In today’s complex and fast-paced organizational environments, psychological safety has emerged as a critical element of effective leadership. Psychological safety refers to the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. It encourages openness, innovation, and the confident expression of ideas, contributing to improved team performance and overall job satisfaction. Leaders who prioritize psychological safety foster environments where team members can voice concerns, share unique perspectives, and engage in constructive dissent without fear of retribution. This episode delves into the four stages of psychological safety: Belonging Safety, Learner Safety, Contributor Safety, and Challenger Safety, illustrating how each stage supports diverse facets of team interaction and performance.
Timestamped Overview
- [00:00:49] Topic Introduction: Psychological Safety
- [00:01:26] Story Introduction: Importance of Psychological Safety
- [00:02:01] The Four Stages of Psychological Safety
- [00:04:32] Personal Story: Head of Logistics at Canada’s High Readiness Deployable Headquarters
- [00:05:32] Implementing Stage 4: Challenger Safety
- [00:06:27] Importance of Establishing Previous Stages for Effective Challenge
- [00:07:04] Demonstrating Humility as a Leader
- [00:07:40] The Value of Team Expertise
- [00:08:06] Benefits of Collaborative Planning
- [00:08:50] Serving vs. Egotistical Leadership
- [00:10:14] Drop the Ego: Enabling Team Feedback
- [00:10:55] Peer Review of Important Communications
- [00:11:39] Outcome of Peer-Reviewed Plan: Achieving the Best Result
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Scott McCarthy
Transcript
The following is an AI generated transcript which should be used for reference purposes only. It has not been verified or edited to reflect what was actually said in the podcast episode.
Scott McCarthy [00:00:08]:
Welcome 1. Welcome all to the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast. A weekly podcast series dedicated to helping you hit peak performance across the three domains of leadership. Those being leading yourself, leading your team, and leading your organization. This podcast couples my 20 years of military experience as a senior Canadian army officer with world class guests, bringing you the most complete podcast of leadership going. And for more, feel free to check out our website at movingforwardleadership.com. And with that, let’s get to the show. Yes.
Scott McCarthy [00:00:49]:
Welcome, 1, welcome all. It is your Chief Leadership Officer, Scott McCarthy. Thanks for tuning into this week’s military leadership insight, where I talk about my experience as a senior leader within the Canadian Army to bring some great leadership goodness to you. And I’m gonna talk to you actually, I’m gonna give you a bit of a story this week. So there’s been a lot of talk lately about psychological safety. We’ve been talking about a lot in the Leader Growth Mastermind as of late. And I was even, a guest on another podcast. And this story just kinda naturally came out.
Scott McCarthy [00:01:26]:
And I was like, dang. That’s such a great story as I reflected upon it after the fact. So I was like, I need to bring this to my audience because this isn’t one where I really necessarily even mentioned to you in the past. So here it is. This is the story about psychological safety. So just a quick reminder. Okay? There are 4 stages to psychological safety, and this is how we go about achieving that leading your team aspect of leadership under human interaction component. Okay? And alright.
Scott McCarthy [00:02:01]:
So stage 1, belong your safety. I feel like I belong here. This feels good. I feel safe. This team, there’s something about it. It just jives with me so forth. Alright. So that is stage 1.
Scott McCarthy [00:02:16]:
Stage 2 is learner safety. Hey. I can make a mistake and not get reprimanded for it. I can mess up and you know what? I will be a okay. I’ll learn from it and we’ll move on. That’s stage 2. Stage 3 is contributor safety where I can actually go ahead and bring forth ideas and they’ll actually get thought about and sometimes even take into consideration and implemented. My god.
Scott McCarthy [00:02:47]:
How many of us would love to actually see that occur? And then finally, stage 4 is challenger safety where I can go ahead and challenge the status quo, challenge my supervisor on whether or not this is a good idea, if things are going right, what have you. Alright. So these are the 4 stages of psychological safety. Again, this is out of my interview with doctor Tim Clark. He’s the expert. I am his padawan, I guess, you can say, and I simply have hoisted his message aboard and helped it, you know, with ours. So if you wanna listen to that full interview, Tim, you can check out lead don’t boss dotcomforward/128. It’s a oldie, but it’s a goodie.
Scott McCarthy [00:03:40]:
That’s for sure. Alright. So let’s go to my story, and my story is this. So if we go back a few years, I was the, basically, head of logistics for Canada’s high readiness deployable headquarters. So what does all that mean exactly? I was the man that was the head of logistics as I said, but with an organization that spent its life, which this is its whole reason the ether is to be highly ready to deploy at no notice. So my team and I lived at 48 hours notice to move. So within 48 hours, we could get a notification, and then boom, we are on a plane headed somewhere for an indeterminate amount of time. This was an extremely busy place to be, especially in the past few years.
Scott McCarthy [00:04:32]:
I have spent a total of 5 years at this organization, and let me tell you my last 2 years were the busiest by far. So one day, we were working on a potential operation much like many days that time of my career, and I had gone ahead and developed my support plan for this potential operation. And I had my team get in the conference room one day. And then I walked in, and I dropped the plan in front of them and said, folks, in 45 minutes, tear it apart. Yes. You just heard that right. I walked in, dropped my work in front of my people, my subordinates, and said to them to tear it apart. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you go about truly achieving psychological safety.
