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Episode Overview:
The episode offers valuable insights into how psychological safety nurtures open communication, teamwork, and overall group well-being. DePaul's expertise shines as he discusses the role of psychological safety in sparking innovation, encouraging risk-taking, and enhancing collaborative problem-solving. Drawing from both research and practical experience, he provides actionable strategies for establishing psychologically safe environments. Key themes covered include leadership's impact on psychological safety, the correlation between trust and this type of safety, and practical methods for evaluating and enhancing it within teams. This podcast equips listeners with a deeper comprehension of psychological safety's pivotal role in cultivating productive workspaces, making it an essential listen for those aiming to foster effective teamwork and organizational growth.
Additional Resources:
Skot Waldron:
Hey Gary, how's it going over there?
Gary DePaul:
It's going great. How about yourself?
Skot Waldron:
Oh, so good. It's been a good morning. It's a little rainy outside, but you know, had some good meetings already this morning. So now I get to talk to you.
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, this is going to be great.
Skot Waldron:
OK, Gary, we're going to tackle something that is huge. And are you familiar with Project Aristotle that Google
Gary DePaul:
Oh yeah,
Skot Waldron:
conducted?
Gary DePaul:
definitely.
Skot Waldron:
OK,
Gary DePaul:
Yeah. Google.
Skot Waldron:
give my audience, give me audience. I think I've probably referenced it in some show somewhere somehow because I reference it quite often. Can you give my audience a little bit of background or insight or what you know of the project? Yeah.
Gary DePaul:
Yeah. So Google, gosh, I don't know how long ago to several before the pandemic
Skot Waldron:
Yeah, but I don't remember when
Gary DePaul:
did
Skot Waldron:
either.
Gary DePaul:
this study. They, yeah, they, they wanted to figure out what makes a perform high-performing team. What, what's the magic ingredient? And they tried to unbundle it and figure out what's, what's really going on. And it's interesting what they came up with was, a couple of things. First, they found out that if you're going to have a successful team, you need to be able to, for lack of a better word, empathize. You have to understand what another person is experiencing. So imagine this, you're in an iron-in meeting and suddenly you just put your hand over your mouth, your arms are folded. If the successful teams, the high performing teams recognize this and they address it and talk about it and they have a conversation about what's going on because it usually unbundles problems that would normally not surface. The other thing they found, which is kind of cool, is everyone has about the same amount of talking time in meetings. So hold on. Sorry, please edit that
Skot Waldron:
Okay,
Gary DePaul:
out. I just had
Skot Waldron:
no worries, we're good.
Gary DePaul:
to, my phone just exploded. I forgot to turn it off
Skot Waldron:
We
Gary DePaul:
and.
Skot Waldron:
are, you know what? We're just like go with the flow on this show, Gary. It's all good, man. Go ahead.
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, the life of an entrepreneur, you have all these things happening at the same
Skot Waldron:
Yes,
Gary DePaul:
time.
Skot Waldron:
you do
Gary DePaul:
So
Skot Waldron:
always
Gary DePaul:
yeah.
Skot Waldron:
something happening. You got it. So, okay.
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, exactly.
Skot Waldron:
All right. So I'm going to, um, let me here. I'm going to mark this. OK, go. Let's
Gary DePaul:
Yeah,
Skot Waldron:
start that whole thing
Gary DePaul:
so.
Skot Waldron:
again. So go back to explaining what Project Aristotle is, and then we'll go back to the beginning.
Gary DePaul:
Okay, Project Aristotle was a Google project that they labeled it that to find out what makes high performing teams And one of they found out two basic things that makes high performing teams Just that high performing the first is Something called social sensitivity And this is sort of like empathy. It's understanding what other people are are experiencing, for example, in a meeting. So if your arms are folded and you're looking down, the successful teams, the high-performing teams, stop everything and they figure out what's going on. They call it out in the open and they have an open dialogue. And with a lot of project teams, it's crucial because people are not wanting to rock the boat or they're not willing to speak up about a problem. They don't want to cause trouble. But when you can empathize and you see that there's something going on, it really enables you to avoid problems in the future and gives everyone an equal voice in what's going on, which is the second thing is a quality of conversational time. Turn-taking is what they call it. Everyone in a meeting speaks about the same amount of time. That's not one person talking. I've, I've coached. a director at a company where he did most of the talking and couldn't understand why no one else would talk. You know, so it and they had trouble with performance and running into problems. But when you're able to divide that time up equally among the team members, awesome things happen.
