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HireMyVA Podcast 127- How to Create Psychological Safety

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Episode Summary

If you’re a leader or high achiever, you know you MUST build a team to achieve real significance in life, because it’s with a team that you can do great things and release yours, and others, potential.

In episode 126, we discussed What Psychological Safety is and why it is important. Now, in this episode, we talk about how to create it.

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Episode 126 - https://youtu.be/UW5eZbq0HrM
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Episode Transcription

Dave Braun
00:00:00
Hello again, everyone! Welcome to the HireMyVA Team and Business Building Podcast brought to you by Yoogozi.com. And in this podcast and at HireMyVA, we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with virtual assistants without breaking the bank – and as you’ve heard before, your bank! I’m Dave Braun, I’m here with Larry Broughton, my partner in all things- coaching great business mentor, coaching me in life and Larry, were brothers going through all these life’s up and downs. Tell everybody, hi!

Larry Broughton
00:00:34
I don’t know that one registered for me, man. Yes. There are life’s ups and downs for sure. Handsome David, it’s good to see you. I’m glad that we were talking about this topic today. Yeah. Life’s ups and downs. Boy, we ought to talk about that someday. How do you keep moving forward, you know. The image I always use is like, just put one dusty bloody boot in front of the other. Sometimes that’s what it feels like, right?

Dave Braun
00:00:59
I know. Yeah, it does.

Larry Broughton
00:01:01
Let’s keep us moving forward. So, Hey, we did this as part two of a interesting topic. So why don’t you share with us what we’re gonna be talking about today?

Dave Braun
00:01:10
Okay. So the question for today is, and it’s part two it’s we’re episode 127, and we’re talking about how do I create psychological safety? That’s the question. So, as Larry mentioned, this is part two, go back to part one, which is episode 126. We talk a little bit more about what psychological. I can’t even say that

Dave Braun
00:01:32
That’s for sure what psychological safety is and why it’s important. So go back to that and listen to the details. But one thing to remember is we talked about the, you know, the main kind of definition of it is that where people have a sense of confidence. Your team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up. Now, one of the things I wanna say about that is this is a sense of confidence, not from you as a team leader, if you are, but the sense of confidence from the people within it. Now that sense is based on who knows exactly what it is. It could be based on a feeling, it could be based on evidence, but there may be evidence to the contrary. The thing is, is that people will have a sense and that’s what you have to address. The perception- Perception is real. Sometimes it doesn’t match the data, but the perception may still be there.

Larry Broughton
00:02:27
It’s so important. And I’m just gonna give a little bit of a disclaimer again, as Dave said, go back and listen to the other. This is one of those ones where it really is important that you listened to the first one, because we give a lot of disclaimers about that. A lot of words have become politically charged in recent years. And when we talk about psychological safety in the workspace, we’re not talking about safe places. Okay. And when we use the word of diversity of thought, we’re not talking about, you know, Quelt what, what’s the word I’m looking for? Quint, not what’s the word? squelching and other people. Thank you. Squelching other people’s ideas, but encouraging diverse ideas. That’s what we’re talking about about here. And Dave, while, while you were talking, yes, I was focusing, but it did remind me. I just had a call with one of our clients this morning and he’s done a really good job of bringing team members on board where now he’s created such a culture where the team members are almost, I, I want don’t wanna use the word policing, but policing themselves, setting accountabilities for their own self.

Larry Broughton
00:03:34
And if people aren’t participating, team members are encouraging their own, the other team members to, to participate. How awesome is that? But he’s been doing this actively doing this for over a year. It’s taken a while to get there, but when your team members start taking charge of building the culture around it, boy you’ve really made some progress instead of us as the leader, the business owner, always doing it. But team members are self putting up accountability, boundaries, that, Hey, you’re here, you’re on the team. What do you have to say about this? How awesome would that be? Right?

Dave Braun
00:04:12
Oh yeah. That’s, that’s Nirvana from a team perspective in a lot of ways.

Larry Broughton
00:04:17
Right.

Dave Braun
00:04:18
But I mean, you hit on the one of the techniques. I think we didn’t even have this on our notes, I think, but one of the techniques is just giving them permission. Right? Give them permission to speak up. Yeah. Like you said, encourage them to do those things. Encourage them to behave without you encourage them to make the step without you. Yeah.

Larry Broughton
00:04:38
Yeah. There you go. Good. All right.