Scott McCarthy [00:05:32]:
Alright? What I did was I forced stage 4 on them. I said, tear it apart. You I need you to tear apart. Okay? And go and challenge the plan. Now it takes a lot of work and effort to be able to do this because you haven’t set the foundation with the other steps and stages. You truly are not going to get what you’re looking for if you walked in. So if you’re unable to establish stage 2, so if you tear people apart for making mistakes, well, then they’re not gonna be really forthcoming with tearing your work apart If you ask them to, they’ll simply tell you, hey, boss. Fantastic.
Scott McCarthy [00:06:27]:
Love it all. But the reality is they’re like, this section here is pretty crappy, and this other section over here is junk, and this makes absolute sense. And this here, oh my god. This is gonna be such a huge failure. K. So you have to enable the other stages first. And you have to in order to make this effective, you need to show humility every day, all day long. Continuously showing humility will enable you to do this.
Scott McCarthy [00:07:04]:
Now what are you getting out of it? The thing is, why did I do that in the first place? Because I’m humble enough to know that I don’t know it all. I just don’t know it all. It’s impossible for me to know it all. I am not a robot. I am a human being. I make mistakes. We all make mistakes. Alright? So you have to consider that when you are working with teams is that you’re not going to know all the right answers.
Scott McCarthy [00:07:40]:
In fact, you shouldn’t know all the right answers. You should not be the smartest person there in the room, but rather you should be the one who’s unable to make decisions. This is how I looked at this. Hey. Look at this. Tear it apart. You each have your different specialties, your expertise. I am not an expert in each one of your lanes.
Scott McCarthy [00:08:06]:
I am more of a generalist when I when I look at you. Okay? Comparison to you, I’m a generalist. You’re experts in your lanes. So look at this along your lanes. What else are we getting out of this? We’re getting the best possible outcome. Again, one person cannot have the best possible plan. Many people, experts in their individual fields, will come up with the best possible plan. And as you, as the leader, to take their advice and turn it into something tangible and actionable that you can go after.
Scott McCarthy [00:08:50]:
Simply we did what I wanted to do, you know, there would be better ways to do it. And at the end of the day, it’s not about your ego, about being right, but rather it’s about serving those who you serve and serve you. So maybe it is your marketing folks who are out there down on the phones all day long or chatting on the online. Maybe it’s your clients that you represent and that you provide a service to. Maybe it’s your people on the shop floor, but the moral of the story is it’s about supporting and serving them and not inflating your ego because that’s what a boss does. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why you go after you establish these four levels of psychological safety so that you could fit the best possible outcome, which means you drive those results and you achieve peak performance. There are too many people out there right now thinking that they’re leaders, but the reality is is that they’re self serving egotistical bosses. My question to you, are you one of them? You’re most likely not because you’re listening to the show.
Scott McCarthy [00:10:14]:
So drop the ego, enable your team to look at your stuff, provide you feedback, tear things apart to get the best possible outcome. Because at the end of the day, everybody wins then. And a few other ways that you can actually go about doing that. One of the ways I do is simply as I’m writing important emails or documents. I would like flip it to my closest subordinate, and I say, hey. Can you do a peer review on this? Which means I’m looking at him as a peer, not as my subordinate, but just as another set of eyes. That’s it. Just need another set of eyes.
Scott McCarthy [00:10:55]:
Why? Because I know I make mistakes when I write long documents. Heck, even short emails, I make mistakes. Wrong word, forgot a word, something didn’t quite make sense. Another set of eyes to read it just helps with making sure the clarity and the message is there. Again, it’s not about my ego. Rather, it is about serving those who I serve. If you’re wondering what happened with the original story, did they find stuff that we needed to change? Absolutely freaking right they did. And did we change it? You know we did, and we achieved the best possible outcome.
Scott McCarthy [00:11:39]:
And that’s it for this week, ladies and gentlemen. Hope you enjoyed this. I hope you enjoyed this segment of the podcast. Feel free to let me know what you think. Alright? Reach out. Scott at moving forward leadership dotcom. As always, lead, don’t boss. Take care now.
Scott McCarthy [00:11:59]:
And that’s a wrap for this episode, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast. But you know what you could do to truly support the podcast and know that’s not leaving a rating and review? It’s simply helping a friend, and that is helping a friend by sharing this episode with them If you think this would resonate with them and help them elevate their performance level, whether that’s within themselves, their teams, or their organization. So do that. Help me help a friend win win all around and hey, you look like a great friend at the same time. So just hit that little share button on your app and then feel free to fire this episode to anyone that you feel would benefit from it. Finally, there’s always more there’s always more lessons around being the highest performing leader that you can possibly be.
Scott McCarthy [00:12:58]:
Whether that’s for yourself, your team, or your organization. So why don’t you subscribe? Subscribe to the show via movingforwardleadership.comforward/subscribe. And until next time, we eat, don’t boss, and thanks for coming out. Take care now.