Skot Waldron:
What was so the number one thing, which is your expertise, the thing that we're going to talk about on this show, the number one thing that indicated a high performing team that gave was like essential for high performing teams. What was that thing?
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, if you have to put it in a different way, they found out something called psychological safety.
Skot Waldron:
Boom, there it is.
Gary DePaul:
And those are two aspects of psychological safety.
Skot Waldron:
Yes.
Gary DePaul:
The equality and conversational turn taking and the social sensitivity or empathy.
Skot Waldron:
Good. How else do you describe psychological safety? You do keynotes on this, you coach about this, you talk about it quite often. How else do you package up psychological safety?
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, well, let me let me let me explain it a little bit differently. If you have an increase in psychological safety, then here's some things that may happen. You're asking for feedback from other people, you're discussing mistakes. You're experimenting, you're giving feedback, you're sharing ideas. And what that results in is an increase in employee engagement. frequency of team innovation, and an increase in learning from mistakes. So think of psychological safety as when team members confidently believe that they can safely take interpersonal risks without scorn or animosity. So there's this respect, there's permission, but it's also fragile, which is interesting.
Skot Waldron:
Explain that. Why is it so fragile?
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, it's very easy to remove psychological safety by making mistakes like shaming people in a sense, for example, in a meeting or what's the word for dismissing someone's ideas. And if you do that enough, then you decrease in psychological safety. But at the same time, you can get it back because you may later find out, oh man, I messed up. I was really not listening to what my team was saying and coming forward and saying, hey man, guys, I really messed up and here's why. And you can reclaim that, but it's very easy to lose it by losing those two characteristics I talked about earlier, not having empathy and not having an open environment where people can express their ideas.
Skot Waldron:
And then I almost feel like there's when, so you talked earlier about this executive that you've coached in the past that, talked a lot but didn't realize why nobody else was talking, which can hurt the psychological safety levels of those teams. It's almost the core issue is that self-awareness piece, that awareness that... Maybe as someone who likes to talk a lot, likes to come up with the ideas, likes to generate noise and doesn't like silence and, and things like that is, is just, he fills the space because he's scared that nobody else will, or looking incompetent or whatever it is. His fear is that self-awareness is what can lead to that damaging of psychological safety. Do you see that too? Or no.
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, that was beautifully stated. It's so easy to ask a question to a team and then wait, and then you start to feel uncomfortable because no one's speaking and then you sit there and say, okay, I'm going to answer it, you know, try, try asking your team something and then count the 10 slowly. Because people, what's happening is people need time to process what you're asking, especially if it's something new. And, you know, they may need four or five seconds. But this particular director, he could not handle the silence. And he was so unaware of what was going on. And he was excited. He was passionate about everything he did in business. And that mistakenly affected the team. And he didn't realize it. So self-awareness. is a huge part. You know, you talk about emotional intelligence. That's, you know, you've got to be aware of your own emotions. You've got to be aware of what's going on and how, how you're interacting with other people. And when you don't have that awareness, it really dampens psychological safety.
Skot Waldron:
sure. So what's the biggest mistake that you see people making when trying to build psychological safety or when they're actually not building psychological safety? Why is that?
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, I'm going to come at this from a completely different angle. So it's, it's not what you typically hear when you talk about psychological safety and, and that's this. If you're in charge of a team and things are not working, deciding, okay, this is how I'm going to solve that. And imagine this, you go into a doctor's office, a medical doctor's office or, or you're a medical doctor on the patient. And I say to you, I saw this thing on TV about restless legs syndrome. And they say, take this prescription. Could you prescribe it for me? If you say yes. Then. You're except you're going straight to a solution and you're doing malpractice in a sense. Because you're not you're not analyzing. You don't you don't try to figure out the problem. And a lot of a lot of times with people that lead teams, they think they know what the solution is and they jump to the solution rather than trying to figure out what really is the problem underlying problem. And would you like a real quick real life example?