Dave Braun
00:04:41
Well for psychological safety, one of the things we talked about, the last one is team members don’t need to be friends. But they do need to be socially sensitive and people need to, especially the leader is got to ensure everyone feels heard. So there’s, you know, a way that that could be done. For example, Amy Edmondson, she’s a PhD researcher at Harvard. She said, and here’s the quote. When the leader goes out of their way to make someone feel listened to or starts a meeting by saying, I might miss something, so I need all of you to watch for my mistakes. Or they say, Jim, you haven’t spoken for a while. What do you think? That makes a huge difference. Yeah. So you wanna expand on that Larry?

Larry Broughton
00:05:28
No, I think it’s a pretty good description, actually. It’s always important to set the tone for the meeting right out of the gate. Yes. You know, basically you’re laying ground rules for it, right? Hey here, what we expect to get out of this thing, I’d like everyone to participate, bringing your own ideas. We talked about it in the previous episode, but, but encourage diversity of thought, encourage different ideas to come out. But it’s an investment in time. You could, it can be a much more efficient if you just come in and are draconian in your approach.

Dave Braun
00:06:07
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
00:06:07
and shutting people down. But that’s only for short term success. You will not have long term success with that.

Dave Braun
00:06:15
And your organization is always going to depend upon you then, because if you’re doing being draconian and giving all of the orders, barking them all the time, what happens when you disappear for a little bit? Team members won’t know what to do.

Larry Broughton
00:06:28
Well, this is where it’s so important for team leaders to really be a leader. And some of the most effective, inspiring leaders that I can think of have been great at being the role model. They show how it is to be an active listener, right? They’re socially sensitive to the group that is vital for a team leader. As Amy had mentioned in her question here is if you see someone who’s kind of be in a wallflower and leaning the back and really not participating, don’t call them out and say, Hey Dave, why are you being such a slug? But say, Dave, this is an area of expertise that you might have had some experience in the past. Remember that? Can you share that with us? Get them engaged there. And so you’ve gotta really be scanning the room and be asking for, well, let me back up.

Larry Broughton
00:07:20
One of the things I like to remind myself is I would rather, I’d rather have brutal honesty than beautiful eyes. And so oftentimes in these meetings, you do see a little bit of posturing from some team members that if some of who they think is the leader, they’re just blowing smoke and brown nosing is what we used to call it. I don’t want that kind kind of thing. I’d rather have people who are bringing out diverse ideas. So I think leaders have to do that. And so you do that by inviting people to speak up. Particularly if you see someone who’s, you gotta watch body language, somebody’s sitting there with their eyebrows point down, their arms crossed shoulders up, It’s time to engage that person. You know, you can say, Hey, Hey Larry, tell me what’s going on in your head right now. Don’t say, Hey, you look like a grouch and say, what’s going through your head. What, what problems do you see with this idea that we’re talking about right now? Don’t turn your back to that person.

Dave Braun
00:08:22
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
00:08:23
Really engage them, invite them to speak in. But this is one of the challenges Dave, that I see so often is that oftentimes leaders are afraid to talk about what are they feeling? What emotions is it evoking right now, when really what we do when we say, Hey, this is making me feel a little bit weird out or creepy, or I’m not sure that this is the direction we ought be ought to be going, because it kind of goes against our core values. When the leader speaks that way, it’s giving permission to the other team members to do this. And again, this is an investment in time. This is an investment in creativity. It’s an investment in future innovation. When you create environments like this and you’ll be able to survive more than just the next economic cycle or the next PnL.

Dave Braun
00:09:12
Yeah. And, and often we are not naturally gonna be good at that. Oftentimes, Larry, the last thing I wanna do when I have a meeting with my team is to go back and sit back and say, you know, I’m not, this just doesn’t feel quite right. Or it’s easy to say, this feels really good. It’s harder to say, you know, it just doesn’t feel right. Or there’s something that I’m not getting here. I’m not quite sure. Could you explain more? That’s a little bit harder for me.

Larry Broughton
00:09:39
Well, it is, but let’s make, I wanted to say this earlier and I slipped my mind. So before I forget you don’t run all meetings this way.

Dave Braun
00:09:47
Yeah,

Larry Broughton
00:09:47
Yeah. Yeah. There are some meetings where it is you get in and you get out, it’s basically a status and an update meeting. I’m talking more problem solving, big picture, meetings. We’re we’re doing this kind of thing. Ideally in these types of meetings, not, yeah. I guess everyone, everyone has about the same amount of clout, the same amount of input. No one has really left out. That’s the ideal in these things. here are other meetings where you’re, you are gonna have a team member. Who’s just a fly on the wall because they’re just absorbing information. You can’t run every meeting like this, but if it is a problem solving or a strategic meeting or brainstorming session that’s with, or an AAR and after action review.

