Making People Feel Safe - a podcast by LCI Academy

How are you making your teams feel mentally safe, psychologically safe, emotionally safe to be themselves? And when they can be themselves, they will be at their natural best for your team and your organization. And that's what you need, right? That's what you need for your team to perform.

Go ahead and take action this week. Find somebody around you, ask them some good questions when there's a mistake that you might make fess up to it, own it. Talk about how you're going to be better because of it and continue to create the environment in which people can as well. 

[00:00:47] And today I want to have a conversation with you around safety. Now in today's day and age with the COVID-19 crisis, everybody is thinking about safety. Safety is at the forefront of everybody's minds, specifically people's physical safety, right? Leaders and organizations are spending so much time thinking about how.

[00:01:07] We can keep our people safe, especially as we ramp back up into our workplaces, as, as quarantines start to lift, as organizations start to ramp up their operations. Again, people's physical safety is, is an incredibly important issue because people need to feel safe when they come into work that they're not going to be put at risk so that they can perform at their best.

[00:01:34] So leaders in organizations are spending a lot of time thinking about how they keep people safe. It's not just relegated to an EHS or a safety department or a safety leader. Safety is at the forefront of everybody's mind. But when it comes to creating high performing teams and having high performing individuals, you know, people that can perform at their best as often as possible and get the kind of results that we need, our teams to get the safety and physical safety specifically, isn't the only type of safety that people need to function at a high level.

[00:02:14] If you're listening to this, no doubt. You've experienced some type of working environment at some point in your life where you didn't feel"safe. I'm not talking about physical safety. What I'm really talking about is psychological safety, emotional safety. People spend so much time and effort and honestly wasted energy and wasted attention on things like office politics on trying to safeguard their job.

[00:02:40] Sometimes people spend more time trying to keep their job than actually just doing their job. And what we know about how human beings function is that when we're in a mindset where we're just playing, not to lose, to lose what we have, what we've worked so hard for when we're playing not to lose versus playing to win.

[00:03:04] Right. When we're playing not to lose, we do not function at our best, but when we're in a mindset where we're playing to win, right. Not just focusing on the mistakes we could make or how we might fail, knowing that those things are a genuine possibility, but being okay with it, because we're just focused on the winning aspect of human beings, then function at their natural best.

[00:03:32] So leaders. It is on you to create an environment in which your people feel safe, not just physically safe, but mentally safe, emotionally safe, psychologically safe, that they aren't always having to look over their shoulder, to the left and to the right worrying about who's coming to get them, or what kind of office politics or company politics or back fighting, or the meetings after the meetings or their water cooler conversations.

[00:04:02] They're going to come back to get them. You see teams that have a natural open and honest ability to trust one, another mistakes and all flaws and all that people can actually be like, like buck naked with each other, Patrick Lencioni. That's how he works at that. People can be just virtually buck naked with one another flaws, mistakes, and awe.

[00:04:27] We can come to the table being really vulnerable with each other about where we're good and where we're not. Those are the teams that actually function at the highest levels because they're focused on. On answers and solutions, not just flaws and problems, right? They can take advantage of each other's strengths, not just always highlighting each other's weaknesses.

[00:04:51] They're aware of them, right. They're aware of them enough so that they know how to compensate for one another. Where, where each other's strengths can take advantage of other people's weaknesses. That's what creates really good high performing teams. But if people are spending more time, Worried about themselves, right?

[00:05:12] Keeping themselves safe and not exposing any kind of weaknesses they have that only does that not create very high performing teams, but that actually has a degrading effect on the human psychology over time. We all know this, that human beings are hardwired with this fight or this flight or freeze response.

[00:05:33] It's a survival mechanism. So anytime we perceive an incoming threat, we naturally go into fight flight or freeze response just briefly, let me unpack it. So anytime that we perceive an incoming threat, some people go into a fight response, which is, you know, I'm going to rise to meet this challenge and it's going to be me or them, and I'm going to fight this thing.

[00:06:00] Now what's interesting is that there's a lot of leaders. That take that approach when it comes to leadership to try to put pressure on their teams. And I figured that the best will rise to the top. Right. But what this does over the longterm is human beings were not meant or designed to live in a fight flight or freeze response over time.

[00:06:26] Like we said, it's a survival mechanism. It's meant to survive the moment, but not to thrive over the long term. So even though some people might perform well in a high pressure state, some leaders might think that, Oh, look, that strategy is really effective. It's a, it's an effective means of getting performance out of people.

[00:06:49] But over time, what you'll find is that people do not perform at that same level when they exist in that high stress, high pressure state. So the fight response, although it does well in the moment, isn't good. Over the long term for human beings, obviously the flight response, isn't good either. And we see this all the time.

[00:07:13] Some people when faced with pressure, they would rather run from it or lean away from it rather than lean into it. We don't want that either on our teams. And then some people we've seen this as well. They had that kind of freeze response, that freeze mechanism, which is, they just kind of freeze up and they can't make any decisions.

[00:07:38] And they are frozen by inaction. None of those responses lead to the type of performance that we want for ourselves or that we want from our team members. So leaders, we have to do a really good job of not sending people into that fight flight or freeze response. If we can make people feel safe, if we can make people feel appreciated that you know what nobody's going to be perfect, we can all make mistakes as long as we learn from them.

[00:08:12] And we don't hold them over one another constantly. That's the type of environment that creates not only high performing teams and individuals. But people that are in really healthy, emotional States that actually go home to their families better for having been a part of your team in your organization.

[00:08:33] So leaders, your job is to help make people safe, not just physically safe. Yes. Physically safe. Like it like is so important in this current climate. But it's an opportunity when safety is on all of our minds to not just relegate it to the zone of physical safety, how are you making your teams feel.

[00:08:56] Mentally safe, psychologically safe, emotionally safe to be themselves. And when they can be themselves, they will be at their natural best for your team and your organization. And that's what you need. Right. That's what you need for your team to perform. Like you need them to perform. So, yeah. Couple practical steps leaders you might think and assume.

[00:09:20] Yeah, my people feel safe. They would tell me if they didn't, chances are you're wrong. Chances are you're wrong. That those people will not tell you if they don't feel safe. That's the whole point. They're not going to tell you if you make them feel unsafe because that will make them feel unsafe. So leaders, one of the most practical, effective things that you can do for your team starts with creating an environment where it's okay for people to be imperfect.

[00:09:53] It's okay. For people to make mistakes. And as the leader, you go first, you set the tone for the environment that exists. So the first time you make a mistake, Admit to it, own it, fess up to it because people will take your lead and isn't that what you want rather than wasting a lot of time with office politics of people blaming one another for any mistakes that are made and finger pointing.

[00:10:24] If people just own the mistake, we can move on faster from it and land on solutions. That will ultimately drive the performance that we want. So you, as a leader, if you own up to and apologize for and fess up to the mistakes that you make, your people then will be more apt to do it. And then when they do what's really important is that you as a leader, facilitate a conversation like that.

[00:10:54] Okay. You made a mistake. How are we going to be better? The second you jumped down somebody's throat. When they make a mistake or you don't let it go and keep hanging it over their head is the last time people will feel free to be open and vulnerable. And this feeling of a lack of safety will perpetuate throughout a team and throughout an organization.

[00:11:21] So leaders, you set the tone for people's feelings of safety, not just physical safety, but psychological, emotional safety that will put them in a position to perform at their best. And isn't that what we want. Leaders. That's what we need is for people and teams to be healthy for people to be fulfilled and passionate what they do to drive the performance that we need and to go home to their families, happy and healthy and safe and fulfilled

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