The most powerful predictor of team success | Rafael Chiuzi

0:00Hey, Yetis, this is Nick and Jack from the Best One Yet podcast. Now, the last company we worked at, they used Paylocity and everything just worked. It wasn't until launching our own media business, this show, that we realized how rare that is. Because Paylocity is one delicious burrito of operational needs. They roll up HR, finance, and IT seamlessly into one delicious bite. When everything wraps together like that all at once, your workforce, your tech stack, your business, you don't need more tools, you don't even need cilantro. You need one solution. And that is why Paylocity built a single platform to connect HR, finance, and IT with AI-driven insights and automated workflows that simplify the complex and power what's next.

0:36Or as we call it, a delicious operational burrito. Yes, we do. Experience a one place for all your HCM needs, besties. So start now at paylocity.com slash one. Paylocity.com slash O-N-E. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank Guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet?

1:14Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

1:24Rafael Chiuzi: This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money, and momentum. A good hire, they can help grow your business. But finding great talent isn't easy, especially when you don't have the time or resources to sift through piles of resumes to find the right fit. That's why LinkedIn built HiringPro, your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you, so instead of sorting through applications, you can spend your time talking to candidates who are actually a good fit. With Hiring Pro, you can hire with confidence knowing you're getting the best talent for your business.

2:06Rafael Chiuzi: In fact, according to LinkedIn, those hiring with LinkedIn are 24 % less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash tedbiz, spelled B-I-Z. Terms and conditions apply. Recently, I was in a meeting with my colleagues when someone shared some information that I thought should remain private. I remember sitting there and deliberating. Should I say something? Should I keep quiet? I gave myself a moment to think, and then I decided to speak up.

2:48I let folks know that a boundary had been crossed. The whole experience got me thinking about the times I've chosen to speak out and the times I've stayed silent. What makes the difference? What allowed me to feel comfortable enough to speak my truth, even though it could have caused a little friction or awkwardness? I realized that in that room, we could disagree because there was a long history of mutual respect, of knowing one another deeply. That psychological safety made it so I could speak up and speak out. I'm Madhupa Akinola. This is TED Business, a podcast from TED. Our speaker today, organizational psychologist Rafael Chiuzy, makes the case that in order for a team to really succeed, people have to feel encouraged to speak their mind.

3:37He gives a concrete roadmap to building more psychological safety in the workplace so that no one keeps quiet out of fear of retribution. Then after the talk, I'll share a tip I learned from one of my colleagues.

3:50Rafael Chiuzi: This episode is brought to you by Paka. I'm always on the hunt for those staple pieces I can easily pack and know I'll be comfortable no matter what I'm doing. At this point, I don't travel anywhere without my Paka hoodie and original cruise sweater. They're both made with the same care and unmistakable softness. Paka creates outdoor and lifestyle apparel from alpaca fiber, one of the most sustainable natural fibers on the planet. Their signature hoodie is unbelievably soft, warmer than wool, yet still breathable enough to wear through whatever the day brings. It's built for real life, thermoregulating, odor-resistant, durable, and made to last.

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5:17your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

5:34But first, a quick break.

5:41And now, Rafael Chiuzy takes the TED stage. When I was a kid, I remember feeling terrified during classes when the teacher would launch a stealth attack called oral pop quiz. I can still feel the sweat in my hands and how fast my heart was beating. And I remember also how relieved I was when my name was not called out that day. I was deeply afraid of looking stupid or not having the right answer. And it felt like the entirety of my character was being assessed in those dreadful five minutes. When I look back, I realize that feeling was not only present during the pop quizzes. It was present the entire time.

6:36So if I didn't understand something, instead of asking, I used to think, just shut your mouth and you can ask a friend later. This fear of looking inadequate or below average haunted me for a long, long time. And it took me years to realize that I was not alone in that feeling. It turns out, many grown-ups feel like that too. In April 26th of 1986, a team of terrified, tired, overworked engineers were trying to desperately solve a problem with reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear plant after a disastrous emergency exercise. When approaching the director, they were received with yelling and threats.