Dave Braun
01:10:34
Yeah. There you go.

Larry Broughton
01:10:35
They, they need to be run this way. But one of the keys, Dave, that I think a leader has to make sure that they aren’t doing, and they’re not allowing other team members to do is to interrupt someone when they’re in the flow of thought.

Dave Braun
01:10:48
Mm.

Larry Broughton
01:10:49
So someone is brainstorming this brilliant idea. They’ve got the guts, they’ve got the courage to express something that most people aren’t talking about. And so, oh, that’s a stupid idea. You know, they don’t let them let them speak. You’ve gotta really be a moderator. You know, some of the most effective moderators know when to step in and redirect the conversation, but you can’t let other team team members hijack other people’s thoughts. Makes sense.

Dave Braun
01:11:16
Oh yeah. Absolutely. Let me go back to a point that you said, I want to ask you a question here, cuz

Larry Broughton
01:11:21
Don’t put me on the spot, Dave.

Dave Braun
01:11:23
Cause I, I wanna see if you think that I’m, if, if you, we can do this. So one of the things that I like to do in our team meetings is, you know, we have ’em on a weekly basis. Usually on Monday is we have some type of a learning time and it’s usually it could be, we watch a YouTube video or some something, and then we talk about it, but then we go through a status and all that. So it’s kind of like a mixture of a meeting where there’s the status as well as learning and brainstorming. Do you think that that’s really a good way to approach it? Or do you think that we should just say, okay, we’re gonna do all the status in the meeting where and where it’s like, what you talked about, we just report and then switch over or have a totally separate meeting to where you’re brainstorming and trying to a, elicit a lot of input and solve issues and things like that. Do you think it’s a, could be a mixture or not? What do you think?

Larry Broughton
01:12:19
I think it just depends. It’s what works for the team.

Dave Braun
01:12:22
Okay.

Larry Broughton
01:12:22
It just depends. And what’s going on, you know, I could see how some days people are chomping at the bit, like my schedule’s absolutely blown up today, I need to get back to this. So it could be frustrating for someone if you’re doing to 45 minute teaching session versus a four to five minute teaching session. So it does depend. And I would ask the team members, is this effective for you guys? What would you prefer?

Dave Braun
01:12:45
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
01:12:46
To, to do? What’s most effective? so I’ve seen it done both, both ways in the military. We used to call those pocket teachings. You got a few minutes down to, and then all the NCOs (non-commissioned officers) would have a couple of topics that they could just teach on spur the moment. Hey, we’ve got an extra 15 minutes. Let’s let me do this pocket teaching for you. So I think it’s a great idea. I like that idea. We it’s another conversation I just had with somebody this morning, we don’t do enough professional development and training in organizations. And so that you do that. I think it’s really commendable because we, we know right from a bunch of surveys that have been done, that one of the reasons people leave organizations is they don’t feel like they’re being professionally developed. But we, we expect all these things from them, but they’re not being trained on how to do it. So I, I think it’s an interesting idea. Yeah. Why not? And if you’ve created an environment, Dave, where there is some psychological safety and you ask them, Hey, is this the best use of your time? Hopefully they’re gonna say, they’re gonna give you the honest feedback.

Dave Braun
01:13:55
Yeah. That’s, that’s a good idea is to take the pulse of the team every, you know, every so often say, Hey, we’ve been running the meeting like this, we’ve been putting up five minutes here, 10 minutes here of learning or whatever. Is this working for you? Or is there another way that could help you facilitate learning? Is there a better approach? So, yeah. And, and I think, we talk about that technique as a leader is asking people’s opinions. And then so Larry, when I’m doing that in my staff meeting, it’s like, I need to ask every single person that’s on the staff meeting. What do you think? What do you think? What do you think?

Larry Broughton
01:14:33
Dave, I think that’s really good. And you should share that with the results are I think with folks because we’re always looking at what are other organizations doing that we can learn from, you know? And maybe you can go into that, you know, there’s that, that Google thing that you shared with me before that Laszlo guy, What was his name? Block something block. Am I right? Yeah.

