. As you said, psychological safety is not binary; it’s a matter of degree. And as we enjoy more psychological safety, we are able to engage in different acts of vulnerability and we’re able to climb a ladder of vulnerability. So, let me explain that a little bit, and we know this is based on a global survey research that we’ve done.

If you come into a new social setting, a new team, new organization, the first thing that most people are concerned about, and when I say most, I mean 92% because this is what the survey research says. What people are most concerned about is, “Do I belong?” That’s the question they’re asking, “Do I belong?” And that’s the first question in the natural sequence.

And then we go to the second question. The second question is, “Am I growing?” And in order to answer that question, you have to be able to learn in that environment. The psychological safety has to be sufficient that you’re able to ask questions, give and receive feedback, make mistakes, experiment, so, that’s the second question, “Am I growing?”

The third question is, “Am I contributing?” So, that takes you to the third level or stage of psychological safety. And to contribute is also, really, a very basic human instinct to want to make a difference, to be able to participate in that value-creation process.

Then we go to the very highest rung on the ladder of vulnerability. And that highest rung allows us to challenge the status quo. So, the fourth question is, “Can I challenge the status quo?” What does that mean? Without retaliation, without retribution, without jeopardizing my personal standing or reputation.

So, out of the research, what we were able to excavate is that there’s this natural progression of stages of psychological safety. So, stage one is inclusion safety, stage two is learner safety, stage three is contributor safety, and then, as I said, stage four is challenger safety. Can you challenge the status quo? And what we find is that when we go from social setting to social setting, wherever we are, it’s not the same. Sometimes the psychological safety is very low, sometimes it’s kind of in the middle, sometimes it can be quite high which can allow us to do some pretty astonishing things as individuals.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to with the research, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it. And when we say astonishing things, can you give us a story, an illustration?

Timothy Clark
Yeah. So, actually, we keep doing case studies of this, but to preface my response, let me go back to Google’s Aristotle project, which I think they kicked off in about 2013, and they studied 180 of their own teams to try to figure out, “Well, what are the defining characteristics of our most high-performing team, because we have all these teams? And the teams are filled with highly intelligent, very talented people, but they don’t perform at the same level. Some really have a hard time getting off the ground. Others are soaring and they’re innovating and they’re doing some pretty incredible things.”

So, for example, we were just working with a client that’s in the construction business, and they put together several teams to try to figure out how they could innovate. And some of the best innovations came from some of their least, at least this is the way they said it, their least talented teams, where these are the people that you would pick last to be on your team.

And so, what we’re learning is that psychological safety becomes this incredibly important enabling condition that allows people…it gives people respect, and it gives them permission to jump in, dive in, lean in, and they have peak engagement experiences. They have career best experiences. They do things that they didn’t think they could do. And we’re seeing this over and over again.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love that. Now, we’re going to talk about how to get there, although I think some maybe hard-nose folks would perhaps suggest, “Oh, Tim, I mean, come on, don’t we just need to have a thick skin and just put it out there and make it happen?” I imagine it’s not so simple.

Timothy Clark
No, it’s not. In fact, Pete, one of the case studies that I give in the book that illustrates this point is that, in the United States at least, a student drops out of high school every 26 seconds. Now, that’s a tragedy but what is even more illuminating about it is that the research shows that most of these students, the vast majority of these students, barring some legitimate learning disability, they can do the work. The reason they drop out of school is because they didn’t have the support, they didn’t have the encouragement, they lost confidence, and they called it quits.

So, what we know about learning is that it is both intellectual and emotional. You cannot separate those two tracks. And so, if you just say, “Oh, you just need to have a thick skin,” well, do you think that that is really all that different in adults, in professionals who are in the workplace? They learn very, very quickly that if they challenge the status quo and they get their heads chopped off, they’re not going to do it anymore. They will retreat and recoil into a mode of personal risk management because what happens is that if the psychological safety is not there, if you’re in fear-based organization, or fear-based team, the fear triggers what we call the self-censoring instinct, and we all have one.

