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Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Linda Ray. She’s founder and executive director of NeuroCapability, and she’s on a mission to change the world one brain at a time. Linda, let’s start with that. Tell me a little bit about how you got into this space and this mission of yours.

Thanks so much, Eric. I guess I was like a lot of people. I know when I speak at conferences, one of the questions I ask people is, how long have you carried your brain around without paying any attention to it? And I carried my brain around in my head for the best part of 40 years and really didn’t understand how it operated.

And most, I think, do that way, right?

Yeah, because my first career was in social work, and I was still trying to change the world as a social worker. So, I was really looking at social justice and try to make change to systems. And that was a great career. And that led on to executive coaching and leadership development, training. And I was really attracted to things like strength-based approaches and positive psychology. A fellow that I was coaching in the Navy, he said to me, have you looked at this neuroscience stuff? And I looked at him and I said, no. And he said, I think you should. And I went, oh, really? And he said, So, he said, hey, go and have a little bit of a look at it. And next time we meet, I want to see what you think. And so, to humor him, I did that. I went and started looking at some neuroscience so I could go back and say, Look, I’ve done what you asked. And the lights went on for me. I just went, oh, my gosh, this is the missing piece of the puzzle, because here is some really strong evidence. And I was a humanities girl.

I did chemistry and biology. I never wanted to see that again. When I finished high school. But for me, I couldn’t read enough. I just kept making connections between how people behave and the brain. And I think that’s one of my superpowers. I’m good at translating complex concepts into something that people can understand. And so, I did some postgraduate studies. I went to a ton of conferences. I read and read, and I decided, okay, I’m going to introduce this into some of my leadership development training and coaching. And what was so exciting is that people were as excited about it as I was. And I And I thought, okay, this is the thing for me. I want to look at how I can change the world one brain at a time by helping people to understand how the brain drives behavior, both in the workplace and outside of the workplace. I developed an accredited program, a diploma of Neurosciences of Leadership, which is a very… In Australia, it’s a very complex system to get curriculum accredited. And so, it was very It was very difficult, but I managed to do that and started to deliver that program.

And when it came time for reaccreditation, we upgraded that to an advanced diploma, and we deliver that to students all around the globe. And I guess one of the things they say is its life changing. And I didn’t ever set out to develop a program that would be beneficial, not just to your leadership and how you lead others, but also to how you lead yourself and understand yourself. So that’s delivered now online all around the world. And it’s exciting to see how people are taking the information and taking it back into their workplaces to improve psychological safety in the workplace, which is lovely.

I think this is the main topic we want to discuss today, is really this topic of psychological safety, which is now common. Most people start talking about it. But you have some very interesting perspectives around it. Maybe let’s start with your view around what is psychological safety. It’s a precursor to culture, to innovation. Tell me a little bit about that perspective and a little about why it’s so critical in business.

I guess one of the things that I found extremely frustrating in looking at how organizations are trying to improve what they do is this focus on lag indicators. So, we’re looking at well-being, we’re looking at engagement, we’re looking at ultimately culture and business results.

Sure.

But what struck me is that we’re not looking at the actual What is the lead indicator? What is the lead indicator that will help us understand engagement more and innovation, all those sorts of things? So really, it all starts with what I would refer to as social safety. In Australia, there’s a big focus on psychosocial safety. And really, at its simplest, social safety, basically what our brain is doing moment by moment, even right now, is taking in about 11 million bits of information through our senses and trying to determine whether there’s something that might harm us or help us. And so, our brain assesses not just our physical safety moment by moment, but our social safety. And that social safety is, do I feel safe to take an interpersonal risk here with another person?

Sure.

And because the key role of your brain is to keep you alive and safe. So, I think what people don’t understand is that any social situation, whether it’s with one person, whether it’s you walking into a store as a customer, we’re going, is it safe here? And if it’s not, then that starts to activate what I call the snap reflex, which is that part of light and flee response. And it’s only after… And that happens pretty much outside of our conscious awareness. That’s your brain just doing its stuff to keep you safe without even really realizing it. And I can walk into an organization and tell quickly whether they have high levels of psychosocial safety just by how I’m greeted, how people are interacting. So, it’s obvious to me. I guess I have a Quite a good radar for that, if you like. And then psychological safety is when we can then express it. So, at that intrapersonal level, I can say I feel safe or not safe because they were rude to me when I walked into that store, or I walked into a meeting, and everyone had their arms crossed and they were looking really terrified.