Dave Braun
01:15:01
Yeah. You’re I’m just laughing, it’s fun. So yeah, Laszlo Bock I mean, it comes from some of the books that we’ve talked about Smarter, Faster, Better. We’ve referred to that before, but he quotes Laszlo Bock, he’s the head of the people operations department at Google that’s right. And talking about his work where, I mean, they just looked at teams over and over and found out what caused teams to be really high performing. Yeah. Versus non high performing. And he said, “The biggest thing you should take away from this work is that how teams work matters in a lot of ways more than who is on them.” Right. In other words, it’s what we talked about last time with the lion and the sheep is you can take a team of average performers. And if you teach them to interact the right way, they’ll do things no superstar could ever accomplished.

Larry Broughton
01:15:53
Yeah. So the lion if, if you have not taken our instructions and gone to listen to the previous episode first what Dave was talking about the lion and the sheep is Alexander the Great, had a great quote that said that an army of sheep led by a lion is better than a army of lions led by a sheep. So that’s how that it kind of ties in with what you’re talking about there. Yeah. I think that he is right regarding these average performers. Right?

Dave Braun
01:16:20
Yeah. And, and here’s one of the key points, you know, we talk about the safety and people, all having a voice and all that. Yeah. But one of the things that’s important that he points out, he says, it’s not about consensus. In other words, not everybody in the room has got to at the end of your meeting, whatever problem you’re trying to solve agree on what the direction is, this is what’s gonna happen, but they all need to feel like they have a voice for, because that way, the next time it comes around, the next problem is their voice may be the one that creates that solution.

Larry Broughton
01:16:53
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that that’s really important group think is a really scary idea and you see this sometimes. And so sometimes it is the odd voice out that really creates the innovation. Think Elon Musk, for instance, boy, he, he could have just followed a bunch of group things and yeah. Doing a privately held rocket company is really a bad idea because NASA it’s always been government funded. What would that have led or let’s, who’s gonna do an electric car? They’ve tried electric cars before and they don’t work and they’re slow and they’re clunky and they’re not very good looking. Why do it, he’s the odd thinker. And then you got to get got a bunch of other odd thinkers. So don’t be afraid to stay away from, stay away from consensus.

Dave Braun
01:17:50
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, and he goes on and he says, you know, let’s, let’s like you said, let’s remember, it’s not about consensus. It’s not about high volume of work or physical location. Those things didn’t make the best performing teams. They is, what matters is everyone having a voice and some social sensitivity. We talked about it and of course that they actually feel that social sensitivity, that psychological safety.

Larry Broughton
01:18:21
Well, again, I’m gonna poke fork in this, just to remind folks when we’re talking about social sensitivity and this impact in this context, we’re not talking about shutting down other ideas. It’s making sure that people aren’t left out, encouraging people yes. To speak up just because, you know, this is one of the things I think of a lot of, you know, I refer a lot to the military because that’s where a lot of my experience came from. But sometimes if you’re a private in the army, you’re afraid speak up because there’s a Sergeant in the room. What you have to do is say, Hey, we’re all kind of, we’re just trying to get ideas here. So I don’t care whether you’re black, white, straight, gay, transgender, whatever, identify as an ape. I don’t care. I want ideas here. Right. And so you have to actively speak it out loud that you’re looking for ideas, and then you have to act on it. You can’t shut ideas down because you don’t like them. If you ask for creative ideas, you need to accept creative ideas. That doesn’t mean you’re gonna implement them. But you gotta make sure that everyone has a voice and you gotta make sure that that folks have a voice and that they feel like they’re being heard.

Dave Braun
01:19:36
Yeah. So when you, when somebody gives their solution or their thought, acknowledging it and saying, thank you for it goes a long way. So he talks about five key norms for some of these high performing teams. Okay. And, and Larry we’ve touched on a lot, lot of these in some of the podcasts. And we touch a lot about it in the, in the victory training.

Larry Broughton
01:19:58
So what’s he say?

Dave Braun
01:19:59
So he says, number one, people must believe their work is important.

Larry Broughton
02:20:03
Oh, that’s yeah.

Dave Braun
02:20:04
Right. We talked about that. Having a vision and a mission for your company and make in core values and making sure that your team understands them and agrees with them.

Larry Broughton
02:20:12
Yeah. And I think this is one of those areas where people like, Hey, I wanna be happy all the time. People perform beyond their own expectations when they know that they’ve got that their work has meaning or their efforts have meaning from it. And that transcends money sometimes if they feel like, Hey, my effort is really, it plays this role in the organization. They become real contributors to the team that their work is important. I agree with them.