Skot Waldron:
Um, yes, Gary, I love real life
Gary DePaul:
Yeah.
Skot Waldron:
examples. So yes, go for
Gary DePaul:
Okay.
Skot Waldron:
it.
Gary DePaul:
Vice president at a Fortune 100 company that's in charge of learning and development. He sat at his direct reports meeting and said, everyone is going to go through project management training. We're just not doing a good job in this area. So I'm going to require everyone to take this class. Instant uproar. So he had an idea. He decided there was a problem. and jumped to a solution, which without realizing what exactly was going on. And here's what happened in the meeting. The guy that created the project management training said, well, I'm not going to take it because I helped design it and I helped implement it. So I'm not going to take it. And then a Six Sigma person said, well, if he's not going to do it, I'm not going to do it. And then someone finally said, isn't that what, isn't that what we try to teach the business? to talk about focus on the problem rather than jumping to a solution. And that's the thing that happens is a lot of this has to do with self-awareness is people tend to jump to their favorite solution. In a construction company, they were having safety issues and the solution for the chief operating officer was... Send an email out saying we need the really focus on safety and stop doing these dumb things solution solved, you know, and, but it wasn't. That's, that's one of the problems with teams is when someone in charge goes from there's a symptom, people aren't communicating or whatever and decide, okay, this is what we're going to do without diving into it and figuring out, okay, why are people not communicating? Well, what's going on behind the scenes. And it's not, it's people that when you move up in organizations, they don't learn really how to deal with underlying problems that teams have. And when that happens, you tend to not have psychological safety,
Skot Waldron:
Hmm
Gary DePaul:
which think about the Gallup polls that have come out. The two the latest one I think it was something like only about I don't know 28 20 hold on a second. I could tell you I'll actually give it to you Because I have it right here Ironically, I had it up Okay, this was the 2023 state of global workplace report only 31% of those thousands of people polled were engaged at work the rest weren't there was uh 17 quietly loudly quitting and 52 quietly quitting in other words they stay but they're not committed to being there and when that's an example that illustrates the problem of teams with psychological safety is they don't have their needs are not being addressed. And people as they go up in the organization, they have difficulty dealing with that aspect of the business. It's easy to do the work, it's harder to lead people.
Skot Waldron:
So people go directly to the solution. They prescribe the pill without understanding what's creating the symptoms. So like you said, with the doctor analogy, right? And I think that we would be pretty annoyed if, here's a story, you ready for this one? My mother,
Gary DePaul:
Go.
Skot Waldron:
and I don't know if my mom's gonna even listen to this show, but if she does, hope that's okay, mom. She, a few years ago, it was right, so it was 2019. Beginning of the year, she's getting these rashes and she's getting sweats all night and up and down and just like miserable fever and then no fever and then fever and then no fever and it's just driving her crazy. She went to doctors, went to all types of people and there's just... They, so they keep giving her like, you know, stand in front of this infrared machine for 30 minutes a day. And here maybe it's, uh, you know, maybe it's some kind of infection. Take this antibiotic and then take this one. And so they're just treating all of these surface level issues here. Try this cream on your, your rashes and all the things that are going on. So throughout this whole time, she's miserable. Okay. Because doctors keep trying to just treat. the symptoms of what's happening. She finally realizes, she gets with another doctor and realizes that she has Hodgkin's lymphoma. So she has cancer, she's diagnosed with cancer. And all of these symptoms were a result of that cancer that was in her body. And that was right before COVID. And then she has chemo and all that other stuff that she's doing during COVID, which, you know. was just stuff on top of stuff. But the core issue was like, how much do we do that as leaders when we look at the rashes and we look at the fevers and we're just like, ah, just fix it, band-aid it, treat it, and we're not going, okay, so what's the real issue with the safety? What's the real safety issue? Or what's the real reason that we don't trust each other? You know, or... why we're not delegating work. I mean, I went on a little side note here, but I mean, what do you think about that?
