The Truth About Psychological Safety | Colin M Fisher

0:00If you're just not hearing dissenting voices, if people aren't speaking up and everybody seems to be agreeing or assuming that everybody's agreeing that everybody's agreeing that's agreeing that's agreeing that way to agree on.

0:30individual brilliance and how the rising tide of individualism blinds us to our most powerful tools for success. Most groups actually achieve less than the sum of their parts because we've been ignoring the science of collaboration. We're going to learn how to master synergy in groups to accelerate our careers. Colin shares why your best people create dysfunctional teams, how psychological safety actually increases conflict, the real reason meetings waste everyone's time, and why competition inside teams actually guarantees failure. Welcome to the show, Colin. It's great to have you. Thanks so much for having me, AJ.

1:05I'd love to hear how this project came together. Yeah, it was kind of a serendipitous story. So there was a scandal over here in the UK with the Boris Johnson's government where one of his ministers left and accused the government of groupthink. And so that was something I taught about. I teach about groups and conformity pressure. And so I wrote a short piece about what is group think and what can we do about it? And from that, the guy who became my agent, Max, saw what I had written and said, you know, I think that's a really important thing. Could you think you could write a whole book about that in that same style?

1:48And from that, you know, I started thinking about it and I was like, yeah, There are so many books about how we can improve ourselves as individuals, but really the story of the science of groups and teams is just not out there to the same degree as us trying to understand how we improve ourselves as individuals or how we improve organizations as a whole. So from that, I ended up writing this book. Well, it's interesting that obviously groupthink in that regard is a scandal. I think many of us think of groupthink as a negative and you argue that actually there's a lot of benefit to groupthink.

2:26Not so much to the extreme version of groupthink that we think of as this dysfunctional conformity pressure where people aren't speaking up. They're kind of going along with the crowd and just saying what they think everyone else wants them to say. That is dysfunctional. But some conformity pressure is productive and necessary for groups to stay together. that the saying, you know, we need to go along to get along doesn't just come from nowhere, that we do need, you know, sometimes to put aside some of our individual preferences, some of our individual needs for the good of any group that we're trying to stay with, whether it's your family, whether it's your work team, or whether it's a friendship group, that we don't always, you know, get our first preference of everything.

3:17And there's always some compromise involved in group life. And conformity pressure kind of keeps us together at times where our individual preferences are threatening to kind of pull us apart a little bit. Thinking back to my college experience and, you know, much of your young adult life, it is about individual achievement. It's about testing well, getting great grades individually, and then you get to college and there's a lot of group projects. And you start to really now have that conformity, those pressures in groups. And I remember my college experience dreading the group projects, like wanting to be the individual.

3:55And I think for many of us in the West, we celebrate individualism to such a degree that we have this blind spot towards groups and their impact. Why do you think that is? I think there are two reasons. One is that, you know, our psychology is wired for us to understand the world as individuals because we are individuals, right? So we, of course, are going to relate to individualistic explanations for behavior. It resonates for us that we should, you know, kind of celebrate the achievements of, you know, heroes and described, you know, things are going wrong to these villainous individuals. And that actually fits with a really well-known finding in our psychology that's so basic that We call it the fundamental attribution error, which is our tendency to ascribe causality to the characteristics of individuals rather than situations or groups.

4:54So there's, you know, it's no wonder that we think, oh, you know, individuals are really what we need to pay attention to here. But then there's a kind of flip side of that, where we really underestimate what groups are bringing and how much they're causing the great things in the world. And that most of the great businesses, the great scientific discoveries, the great bands and musicians, all of this is coming from groups. And there's a lot of science behind the idea that the proportion of group relative to individual discoveries, knowledge creation businesses has been rising over time, that we're actually in a time now where groups are doing most of the important work.

5:44And yet, simultaneously, there's been this rising individualism, not just in the West, but all across the world. And so the kind of our perception of individuals as the vehicle for achievement and the reality that it's actually groups doing this work are really intentioned more than they ever have been before. That we're in a way the wrongest we've ever been about how things are getting done in the world. And I think it creates a mental trap for a lot of us with that individualism being so celebrated that oftentimes in group settings, we look to blame others and we look to steal credit and we don't actually look for the group synergy that creates all this great achievement.