Dave Braun
02:20:45
And as leaders, it’s our responsibility to make sure that they understand it. Point out all kinds of examples. Like in our team meeting, we talk about our vision or mission or core values, a portion of that, every single meeting. And then we also will mention how we are accomplishing that. We’ll mention a client, we’ll mention how we’re actually making a difference that we actually are in a client’s life.

Larry Broughton
02:21:12
Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Braun
02:21:13
Good. And that, and so once people recognize that client, they see that, then they’ll remember, okay. Yeah. That I did some of that work for that client, and so they’ll realize that it’s meaningful, but as leaders, we just have to continue to emphasize that.

Larry Broughton
02:21:27
Okay.

Dave Braun
02:21:28
One of the things that I find that leaders don’t do is they’re constantly going to the next problem, problem, problem, and never talking about, Hey, we solved the problem for a client. We did some great things for somebody.

Larry Broughton
02:21:43
I’m guilty of that.

Dave Braun
02:21:44
We all are because people who are very successful in life are what? problem solvers. So we naturally wanna solve problems. So what we have to do is make it a habit. We’ve got, we talk about habits and how to create ’em, but create an environment where it almost forces you as a leader to do that. It’s like, that’s why I have an agenda for my team meetings.

Larry Broughton
02:22:05
I remember doing a meme

Dave Braun
02:22:06
Cause I always forget.

Larry Broughton
02:22:07
Remember doing a meme, you know, you got, you know, like on social media, I do all these different memes. So I remember one of ’em from years ago was like, problem solvers are exalted. They are right. Everyone wants their problems to be solved. And I forget personally as well, I forget to like, remind us of, Hey, here’s the victories that we have. Here’s the problems that we have solved. Here’s the, you know, here’s the good that we’re doing as well. Yeah.

Dave Braun
02:22:28
Yeah, we have, yeah. We have to force ourselves to remember. Yeah. Doesn’t happen naturally for most of us.

Larry Broughton
02:22:35
Yeah.

Dave Braun
02:22:37
Okay. So those five key norms, number one, they must believe their work is important. Number two must feel their work is meaningful. Number three is, must have clear goals and defined roles. So that’s, that’s really important. And we can go into detail on that in another episode.

Larry Broughton
02:22:55
It’s pretty self explanatory, I

Dave Braun
02:22:56
Think. Yeah. What, what are people responsible in their position in the, in your company. Number four is they need to know that they can depend upon each other.

Larry Broughton
02:23:06
That’s a hard one, Dave.

Dave Braun
02:23:08
Yeah. How do you, yeah. That is, is, go on. Tell me more, Larry.

Larry Broughton
02:23:11
No, I just think that there are so many, I, I not among your organization or mine necessarily, but we hear it from so many clients and the folks that we’ve done some consulting for is that there are adversarial roles that build between individuals and sometimes departments in organizations. And there are some leaders who kind of thrive on creating that

Dave Braun
02:23:36
Unhealthy competition.

Larry Broughton
02:23:38
Unhealthy competition. Right. And which can be good. But the ugly side of when that manifests is that they don’t feel like anyone’s got their back.

Dave Braun
02:23:49
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
02:23:49
We’ve seen it when there are some team members that actually undermine each other, you know, and that’s terrible. There is a certain level of healthy competition, I think, among people and, and that kind of thing, you know? Yeah. But that is actually healthy sometimes. But when you actually have team members that are working against each other, that’s a culture that is destined for failure.

Dave Braun
02:24:19
Mm. Yeah. And the last one I’m gonna touch on that in a second, but the last one of the, the norms is the psychological safety that we talked about. And we’re gonna talk about some of the techniques to create psychological safety here in a second. Okay. But oftentimes, Larry, one of the things that we tend not to do when we’re trying to be successful to learn something, is we don’t look at examples of when people are not successful. And so what I’m thinking on this and tell me if you agree, great example that of people not successful when it comes to psychological safety is look at our political arena. People express an opinion. And even if it, you know, they say troll, you get outta here, you’re stupid. All that kind of stuff. So take what’s going on in the political world and don’t do that stuff.

Larry Broughton
02:25:17
Yeah.

Dave Braun
02:25:17
Right. That’s the number one tip, right?