If that self-censoring instinct is triggered or activated by the behavior of other people, we catch on pretty quickly. And so then, we self-censor; we do not contribute all that we are capable of contributing. And that is a universal pattern across demographics, across cultures, across nations. So, does it matter? Oh, it matters. Think about the unintended consequences of how it matters when it relates to productivity, innovation, overall performance. Yeah, it matters.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And maybe if you could clear a misconception, I have heard or internalized somewhere that psychological safety may alternatively be defined as something like the ability to express what you really think without fear of reprisal. And I see a Venn’s diagram in my mind’s eye. There’s a good overlap with your definition but, also, it’s different. So, could you lay it on there, is there a distinction there? And I imagine there’s some form kind of ground rules, like, “Well, you can’t say anything.” But I don’t know, is it like 97% of things are acceptable, barring, which is wildly inappropriate, offensive, aggressive? How do you think about that?

Timothy Clark
Yeah. So, the way that I think about that is that, first of all, let’s go back to psychological safety is a function of two things. It’s a function of respect and permission. And so, we have to maintain, in order to maintain high levels of psychological safety, we have to maintain high levels of respect and permission.

So, what that means is that we patrol the boundaries of respect when we are engaged in dialogue and discussion. So, what that means is, as a practical matter, if you’re a member of a team and we are debating issues and we’re trying to solve problems, and we’re trying to figure out solutions, we do need a high level of intellectual friction. We do need creative abrasion and constructive dissent. We do need hard-hitting dialogue.

The only way you’re going to maintain that, however, is that you have to manage the social friction down. So, the intellectual friction has to go very high but the social friction has to stay very low. The only way you can do that is by maintaining respect interpersonally. So, what does that mean? That means personal attacks are off limits, and we’re going to be careful about what we’re saying. Now, we’re not going to coddle each other, right? We need a high tolerance for candor and we need to debate issues on their merits but we’re not going to attack people personally. We’re not going to demean or belittle or marginalize or embarrass.

If we move into that kind of behavior, then it shuts down our intellectual friction and we’re not able to make the breakthroughs that we need. So, we have to manage the respect and the civility in that dialogue.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s zoom into maybe some particular interactions and how they can be conducted optimally. I’m thinking, let’s just say someone says something that you find frustrating in the sense of, I don’t know, for any number of reasons, I don’t know, “We’ve been over this a dozen times before,” fill in the blank. So, I mean, what you laid out there in terms of things that are out of bounds, I could see, like, you’re not going to demean or shout or whatever, but I think it’s quite possible that we could have some nonverbal cues that can be tricky in terms of our vocal inflection or like a sigh. How do we play that game? You’ve got emotional reactions to stuff people say and they can pick up on those and not feel so safe afterwards. What do we do?

Timothy Clark
Well, I think that’s true, and so it’s not just verbal. As you say, it’s the nonverbal. Take, for example, think about all of us who are working virtually during the pandemic, we’re working with a distributed workforce, we’re on some kind of virtual platform. And so, our interactions, so I see from the shoulders up, and what am I relying on? I’m relying on some gestures. I’m relying on your facial expressions. I’m relying on your vocal characteristics.

It’s okay to be frustrated. It’s okay to be human that way because that communicates some very important things but it crosses a line when it becomes disparaging, when I’m rolling my eyes, when I’m being dismissive of what you’re saying. So, there’s a line there of respect and of acknowledgement for what you’re saying. Even though I may vehemently disagree, and we need to be able to have that discussion on the merits, but, again, I still think the whole key is that you’re maintaining the civility and the respect, and you’re having marvelous disagreements at the same time.

Can you do that? Yeah, you can do it but it takes practice. It takes practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Marvelous disagreements is a great turn of phrase. Thank you. And then how do we do that practice? Like, what does that look like when we are trying to build those skills?

Timothy Clark
Yeah, that’s a great question, Pete. So, what we did is we, our team, our research team, we put together what we call a behavioral guide, and we identified very concrete behaviors that are associated with each of the four stages of psychological safety. Let me give you some very concrete examples.

So, for example, with stage one, inclusion safety, it’s very important that you learn people’s names, you learn how to pronounce them, and you use people’s names. Now, that’s very, very simple. Here’s another one, and this one is backed up by research that’s come out of the MIT Human Dynamics Lab. When you are speaking with someone, even virtually, face them with your entire body. Don’t swivel. Don’t look at them from an angle but face them with your entire body because it communicates a different level of acknowledgement and interest and attention to what they are saying. Those are just a couple of examples.