So that’s really that idea that I feel safe to speak up and speak out, that I feel able to even disagree with people in a respectful way, that it’s okay to make mistakes. So, it’s really that feeling of belonging, connection, and feeling like you can trust the people that you’re engaging with.

That has significant impacts on physical safety because as you describe it this way, the first piece is, is somebody going to stop work if they see something that’s not, right? Are they going to escalate an issue if they see something that’s not, right? Can they speak up if they see something? But I’m even thinking about the dynamics on a team where you’ve got perhaps… Pilots are a good for an example of this, you’ll have a very senior captain in command, and then you’ve got a more junior first officer. There’s often a big difference, not always, a bit of substantial difference in hours of experience. You want that first officer to say something. If they see something that doesn’t feel right, or something could be wrong. How do you create the dynamic? But any crew, electrical crews, construction crews, the dynamic is not there. There’s always going to be some form of a seniority, some degree of experience. Am I comfortable saying something if it doesn’t feel right?

That’s right. I think for people familiar with Amy Edmondson’s work, her initial research was looking at medication error reporting in hospitals. Her initial hypothesis was that there would be low medication error reporting in teams with high psychological safety. To her astonishment, it was the opposite. But that makes sense because you would feel safer to challenge and to speak up when you notice that there’s a potential error with medication. Those teams that didn’t feel safe, they weren’t reporting that stuff. And that can lead to pretty drastic consequences, patient deaths.

Absolutely.

And you’re right, in construction, in mining, if people feel safe to say, hey, I’m not sure that that’s the best way to to do this. But if on the other hand, they feel like they’re going to be humiliated or belittled, they’re not going to speak up. So yes, there’s a very strong connection between safety and psychosocial safety, physical safety and psychosocial safety.

The norms that Cruise create, but I think this is also the complexity is you could have a culture that’s trying to be safe, but on a smaller crew, you’ve got dynamics that are present as well that could also skew it in a different way.

That’s correct. I think that that’s when we look at how we measure psychological safety, you’re really looking at team psychological safety because you can have 20 teams in an organization, and you’ve got some great leaders. We know leaders influence the social safety by as much as 75%, so you can have vast differences in teams within the same organization.

Right. So, you touched on measuring it. I think that’s an important way. Tell me a little bit about how you measure the psychological safety on the team.

When I first started looking at this, I was looking at engagement surveys, as I mentioned before, and was really frustrated with how they weren’t measuring the right thing. I did a lot of looking at the neuroscience literature, and there are basically five domains that we can experience threat or reward Certainties, the brain is a prediction organ, so we like to know, have clear expectations around our role and be able to predict the future. And your brain is always trying to predict the future. Autonomy, we want to feel like We can choose the way in which we do our work and that we’re not being micromanaged. Relatedness. We want to feel like we belong, and that people care about us in our team. Equity. We want to feel like we’re being treated and fairly by other people. So, my leader is holding everyone to account in the same way and not playing favorites. And the last one is significance. We want to feel like we matter, and we’re appreciated. And so, I looked at those domains, and that’s common in the which you’ll see that those are agreed upon drivers of behavior in the workplace and outside the workplace.

And so, I looked at developing five questions that would measure the degree to which people felt certain about stuff, felt like they had autonomy, relatedness, equity, and significance. And it’s important when we’re thinking about how we measure it, that we’re looking at the frequency with which that happens. I feel my leader holds people accountable in my team from never to always, or I feel I understand what is expected of me in my role. So, it’s very much rather than that strongly agree to strongly disagree, it’s looking at the frequency within which something occurs. And then that gives us good data when we start looking at, well, what are the areas that this leader can improve on to lift the needle on psychological safety in their team? And It’s interesting because I can look at a team result and tell you straight away by looking at it, is this a leader issue or is it a team dynamic issue or is it a bit of both? So, we know that sometimes there can be personalities within a team that can mean that other people don’t feel safe because of their behavior. So, it’s not just a leader.

And in a lot of the training that I’ve done over the years, it’s around everyone needs to play a part in influencing psychosocial safety, not just leaders, it’s every person. And how do you support people to act in ways that is how you want to be treated in the workplace with respect and dignity and all those things.

Right.

