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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker, and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Dr. Dan Radecki. He is the co-founder and chief Scientific Officer at the Academy for Brain-based Leadership. He also has a second job as a Vice President and Head of Global Clinical Research at Object Pharma. He’s co-authored a book as well as a regular TEDx keynote So Dan, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me. I think we’re going to have a great conversation today. So, tell me a little bit about your background and the two roles that you have.

Thanks, Eric. I’m happy to be here. I’m a neuroscientist by training and have done research in the space in mental health and the neuroscience aspects of all of this, but also found myself working in the corporate world as a leader at biotech and pharma. And so early on, I appreciated this difference between the way that we, as leaders, behave, how we lead our people, and what the neuroscience says about how you should. So that whole dichotomy between what you should be doing and what you are doing. And it always frustrated me, even in the science field, how leadership didn’t adhere to what we know about how the brain works and how we get the best out of our people. So it was really intriguing to me to be able to get into this field of brain-based leadership years ago and to, along with my partner Lee Hall, start this company, Academy of Brain-Based Leadership, about a decade ago now, to really bridge that gap, to teach people about what we know about the brain and how we can build a better competency for leadership. In this case, what we focus on is safety, psychological safety.

Great topic because we know the linkage between psychological safety and physical safety in the workplace. Tell me a little bit about how does the brain operate and how it impacts psychological safety.

Oh, yeah. We can spend weeks on that at a very high level. I think when we talk about this, we get people to understand some very basic concepts, which is your brain is almost always fighting itself for control of your behavior. You’ve got two pieces of the brain that are very distinct. One is the higher brain, and the other is the lower brain. When I teach this to kids, and this holds up, I think, for adults, I use the analogy of Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader. Luke Skywalker is that higher brain. We have this uniquely human higher brain, and it helps us be moral, think about the future, be empathic towards people, all these things that we think are unique to humans that most animals can’t do. All right. And then on the other hand, we have this lower brain. That’s Darth Vader. And it’s been around a long time. It focuses on threat, on danger. It’s very powerful, very fast. It’s that part of the brain that we share with almost every animal, even birds and lizards. It’s that fight or flight system. And so, your brain is constantly scanning the environment to look for threats.

That’s the way it’s wired. That’s the way all our brains are wired. And so, it’s always focused on that. But what the higher brain does is steps in and allows us to get out of that survival mode and do those, as I mentioned, uniquely human things, collaborate with other people, even though they may be different than us. Or to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, even though they may not share your perspective. Let’s say someone has a different political ideology than you. You know that, but you can still appreciate their friendship, and you can value what they say. That’s not easy to do, and our brain isn’t wired to do that. But as humans, we’ve got higher brain, and it helps step in and keep us away from that animalistic, threat-based brain. And then so everything’s great in our world, right? The problem is when we become stressed, and We really start to have an impact of that higher brain, and then we’re just driven by that lower brain. We’re in threat mode. We’re in that mode that looks around our world for differences and things that could be scary. And that’s where psychological safety comes in.

What we’re finding in the field of neuroscience is that our brain really doesn’t distinguish between physical stressors and psychological stressors. The example I use is if you think about evolution, which is a very large time scale, it’s only been very recently since we as humans have had the creature conference that we do. So, for example, being able to have food available to us at a store where we go and get it or deliver it to us. It wasn’t that long ago, a couple of thousand years ago, where we didn’t have that. You had to go out and forage or hunt, and it was life or death, or you lived at the fear of being attacked by animals at any given moment. So, we don’t have that. Our society is different, but the wiring of our brain hasn’t evolved to the point our society has. So, we’re still stuck with this brain that when we encounter a stressor, it doesn’t distinguish whether that stressor is internal or external. So, if I’m worried about the stock market or how many meetings I have this week at work, that’s stress. It’s the same response to your brain and body as those thousands of years ago when we were worried about being chased by a saber to tiger or something like that.

So, the fact that I think there’s a lot of appreciation now between the fact that there’s a big overlap in our brain in terms of this idea of physical safety and psychological safety. And We’re starting to get on that page, at least in the organizations that I work with, to have that appreciation and understanding of what psychological safety is and how important it is.

