35· Women & Psychological Safety
Podcast show notes
Join me this week where we delve into the crucial foundation of trust within organisations—psychological safety.
Having worked extensively with teams to foster environments where members feel secure and valued, I'll explore why psychological safety is particularly vital for women and how it impacts organisational success and leadership development.
We'll discuss practical ways to enhance psychological safety at work, ensuring that everyone feels empowered to speak up, contribute, and innovate without fear of negative repercussions.
Tune in to learn how you can cultivate a more inclusive and supportive workplace.
Here are the highlights
(1:07) Psychological safety in organisations, particularly for women.
(4:20) Psychological safety and its impact on performance and inclusion.
(8:32) Women's contributions are often hindered by a lack of psychological safety.
(10:46) Fostering open communication to avoid humiliation or risk.
Connect with Ruth
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Ruth
Welcome to Frustrated and Exhausted, the podcast for women in leadership, where I help you fulfill your ambitions without sacrificing your sanity, or your resilience.
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Frustrated and Exhausted. In last week's episode, we talked about trust and self-trust with Andrea White. And she was sort of exploring really how her gender in her career had impacted her ability to trust herself and what she'd had to do to really build that up. In this week's episode, I want to explore a really critical kind of foundation for trust. This comes up in organizations a lot at the moment and in Organizational Psychology. And you'll have heard about it if you kind of follow these sorts of things, whether it's through work or in the media or whatever.
Psychological safety - we've heard more and more about it over the last decade, it's become kind of trendy, I guess, in terms of thinking about organizational culture, and how to kind of improve performance and innovation. And it is fundamentally important, it's something I've done a lot of work with, with teams, and with trying to create that same sense of psychological safety. And with trying to kind of raise awareness around kind of where they're really at with it, you know, how safe do they feel sort of thing? And how is that impacting kind of both their relationships and the dynamics within the team, and also their performance as a team?
But why does it matter? So specifically, for women, the research kind of shows that we experience less psychological safety overall, in life. And that's perhaps not surprising, given, you know, violence against women, sexual assault, you know, the kind of nasty end of everything that many of us can have experienced and go through in our lives. And in an organizational context, you know, women also experienced that lower level of psychological safety. And it matters for organizations as well as women, because organizations who have a lower ratings on psychological safety, also produce fewer women leaders, they also tend to not perform quite as well, either. So it matters in a whole range of ways. And for women, I think it matters, particularly in terms of understanding where we are with it. And how it might be impacting is kind of another lens, really to look at early experiences and organizations through and to really consider.
So we all have different life experiences, obviously. And those experiences impact are fundamental feelings of safety, and our ability to trust other people. That impacts us in terms of our relationships, you know, whether that's with a partner, whether that's at work, it also kind of leads us to behave in quite specific ways. And, you know, if you're anything like me, you probably sometimes walk down a dark street with a car key between your fingers, or, you know, when I was growing up and kind of starting to start to get a bit more independent. My mum's questions to me before I went out was like, Where are you going, who are you going with? And what time are you going to be back? You know, that sense of letting other people know where you are. Because there is some sort of threat out there towards you. And, you know, that kind of sense of lack of safety kind of gets really instilled quite early for everyone to a degree, but specifically, I think for women, and in a different way, there's certainly a lot more emphasis placed on it for women. We take those experiences with us, obviously, into the workplace.
There was a whole lot of research done a few years back, which drew on earlier research from a few decades ago, actually, but Amy Edmondson is a researcher based out of the US she has written many books, some of you will have read them, no doubt. Her work started off into psychological safety when she was actually doing healthcare research. And she was looking at performance of consultants and surgeons, and she was trying to understand why, in some cases, surgery went well and why may be unexpectedly it didn’t and what the disparities were across teams. And what she discovered was that actually the underpinning reasons were teams are making high numbers of mistakes was because the team wouldn't speak up if they thought the surgeon had missed something. And that obviously had consequences for patients, some pretty big ones, too. And this fundamentally came down to the fact that they were afraid of being humiliated in some way, they were afraid of being shot down in flames. And so they were scared to stick their head above the parapet, even when the consequences were so significant. And I think that just goes to show that that how powerful that sense of potentially being publicly shamed is in us, the way that it can kind of drive our behaviors, even when we know it's potentially happening.
So, fundamentally, what she found was that in teams where psychological safety was lower, where people felt that they couldn't challenge they couldn't speak up, there was less learning, there was less performance, and that produced lower outcomes for patients. And there was a lot less innovation that came out from those teams as well. So when we lack psychological safety in organizations, we're missing a trick in terms of performance. And in terms of getting the best out of people.
The challenge, of course, you know, from a leadership perspective is how do you create an environment where everyone feels safe? Now, this is obviously a kind of fundamental question for anything around inclusion and belonging, and diversity and equity and you know, accessibility for people, and it's hard, I think, is the answer. But, you know, can we all feel safe all of the time? Is it possible to create those conditions? Probably not. In terms of having a blanket one size fits all. I think what I've found in the work that I've done with teams is that different personalities will feel more or less comfortable with each other. There are some conditions in organizations which you really do undermine psychological safety, that are behaviors that some people will be comfortable with, and others won't. And I don't mean just comfortable. I mean, like it'll keep people quiet or not. And so this is something I think that really needs to be approached on a kind of team by team basis.