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I love your scale around never to always because the frequency, I think, also will activate our response. If it’s happening all the time, then I may me feel safer. You also mentioned that when you walk into an environment, you can see right away. Obviously, this is what you do. Your radar is looking and sensing for these signs. Are there signs that leaders should be looking for to get a bit of a sense? When we’re talking about dynamics on a team, as an example, where things are okay or less That’s okay.

One of the great acronyms that was shared with me by one of our students of the advanced diploma was, he said, we need to activate weight, so W-A-I-T, and that stands for why am I talking? I think one of the leaders… I love it. I just think it’s beautiful. One of the things that leaders need to be able to do is to listen to them. And I guess when I look at some of the key behaviors that we want to see leaders demonstrating, it’s listening, its empathy, it’s adjusting your style to meet the person that you’re working with. And so, I guess for leaders, if they are noticing that everyone’s always agreeing with them, then I think there’s a problem. And we’ve seen that in some of the stories of CEO saying, I want you to disagree with me. So really, you want to see that people will have constructive conflict, constructive dialog, where they may not always agree. If leaders are doing all of the talking, then people will feel influenced by that. So, a lot of people will say, hey, I want to share an idea with you. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could say, hey, we’ve got this challenge.

I’d love to hear your ideas about it before they input their ideas. So, I love that. Why am I talking? Is it useful here or not useful?

I’m thinking because of the link to safety as well. My assumption is, as a leader, I should be scanning as well where my team are, and I should be noticing some signs of, okay, in this area, some of maybe the more junior team members are not speaking up as regularly, or as you mentioned, maybe somebody is talking too much. But there should be some signs that you should be able to notice when you’re going from group to group in terms of how team members are showing up, just like you’re able to see as you walk in to see the differences. Because if it’s a strong link to physical safety, then I’d want to make sure that we change up the team. In aviation, there’s a lot that goes into how to create the team dynamics. So even if I don’t know you and this is our first time flying together, we have codes of communication so that you know how to communicate I know how to listen, ultimately through a lot of the crew resource management, so you avoid those critical failures. As a leader, my assumption is I should be able to search out the pockets, the areas where I need to be more targeted to understand some of the differences in terms of leadership that may be present on my teams.

How might I be able to see the differences in terms of how leaders are showing up, but also how the team or crew dynamics might be coming through?

When I said before, I can feel it when I walk into a room, it’s really noticing how your people interacting. Are they staying quiet? Are they offering up suggestions and ideas? Are they looking down, even looking down and not engaging and being hunched up a bit? There are all those nonverbal views as well as what people are saying or not saying that can help you to determine, are people feeling safe here? And I think leaders that do this so naturally really show some great traits like humility and curiosity. Are you noticing that leaders are asking people curious questions, really trying to tap into their own expertise to look at solving a problem or a challenge? So, I think it’s really when you look at a team, also look at how is the air space being shared? Is it just two people speaking in a team? They’re dominating the conversation. Or are we seeing turn-taking? Because when we see and turn taking has been some really fascinating research around how the brains, when there is more equal to turn taking in conversations, start to sink. And insights become much easier to be generated in that situation when we’re taking turns in that airspace.  

I think a lot of leaders also don’t understand the difference between introverts and extroverts. I think one of the things that we do, not intentionally, but I’m an extrovert. I love thinking out loud. That’s how I think. That’s not how introverts think. So, one of the things is also to notice our leaders using different styles of communication to support those people. And are they leaning with the brain and mind in terms of giving that certainty, autonomy related as equity and significance? So, we would see a culture where people are laughing and having a good time. Really great example. My daughter is also in her early career of social work. She had two job interviews last week, and both great jobs. And in fact, one of them is in a much better location. But guess which job she’s going to take? The one in the poorer location because she said, Mom, the vibe. It was just so lovely, and they were joking and having, and it looked like fun. So really, you can feel that warmth and you can feel that. I guess a lot of people ask me this question. I don’t know whether this is something you We’ve also heard, but isn’t psychological safety just about being warm and fuzzy and holding hands?

I have heard that, but it’s not that.

No, it’s not that. Because I guess when you have psychological safety, you also feel okay about holding people to account and holding people mutually to account. So that happens within the team. We would see people holding each other to account as well as leaders holding people to account.

And I think it Next to what you were talking about in terms of equity, if I feel I’m being treated equitably, then we’re comfortable with the accountability piece. If it’s random and you don’t like me, so therefore I’m always getting the sharp edge, then that would not be a safe environment.

