The Need for Psychological Safety

The Need for Psychological Safety

by | 27 May 2020 | Creativity, Michael Nicholas, Psychology, Teamwork

Understanding the dynamics of effective teamwork is becoming ever more important, as businesses face relentless pressure to increase their profitability. Studies, however, consistently and convincingly demonstrate that structuring people into teams may be counterproductive to decision-making since, unless the culture is right, individuals outperform teams much of the time.

In Project Aristotle, Google researchers sought to understand how team composition and dynamics impact team effectiveness. They analysed 180 teams, including a mix of high and low performers, and conducted hundreds of interviews. What they found was that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together.

At the top of Google’s list of the things that matter when it comes to team performance is psychological safety – a concept originating from the work of Amy Edmonson, Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. What she showed is that people will not give their fullest contribution to their team unless they feel safe. For teams to do well, the people in them MUST be:

  • Unafraid to share their ideas.
  • Willing to challenge and be challenged.
  • Prepared to risk failure.

Only by solving the safety problem can teams maintain the creativity and openness needed to make complex decisions and function effectively today. This article summarises some of the steps Google took in order to do so.

Read the Article: High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It

My Advice

We now live in a world were old styles of leadership are unlikely to achieve better than basic levels of productivity. To be successful, leaders now need to create a team culture within which employees will commit their discretionary effort and bring their full creativity to work. For you to be successful in this area, it is essential that you do everything you can to remove any obstacles that block your team from feeling safe.

Zoom Fatigue: A Hazard of the Times

Zoom Fatigue: A Hazard of the Times

by | 27 May 2020 | Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Mindset, Psychology

Don’t automatically assume that video will be better than a phone call – the overloading of the brain as it strives to make sense of information which it expects to be there, but can’t find, has a mental cost which needs to be taken into account.

In the context of the need for psychological safety, that was highlighted as being so critical in the last article, these barriers to effective collaboration create a significant additional hurdle. It is much harder, for example, to monitor non-verbal feedback from other attendees in order to determine how a message is being received, making it difficult to know when it would be beneficial to ask for feedback or adjust course.

This article looks at some of the ways that video conferences can create mental stress through their unique impact on our unconscious mind, leading to poor concentration during, and unusual levels of tiredness after, the meetings. One interesting point highlighted by the article, which serves to illustrate that this environment is different in a fairly fundamental way, is that people who have a restricted ability to handle interpersonal situations, such as autistics, may actually benefit from the switch from physical to video conferencing!

By becoming aware of these factors, we can prepare ourselves differently, thus making such meetings more effective.

Read the Article: ‘Zoom fatigue’ is taxing the brain. Here’s why that happens.

My Advice

The advantages of video conferencing in the current environment are obvious; however, it is important to be aware of the additional risk of exhaustion that it can create. The cause of this tiredness is the unique mental challenges involved in online collaboration, especially as we attempt to pick up social nuances and maintaining attention. These practical steps can help:

  • Don’t automatically assume that video will be better than a phone call – the overloading of the brain as it strives to make sense of information which it expects to be there, but can’t find, has a mental cost which needs to be taken into account.
  • Ensure that everyone in the meeting is fully engaged, encouraging them to show up with energy and to give good visual feedback. This makes the presenter’s task much easier and eases the load on the unconscious mind of everyone in the meeting. For even greater benefit, it helps enormously if cameras are arranged so that participants fill their screens with their face and upper body, thus providing stronger non-verbal signals. This might sound like common sense, but it is not common practice!
  • Because the mind is working harder, it is likely that attention spans will be significantly shorter on video calls than face-to-face. To offset this, more breaks are necessary. As a rule of thumb, I’d recommend taking shorter breaks at least twice as often as you would normally.
Struggling to Find the Time for Exercise?

Struggling to Find the Time for Exercise?

by | 27 May 2020 | Exercise, Michael Nicholas

I’m still waiting for the day when a leader tells me that they don’t struggle to manage their workload. Under such unceasing pressures, it is easy to deprioritise maintaining our physical health and fitness. Doing so, however, comes at a high price.

Fortunately, more and more ways are being discovered by which we can stay healthy, without needing to spend hours working out. The 4-minute workout described in the article is designed to maximise the release of nitric oxide, a powerful molecule that delivers multiple benefits in our bodies: so powerful, in fact, that the medical journal Science named it the “Molecule of the Year”. Its physiological importance was officially recognised in 1998 when a Nobel Prize was awarded to the scientists who discovered its critical role in the cardiovascular system.

The great thing is, you can get the whole thing done in less time than it would normally take you to shower and change.

Read the Article: 4-Minute Daily Workout

Leading When Uncertainty is Pervasive

Leading When Uncertainty is Pervasive

by | 27 May 2020 | Agility, Critical Thinking, Decision Making, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Mindset, Perception, Resilience, Uncertainty

That leadership is about dealing with change – handling difficulties as they arise and adjusting course when necessary – is not news, or new. It involves diagnosis, then action, and it involves a great deal of resilience.

The problem is, the nature of decisions, even the approach needed to make them, varies hugely depending on the level of complexity and uncertainty in the environment. The more volatile and ambiguous the circumstances we face, the greater the difficulty of diagnosis becomes. As this happens, decision-making becomes less science and more art.