6:30The reason I think group projects and committees and all these things are so dreaded is actually because we've been ignoring groups for so long. We do them really poorly. That for the amount of time we spend in groups, we have not paid attention to the things that make them more effective, that create the likelihood of, as you just said, synergy of these groups being more than the sum of their parts. But it keeps me in business because so many groups are getting this wrong. So many organizations, so many student project teams, everybody could stand to pay a lot more attention to creating the conditions that are most likely to make their group successful.

7:14And yet we're just not doing it most of the time. I think it's only in our modern society that we've been focused on our individual self. When you start to look into philosophy and how different tribes were able to survive through famines and ice ages and everything else, those people did not look at themselves as individuals. They saw themselves as part of a collective. And that collective depended on each other in order to survive those ordeals. The individual is not going to survive an ice age. It takes a tribe. It takes a society. It takes many people coming together and depending on each other to do that, and certainly harsh winters and everything else that goes along in life.

8:03you can you can see in through our media how it has been focused in on the individual certainly for some time and you could see it really taken off during the 60s if you kind of trace the trends of individualism versus collectivism and you're you're absolutely right, that this is our brains evolved for us to be social creatures that live in groups, and that at different times, we don't actually view ourselves as this, you know, island in the way we do today, that we used to view the self as much more including the, you know, close family, you know, out to kind of these small communities and tribes.

8:51And that, but that, you know, by all the indications that we can measure as scientists, we're seeing this rise in individualism that's been creeping up really for about the last, you know, 120 years where we can see it most deeply. And so what I think is the big threat of this is that most of the problems that we have today are things that are going to cross a lot of different boundaries. They're going to require a lot of different kinds of expertise where we can't rely on some great hero or savior to swoop in and solve these problems. We're going to need better groups than the ones that we have right now and that they're going to need to get to work on being the next great business that's going to change the world, being part of the great governments or the scientific teams that are going to make the discoveries that push things forward.

9:46Let's talk synergy because I'm hearing the groans in our audience. We've heard this buzzword at work. We need synergy. But what does it actually mean and how do we create it? Because we've been in those group meetings where there isn't synergy. We dread staring at our calendar with those full of those meetings these days. And I think a lot of us, again, have that negative view of groups because of it. Synergy is kind of the ideal state of a group where groups are literally more than the sum of their parts. When you're part of a great band, and this is certainly my early experience, so I used to be a professional musician before I got into this whole business school professor thing.

10:25And there were times where you're playing and something is coming out of you that's something you didn't even know was there. And it's something that is truly collective that no one of us could have thought of or predicted or experienced without the group. And that those moments where we really are not just adding up individual contributions, those are the moments of synergy. And that they're actually, in some cases, things that we can measure and we can figure out when groups are actually doing more than the individuals who make them up could have done on their own. But those moments, as you say are all too rare because most of the things that set us up for synergy are things that we routinely violate.

11:12And so meetings are a great example. One of the best things we can do to give ourselves a chance of synergy is to have small groups that are, you know, between four and five, or maybe if we're being generous, between three and seven members. And that it's easy to think Think about, you know, if we're in a room gathered around a table or we're at a dinner party, wherever we are, if we've got four or five people, we can be pretty confident we're going to hear everyone's perspective. Everyone's going to be able to contribute. We're going to know what everyone thinks. And everybody's going to know, you know, basically where everyone stands.

11:51If we have an hour together, that we're all going to have voice. But meetings often have 10, 20, you know, sometimes more people in them. And that if you think we've got an hour, are we all going to actually be able to contribute? There's almost no way if you've got 20 people in a room and you've got an hour. That's just not going to work. And so a lot of these basic things of how are we going to get synergy, like did we compose the group in a way that even gives it a chance, are violated so routinely. And that we have meetings that are composed based on inertia, based on political concerns, where we're just trying to make people feel involved and give the illusion of contribution without actually thinking carefully about what we want from everybody and why we're there.

