Voice At The Table

Have you discovered Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas yet?  If not, put it at the top of your reading list! Not only is this a highly insightful book on the value of cognitive diversity, it is also a skilled and eloquent account of what we at Voice At The Table aim to deliver to our clients: the full benefits of your diverse teams.

Today, prompted by a section of the book, and in light of this month’s focus on mental health, I want to talk about the importance of creating psychologically-safe teams.

What is Psychological Safety?

Psychological Safety refers to an environment in which people feel safe to offer suggestions and take reasonable risks without reprisal. It is crucial to the development of an inclusive environment.

As defined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is: “A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking… [It instils] a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up… it describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”

In 2012, Google asked itself the question (as part of the celebrated Project Aristotle study): “Why are some of our teams performing better than others?”  After extensive research, the study concluded that “psychological safety was far and away the most important of the dynamics we found” that was the single most important factor driving success. “Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re related as effective twice as often by executives,” it concluded.

How do we achieve psychological safety in our teams?

Psychological safety begins with the leader.

A leader’s ability to put him- or herself on the same level as his team (rather than being dominant), to show vulnerability and be as human at work as they are in their personal life –creates trust and collaboration.  In other words: a leader who is truly inclusive will have the best chance to instil psychological safety in their team.

Matthew Syed describes this kind of leader as someone who uses “self-deprecation as a rhetorical devise to signal a different dynamic [from that of a dominant leader]. They explain their ideas thoroughly, because they know that colleagues who understand, and endorse, them are more likely to execute them with judgment and flexibility. They listen to those around them, because they recognise that they are not too smart to learn from others”.

How do teams benefit from psychological safety?

One of the essential benefits of psychological safety is that it allows the team to profit from its diversity of thought. By instilling an environment in which team members are encouraged to share their experiences and individuality, teams are able to be more creative and make better-considered decisions.

In order to do that, it’s important to be mindful of cognitive biases that may get in the way of sharing from the heart. Groupthink is one such bias: groupthink occurs when members of the team are influenced by another’s thinking. That typically occurs in group dynamics when a leader – or someone else with influence – expresses their opinions first. And even when the leader doesn’t speak until later, hearing other members speak out loud impacts on the thinking of the rest of the team.

For this reason, an inclusive leader is mindful of team dynamics.

In Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed points to a number of techniques that safeguard effective communication from biases. Most notably, he describes a practice introduced by Jeff Bezos at Amazon, known as the “golden silence” – a team dynamic that requires that each meeting begin with a 30-minute silence during which each member quietly considers the main agenda item, set out in narrative form in a six-page memo provided at the start of the meeting. This enables each member to evaluate the challenge, without being influenced by the views and experiences of others. When, finally, the team begins to discuss the issue, the most senior person speaks last.

There are many other techniques available to inclusive leaders that allow them to benefit from the full cognitive diversity of their teams – but before the leader can take full advantage of the team’s amazing diverse thinking, they need to learn how to establish psychological safety.

Need help with becoming a more inclusive leader?  We can help.  Talk to us about our inclusive leadership and inclusive behaviours programmes.

By Melissa Jackson

We are living in a world – for good or bad – where social media permeates every aspect of our lives. But what happens when social media is used against women in their professional environment, to threaten, undermine and abuse them?  It’s a serious issue for female MPs and the fear is that such toxic behaviour is going to deter women from engaging in public life and that we could lose a generation of potentially brilliant MPS.

There are currently 219 women MPs in the House of Commons – the second highest ever. But at what price? Many have received – at the lower end of the spectrum – harassment and abuse and at the disturbingly violent end – rape and death threats.

Last year, Brent Central MP Dawn Butler, publicly voiced her support for the Black Lives Matter campaign in a column for the Metro newspaper. She received 6,000 comments, of which about 2,000 were, what she described as, “hate communication”. At the time, she said: “There were people calling me every word you can think of – the C-word, the N-word, the B-world. People threatening to kill me.”

Research has found black and minority ethnic female MPs are subjected to far more abuse online than their white peers – with a previous study by Amnesty International discovering black female MPs and journalists were 84% more likely to be mentioned in abusive tweets than white women.