7:27Now fast forward to around June of 2018, and after seeing many of his co-workers burning out due to an overwhelming work schedule, and also knowing that this could lead to potentially fatal errors, Ed Pearson, one of the senior managers at Boeing for the 737 MAX project, decided to break the silence. Go to the bosses, straight to the top. Nobody listened. And almost a year later, more than 300 people died in two separate 737 MAX accidents. That also mentioned later on how stifling the culture was, and it was silencing most of the concerned employees. When working with a client a few years ago, I remember seeing on the wall an impeccable record of health and safety awards.

8:23I saw four years in a row they won the award, but nothing after that. So I asked the COO, what happened? To which he only replied, oh, we learned a lesson. So his management team became so obsessed with winning the award that the most important thing they could do was to check all the boxes. So the following year, many employees were incapacitated or even died as a consequence of several workplace accidents. When talking to the employees, many of them said they could not report nonconformities to the managers. Otherwise, they would be ostracized or labeled as inefficient. So they took the only route possible, faked the numbers, to win the award.

9:12See, these stories, they all have something in common. Like me, as a kid, these people were afraid of speaking up. And this is a clear symptom of a workplace lacking what scientists call psychological safety. Psychological safety, as Professor Amy Edmondson very well puts it, is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, suggestions, concerns, even mistakes. So as an organizational psychologist, it fascinates me the science behind this concept and how easy it is to notice the importance of it. As a professor in higher education, I am constantly concerned with creating an environment where curiosity has a free flow and my students have a safe space to be creative.

10:06And as a consultant working with large-scale organizational transformation, I constantly try to be the voice advocating towards more psychologically safe workplaces. Now, I want you to try in imagining working in a team where everyone has a voice. Your colleagues take their turn speaking, and more importantly, people actually listen to one another. They understand your talking points, they address them, ask for more explanation. Imagine you walk out of a meeting and the people there understood you were only talking about ideas, and because of that, they don't take personal offense. That is what working in a psychologically safe team would look like.

10:54There is something very, very powerful about knowing that you can talk in a safe space. Also knowing that people will listen to your ideas and consider them. Yet, in a recent survey, workers confided that they did not feel safe speaking up at their workplaces. They were afraid of being labeled as dissenters or receiving negative feedback or even lose their jobs. Now think about for a second, what are the consequences of that? How many ideas were discarded? How many suggestions never happened? How much innovation was lost? How many lives could have been saved if only people felt safe enough to speak up and ask questions?

11:41Now, some people might say, oh yeah, I do that all the time. Don't worry about me. I ask my team always, do you want to say something? That is not that simple. There's a little misconception about how this works. To foster a psychologically safe environment, leaders must walk the walk and talk the talk. Sometimes they are great with words, but they forget to act on it. So for example, let's assume that a certain leader asks for their teams to speak up. But when listening to new ideas, different ideas, they instantly become defensive or very territorial about their own position. well they are sending a powerful implicit message just shut up i call this the whack-a-mole culture you know that fun arcade game where kids must whack the moles in the head to score some points it works the same way in cultures where fear is predominant and safety is scarce employees voice their opinion, and in exchange, you get a whack in the head.

12:50Sometimes even in public. Well, I guarantee you, after the second or third whack, they have learned their lesson. Do not speak up. Now imagine hundreds or thousands of employees thinking like that. So why does this matter? Why having this culture of fear is not good for you? Well, psychological safety has proven to be the most powerful predictor for team success. There is robust empirical scientific evidence that it enhances team performance, creativity, team learning, team confidence, and synergy, and that is just to mention a few. To put that to the test, I did an experiment with one of my courses at the university.

13:37One of the components of this course is a big group project that students must present at the end of the semester. and it's one that requires a lot of creativity and some risk-taking. So I asked them, what is this thing that scares you the most? What are you afraid of? After getting many, many answers, I could narrow down to one single factor, the fear of getting bad grades. So I proposed them something. I said, listen, how about I will personally guarantee you that as long as you can deliver me something that it's your own, it's creative, it's not plagiarized, no matter how bold the idea is, I'll give you a fair grade above average.