We’ve put together about 35 specific concrete behaviors for each of the four stages of psychological safety. And so, what it comes down to is practicing those behaviors. So, for example, if you want to elevate inclusion safety, stage one, then you need to engage in behaviors that invite, that share, that solicit feedback and input, and you’re acknowledging other people. So, there are examples, there are behaviors that do that very naturally. Those have to be practiced over and over and over again in order to shift the prevailing norms of a team.  Yes, it can be done but you got to practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Tim, this is so much gold. Tell me, first of all, how do we get this behavioral guide?

Timothy Clark
Oh, this behavioral guide, you can just go to our website and it’s a free download. And I can also send you a link, Pete, so that you can have it available on your site.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. We’ll totally put that in the show notes. And so, okay, 35 for each of the four, or a 140 total.

Timothy Clark
A hundred-forty total.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m going to play 80/20 with you here. Can you give me the top three? And I’m going to say top in terms of it’s high impact, and it’s maybe frequently overlooked, and it’s relatively easy to make the shift. For example, I think that names is awesome, and facing with your entire body is great. Like, I can do that right now. Can you give us maybe another one for the belonging or inclusion, and then maybe the top three for the other three stages?

Timothy Clark
Okay. I don’t have them in rank order but I’ll take a shot. So, let’s go to stage two, first of all, to learner safety. So, for learner safety, one of the concrete behaviors that’s in the behavioral guide is that you need to publicly share mistakes that you’ve made. Okay, that’s one. A second one is to ask for help from someone of lower status than you. So, that’s another one. Another one for learner safety is to acknowledge when you don’t know something and do that very publicly.

Now, let me build on that because we can keep going. I’m going to skip for just a minute all the way to challenger safety, stage four, because this is the toughest one. So, here’s one, number one, weigh in last. If you have positional power, absolutely never speak first, give your opinion or your point of view first. You weigh in last. Another one is to publicly change your opinion so the people can hear that you’ve been influenced and that you’re changing your opinion or your point of view on something. Here’s another one. Formally assign dissent.

So, for example, say, we’re debating an issue or, say, we’re thinking about taking a course of action. Then what I would say is I would say, “Okay, you, you, and you, we’re assigning you to be our loyal opposition. We’re assigning you to dissent. So, as we go through this discussion, we want you to tell us what’s wrong with our point of view, what’s wrong with this proposed course of action, where are the flaws, shoot holes in it, and we’re giving you this as an assignment.”

The reason this works so well, Pete, is because if we assign dissent, we are trading your personal risks for public permission. And as soon as I give you public permission, you don’t have to use your personal risk, you’re going to be much more likely to do it. It changes the entire dynamic of the team. So, I kind of bounced around a little bit but let me give you another one. It goes back to inclusion safety. This just came to mind. It’s called hop-on hop-off  interviews.

Have you ever been to a city where you’re a tourist and they have these hop-on hop-off buses and you go around the city and you hop off, and you look at particular tourist attraction, then you get back on the bus and you keep going? It’s a similar concept. If someone comes in, a new member comes in, you assign that member an escort and a guide.

And that escort takes you around to the other team members, and you have very brief hop-on hop-off interviews of 5, 10 minutes each where you literally make the introduction to each person on the team, you say, “I’d like you to meet Pete. He’s a new member of our team.” Then you tee up a few questions and you accelerate the normal pace of social integration.

So, this happened to me, Pete. Let me give you an example. So, in college, in graduate school, I spent some time at Seoul National University in Korea, and they gave me a place in what was called the Social Science Research Center. As soon as I got there, the director, he introduced himself to me, and he said, “We’re so happy to have you here. I’m assigning two graduate students to be your guides, so here they are, and they’re going to take you around, and you’re going to meet every single member of the center, every faculty member, every graduate student.” So, they did that exact thing and then they took me to lunch.

Can you imagine how I felt? In the first day, we accomplished as much social integration as you would accomplish maybe in a month. I don’t know, maybe longer. So, what we’re saying is that there are these very concrete behaviors that accelerate and they elevate the psychological safety, and they absolutely work. Those are just some examples.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s so good. Now, let’s see. Did we get some for the contributor safety?