Tell me a little bit about how stress in the workplace will impact our brain and the quality of our decision-making.

Yeah, there’s a ton of research on that. The fact that we all have stress means that for the body and brain, it must be somewhat beneficial to us. There must serve a purpose, and it does. A little bit of stress allows us to be alert, aroused to a point where our brain is firing on all cylinders. Some people call it flow state, but everything in moderation. So too much of that, we call it you stress, good stress, too much of that. And then you start to dive over a cliff into distress, bad stress. And what we find happens when we encounter too much stress, and particularly stress that you feel you don’t have control of. We call it learned helplessness. But you feel like you don’t have control of your stress or what’s going on in your world. That’s when we start to see problems. What we start to see is that higher brain, that higher brain that allows us to do these uniquely human things, be creative. Actually, the things we get paid to do at work, it starts to suffer. It physically slowly slows down. We actually can see this on imaging. It slows down, it shrinks over time, and it’s less powerful to be able to counter that lower brain.

Okay, so whereas, let’s say on a daily basis, your to be able to use that higher brain for most of your activities at work, to collaborate with others, even though they may be different from you, to be able to manage conflict, to be creative. But now you have stress, and what we see stress does is it dampens that higher brain ability to do this. And now that lower brain, and this is where I use that analogy starts to take over. So now you’re constantly concerned about safety and threat. And whereas you might not have seen this person down the hall as a threat, now they are, because that lower brain is taking over and it’s very cautious in determining danger. What we see in the workplace then, when people are chronically stressed, and the research is showing us this very clearly, is that you start to have people become disengaged. You don’t have that higher brain online, so they lose productivity. In fact, if you look at some of the data from the recent massive Gallup survey that came out from 2023, this is really bored out.

In fact, I think the latest was they did a poll with over 122,000 employees in 160 countries. So very big sample size. And they reported that 44% of the employees’ question reported a lot of stress in their workplace in the past day. So, we’re really at a point now where it’s starting to be a crisis. I think people are paying attention to, wow, there’s a lot of stress in our workplace environment. What’s it doing to me?

Right. You talked about chronic stress being present. Is there a difference between chronic stress and acute stress? Because I’m thinking about some environments where even an airline pilot, as an example, may have acute stress when something goes wrong, versus what you’re also describing, which is this chronic state of stress, potentially around psychological safety in the workplace.

Yeah. I think it is a good point to make because the acute stressors, to some extent, can actually be beneficial for us because they allowed us to build, we call, build something called resilience. Sure. It’s almost like the philosophy behind taking a vaccine. Why do we take vaccines? Because what you’re doing is you’re inoculating yourself against a potential threat, a virus, let’s say. Sure. So, when people took the COVID vaccine, they took it in a small dose because the theory is that the body would build up immunity to the actual COVID virus and then become not so affected when they encountered it. That’s what we’re finding that acute stress can do. And there’s actually a whole field of research talking about stress inoculation, exposing yourself to increase and gradually more levels of acute stress, like you say. And that allows your brain, which is very adaptable, to acclimate to it so that in the future, when you do encounter stress, it’s not so detrimental, that higher brain doesn’t totally shut down. So in many instances, that acute stress can be beneficial. I think the thing we’re finding is that perception of that stress, when you see it as something that can build resilience or that it’s finite, your brain can adapt.

The problem is when people see it as a doom and gloom, I have no control over this. It’s something that’s not going to go away. That’s when you start to see the big issues. And so when chronic stress happens, that’s where a lot of people’s minds go to that helplessness piece of it, and that it’s never going to end. And that’s where they get into problems.

Very interesting. This element of the chronic stress that you’re talking about, that doesn’t build resilience unlike the acute stress, unfortunately.