14:24They did not believe me. They were laughing. They thought it was some kind of trap. But once they realized I was being serious, I could feel the tension just fading away, and the results were amazing. not only better projects but also more fun more openness more willingness to go the extra mile they had a safety net so creating this environment where failing is not judged harshly and approaching learning as a laboratory where you can make mistakes and fail better it's the pillar of human development of course fostering such a positive environment means understanding a few caveats, so it's important to highlight what psychological safety is not.

15:12You can share your ideas, for example, but that doesn't mean you get a free pass to say anything you want at any time. It means being open. Yes, the team will consider all the plans and alternatives, but bear in mind that might come with some level of discomfort to you. It's expected. It doesn't mean everybody will hug and be best friends forever. To put it simply, psychological safety is about courage and vulnerability, and it's also about shaping culture and designing systems that will be conducive of healthy and effective behaviors. So what to do then? How can we nurture psychological safety and help others around us?

16:00When you find yourself in a leadership position, whether this is your own family, your community, your organization, school, or church, you have to make sure that your team feels safe. Fostering this environment requires ideas, yes, but more importantly, your actions. Now I can suggest you three big actions that can help you. First, remember, leadership matters. People will follow the lead and mimic the behaviors that are displayed from the people running the show. So cultivating healthy, positive behaviors at the top will send the right message to the people around you. That includes, for example, preventing dominant personalities from monopolizing your meetings and ensuring that a good tone prevails throughout the conversation.

16:54It's also a good idea to steer away from pointing fingers. That means treating mistakes as learning opportunities and shifting questions from who did it to how did this happen and how can we prevent that from happening in the future? Especially in scenarios where the system is far from ideal. We've all been there. You know the old saying, a bad system will beat a good person every time? Well, it stands true. So address the system without sacrificing the individuals. Number two, observe. One of the most effective ways of assessing psychological safety is to attend a meeting or watch informal group conversation.

17:40I remember one time in a client, I was sitting in the back of a room just watching a meeting. It was one of the many team meetings that we had in that organization. the leader was up front, laying out the big plans, the rollout for the big initiative, and he would constantly stop and say, do you have any questions? Do you want to say something? The room was silent. Dead silent. 45 minutes in, and there was a slide, Q &A. The room was still silent. Well, there was one question from one person. okay then if we don't have any questions can we go this particular team had the highest level of resistance to change in the entire organization and this is why i was sitting in that meeting in the first place many focus groups later and those employees told me they knew better than that even when disagreeing with the boss's plans they wouldn't dare say anything because he was known to target practice the troublemakers.

18:52So be observant. And finally, aim for consistency. After many years helping teams, I've discovered that encouraging open dialogue does not happen overnight. And it does not happen because you told them to speak up. Shaping that environment takes time, takes effort, and most of all, consistency. To do that, you must, whenever you can, increase granularity with your people. Have more one-on-one conversations, at least at the beginning. And then you can encourage them to say what they need to say during the group meetings. Like the example of the whack-a-mole culture, the opposite is also true. So after learning through role modeling and observation that your meetings are indeed a safe space, people will gladly participate, ask, comment, and suggest.

19:52Now, I know most examples I gave you come from corporate experience, but this concept also applies to our own families. Think of how many children and teenagers wish they had a more psychologically safe household so they could discuss their anguishes, their afflictions, their insecurities. this open channel helps us parents to better understand what's going on with our kids and it helps our kids by letting them know they have a safe port to ask questions whenever they are confused the benefits of psychological safety go beyond organizational teams it helps people to nourish better human interactions and if there was one thing we all know now is how important meaningful human connections are to our mental health.