You know, one of the things that I do a lot of is contracting with teams, and really taking them back to some core principles of what is it that you actually need in order to feel safe right now, and trying to over time create an environment in which people can raise issues and concerns more openly. So I don't think it's possible for us all to feel safe all of the time. And, you know, we really want to, you know, because we always feel unsafe when we're going into a new or different situation. So it's that thing where you might start a new role. And you're a bit quiet for the first few weeks while you kind of suss out the lay of the land, and who's who and what all the norms and things are of that team. But the problem arises when there is not enough psychological safety. And we're really missing out on people contributing, that are dominant voices that are kind of constantly the only ones heard that sort of thing. And that's when things become problematic, or whether other can afford poor behavior, whether that's bullying or you know, unrealistic expectations or whatever it might be.
Now, women's psychological safety in the workplace is often undermined, in all the ways that we all talk about a lot. I've talked about a lot on this podcast, you know, mansplaining being interrupted and shot down, publicly being shot down when you've just got up the courage to kind of stick your head out and say something, and being out numbered. You know, when you're the only one or have a particular group, it can be a very vulnerable experience, to sort of put your hand up and say something that's just kind of part of the human condition. But if you do that, and then you are talked over, shut down, have your idea nicked or ignored, even worse sometimes. Then that is obviously going to really put You have done that again. And so your contributions are missed. And in action, what that can really look like is conflict avoidance.
You know, I see this a lot in teams, artificial harmony, or fake harmony, and when everybody's very nice to each other, but they're all just not seeing what really needs to be said. And it's that real kind of conflict avoidance, you know, when we're keeping our heads down, and we're not speaking up, and we're not really, we're not really making the points that need to be made, we're not being honest and transparent with each other, for fear of being shut down, or being publicly humiliated, of being ignored, and not being relevant.
So what do we do about that? Well, it's hard at times, but there are things that you can do to start to open up those conversations, one of the things I would really recommend is taking a look at the work of Tim Clark, who has written about the four stages of psychological safety. I'll put an introductory link in the show notes to this, and you can kind of go further from there if you want to. But he describes the four stages of psychological safety as a first and foremost inclusion safety. So are you included in the conversations? Are you including other people in the conversations? Are the people who need to be part of those conversations part of them? And do you feel like you will be included in the conversations that are relevant for you? Now, obviously, in organizations, there's lots of politics and lots of land grabs, and trying to, you know, build empires and all this sort of stuff. And that can really get in the way of this sort of inclusion safety. But just being part of and making sure that people are part of the right conversations, you're when you're leading organizations, you're leading teams, and it's really important, especially if they are the only one over a particular group, or in a minority of some description. So that's inclusion safety. The other thing to think about then from this point is learner safety. So are people asking questions? Do you ask the questions that you want to? Do you feel safe to do that? Again, from the perspective of will I be humiliated? Is this something that's putting me at risk? Am I making myself too vulnerable? If I just asked some questions, and that might sound for some of you listening like a really small thing. But in some workplaces, in some homes, in some all sorts of places, schools, actually asking questions, can be quite a risky thing. So, you know, are people asking questions? So the, you know, are they free to do that? Do they feel free to do that? Do you feel free to do that? The third thing is he kind of points to is contributor safety. So is everybody contributing? Are voices evenly heard around the table? Or are there kind of particularly dominant personalities? If you're thinking about contracting, you know, how easy is it to sort of point these things out, you know, and have those conversations as a team, like, you know, you need to you need to listen to other people, not just yourself. So making sure that everybody has a chance to contribute to things and can speak up safely. And this is one I hear a lot about in one to one client work, people not feeling safe to say what they want to say. So that's definitely one and you know, authority, and all those things come into that as well. And the final stage that he points to is challenger safety, and you this is obviously kind of almost like the Holy Grail in teams where actually, you can have a really productive, slightly punchy conversation where you're not necessarily agreeing with each other. But people are able to challenge the status quo safely, without fear of reprisals, without worrying about whether it's going to damage relationships, because everybody knows that they're focused on getting the best outcome. And you know, that's actually what they're there to do. And teams that can do that. You're the most innovative usually. So really thinking about that challenge, your safety and kind of as the pinnacle, really, you know, people can do all four of those things, then you have an environment in which people can safely speak up, challenge, ask questions, and know that they can trust that they're going to be included in the relevant conversations.
So those are some things just to think about, you know, how safe do you feel in your current kind of work scenario? What if you think about those can four categories of safety, you know, what ones are you comfortable in and where you know, and what that might that mean in terms of your team culture, or your organization's culture and kind of what needs some work? That's really kind of something to think about. So just in summary quickly, psychological safety really matters for women, because in organizations because we're likely to, you know, experience less of it. And you know, overall in terms of women in leadership, and women can get more women getting into these sorts of roles is important for organizations as well. And I think really thinking about those four stages of psychological safety and where you sit within that and where your teams sit within that. And what that means in terms of your organizational culture will give you a starting point for considering what might need to change what's being done well, and where you go from here.
I hope that was helpful. It's a very quick scoot over what's a really big topic and what you know, you can work with teams on for quite some time often. But it is really worth doing. And it's worth introducing this sort of language into organizations because it just raises awareness and in raising awareness, it opens up conversations and the opportunity for change and to make things better for everybody really. If you've got any questions or queries or you want to have kind of more of a discussion about this, I'll pop my links in the show notes. Please don't hesitate to get in touch. I'd love to hear from you. Take care
Thanks for listening to this episode of Frustrated and Exhausted! Hit the Follow button for future episodes. You can also follow me on Instagram at resonate leadership and LinkedIn at Ruth Alexandra Wood. I’d absolutely love to hear from you. Frustrated and Exhausted is brought to you by Resonate Leadership and the wonderful team at the Podcast Boutique. I'm your host Ruth Wood. Take care and speak to you soon.