Leicester East MP Claudia Webbe, who has been trolled and received threats of rape, lynching and death, has described this type of abuse as “psychological violence” – a toxic onslaught that could easily fragment and impair mental health.

On a recent BBC Woman’s Hour programme, she courageously said: “While I genuinely fear for my safety, I refuse to be silenced.” Bravo, but it may not be the rallying cry of every female politician.

An equal power survey in 2019, revealed that 59% of women said they’d be unlikely to stand as an MP because of the abuse or harassment they feared they would receive. This has since risen to 74%.

This fear is hard to shake off. A targeted barrage of online sexism is undermining female resilience and ambition and attempting to silence female mouths.

Basingstoke MP Maria Miller – who has received abusive threats via Twitter – told Woman’s Hour that the issue of abuse is the main reason that women don’t want to go into politics and it’s an “integral part” of why they want to stand down.

She said, “I had a rape threat… it was a very explicit threat… it was difficult to know how to deal with it.”

One way would be to withdraw from social media and close accounts, but we know that they’re a necessary asset/evil; a modern marketing tool and a hugely effective way of increasing visibility and relevance.

Nadia Whittome, who at 24, is the youngest MP in the Commons, has been forced to go to the police over death threats and is regularly subjected to hate mail and racist abuse on social media.

The Nottingham East MP, of Punjabi descent, has taken radical steps to protect herself from such online bullies in a bid to continue in the role she loves. She no longer looks at her own social media comments, choosing to delegate that role to her staff, who spend their time trawling through hate mail and racist abuse.

Undoubtedly, more needs to be done to protect women at all levels. Women and girls need to feel safe in our society. We must all bear some responsibility for fixing this heinous situation – and fixing it soon or we will revert to an unrepresentative House of Commons, where women fear to tread.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy Beware! Girl Power is the New Superpower.

Stress is something we all have to deal with at certain times of our lives, be it at work or at home or in our personal relationships. It can sometimes feel overwhelming, but there are things you can do to manage it. Build yourself an action plan and take steps to develop your resilience so that you can face stressful situations with confidence. To mark Mental Health Awareness month, we share 8 ideas to show you how.

1. Treat problems as a learning process. Develop the habit of using challenges as opportunities to acquire or master skills and build achievement.
2. Celebrate your successes. Take time at the end of each day to review what went well and congratulate yourself. This trains the mind to look for success rather than dwelling on negativity and “failure”.
3. Nurture a positive view of yourself. Developing confidence in your ability to solve problems and trusting your instincts helps to build resilience.
4. Develop realistic life goals for guidance and a sense of purpose. Do something each day to move towards them. Again, small is beautiful; one small step amid the chaos of a busy day will help.
5. Avoid seeing crises as insurmountable problems. You can’t change the fact that highly stressful events happen, but you can change how you interpret and respond to them. Try looking beyond the present to envisage future circumstances in a better light. Note any subtle ways in which you may feel better as you deal with difficult situations.
6. Make connections. Good/strong relationships with family, friends or others are important. Accepting help and support from those who care about you and will listen to you, strengthens resilience.
7. Maintain a hopeful outlook. An optimistic outlook enables you to anticipate that good things will happen in your life. Try visualising what you want, instead of worrying about what you fear.
8. Take care of yourself. Pay attention to your own needs and feelings. Engage in activities you enjoy and find relaxing. Taking care of yourself helps to keep your mind and body primed to deal with situations that require resilience.

And if you want to check your physical, mental and emotional wellbeing, try this quiz below. It could set you up to make some positive and beneficial changes in your life.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy Active Voice: 7 steps to handling change without pain.

Many organisations seeking to improve their D&I efforts often struggle with the following questions:

Do we bring in external interim expertise in the form of a consultant, hire someone to work with us on a more permanent basis, or do both?  And how do we decide what the right result is for us?

There are many factors that influence the outcome of these questions.  But the most important part will be understanding where your organisation is on its Diversity journey.

The Diversity Journey Roadmap ^(SM)
I have set out the Voice At The Table model for the Diversity Journey below.  Each step represents a different level of awareness and therefore moving through each step will require a different type of expertise.

For purposes of this discussion, the most relevant stages are 3 and 4, which are discussed below.