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, I mean that that's so true and sticking with their side note for a moment and then I'll get to that uh when with doctors When there's a saying when they hear hoofbeats They envision horses But it could be zebras And what that means is that maybe eight out of ten? uh the symptom of a rash maybe something very simple where you just have a cream, eczema or whatever, you know, eczema or whatever, easy solution. But sometimes it's a zebra that's much deeper. And as people who lead teams, we tend to hear hoofbeats and think horses and think we know what's going on without doing any type of analysis or really focusing on what is what is the problem that we're trying to address and talking with the team about that, which rather than deciding, oh, well, we need better communication. So I'm gonna have everyone take a communication course, or I'll type a memo and say, hey, email everyone, stop doing that. It's not addressing what's really going on. And that is the big challenge with people who lead teams.
Skot Waldron:
So how does that build psychological safety? When we figure out the real problem, how is that feeding a psychologically safe culture?
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, so think of the process. If I was building psychological safety among my team and I knew that there was a problem, I would go to my team and say, here's what I'm seeing. This is the problem, we're not communicating well, or whatever. And then you do something amazing. You say something like, I'm a contributor to this. And... you could apologize or you can give an example of what you're doing wrong. And that's you're going first, so to speak, and explaining to the team, being vulnerable with them about what you're thinking and feeling and saying, you know, I, I really want to address this communication problem that I'm seeing. But what, what do you guys think? What are you seeing the same thing that I'm seeing? And it's asking those types of questions. It's involving other people that help you get to what really is going on. And then if you spend more time listening than talking, then chances are you're going to get to a state where you're more in a psychological safety environment.
Skot Waldron:
So listening, being vulnerable, collaboration, input, all those elements build psychological safety. What else can we do to, and those help solve the problem, um, as a whole. I think, I guess another thing that I've seen too, um, is that They get some of that stuff and then they leave and then they come up with the solution themselves and come back and say, okay, this is the solution because this is what I heard. So they're kind of half doing it. They're like half they're doing the listening thing. Then they go off and they just like think they fixed it. I would almost add, and you tell me if you disagree, cause we haven't really talked about this yet, but part of the psychological safety part and building healthy culture would be having. the team also come up with the solution rather than you just going
Gary DePaul:
Yes.
Skot Waldron:
into your ivory tower and finishing the solution, yeah?
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, that's exactly what I was trying to say is that you want everyone to help diagnose the problem and what's going on, because everyone's going to have a different perspective just based on who they are. And part of your job or anyone's job on a team is to protect the right of the team to speak up and being be able to express themselves and without ridicule, without joking about what the person says, but seriously listening. and trying to understand what other people are perceiving.
Skot Waldron:
Okay.
Gary DePaul:
I think that's crucial.
Skot Waldron:
Oh yeah. That's really, really good. Okay. Um, what other aspects of psychological safety do you hit on? I mean, as a, as a speaker, uh, you talk about this topic, what distinguishes your ideas from some of the others that are out there, what kind of unique spin does what's Gary's unique spin on psychological safety or how you like to solve the problem?
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, well, one thing one thing I do with people that I talk with, I take them on a journey, first of all. And I kind of start with the hey, here's the big problem and talk about like the Gallup report and then break down psychological safety and what are the components? How can you have developed that? And actually, I show some videos that illustrate some of the main points. At the end, you've got to have action items. You've got to be able to do stuff with this information. And one of the things I encourage people to do, especially in management, is discuss the concept of psychological safety. Then agree upon some expectations about how you're going to work with one another. You know, about being open with the team and... You know, some of the things I talked about not ridiculing them. But the other, the important thing is you hold one another accountable. So I need to be accountable for me. That's a hundred percent. But, and I need the, I need the hold other people accountable. And that's my other hundred percent. So the speak, even though 200% it's not possible, but,
Skot Waldron:
It is on this show,
Gary DePaul:
but you
Skot Waldron:
Gary.
Gary DePaul:
get
Skot Waldron:
It is on this show.