No. What we’re finding is… And that’s what we’re finding. That’s usually how we define it, because the chronic stress is stress that’s occurring over a long period of time that’s unmanageable. So, yeah, a lot of times when I do talks and we talk about the impact of stress on the brain, you’ll invariably have someone say, well, look, I I’ve got a lot of stress. I’ve got kids. I have a full-time job. But those are the things, and this is why we talk about how to manage these stressors. Because, again, in the acute setting, these can be beneficial for us, and they can help build the resilience of our brain. It is something that people tend to fixate a lot. I’ve had situations where I talk about this impact of stress on the brain, and people say, oh, my gosh, I have stress, and now you’re telling me that it’s bad for my brain. Now I have more stress, and now it’s worse for me. It’s a downward spiral.

This shrinking of the high-odor brain that you’re talking about, is it temporary or is it as far as long as the chronic stress is there or is it something that becomes permanent in terms of the shift? Do we know?

Yeah, and that’s another thing to highlight. When I do these talks for people, I get to the light at the end of the tunnel, which is our brain is very malleable. We call it plastic. It can adapt. It’s amazing how much it can adapt and rewire itself. It can. This atrophy that occurs in certain areas of the brain and change in neural networks, it can reverse itself. It can heal itself. It’s very good at that. It’s not all doom and gloom. If you can get to a point where you’re either managing the amount of stress you have or reframing the stress so it’s not so impactful to you personally, then the brain can adapt and say, okay, I feel fine. This stress isn’t so traumatic to my survival. I’m going to go back to normal.

That’s what we see. Fascinating. I’d love to double click a little bit more in terms of the connection between psychological safety we just touched on the impact of stress in the workplace, and ultimately, physical safety, because we’re making decisions that can put us in harm’s way.

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I think I think it may be interesting to look at it both from an acute standpoint, acute stress, and as well as a chronic piece, because certain high-risk functions, I’m thinking, firefighters, I’m thinking pilots, will have acute stress and will have to deal with safety decision making at that point. I think it may be a little bit different versus the one when they’re operating under a more chronic state of stress. Is that fair?

Oh, that definitely is. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s coincidental that our organization has been contacted a lot by first responder groups for just this purpose. Actually, the United States Marines in basic training have implemented. I have a colleague who’s worked on this, who have implemented stress inoculation training.

Interesting.

In the basic training curriculum to be able to get to a point where when they’re on the battlefield and it’s life and death, and it truly is profound stress, they still have their faculties above it. They can still say, even though I know it’s life and death, I can call on that higher brain to be able to guide me and make the right decision and the right choices. So, it is something that is very relevant, and I think these organizations are seeing that. But in terms of, so I think you’re really trying to get to the question around the link of psychological safety to physical safety? Yeah. So, what we found is that, and again, working with organizations, particularly in the oil mining industry, is that a lot of the… If we go to, say, some of the work sectors that have to do with manufacturing, let’s say, or something where you’re doing the same repetitive tasks over and over. There’s an element of concentration to have physical safety. I think of some of the assembly line workers that we had engaged recently with workshops on this topic who are constantly in the grind every day, having 40-ton sheet metal presses punched out by this massive machinery that you have to at least stay aware that you don’t have your fingers caught in them.

Sure. And they have consistently had accidents because people’s… That higher brain gets turned off. When we have repetitive tasks, it becomes a habit, and that’s the lower brain. And so, we talk about the importance of psychological safety. And in another realm, particularly feeling that in the environment you’re in, you don’t have a lot of conflict that’s unmanageable. You’re not being treated unfairly. You do have a voice, because when people don’t feel psychologically safe in that realm, that lower brain takes over and that sense of focus and concentration really suffers. Sure. And that can lead to a lot of accidents. And in fact, that’s what a lot of the organizations that we engage, we hear that story time and time again.

Which is a common piece. Often, it’s referred to as complacency or it’s referred to as job normalization of some sort, where we’re starting to reduce the visibility of the hazards in front of us.