Stage 3: Let’s Fix It!

Stage 2 is characterised by the need to address Diversity in order to appear to be doing the right thing.  The organisation has not yet fully comprehended the need for more Diversity and Inclusion and is at this point going through the motions of D&I.

At Stage 3, however, leadership has awakened to the fact that the lack of diversity in the organisation poses a genuine problem that needs fixing.  The need to become more diverse might be driven by a talent pool shortage, the need to meet client diversity requirements, being more representative of the customer base, or any other reason.  Leadership have identified whatever the problem is and they are keen to solve it.

This stage is characterised by identifying the various Diversity-related problems and by introducing initiatives to address them.  Examples of D&I solutions include Unconscious Bias training, setting Diversity targets and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and reviewing recruitment practices.  Initiatives tend to be disjointed and typically fail to deliver impactful change.

An organisation that finds itself at this stage would greatly benefit from external support – an expert consultant who can identify exactly where the organisation is and suggest the most impactful next steps.  The recommendations often include the hiring of an internal expert to streamline initiatives and develop a suitable strategy or plan to address Diversity and Inclusion.

Stage 4: Seeing Diversity as an Opportunity

At Stage 3, the company saw the problem that the lack of Diversity posed and was prepared to address it.  At Stage 4, Diversity is seen not as a problem but rather the solution.  This is when leadership finally recognises that there are commercial benefits to be gained from greater diversity.  This is also when leadership realises that addressing Diversity is not simply a project; it is not a problem that can be fixed by individual/separate interventions.  Rather, to benefit from Diversity fully, leadership realises that it is important to develop (i) a culture that appreciates Diversity and (ii) leaders who know how to leverage that Diversity.

This stage is generally a crossroads between external consultants and a permanent internal expert.  Whereas a consultant can help build a platform from which to grow and develop an inclusive team and leadership, that platform alone will not be enough to produce the required culture change.  Culture change is a process that will need to be nurtured, grown and monitored.  This is therefore the point at which it will be most impactful to take in the learnings from the expert consultant who has helped erect the foundation for inclusion and hand over to a permanent Diversity and Inclusion lead.  They – having received the proper tools and training – can ensure that the initial platform is used to embed Inclusion.

The stages that follow from here can mostly be implemented by an internal expert (or team of experts, depending on the size of the organisation), with occasional support from external coaches, trainers and consultants.  But once the foundation has been put in place, the dependence on external consultants becomes less onerous and a team of internal experts becomes a more natural and effective port of call.

Need help building your company’s inclusive foundation?  Talk to us about what we can do to support you.

Liked this article?  You might also enjoy reading Tackling the pain of the D&I Journey.

This month, we’re unpacking what makes the Diversity and Inclusion journey painful.  There are lots of reasons to disengage with the journey because it is (either perceived as or actually is) quite difficult.    Today I want to look at the complexity of behaviour change.  This, I would agree, is a real challenge.  So how can we make it easier?

To simplify the process of becoming more inclusive, we have broken down Inclusion into 8 Inclusive Behaviours.  This allows us to practice getting better at individual behaviours.  As we gradually improve at each, we grow more and more inclusive and more and more appreciative of diversity.

But as we all know, changing our behaviour is hard work.  How can we make it easier for ourselves?

The six stages of change

In order to explain how we can make the process of change easier, I want to introduce you to the Transtheoretical Model (aka the Stages of Change Model), developed by Prochaska and DiClemente in the late 1970s.  The six stages are set out in the picture below, featured in this article, where you can learn more about TTM.

I want to focus on the Action (Stage Four) and Relapse (Stage Five).

In the Stage of Action, people have recently started changing their behaviours and intend to keep going.  This is the stage where many of clients find themselves.  They understand the need for change and want to embrace it.  They even begin to take Action by noticing their own and other people’s biases, catching themselves and others in making assumptions and rash judgments, and realising that they may have used inappropriate language.

While determined to progress, Stage Five – Relapse – often thwarts efforts to maintain these new habits.  This is when motivation wanes, opportunities to practice become difficult to find and time/work pressure makes it less engaging to stay the course of Action.