This is a real challenge, right now. If there is a simple way to describe the operating environment of the last few months, it is the absence of predictability and increase in ambiguity. Complexity has been spiralling out of control, and this has fundamental implications for leaders, many of whom have leaned heavily on their market, technology or industry expertise in reaching their level of seniority. The problem is, as uncertainty increases, so does the risk that expertise will become more of a hindrance rather a help.

“I know that I am intelligent because I know that I know nothing.” ~ Socrates

The most compelling warning that I’m aware of, which highlights the dangers of over-reliance on expertise and being blinkered by certainty our knowledge is correct, comes from the largest study to date on this subject, completed by Professor Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania. Over 20 years, and involving 82,361 forecasts by a large group of experts, he investigated their thought processes as they made predictions about future events, then he followed up to assess their accuracy.

This piece of work has become quite famous, perhaps because the high-level conclusion that Tetlock drew from it is rather memorable: that the average expert “is not much better at predicting the future than a dart-throwing chimpanzee”. Many of them, he found, would have done better if they had made random guesses!

I believe this should strike a note of caution for all of us…

What makes this study extremely important, is that Tetlock was able to identify a small group of experts who consistently defied the odds. They made startlingly better predictions than everyone else, even in the face of massive uncertainty.

What differentiated this group was their thinking style: they were comfortable with complexity and uncertainty and did not allow themselves to become overconfident. This allowed them to constantly seek new perspectives and to avoid getting locked into the rigid mindset of what they already “knew”.

This article suggests that responding to the pervasive and unprecedented uncertainty that we all face today requires a whole new style of leadership: one built on humility, openness and commitment. I like this suggestion, not least because strengthening these traits does much to overcome the problems associated with over-reliance on expertise outlined above.

Read the Article: Leading in Uncertain Times: Be Real – Not a Hero

My Advice:

Remember, one thing that history demonstrates conclusively is that almost everything, even the most widely accepted scientific “facts”, will be disproven eventually. Unfortunately, we naturally tend to resist the idea that we might be wrong, because falling back on our expertise is comfortable and almost effortless. On the other hand, learning requires commitment and can be very uncomfortable. That’s where resilience comes in. We must learn to welcome the discomfort inherent in facing new challenges to maximise our ability to cope with highly complex and ambiguous situations. By practicing humility and openness, which will help you to see things from a new perspective, while displaying confidence and commitment, you will dramatically improve your resilience, thereby transforming your ability to adapt effectively.

Developing Inner Agility

Developing Inner Agility

by | 27 May 2020 | Agility, Creativity, Perception, Psychology, Resilience

This article, from McKinsey & Co., suggests that, “To navigate effectively, we must learn to let go—and become more complex ourselves“.

The concept of developing greater personal complexity encapsulates the approach that I’ve adopted in virtually all of my work. Because great leadership is critically dependent on emotional intelligence (EI), we can see that it has more to do with our mindset than any skills we might possess. This means that it must be constructed, from the inside out, by creating learning environments, not instructed from the outside in, as has traditionally been the case when teaching skills.

Let’s look at this in the context of one key point from this article, which is the statement that, “The problem isn’t the problem; our relationship to the problem is the problem”. In relation to resilience, this would suggest that it is not stress that is the problem, but our perception of the situation that is the problem. This recognition is incredibly powerful, because it puts us in a better position to find a solution.

At the heart of this challenge, of changing our relationship to our environment, is one of the biggest paradoxes of dealing with the unknown.

Current thinking in psychology, which is supported widely by research, suggests that we all experience stress when faced with change or uncertainty, to some degree. This is thought to be the result of deep conditioning that evolved to aid our survival.

The problem today is simple: very few situations we face are genuinely life-threatening, but our mind reacts to uncertainty as though faced with a predator: by triggering our fight-or-flight response. We experience this as stress, and it drives behaviours that may be highly inappropriate, such as acting on instinct, falling back on old habits, or to becoming so preoccupied with seeking more information that we cannot make any decision at all.

So, what is the paradox I referred to above?

Let’s assume for a moment that our stress is not the result of misperception. The root cause of the stress that arises when we face the unknown is that we don’t know how to resolve the situation we face, and we therefore worry about the outcome. If we knew what to do, we wouldn’t feel stressed!

It follows that what we most need in such situations is a new solution; however, that would require creativity, and – here’s the paradox – creativity is blocked by stress. How ironic! Because our brain is maladapted to modern challenges, just when we most need to be creative is when this mental resource is least available to us. It occurs because the part of our brain that triggers our fight-or-flight response, the amygdala, also suppresses activity in our prefrontal cortex, which is the part that gives rise to our creativity (as well as many other higher human functions).

To remain agile and creative when confronted by unpredictable change, it is essential that we learn to become more comfortable with uncertainty. I believe that this article conveys some useful insights to help you move towards this goal.

Read the Article: Leading with Inner Agility

My Advice:

When we resist a situation, wishing it would go away because it feels uncomfortable, that resistance increases the stress we experience. This puts us into a vicious cycle where, as the article highlights, our poor relationship to the problem only increases the magnitude of the problem as we see it.

Try to shift your perception of challenges, to see them as opportunities to learn and grow. Every world-class athlete knows the importance of this mindset, having achieved success by continually pushing him or herself into situations where they are stretched beyond their current physical, mental and emotional limits. Without the stress this creates, the growth they seek is impossible. If you can use your challenges in a similar way, as melting pots that create the conditions necessary to become stronger, they will immediately feel less stressful.