Gary DePaul:
that. You. There you go. And, you know, all it takes is someone to speak up. And then when you're doing that, and especially when there's these key moments that happen where the first time someone speaks up at a meeting, what the manager does is so crucial, it's a crucial moment. If the if the manager discounts what the person says or brushes it off or goes You know what's going to happen. But if the manager acknowledges it sends a, and it sends a message to everyone else, Hey, he's this guy, Gary is really listening to what we're saying and is taking that as input, you know, so that's, that's really important.
Skot Waldron:
Mmm.
Gary DePaul:
And then, Oh yeah. One other thing that I encourage people to do with psychological safety, you've got to get to know your people. the people you work with, not necessarily your boss or your peers, but everyone you work with, the more you know about them, the easier it is to humanize them. You've heard of the fundamental attribution error.
Skot Waldron:
No, I haven't. Educate me.
Gary DePaul:
Oh, fundamental attributionary is attribution errors is really simple, but it's a difficult concept to put into practice or address. Here's how it works. I'll give a car example. You're driving down the road. Someone pulls in front of you, cuts you off, and the hand shoots out the window and you think this guy's a jerk. I can't, may flip me off. But the reality is. You just saw someone pull in front of you and cut you off, but you don't know why. You don't know what was going on. Maybe there was a bee in the car. Maybe the person was rushing to the hospital because her daughter was in intensive care. It could be anything, but what we do is we make up stories to explain behaviors. And then we react to the made-up story In the in the car example I get upset because I think the person is being a jerk and cutting me off Or I can make up the story in my head. Oh my gosh. This person is really in a hurry I feel really bad that this person is having the drive in this traffic like this, you know, it's We tend to be very forgiving to ourselves internally because we know what why we're doing things But when it comes to other people, we tend to be very judgmental and we assume more or create stories in our head that are more harmful than or negative than positive. We attribute bad things to other people and good things to ourselves is another way of putting it. So with psychological or with the fundamental attribution error. The thing that's interesting is the more I get to know someone, the less likely I'm going to attribute negative stuff to your actions or to their actions. So that's why getting to know other people is so important.
Skot Waldron:
I love that. That is so good. It's built on those impressions that we get and how much grace we give people in the sense of what they're going through. It's that empathy piece that you explained way at the beginning of this show is a core essence of psychological safety, a core ingredient of that. Let me ask you this question. I'm going to push back on you a little bit. I want to hear what you say. Cause I've heard some of this before too, with, uh, but some of my clients, um, I'll be coaching them through an idea of this and this and this and this. And they go, yeah, but that's not how it is here. And I'm just like, okay, well let's, you know, unpack that a little bit and understand aspects of it. I don't want to paint like this beautiful picture of how everything's psychologically safe, but you're like, okay, so I am going to come into a meeting and I'm going to present an idea. And I'm going to sit there and I'm going to listen because now my coach is telling me that I should listen. Although before I've burned some bridges and I've ripped people apart and I've told them their idea sucks, et cetera. And now I'm going to go, no, I'm going to be good now. Cause my coach is telling me to be good and I'm going to listen. So everybody, this is a psychologically safe environment. Go. And then I go back
Gary DePaul:
Yeah,
Skot Waldron:
to my
Gary DePaul:
what
Skot Waldron:
coach
Gary DePaul:
a great way to terrorize someone.
Skot Waldron:
and I go back to my coach and I go, nobody talked. See, I told you. wasn't gonna work, nobody talking. So how do we get back? So we burned the bridge, we traumatized the team. How do we get back to a psychologically safe space?
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, when someone is very resistant to psychological safety, they think, we have that. 360 is a beautiful way of exposing the reality. And I gave you some numbers a while ago, very few people feel like they're actively engaged in the work that they do. I mean, the numbers show it, that there's a lot of people that don't. Well, here's the thing. If you come to a realization that, you know what, maybe I haven't made the environment as psychologically safe as I could, two things you could do. One, admit fallibility that, you know what, I'm not good at this and I need to let the team know. I need to talk to them about it. And then the other thing to do, which is crucial, is show curiosity. So instead of focusing on what you're thinking as someone else is talking, you focus on what they're saying and follow up with questions and really try to understand why is this person saying what they're saying rather than assuming I know. And that remarkable things happen when you start to have that curiosity and you really get away from. I'm thinking about the next thing I'm going to talk about while this person is talking, which we all do. It's natural. Our brains work faster than our ability to take in information. Our hearing is, we process information like 400 times faster than when someone's speaking. It's crazy. So forcing yourself to focus on what someone's saying and then being curious and asking, why is it that you... you're saying that. Give some examples and you could be quite surprised at what people have to say.