Behaviour Change as an Experiment

One way to minimise the potential for Relapse is to create a team environment that encourages experimentation.  In this kind of environment, people feel free to try new things, ask questions if they’re unsure and make mistakes without worrying about unintentionally offending someone or being offended.  This kind of environment is more conducive to learning and is more resistant to Relapse.

Setting Ground Rules

In order to feel ‘safe’ to experiment, it is advisable to set some Ground Rules.   The aim for these rules is to allow people to experiment, make mistakes and nudge each other towards learning – without serious repercussions.  It is also important to set boundaries, given that some people might view these relaxed societal norms as an invitation to cause discourse and intentional affront.  Boundaries help safeguard psychological safety, like ensuring that one person’s freedom does not impose on that of another.

The Ground Rules should address concepts like what information ‘stays in the room’, how to keep an open mind rather than jump to conclusions, how to give people the benefit of the doubt, how to accept that we sometimes don’t know what the right thing is to say or do and how to maintain a level of curiosity for people’s perspectives.

Although setting Ground Rules appears like a complicated process, a session of creative thinking with the team can yield a set of reasonable standards to which most people (preferably everyone) can agree.

So, while behaviour change isn’t easy, we can make it much more achievable than it may currently appear.

To facilitate this state of experimentation, we are launching our D&I Confessions series.  In this column, we will share real examples of common missteps and mistakes that many of us make while practicing our Inclusive Behaviours.  Want to contribute (anonymously)?  Email us!

By Rebecca Salsbury

What does it mean to “tackle” Diversity and Inclusion in your organisation or team? And why does it seem so hard sometimes? To name just a few of the tricky areas: overcoming deeply held beliefs and unconscious biases, changing behaviours, facing up to embarrassment, or even shame, when discovering how past actions have impacted others. Organisations of all sizes and shapes face the same challenges.

In my experience, leaders (and employees) in large, established companies believe their challenges are on a different scale. Their size, and the characteristics associated with their size, explain slow progress embracing D&I and making change stick.

Of course there are factors which complicate implementation: large workforces, large management teams, unwieldy decision-making processes, spread across multiple regions or geographies, or policies written at another time and with different goals in mind. Some companies have a legacy of systems which makes data collection and analysis non-trivial. Others have a legacy of cultural norms, expectations, and behaviours which mean getting a ‘toe hold’ in the mountain of change is, indeed, difficult.

I’m generalising, and we all know that this leads to dangerous assumptions! These observations are grounded in my experience, however. Until recently I held a leadership position in the BBC’s technology division. I have personally uttered some of these very factors to explain – or excuse – my own/our department’s progress in relation to tackling diversity in particular. I’ve been both an active and passive contributor to some of the most common mistakes (large) organisations make when they set out to ‘improve diversity.’ Hindsight, and continued learning, mean I can now see different ways through.

As an example: it took me many years to either accept responsibility for being a role model and champion of change, or understand the positive impact that role models can have on changing behaviour. I was an experienced, senior female leader in technology, but at that time, it was important to me to ‘fit in’ and not to be thought of as ‘different.’ I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, or ‘ruffle feathers’ of my peers and managers (almost entirely men). I didn’t want to risk detracting from my professional credentials. Sound familiar? If I was thinking that way, imagine how those attitudes and (very real) fears could impact other decisions and actions I was taking as a leader. Extrapolate this to a department, or division, or whole organisation – and the mountain looms large.

Other false summits appeared on that mountain: unconscious bias training didn’t have the impact I hoped for, well-intended targets were mathematically impossible to achieve, data was misinterpreted or incomplete, and our focus was too much on diversity without improving inclusivity. My D&I education in recent years has shown me that I didn’t fully appreciate the (business) case for change, and hadn’t invested sufficiently in developing the motivations to change – to climb that mountain. All organisations – of any size – can make progress and be successful if they discover real motivators, and are honest about the challenges they’ll face along the way.

P.S. – Read the BBC’s new Diversity & Inclusion plan. I’m rooting from the outside now!

Rebecca Salsbury is one of our D&I consultants, specialising in Inclusive Leadership. She has built and led teams in the media and digital technology sectors.

If you’re ready to take stock of your D&I strategy and the impact it’s having, or restate the business case for your organisation, Voice At The Table can help: please get in touch!