Larry Broughton
02:25:20
Yeah, yeah. Don’t do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Braun
02:25:23
So let’s talk about a few things that we can do to model these, some of these behavior. So number one is we talked about don’t interrupt teammates during conversations

Larry Broughton
02:25:31
So important

Dave Braun
02:25:33
Now. So there’s a caveat to this. I, and I’ve done this before is when you sense. Let’s say you’re in a meeting and you’re doing problem solving, but it’s so obvious that the person either doesn’t solve of the problem or they’re going down the wrong direction and they tend to continue to talk and talk and talk.

Larry Broughton
02:25:54
Yeah.

Dave Braun
02:25:54
Well then you’ve gotta be gentle. You you’re gonna have to jump in.

Larry Broughton
02:26:00
Well, this, I think I mentioned this in the previous podcast, Dave, in part, one of this is that our role sometimes has to be, it’s a moderator, Right? Moderators. Don’t call people idiots because they’ve gone out, down the wrong path. It’s like, Hey, that’s a great conversation piece for maybe, maybe that needs to fit into our next meeting. There’s a way to corral someone back in. Yeah. You know, during that, what I’m talking about, when I say don’t interrupt them is just because you disagree with someone, you interrupt them.

Dave Braun
02:26:30
Yeah. You say, no, no, you it’d be like, no, don’t even finish your thought, Larry. Cuz you’re wrong.

Larry Broughton
02:26:37
Yeah. So what does that do to the other person

Dave Braun
02:26:39
Shuts ’em down. They’re not shut down.

Larry Broughton
02:26:40
They feel disrespected. If it’s someone who’s not a fighter? Or someone who’s a fighter, you actually escalate and the fist go up. Yeah. Whether literally or figuratively. And they’re, they’re fighting words. Right?

Dave Braun
02:26:57
Yeah. And I think so

Larry Broughton
02:26:59
The better way to do it is to ask you pose questions.

Dave Braun
02:27:02
Yeah. And I think in the pre episode, I talked about that example where we had these two engineers who were going at each other and it ended up escalating exactly. Like what you talked about.

Larry Broughton
02:27:15
Yeah.

Dave Braun
02:27:17
Okay. Well, another point is demonstrate. So a team leader has gotta demonstrate that they’re listening by summarizing what people say after they said it.

Larry Broughton
02:27:26
So it’s almost like active listening, you’re saying, yeah. What I hear you saying, Dave is right. Something along those lines.

Dave Braun
02:27:34
Now this is not drive through listening.

Larry Broughton
02:27:37
No, that’s the whole thing about active listening. It’s like actually diving deep. Yes. On it. Yeah.

Dave Braun
02:27:44
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
02:27:45
Okay. I like that.

Dave Braun
02:27:46
The next one is team leaders should admit what they don’t know.

Larry Broughton
02:27:51
Hey, if you don’t admit it, your team member knows anyway.

Dave Braun
02:27:55
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
02:27:55
Right. They do. Or at least they have a sense of it. And if, I think if the team leader pretends, they know

Dave Braun
02:28:00
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
02:28:02
A couple things are gonna happen. One is you lose credibility because they know anyway. But sometimes, and I’ve seen this happen before, is there will be someone who might be a little smarter than the team leader in that area. And they’ll sharp shoot them in front of the team. You know, it’s called icon toppling.

Dave Braun
02:28:23
Yeah.

Larry Broughton
02:28:24
And they’ll do what they can just to bring that person down a peg

Dave Braun
02:28:27
Yihh!

Larry Broughton
02:28:28
You know, which is basically the, the idea that I win by you losing. And that’s not a great recipe for success in teams.

Dave Braun
02:28:37
Yeah. Agree

Larry Broughton
02:28:39
That’s a good one, Dave. I like that.

Dave Braun
02:28:40
So the next point is they shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least well once.

Larry Broughton
02:28:47
Wow. So that means that the moderator or the team leader needs to make sure that people are participating throughout the meeting.

Dave Braun
02:28:57
Yeah. And I would say, don’t wait till the end to ask somebody. You better do it at the beginning. Cuz obviously what’ll happen at the end. they’ll say, Nope, I don’t have anything else. Cuz they’ll probably want to go and exit and be done.

Larry Broughton
02:29:09
Right. But this also encourages is to make sure that we’re controlling the amount of people that are in the meeting. But if you have 50 people in the meeting?

Dave Braun
02:29:16
Oh yeah. That’s not a, that’s something we’re talking about. Right, right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Okay. The next point is they should encourage people who are upset to express their and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways.

