Psychological safety

Like you

said, the important keyword, right? Trust, right? Like a substantial part of this is the psychological safety aspect of it.

The other thing, which I think is natural for the AI labs, but hasn't been nearly as dominant for the rest of the industry yet, is you're learning as you go and if you look at all of the research you know like dora research on stuff or any research on productivity or team efficacy or any of those things like at root it always boils down to culture psychological safety and the the permission to learn It's the permission to admit that I don't know something.

It is the incentive to learn from each other.

It is the incentive to share your mistakes so that the team only has to do that once.

And you'll do better over time if your team is better next time.

I want to

go back to psychological safety because back about five, 10 years ago, we kind of talked so much about it in engineering leadership circles.

it was to do with misgendering.

And I know, and I know we're not here for that, but there is a psychological safety aspect of our working environment that we have to maintain, don't

we?

Yep.

And if you object to somebody that was born male being in the female toilets, you are entitled to raise your objections to that.

And the organisation has to make a decision on what it's going to do at the end of the day.

But I feel that there is an element of psychological safety that we have to provide where we are...

in an environment, in a team, in a workplace, where we are looking out for one another.

We're creating that container of ideally safety.

And psychological safety has to come into play here.

Psychological safety essentially points to the idea that I can take a risk in a given conversation like we're doing here.

And I'm not going to be, as I take those risks, I'm not going to be judged for those risks and not going to be reprimanded for those risks, especially when I make a mistake.

And when I do make a mistake, then ideally in a healthy, psychological, safe environment, there's opportunity for repair.

So that's a very sort of truncated version of psychological safety.

But it essentially says that I'm willing to bring my whole self into the conversation, into the relationship, into the work that we're doing.

And I'm inviting you to do the same.

Yeah, yeah, I love that.

And psychological safety, you know, it is the core of everything.

It is the biggest foundation to do anything different with your team, to lead change.

And not only within your team, it's also about taking your stakeholders through that as well.

And like you said, the influence that if you don't have that psychological safety, that also spreads through the team when you've got those silos or you've got somebody who might be, you know, I don't know if you've heard of the phrase Laura's metaphors again, but where it's the be a radiator, not a drain, you know, and and, you know.

If there is somebody who is having that impact, it's good to check in with them and see what's going on.

Because every behaviour has positive intent behind it, whether it looks that way or not.

So I guess like, you know, from your perspective, like Yeah, we know we've got lots of leaders, heads of procurement, CPOs that kind of tune in.

This connects with research by Amy Edmondson at Harvard.

In a 1999 study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company, she examined what she called psychological safety, the shared belief that people can take interpersonal risks without fear of punishment or humiliation.

She found that psychological safety was associated with greater learning behavior within teams.

This points to an underlying question which matters enormously for delegation.

When a decision goes wrong, can the person responsible explain what happened openly? Can he point to boss's error before it became expensive? Or does everyone understand that the safest response is to protect themselves? Because delegation without the freedom to surface bad news may simply push risk out of sight.

Okay, so Google actually did a research study and showed that the most successful teams that got them to that space, that incredible space, had nothing to do with their educational background or their technical skills.

It all had to do whether or not they had psychological safety, meaning did they feel safe enough to try something even though it meant they'd probably make mistakes?

Yeah.

And did they feel safe enough to speak their truth and share their ideas about new ways of doing things? And when they did feel safe, they experimented and they tried new ways and everything got better.

And Dara really challenged us to think differently about leadership itself.

Sometimes the people best equipped to lead are not necessarily the loudest voices in the room.

They may be the people who listen well, build relationships, create psychological safety, and help others succeed.

The conversation also brought us back to something we discuss frequently on the Criminologist podcast, the gap between knowing and doing.

And then our newest strategic period, we are still, of course, very focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But as part of our focus area, we are also focusing on safety, in particular psychological safety, health, and overall how to make a career at sea more flexible and more attractive.

And we have more than 30 companies.

I think we're at 35 now, member companies involved in this work, where basically what we do at the Global Maritime Forum is bringing all of these industry leaders together align on what are the challenges that are currently not being addressed and then finding ways to work closely together on really improving conditions at sea and making a career at sea more attractive for many more people.

So I do think it's brave work to do, but very important.

Earlier this week, we brought together for the first time members from the Orobor lines together to co-design a very early draft of these 10 global standards that we're setting out to develop.

And for the conversation around how do we make sure that everyone can feel safe on board, we had some really important conversations about the nature of psychological safety, because we want, of course, people to report when they experience something.

And psychological safety is not necessarily sort of built from whether they feel they can trust management or whether they can trust their colleagues on board, it's just as much about whether they feel that they can trust the processes.