Yes. The funny thing is our brain is very good at that because when we’re exposed to something regularly and we realize that maybe we’re very proficient at doing that task, even though it’s dangerous, our brain relegates that to the lower brain and say, That’s a habit. I’ll give you an example. I’m sure everyone can relate to the fact of you’ve driven to work on the same road for a decade, right? Yeah. And I know I’ve done this. And then you find yourself one day, getting in the car, and then the next thing you know, you’re at work. You couldn’t even remember a single thing you saw or encountered on the way to work. That’s because our brain, at the very core of it, it’s simple physics. It wants the path of least resistance. So, if I’ve done this 30 times, it’s going to ingrain it and become a habit, and I don’t have to think about it. Well, the problem comes in in some of these organizations, some of these, particularly in the manufacturing sector. People get to that point. Well, they’ve been doing the same thing for years. They don’t see, like you say, they don’t see the task in front of them or the potential dangers until it’s too late because it’s been ingrained to a habit, and you don’t react to differences that may have happened.

You just don’t even recognize it.  

What are some of the ways that organizations can respond to that to reduce the risk that we turn a job into a habit and then start missing the hazards in the workplace right in front of us?

One of the ways we do this is in terms of getting people to be… We create self-awareness a little bit about how the brain functions, but importantly, about what their individual brain needs to feel psychologically safe. We have a whole model around, based on the neuroscience research, about what some of these variables are that everyone’s brain, it’s almost universal, everyone’s brain needs to feel psychologically safe, to be able to be present. I like to use the phrase present in the moment because that is when we talk about safety, this idea of being present. But the other piece of this is with this model, I could describe it a little bit. It’s basically looking at five of the low hanging fruit needs that our brains all have to feel psychologically safe. And they have to do with dealing with our social environment. So, we have an acronym called SAFE. And that stands for Security, Autonomy, Fairness, Esteem, and trust. You can think of them as things that everyone’s brain needs. Everyone’s brain needs a sense of fairness in the world, a sense of trust or security to feel psychologically safe. If you don’t have it, it can then cause psychological stress and a lack of psychological safety for you.

What we typically do is we run people through quantifying exactly which one of these is most important to them, generating some self-awareness around that. Then what we find is once they have that self-awareness, it helps them understand. If I’m in an environment, let’s say, security is the highest need for me, and so I need to know the details, and I need to know that everything’s consistent. If that’s the case, if that’s my highest brain need, then I can ensure that if I’m in an environment where things are rapidly changing, I know that that’s a threat to my brain. I know that’s going to make me feel psychologically unsafe, and that can cause issues for me. So, I have to be aware of that when I’m in that environment, take a step back. And we use this mantra, it’s not me, it’s my brain, which allows us then to be able to work on that and then work through some of the techniques we have to be able to manage that.

Interesting. Then we touched on the other one where you talked about brain inoculation when it comes to, I think that was the term you used, in terms of the acute stress and how do we help people make better decisions in those instances. Tell me a little bit more about How do you do it? Because in high-risk functions, you talked about the Marines, incredibly important to make the best possible decisions under fire.

Yeah. There’s a whole program with stress inoculation, and it basically relies on the fact that the brain can adapt to virtually anything you expose it to if it’s done. It’s like an analogy of lifting weights to build muscle strength. You gradually do it over time, the muscles acclimate, they become stronger. So, the next time they encounter a resistance, it’s easier for them. It’s the same situation with the stress inoculation. So typically, what’s done is what we do is actually something a little bit more indirect, and that is teaching people techniques to build up their brain resilience so that you have that stress inoculation. So, we do a lot of work around, first and foremost, that self-awareness. Okay, what is driving my psychological safety? What are those variables? Is it security, autonomy, fairness? And then we talk about some of the ways to really, I use the phrase, bulletproof your brain so that you’re not so susceptible to stress. So, we talk about the and it’s all scientifically driven. What are the benefits that we know behind nutrition, fasting, that could confer this resistance to the effect of stress? And then we talk about the neuroscience behind that.