Skot Waldron:
So the idea, I like this idea because what you're doing is you're kind of reversing the expectation because if I'm not creating a psychologically safe environment, those individuals are usually not listening and they're usually not curious because they think they know everything. So there's arrogance there and some pridefulness or whatever. So if I reverse that through behaviors that show that I'm trying... to listen, I'm trying to put effort, I'm being vulnerable, which is another element that you mentioned earlier on, and saying, hey, I may not be good at these things, tell me more about that. And they're like, are you sure, why are you asking me questions all of a sudden? You never asked me questions before. It's just part of them saying, well, I'm trying. I'm trying to work on this, I realize I've burned some bridges before, I'm trying to work on this thing. And so over time, you're saying that those little micro moments will end up building trust. helping us have open lines of communication and then creating that psychologically safe environment.
Gary DePaul:
Yeah. Let me, let me give you a hospital example of how, how this, this kind of works out. Suppose, suppose you work at a hospital, you're, you're there. And one of the things that, um, uh, the consultants have discovered is that doctors are not washing their hands consistently as, as they should be. Uh, they, or they, they wash their hands wrong. Um, and you know, there's, there's actually been some Real stories where they doctors say, oh, we all wash our hands, whatever. And they hold up a light, a special light, and they show how, no, they have germs on their hands, et cetera. Well, here's when psychological safety really kicks in. You're a doctor. You just finish with a patient and you walk out and you don't wash your hands. A janitor standing right there says, hey, doc, did you wash your hands when you came out? Could you You're not drying your hands like other doctors do. That is a crucial moment. What I mean by that is, if I berate or talk down to that janitor, everyone's gonna know about it. But if I look at that janitor, it's that, you know what, you're right, I screwed up, and thank you for holding me accountable. I'm gonna go back in and wash my hands. That experience is gonna reverberate all over the hospital. and people are going to hear, hey, Dr. Waldron, he actually wants people to talk to him. He's open to it. And he admitted he made a mistake. You know, so that's a crucial moment. So when your team members are saying something and you're receptive, it's going to build psychological safety because another team member say, hey, Gary just talked to Scott and Scott listened. I'm going to say something now and it becomes this build that you have around psychological safety.
Skot Waldron:
Mmm, that's so good. You know what the best part of that whole story was? You calling me
Gary DePaul:
What's that?
Skot Waldron:
Dr. Waldron. That has never been done before. Oh, you have to call me Dr. Waldron the rest of the interview, Gary.
Gary DePaul:
You got it, doc.
Skot Waldron:
So let's wrap this thing up. This has been so good. I haven't had a show where I focus just on psychological safety, so I think this is important. especially from Google's research and the project Aristotle. So if you haven't looked at that, everybody just Google project Aristotle, it comes up and you can read, they've got the information in there and you can read about that. Gary, if people want to hire you to speak, if they want you to come out and help them a little bit with this idea, maybe they wanna check out one of your books, what do they do to get in touch with you? How do they do that?
Gary DePaul:
Yeah, um first look me up on linkedin and connect with me I'm open to open to that but gary adepal.com Is my um is my website. It's a Pretty simple one. It has all my books on there. Um The the big one that I have is nine practices of 21st century litigate Nine practices of 21st century leadership. Uh, it's all evidence-based research that I did. Really cool stuff. So the website, I'm on SpeakerHub. You can find me there as well. So yeah, come find me.
Skot Waldron:
Okay. Good. Well, uh, look forward to staying in touch with you and see what the future looks like for you. Uh, good luck with the new book edition and the speaking career and everything you're doing. Well done, Gary. Well done.