20:52So let's go out there and create more psychologically safe workplaces. Hey, Yetis, this is Nick and Jack from the Best One Yet podcast. Now, the last company we worked at, they used Paylocity and everything just worked. It wasn't until launching our own media business, this show, that we realized how rare that is. Because Paylocity is one delicious burrito of operational needs. They roll up HR, finance, and IT seamlessly into one delicious bite. When everything wraps together like that all at once, your workforce, your tech stack, your business, you don't need more tools. You don't even need cilantro.

21:26You need one solution. And that is why Paylocity built a single platform to connect HR, finance, and IT with AI-driven insights and automated workflows that simplify the complex and power what's next. Or as we call it, A delicious operational burrito. Yes, we do. Experience a one place for all your HCM needs, besties. So start now at paylocity.com slash one. Paylocity.com slash O-N-E. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs.

22:06Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC. There are many podcasts you can turn to for work advice, but on our show, Fixable, we help real people just like you tackle real workplace challenges fast. I'm CEO and bestselling author, Anne Morris. And I'm Harvard Business School professor, Frances Fry. and we are the hosts of the TED podcast, Fixable. Whether you're lacking confidence at your new job, feeling burned out, or struggling to lead your team through a big change, we won't shy away from any problem.

22:44We bring our clear thinking, honest opinions, and expertise to solve your toughest workplace issues through practical solutions. Hear new episodes of Fixable every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.

22:58Families and communities.

23:07That was Rafael Chiuzy speaking at TEDx McMaster U. Rafael has some really solid tips for how to bring more psychological safety into the workplace. And I want to add one more. It's an idea I got from another professor, Dr. Sakira TJ Hudson. She told me that before each class, she'll randomly assign a few students to be dissenters. or rather she calls them boundary pushers for the day. Others in the class that day don't know who these people are. So during class discussion, some students might be pushing back because they really have a different opinion while others might just be fulfilling their assignment to play devil's advocate.

23:49But either way, this strategy ensures you're creating an environment where open discourse and the ability to disagree is established from the start and built into the fabric of the classroom. And on an individual level, people feel more free to disagree because it's not attributed to the self. I love this idea. And I think it's a great experiment for you to try in your workplace or organization if you're curious. Doesn't have to be forever. Could just be for one meeting, a week, a month. You might be surprised what results it yields. That's it for today. TED Business is part of the TED Audio Collective.

24:29This episode was produced by Hannah Kingsley-Ma, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Maria Ladias, Farrah DeGrange, Daniela Ballarezzo, Tansika Sangmanivang, and Roxanne Heilash. I'm Madupa Akinola. Thanks for listening.

24:53Hey, Yetis. This is Nick and Jack from the Best One Yet podcast. Now, the last company we worked at, they used Paylocity and everything just worked. It wasn't until launching our own media business, this show, that we realized how rare that is. Because Paylocity is one delicious burrito of operational needs. They roll up HR, finance, and IT seamlessly into one delicious bite. And everything wraps together like that all at once. Your workforce, your tech stack, your business. You don't need more tools. You don't even need cilantro. You need one solution. And that is why Paylocity built a single platform to connect HR, finance, and IT with AI-driven insights and automated workflows that simplify the complex and power what's next.

25:30Or as we call it, a delicious operational burrito. Yes, we do. Experience a one place for all your HCM needs, besties. So start now at paylocity.com slash one. Paylocity.com slash O-N-E. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank Guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet?

26:07Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. Take a listen to this robin call. And now, these orca chirps. Beautiful, right? How would you feel if I told you one of those animal calls wasn't real? Hard to catch, but that first robin call is actually a deepfake created by an artist using AI. New technological advancements and scientific breakthroughs are transforming the way we understand non-human generated sounds. What if AI could help us understand the first thing an elephant mother said to its baby when it was born? Or even make it so that an orca could give a TED Talk?

26:54The possibilities are world-bending to think about, but this kind of interspecies communication needs strong ethical guardrails. Scientist Karen Bakker dives into it all on one of five featured episodes on sea creatures, only on TED Talks Daily. Thank you.