12:40and that if we don't do these things, if we don't think carefully about the goals that we're giving groups, the tasks that they're asked to do, the composition of that group, and the norms that they are using to communicate, we almost have no chance at synergy. And so unfortunately, the opposite of synergy, what we call process losses, where groups become less than the sum of their parts, are the norm in most people's experience because we're not listening to the science and doing these things well. If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to saying no. That's Mint Mobile's whole thing.

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17:01Visit theartofcharm.com slash intel for a social intelligence assessment and discover exactly what's holding you back. That's theartofcharm.com slash intel because your brilliance deserves to be recognized in the boardroom and beyond. Well, one of the big parts, especially that our clients talk about in our meetings is the role of hierarchies in these group meeting settings where, yes, that synergy would be great if there were no hierarchy and if everyone's thoughts and feelings were weighed equally. But oftentimes in these group settings, the hierarchy is before we get to the group and then we're in the group, we defer to others because of that hierarchy.

17:40And oftentimes our voice isn't even heard. Hierarchy tends to get in the way, although it doesn't always have to. And that I would say, on average, most groups and organizations have more hierarchy than they need. And it's pretty easy to understand how that came to pass, that humans, we love status, we love to kind of move up in the social hierarchy and move up rungs in the ladder. But people really, really hate moving down the social hierarchy, that that's something that it's so psychologically painful from us, it actually makes us less physically healthy when we feel like our place in the hierarchy is threatened or we might be moving down.

18:23And so when people start adding new levels of hierarchy, they almost never take them away in organizations. So all organizations ever do is accumulate hierarchy. And so in most places, we've got too much of it and that we could stand to have less of it. But then the other part of that is of what you're saying is the behavior of those who are at the top of the hierarchy matters a lot and that they have a lot of control. You know, whoever's seen as a group leader or seen as powerful and in control of resources can promote you, fire you or controls your bonus. those people's opinions matter quite a bit.

19:05And that we know in our psychology, negative cues are much stronger than positive cues. So if somebody criticizes you, if they make fun of you, if they chastise you, that sticks in our minds almost five times as strongly as an equivalent positive cue. And so what ends up happening is that we're so afraid of getting these negative cues from powerful people and that we withhold our true thoughts. And that's really the kind of origins of group think, where we get this dysfunctional conformity pressure. We get this group where people aren't comfortable speaking up and saying what they really think.

19:50And then, And yeah, hierarchy can be really dysfunctional. But hopefully leaders can also do some productive things to overcome those. Well, you bring up a great point about those negative body language signals that we're looking at and reading. Because, and we've seen this in our classrooms where we will film clients, oftentimes when we're being very analytical and very thoughtful, we can showcase those negative perspectives non-verbally. scrunch our face, cross our arms. And we may not be judging anyone in the group. We may just be searching for the answer, what to say. But we don't often think about that signal then being read by the group.

20:30And to your point, impacting whether people speak up or share and how they're viewed in the group. When we're kind of uncertain about in any situation, we look for what's called social proof. We look around to see what other people in the group are doing. and that we take those cues very seriously. And this is the kind of prehistoric part of our brain that's trying to protect us from getting ostracized from the group, from getting kicked out of our little tribe. But that's not very functional in most workplaces, that what we actually want is when people are unsure for them to speak up and for them to ask questions about what they're unsure about.

21:14And, you know, rather than leaders being in a position where their, you know, their subordinates are guessing what they're thinking, it would be better if they were saying what they were thinking. And I think, you know, there's a higher tolerance for some of this ambiguity or some of these like potentially negative signals in a group that's got what researchers call psychological safety. The shared understanding that it's okay to take interpersonal risks. It's okay to speak up and ask questions, do experiments, sometimes screw stuff up. And that in a group with a lot of psychological safety, you can actually see some of these, you know, potentially critical nonverbal cues or even verbal cues and saying, hey, I don't think your idea is right.

22:04in a psychologically safe group, that could be an okay thing to say. But in a psychologically unsafe group where we're, you know, the part of our brain that says, oh, oh my God, I might get kicked out here or, you know, maybe something bad's going to happen. Then those same cues have a really outsized effect. Well, much like synergy, I feel like psychological safety has become a new buzzword. A lot of leaders want to achieve psychological safety for their group, but oftentimes they don't realize that the actions that they're taking actually make it less safe and we feel more judged in those environments.