Larry Broughton
02:29:33
Well, that’s the idea that I was talking about earlier. If you see somebody who’s sitting in there with their brow fur and their arms cross and they’re slouched down. Yeah. You better engage them because they’re gonna, they may not speak if they don’t, if they aren’t given the opportunity to speak their piece there, believe me, they’re gonna speak it afterwards for sure.

Dave Braun
02:29:50
And then, and then as a team leader, if they’re speaking it afterwards, then you you’re not around then you can’t control it or you can’t frame it or direct it into something that could be positive.

Larry Broughton
03:30:01
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What else did they say?

Dave Braun
03:30:04
Okay. The team leaders behavior is they call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussions.

Larry Broughton
03:30:11
Call out intergroup. That is really important, Dave.

Dave Braun
03:30:16
Yeah. That, and that takes courage. Correct?

Larry Broughton
03:30:19
Man. It takes courage for sure. Because the, it does mean that you’re gonna have to be a, I keep using the word moderator. But you’re also gonna have to probably be a little bit of a peacekeeper. If you’ve got intergroup conflicts, people are sometimes more willing to dig their heels in for the sake and protection of the team and ideas. And the boy that’s a whole podcast by itself is like, how do you find common ground between these two? How you do it? You gotta find common ground first. Can we agree on this? Yeah. Can we agree on this? Well, what if we were to move you by five degrees, move you by five degrees. That’s the, that’s the process takes a skill that takes some actual practice.

Dave Braun
03:31:06
Yeah, it really does. Okay. I don’t think I’m that good at it. You sound like you’re pretty good at it.

Larry Broughton
03:31:12
Smoking mayors, baby.

Dave Braun
03:31:14
I don’t think so. All right. So then, so the next one is team leaders will give others control.

Larry Broughton
03:31:21
What do you mean by that?

Dave Braun
03:31:22
Well, I think it’s

Larry Broughton
03:31:23
Think it’s of the meeting.

Dave Braun
03:31:24
Yeah. I think there’s no reason why you as a team leader have got to always be the one facilitating the meeting. You could be working with somebody else and say, you know, Larry, why don’t you take this one over?

Larry Broughton
03:31:38
Or this part of the meeting or something?

Dave Braun
03:31:39
Yeah. Or this part of the meeting. Let other people have practice and do it as well.

Larry Broughton
03:31:45
Yeah. Yeah. You and I talked about this with some of your team members when it came to leading client meetings. Mm yeah. They would join you and you, they would go into this. They would intentionally, you said, okay, watch me how I do this. And then you’d give them opportunity to run part of the meeting. And then they would run part of the meeting with you there before you set them free to do it on their own.

Dave Braun
03:32:09
That’s right. Yep.

Larry Broughton
03:32:10
You gotta be intentional about this, I guess.

Dave Braun
03:32:13
Got you. You do. And of course, I mean, this, this goes without saying the last one is like being engaged and if you’re, if you’re a team leader and you’re coming in the team meeting, you’re the one who’s got your arms crossed or you’re all talking on your phone or, or you’re, you know, working on your computer and you’re not engaged. Oh my gosh. That’s like one of the worst behaviors you can have of all. I know some people, when they have meetings in a corporate environment, they’ll say, don’t even bring your phones with you. Don’t bring your laptops or at least put your phones on silent and keep them in your pocket.

Larry Broughton
03:32:53
Yeah.

Dave Braun
03:32:53
But team leader has got to not only be engaged, but work to help everybody else be engaged too.

Larry Broughton
03:32:59
Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Braun
03:33:02
All right. Well, one of the final things that I think Larry, we want to talk about is this type of creating psychological safety, depending upon the culture that you’re working with, you may have a lot more effort to get that created than other cultures. So in other words, like Filipino VAs and you advocate using Filipino virtual assistants.

Larry Broughton
03:33:29
For folks here in the, for folks here in the us. Yeah,

Dave Braun
03:33:31
Yeah. For folks here in the US and Larry, they as a general rule, this has been my experience. And I think your experience as well is you’ve really gotta work to get them to feel comfortable, to tell you as well as other people on the team, their thoughts, their ideas, because they it’s, I dunno if it’s a culture thing or it’s because they’ve had different bosses or leaders who haven’t led and said, you do this, this and this. And that’s all I want to hear from you. Just get your stuff done and if I want your ideas, I’ll ask for ’em. Yeah. You know, it could be some of that.