Timothy Clark
Contributor safety, okay. Contributor safety, let’s go back to what that means. Contributor safety means that you feel free and able to contribute as a full member of the team, to make a difference using your talents and skills and experience and knowledge. So, for contributor safety, I would cite, let me see, one example is that what you do, if you’re the leader of the team, you talk about the things that you have tried that did not work.

So, you talk about mistakes very openly because what happens is, and we know this from research, is that when we’re contributing, we’re very tentative, especially if we’re new, we don’t have the informal permission rights that we would want to have. And, usually, a team grants those slowly over time. Well, we don’t have time to wait for that.

And so, if, as a leader, you can say, “You know what, I tried this and it didn’t work out that well. I tried this and it was okay. We had a little bit of ,” but you’re very forthcoming with trying to solicit contribution from the person so the person is not standing on the sideline very tentative, very reluctant to dive in. And so, you model that, number one. And then, number two, you protect that person in the process.

So, let me give you another one that is a pattern that we see very clearly. So, that pattern is, for contribution, that you invite contribution but you provide autonomy with guidance. And the reason is that the more autonomy that I have, the more likely that I’m going to take ownership for something. Then if something goes wrong, you’re going to protect me in that process. So, there’s got to be some reassurance that if I’m venturing out and I’m going to try some things and I’m going to contribute, that I’m going to receive some level of protection in that process.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say protection, can you give us a couple examples of what that means in practice?

Timothy Clark
Yeah. So, for example, there is interpersonal protection. Interpersonal protection means that you’re protecting me from embarrassment, you’re protecting me from demeaning or belittling or that I might feel humiliated. I’ll give you an example.

So, early in my career, I was in manufacturing and I would have ideas about performance improvement, for example, for a process but I didn’t want to say anything because I was a rookie and I didn’t have permission rights, the informal socio-cultural permission rights. But I had a manager that could tell, he could just read my body language, and he would say, “Tim, I think you’ve got something to say. I think you’ve got an idea.”

And he would coax it out of me, and then I would give the idea. And it may have been a foolish idea, a silly idea, but he would protect me in that process so that nobody else around the table, nobody else on the team, would ridicule that idea even though I was a rookie. So, he gave me protection, interpersonal protection within, in the context of the group dynamics, so that I would do it again because he wanted me to do it again and again and again. If you get shot down, you’re not going to do it again.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, how would he verbalize that, or would he speak to other teammates, or just continue leading the meeting with an affirmation, or like what kind of verbiage was unfolding here?

Timothy Clark
Yeah, it was pretty subtle. He would just say, “Yeah, I could see where you’re coming from. That may have some merit. What do the rest of you guys think about that?” So, just subtle cues both verbal and nonverbal.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Thank you. Well, now I’m curious. If, let’s say, an individual contributor is in an environment that they say, “Wow, I want that and I don’t have that psychological safety,” what can they do? I mean, I guess they could quit and try to find a better environment. But are there any tools in terms of how we run our own brain or how we might try to advocate, instigate for getting a healthier environment?

Timothy Clark
Yeah. What I would say in response to that question, Pete, would be that if you’re an individual contributor, and contributor, you, by definition, probably don’t have  power and so you feel at a disadvantage. You may feel that you have no ability to influence. What I would say is build your credibility, build your platform of credibility, based on your competence, little by little so that people will listen to you because, then, if you keep doing that, little by little, you’ll be able to influence your peers and then your boss.

So, it’s kind of, this is the opposite of top-down. You don’t have positional power so you’ve got to create a beachhead of influence. And the way that you do that is, first of all, do your job and do it extremely well. Be very, very good at what you do. If you’re not good at what you do, people are not going to take what you say seriously. You don’t have credibility. So, you’ve got to get good at what you do.

You need to become good at asking good questions. Even though you may be new, even though you may be inexperienced, if you ask some thoughtful, reflective, good questions, you can build credibility in the questions that you ask even though you don’t know the answers because people can see that you’re being reflective. So, I think there are several ways to come at it but you’ve got to start with your own credibility. That’s what I would say.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And any tips for insulating our brains from the barbs that might be coming our way?