22:40And some of the best groups have fierce debates and real disagreement to really chew on what's going on and then come up to an opportunity to actually resolve things in a meaningful way to the outside observer that might not actually appear psychologically safe because it might mean heated arguments. It might mean real disagreement. So what are we getting wrong about psychological safety and what should we be doing to really create that environment now recognizing how impactful it is. Yeah, I think you've hit on one of the biggest misunderstandings about psychological safety that certainly I find in my own teaching, which is it's got the word safety in it.

23:18So we feel like we think, oh, this is going to be this harmonious group that, you know, everybody, everybody's, you know, kind of singing Kumbaya around the campfire. And that's what psychological safety is going to look can feel like. But the reality is often quite the opposite, that a psychologically safe group is one where people feel like they can disagree. And they're often the groups that are respectfully combative, that they have vigorous debate between different members, and that psychologically safe groups can look like you've got a bunch of people who are arguing about stuff. And that's good.

23:55That's where synergy comes from. That if we all thought exactly the same thing and we knew exactly the same stuff, we have the same perspectives, how are we going to come up with something better as a group than we could have as individuals? That we need that difference of opinion, that difference of information, that difference of skill in order for groups to actually achieve synergy. So to do this, one of the both most obvious and strangely counterintuitive things that leaders can do is simply say that they want people's perspectives. They want people to take these risks. They want people to ask questions when they have them.

24:41But then they have to put their money where their mouth is. And when people do speak up, when they do take these interpersonal risks, knowing that how strongly our brain is cued on these negative cues, especially from leaders, they need to really be cautious about saying something that could be construed as criticizing the person for speaking up or taking the risk. right and and that's different from saying like we can never criticize each other's ideas but that we don't want to you know make people feel like it was a mistake to ask that question or it was a mistake to suggest an idea that doesn't mean we agree with the idea that doesn't mean we think this is the right thing for us to be discussing necessarily but that we have to be really really cautious about those things and so leaders have to kind of model this

25:41extraordinarily, in a way, risk-seeking behavior, that it's okay to make mistakes. And so talking about your own mistakes is a great way to create psychological safety. Asking what might be construed as an obvious question or a dumb question is a great thing for leaders to do because it makes it okay for other people to do them, or suggesting an idea that maybe is a little half-baked. Those are great ways for leaders to kind of model this. So saying that you want this, saying that this is an appropriate way to act for this group in this task, and then modeling those behaviors are some of the most important ways that leaders can kind of establish this culture of psychological safety.

26:24I'm glad you mentioned speak up because I know as an introvert myself, that was another reason that I dreaded groups because I felt groups reward extroversion to an extreme degree, at least my experience, especially in my early years. And I think a lot of our audience that are on the introverted side, that's one of the reasons they dread the groups, because they can't muster the words, they can't be as loud and as boisterous as often we find in these group scenarios. What can we do to create that supportive environment for those who are introverted and aren't as extroverted, recognizing that leaders tend to be a bit more extroverted in these group environments?

27:03I don't think the things that we do are necessarily all that different. So I'm also quite introverted as well, that these are not kind of natural behaviors for people at work to take these interpersonal risks, which is why we call them interpersonal risks. But I think the underscoring of how necessary it is that we get everybody contributions and perspectives, that we take longer pauses after we ask questions. I mean, I used to teach trainees to count to seven after they asked a question and just sit there, be comfortable with some silence because it may take some people a little bit longer to gather their thoughts and want to contribute and think what they want to say to the group.

27:56and sometimes to take time to ask people individually if they aren't contributing in these group settings, if they have any thoughts on what we're talking about, and that we notice and kind of call out when the balance of contributions in the group isn't quite right. And that I will a lot of times say, hey, I feel like we're hearing from the same people. We're hearing a lot from AJ, we're hearing a lot from Colin. How can we, you know, I want to just check if anybody else has a view on this right now. And that these kind of explicit calling out of what's going on, if we're not hearing from certain people, we're always hearing from the other, from, you know, maybe it's the more extroverted people, or maybe it's just somebody who's opinionated on that particular issue.