We talk about the impact of physical exercise and what that does for the brain to be able to keep you resistant to stress. We talk about, I think probably the one with the most research is mindfulness training. Whether it be whatever form of mindfulness training you use, and this is actually used by a lot of first responders now, to be able to build those neural networks that can counter stress when we come up against it. Then the impact of sleep and what restful sleep can do, again, to be able to build up a stress inoculation system. Importantly, I think the last aspect we about, which a lot of people don’t understand, is a feeling of social connectedness. I think in our day and age, we dismiss that, but we’re showing hard neuroscience research around the benefit of feeling not just that you have a close social circle that you can rely on because our brains are very social, but to have a sense of purpose, a wider purpose in your life, how important that is to counter the effect of stress. All these things, I know, to a lot of people, sound very Squishy, very New Age.

But what we do is bring the neuroscience data into it. And a lot of it is stuff you would say, well, people have known that for many. There are cultures that have practiced mindfulness training for thousands of years. But now we’re showing up why it works and where the benefits lie. It’s pretty amazing.

Last topic I want to touch on is when we originally had a conversation, talked about neurodiversity and some of the things that people need. Tell me a little bit more about what we need and what our brains need.

Yeah. So, the neurodiversity part is interesting. It’s a buzz phrase now, right? I mean, being in the field of neuroscience, even the past five years ago, I don’t think people would have really understood what neurodiversity is. And when we talk about it more and more, it really is… And working with the model we do, it’s very easy to understand with this safety model. If my brain has a real strong need for trust. That means that I need to be able to work within my own social circles, people that are familiar to me. I really value loyalty. And let’s say I have someone who doesn’t have that high need for trust. Let’s say they just love to float around, and they love all the differences. That’s diversity. The fact that my brain needs a lot of trust to be able to perform optimally, and yours doesn’t, that’s truly neurodiversity. Neurodiversity. And so, when we talk about neurodiversity, it really is under the auspice of what does your brain need to feel psychologically safe? It’s different between individuals. So that’s one piece of it. Okay, so we’ve got differences of what our brain needs to feel psychologically safe.

And then once you have that understanding of what you need, the key here is to be able to step out of your own brain and put yourself into someone else’s. So, if I do have a high need for trust in my world, I understand that, but you don’t. That’s fine, because your low need for trust may confer a benefit to my team for all of us. What we do know is that diversity, there’s a lot of research around the fact that a diverse team performs better. Sure. And there’s a lot of questions as to why. We think one of the reasons is because this neurodiversity, if you embrace it, you really have different angles to tackle a problem from different perspectives. And so, I think that’s one of the reasons why this whole neurodiversity stream of work has become really popular these days, because we’re realizing we’re becoming more open about mental health and eliminating the stigma behind it. And understanding that, I like to say no one’s normal. There is no normal. It really is about what your brain needs in the moment. So, it’s something we deal with in our organization all the time.

And I think once people truly understand it, there’s a big sigh of relief because they don’t have that stigma attached to it anymore.

Interesting. Dan, fascinating topics. Great connection in terms of how we improve effectiveness on our teams, but also how do we improve physical safety in a workplace because it impacts ultimately decision-making capabilities. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, learn more about what you do, but also in terms of maybe some of the training programs that you offer, tell me a little bit more in terms of how they can go about doing that.

Yeah, the best way to do it is just going to our website, brainleadership.com. We really focus on building that knowledge, that self-awareness about what drives your psychological safety. We have many offerings for the individual, for coaches, for organizations. It really is about helping people understand this really complex machinery inside of our head, and I think the benefit that I’ve seen for people doing this, and we’ve been doing this for many years now, is that, yes, it helps you in this situation understand and feeling more psychologically safe and maybe having a safer workplace. But since you take your brain everywhere you go with you, once you’re in your personal life, now you have a better understanding of maybe why you have conflict with your spouse or with your children. It really does help you feel more psychologically safe in those environments, too. You get many benefits from one work stream of understanding your psychological safety. It really permeates your life.

Interesting. You get a user’s guide to that brain that you’re stuck with, whether you like it or not.

It’s much more effective to work with your brain than against it.

I would imagine. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Dan, for joining our show. I really appreciate your thoughts and insights on the topic.

Okay, sure. Great. Thanks for having me, Eric. I appreciate it.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.