Larry Broughton
03:34:10
Yeah. I think that that’s not just a Filipino thing. I, I do think that it’s across all here in the US, it happens as well. There are some folks and I, I suppose it does. I mean, we’ve had both Filipino VAs and Filipino full-time team members at our hotels, but I can think of a lot of folks who are just afraid that if they bring up a different opinion or if they make a mistake, they feel like they’re gonna lose their job.

Dave Braun
03:34:46
Yes.

Larry Broughton
03:34:47
Right. And so, unless you are intentional about creating the cultures, like, Hey, we want diversity of ideas because that’s how we’re gonna innovate and change and come up with, you know, new creative, whatever it is, products, solutions, whatever it is, we need those types of things. But you need, as a leader, you have to intentionally say, you will not lose your job for making a mistake. You will not lose your job if you can come up with a different opinion, as long as you’re direct and respectful and you don’t hide the results of it, you will lose your job. If you keep making the same mistake over and over again or there could be consequences. But we encourage it. We absolutely encourage it, but people still aren’t gonna believe it until they see it happen.

Larry Broughton
03:35:36
So if someone does make a mistake or someone does have a significant failure, or if you make a mistake, you shouldn’t hide from it either. You should share it. Hey, we made, and you can even say, Hey, instead of going to the meeting and say, Hey, you know, Dave really screwed up last week. You can say, Hey, we tried this. We find out these were the results. And so here’s how we corrected it along the way. And people said, somebody made a mistake and they survived and they’re still here. Oh my gosh. Maybe I can do that too.

Dave Braun
03:36:04
Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Larry Broughton
03:36:06
You have to actually celebrate those learning opportunities, I guess.

Dave Braun
03:36:12
There is something and I don’t know what it is cuz I have, I saw it in my previous company. I see, I’ve seen it in my team. I see it in somebody really close to me or her company that just by default, they feel just by default, and I don’t know what happens, but just by default they feel like if they say something out of order, they challenge somebody that they’re gonna get fired. Yeah. It’s unbelievable. So we, as leaders have got to go out of our way to create it because if we don’t go out of our way to create it, it’s not gonna happen. Yeah. Just doesn’t happen. The default is people being guarded and afraid to say something. That’s the default behavior of everybody. We have to go out of our way to create psychological safety. Yeah.

Larry Broughton
03:37:00
Yeah, for sure. We did. We do for sure. Good.

Dave Braun
03:37:03
Okay. Anything else?

Larry Broughton
03:37:05
I think we did went pretty deep on that and I would just re remind people, go back and listen to episode one. If you’ve got other or episode one, the first part of this conversation regarding psychological safety. This is an interesting topic to me. I’d love to hear people have ideas on how to incorporate psychological safety in the organization. Maybe you’ve struggled with incorporating this into your organization that maybe your culture was one way. And now you want to go this way. I’d love to hear any kind of feedback on this or share it in the ideas or in the, the comment section of wherever you found this cord in our podcast. Because I think I’d like to dive a little bit deeper on, on this.

Dave Braun
03:37:46
Yeah. Okay. Everyone. Well, thanks again for being with us and listening. Remember building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom. And of course we are here to help you with our course community and our White Glove Service where we find a Rockstar VA for you. Now of course we don’t just leave you alone. We have certain part of our course that helps you with this psychological safety. It’s the thrive part. That’s really, really important. Yeah. But for now we want you to do three things. Number one, subscribe to this podcast if you haven’t already done. So either on your iPhone or Android phone or our your YouTube channel, number two, give us a rating. Preferably five star, we’d love it. Leave a comment below this video, talk about psychological safety. Talk about anything you want actually just give us a comment. It helps get the word out. Number three, go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our course in community. And of obviously our White Glove Service. Remember even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for hire and what we talk a lot about in these episodes thrive with virtual assistants. Yeah. Larry, we’re helping a lot of folks looking forward to a couple of Q and A’s coming up, our virtual spotlight sessions and you know, folks come join us on those. So just go to Hiremyva.com for more information.

Larry Broughton
03:39:02
Yep. And I’m gonna encourage folks stop chasing success. Ugh. There you go. Yuck. It’s gonna drive your life off a cliff is kinda how I always describe it. That’s what it feels like when you’re just chasing success all the time. But instead I’d rather you seek a life of significance. Success is the byproduct of living your life of significance. So go do something significant today. All right! God bless you, God keep you and God hold you. We’ll see you on the next one. All right. Bye folks. See you next time. All right. Bye everybody.

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