That’s right. Absolutely.

I do love that in your surveys, one of the pieces is on top of what we’re talking about, which is scanning, is that you’re also able to start targeting your approach because you may see some pockets, like you said, in some cases it may be leader-led, in other cases it may be the team dynamics. How might an organization start taking a more targeted approach to psychological safety or social safety, essentially?

I think the key is measuring it. I’ll give you an example. We worked with a retail chain in Australia, 70 stores. Great case example because they all have the same product, the same training. We measured psychological safety in those 70 stores, and it ranged from high, great levels of psychological safety to really It was darn awful. Really? And we also in the survey tool that we’ve used, have a question 26, which is around anything else that you want to say. And the low psych safety stores had bullying and sexual harassment happening. So, it was a very unsafe environment. I guess what that allowed that organization to do is to then go, okay, we’ve got these green stores. They’re doing pretty good, these orange stores and these red ones. And they could target their intervention so they could use their HR team to go in and do a little bit more investigation. What was interesting in that scenario as well is the business owners, it was a privately owned company were very focused on the ultimate lag indicator, really, which is profit. And so, they wanted this business to be profitable. And so, we looked at and they were trying to set We had very new targets, but we thought, well, that makes no sense to people on the shop floor.

So, let’s look at the best leading indicator in retail, which is sales conversion rates. Sure. And so, we measured sales conversion rates together with and we were able to see that stores that had high levels of site safety often had high levels of sales conversion rates. And what we did was we worked with this organization to lift sales conversion rates by 5 %. And so, we just did some targeted training, some interventions, did some work with the executive team. And in 91 days, we’re able to lift their sales conversion rates by 14.8 eight %, which was about a $22 million improvement in revenue. And just starting small. And so, the key goal in that was how do they greet customers that came and come into the store? And interestingly, their focus was on loss prevention. So, you walked into their stores, and you saw the back of the staff member as I was checking everyone’s bags coming out. And I said to them, what would it be like to walk around and actually welcome people into the store?

You’re being treated like a criminal as opposed to welcomed.

Being welcomed and what can I help you with? So, I think there’s very strong links between psychosocial safety and KPIs. And yet we still see, I think there’s been some awful examples of how to actually crush psychological safety. We saw when Elon Musk took over Twitter, look what happened there. People were waiting to get an email to see if they still had a job. How do you think their psychosocial safety was while they were waiting?

It was very high.

Yeah. Really, it should be an indicator that a CEO is measured on for their performance bonuses. We haven’t seen that happen yet, but I think ultimately it will. It’s being legislated in many countries around the world, this duty of care for psychosocial safety. We’ve seen physical safety has come leaps and bounds. But I think you can get physical safety to a certain point, but without psychological safety, then you don’t get it to the point that people talk about zero tolerance to safety incidents. But if you don’t have those two things working together, good systems and process around physical safety, but also people feeling confident and brave enough and okay to say this is not okay and this is a personal safety risk.

I think managing a team by team creates a dynamic where… Because in safety, we talk about brothers or sisters keeper. How do we look out for one another? But that requires a certain degree of psychological safety and care for each other. I need to notice and then do something when I see something that’s maybe off. That’s, I think, where the psychological safety really comes in because you can’t get to that view, that perspective where peers are helping each other, giving each other feedback, unless you’ve got psychological safety on the team.  

Yeah, absolutely. You can have all the policies and processes around physical safety. It’s not going to make it different. Yeah.

In the same as in aviation, there was a huge focus around crew resource management to just get the dynamics between the captain and the first officer, where there’s already a pecking order that’s, by definition, being put in because somebody still needs to be in command. But how do I make sure that I have the right level of communications that we’re looking at for one another and ultimately for the safety of the flight and the mission, ultimately? Linda, if somebody wants to get in touch with you to hear more about some of your work, is maybe interested in some of the surveys you mentioned, what’s the best way for somebody to get in touch with you?

Hop on our website, narrowcapability.com.au, and you can send an email to [email protected]. We’d love to have a chat with people if they’re interested.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Linda, on such an important topic of just really, how do I increase psychological safety on my team, in my organization. And ultimately, the link as a leading indicator is huge for physical safety. But as you mentioned, even from a business performance standpoint.

Thank you. It’s lovely to have the opportunity to be on your show. Thank you.

Excellent. Thank you.

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.