Timothy Clark
Yeah. I would say that it really is worth your while to try to not take things personally even when they are meant to be offensive or people are taking shots at you. I think it only works to your advantage if you are patient with the egos and the insecurities of the people around you. I’ll give you an example.

So, I did a kind of a roundtable discussion with a whole group of women of color the other day. It was absolutely fascinating. And the one insight that I gained from them that was bigger than anything else is they said, “You know what, this is what we do. We have learned to take some shots, to take some insults, to absorb those but then to focus on building our own credibility.”

Now, there are, of course, times when it goes too far. I mean, if we’re talking about bullying or harassment or public shaming or outright manipulation, that’s completely out of bounds. But they would absorb a certain amount of, I guess, rude or just impolite behavior. They wouldn’t worry about it too much and they would work on their own credibility in terms of their ability to contribute, in terms of their ability to collaborate. And they said that was an accelerator for them, and I thought that was so interesting because they said, “Look, we have barriers to overcome and we’ve learned.”

Now, of course, we have a ways to go in many of our organizations but I thought that was a particularly important insight. Don’t get tipped over by little things that people say or do even when they, perhaps, were not done with the best intent. Be forgiving and just show how  you are in your response patterns, and you will earn trust and credibility that much faster.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I think when you are in that place where you’re doing some forgiveness and that sort of fuels determination in terms of, I guess, the term killing them with kindness comes to mind, it’s like, “I’m going to take this masterfully.” And in so doing, you stick it to them.

Timothy Clark
That’s right. That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Tim, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Timothy Clark
Well, I would just say that every team is on a journey of psychological safety. Psychological safety is dynamic, it is delicate, and the job is never done. So, even if you’re not a leader, now, this is something that I think we really need to clarify. It’s not just the leader’s job. Now, does the leader set the tone? Sure. And is the leader’s modelling behavior perhaps the most important factor? Yes, that’s probably true.

But every member of the team has a role as an architect of the culture. All of the individual contributors, it doesn’t matter what your role is, you are an architect of the culture. You are radiating influence every single day, there is no off switch, you can’t turn that off. You cannot turn off the influence that you’re radiating, so keep that in mind. So, you’re either leading the way towards higher levels of psychological safety or you’re getting in the way, but you’re not a neutral party.

So, regardless of your role, regardless of whether you have positional power or not, please understand that you are an architect of the culture.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Timothy Clark
Well, I’m going to go real simple, Pete, with you on this one, and that is that, “The best synonym for leadership in the English language is influence.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And a favorite book?

Timothy Clark
I’m going to go with an oldie but a goodie, The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. It was published many years ago, still extremely timely and relevant.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Timothy Clark
Yeah, what I do, Pete, is I have a habit of writing down concepts, thoughts, ideas, insights. This is something that I’ve done for years and years and years, and it’s one of my favorite habits, and it’s the return on investment for that habit has been enormous. So, I used to use a pad of paper and pencil. Now I just use my phone but I am constantly just trying to capture insights and thoughts and observations. And I put them in no particular order, I call it my gristmill file. It’s just filled with stuff. And then I just go back through it and I make connections. That’s been, well, it’s one of my favorite habits.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share, something that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Timothy Clark
Yeah, honestly, lately, it really is the five-word definition of psychological safety – an environment of rewarded vulnerability. That seems to be resonating massively with people.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Timothy Clark
Sure, yeah. Just come to our website LeaderFactor.com. We’d love to see you. And you can certainly follow me on Twitter or visit me on LinkedIn, Timothy R. Clark.

Pete Mockaitis
And at Leader Factor, we could find those 140 behaviors?

Timothy Clark
Absolutely. Yeah, downloadable, fantastic resource, and absolutely free.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Timothy Clark
Yeah, I would say try to do a baseline, ask yourself this question with your team or the environment in which you work, “Do you belong? Are you growing? Are you contributing? Do you feel free and able to challenge the status quo?” Ask those four questions to baseline the level of psychological safety on your team.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Tim, this has been a treat. Thank you so much and I wish you many psychologically safe adventures.

Timothy Clark
Thanks, Pete. it’s been a pleasure to be with you.