Latest / Smart Business Growth with Nicky Miklós / High Performance ‘Teaming’ Insights from Dr. Amy Silver

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High Performance ‘Teaming’ Insights from Dr. Amy Silver · Smart Business Growth with Nicky Miklós

• 0:04
  Nicky: Welcome to the Smart Business Growth Podcast with Nikki and Ness.
• 0:11
  Ness: We would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of country, the Turrbal and Bunurong people of Brisbane and Melbourne respectively, where Nikki and I both work and live.
• 0:23
  Ness: Dr Amy Silver is a psychologist, speaker, author and media commentator on sustainable high performance and the mindset to get there, both individually and collectively.
• 0:34
  Ness: She partners with organizations, teams and individuals to offer her coaching, leadership, teaming programs, whole culture programs, keynotes and offsites.
• 0:44
  Ness: Amy's programs help participants to build the behaviors necessary to lead into the future courageously, whilst growing psychological safety in the workplace.
• 0:53
  Ness: Her work helps people lead, raising courage, driving effective conversations and psychological safety.
• 1:00
  Ness: Today we tap into Amy's extensive experience.
• 1:03
  Ness: After all, she has spent the last three decades as a psychologist, developing content on how fear restricts us and safety expands us, and we dive into the psychological safety in the workplace concept.
• 1:16
  Ness: Amy's take on high performance when it comes to teams had Nikki and I thinking a little bit differently, and it may just do the same for you.
• 1:23
  Ness: I love that she challenges what's possible in the workplace for the better, both for a profitable business and for an empowered team.
• 1:30
  Ness: I know you're going to love it.
• 1:32
  Ness: Let's jump straight in, amy.
• 1:33
  Ness: We're so grateful to have this conversation with you today because Nikki and I talk a lot about peak performance, not just in teams but for individuals as well, and we believe it's a really critical factor in smart business growth.
• 1:48
  Ness: I noticed, though, your terminology is a little bit different.
• 1:51
  Ness: You talk about high performance teaming.
• 1:54
  Ness: Can you help us understand what that is, what aspect and angle you bring into that conversation?
• 2:01
  Ness: Thanks for having me.
• 2:02
  Amy Silver: Oh, you're so welcome into that conversation.
• 2:09
  Amy Silver: Thanks for having me.
• 2:09
  Amy Silver: Well, I think that to team is a verb, and I like the idea of reminding everybody that when we show up at work we are part of a team and that's the noun.
• 2:15
  Amy Silver: We are in a team but we have to team.
• 2:17
  Amy Silver: So to call us into the doing word of teaming, I think, is really it's just a semantic, but it's actually an invitation to take the role of nurturing and thinking about high performance from a team perspective rather than just an individual.
• 2:35
  Amy Silver: And I think you're right.
• 2:36
  Amy Silver: I mean, all my work is also around the individual.
• 2:39
  Amy Silver: So, you know, a self-managed individual is essential, and then we have to take responsibility for managing the team too.
• 2:47
  Amy Silver: So anything that we do has a knock-on effect for everybody else that we're teaming with.
• 2:53
  Amy Silver: So to take that role seriously and I think as we've progressed, you know, certainly through the last few years, that's becoming even more clear that our role is to team, not just to show up as a high performing individual, but to recognise our impact on each other.
• 3:10
  Ness: What are some of the finer qualities around being successful at teaming?
• 3:15
  Ness: What are the attributes we need to tap into to make sure that we are good at that?
• 3:20
  Amy Silver: I think it's first of all taking responsibility for self Again, you know, noticing what impact we have on each other, of noticing and then suggesting or picking up on other people's cues.
• 3:51
  Amy Silver: Returning to the what are we actually here to talk about and everybody taking a shared responsibility for that, because it sort of can spiral up or down our performance pretty quickly when nobody's facilitating.
• 4:05
  Amy Silver: And if one person is facilitating, I think we get into a danger zone there because we've got the dominant sort of thinking style, possibly if one person's taking that role.
• 4:17
  Amy Silver: So I think the qualities of teaming well is to recognize the impact that we have on each other and manage self, but also to invite everybody's best version of their selves and then to facilitate the space.
• 4:32
  Ness: It's really interesting you say that.
• 4:34
  Ness: So recently I've been facilitating for clients and online, which is always more challenging than being all in the same room together, just from a connection point of view.
• 4:44
  Ness: And I say that because what I noticed I don't say it all the time, but a particular example I'm thinking of maybe half the group were sitting with clearly no distractions, leaning in, looking at the camera, engaging, and then the other half you could tell they were typing I don't think it was notes, everything that we were talking about was amazing that they were typing.
• 5:04
  Ness: I don't think it was notes.
• 5:05
  Ness: Everything that we were talking about was you know that you know amazing that they were just madly typing out notes, so they were distracted and they they come back when they were asked to contribute and and then you could see them sort of disengage again or may, not making eye contact, not being fully present, and just to me.
• 5:25
  Ness: I thought about that from the perspective of how we support each other as a team, because the way they showed up is actually a contribution to how other people would have had a feeling of connection with their team, felt like it was important to them, the impression that you're giving the story, that you're letting people make up about you.
• 5:47
  Ness: And you know, because I think sometimes we think we're just super busy and we're really important and I have to mouldy skill because I've got to turn up to this team thing but I also have all these other things done.
• 5:59
  Amy Silver: Yes, or that my only value in this team is my individual knowledge which I think is a real shame because a good question is powerful or if you aren't necessarily engaged in the direct conversation that's happening at that moment, but you notice something that could elevate the quality of the conversation that's so crucial.
• 6:18
  Amy Silver: But I think, yeah, we sometimes think of a team or a meeting as a group of individuals coming to sort of represent their own stuff.
• 6:26
  Amy Silver: And I think you know all the literature from psychological safety sort of would suggest that you know the quality of the conversations has the biggest impact on the outcomes of the work.
• 6:36
  Amy Silver: So, nurturing that and sort of recognizing that, even if we show up and we're not saying anything, that has just this huge impact on the quality of what happens in that space, and and then sort of acting into the diversity of the individuals you know, as opposed to everybody, sort of you know dialing back their own thing and you know we get into sort of a really stilted sort of human experience when we're not feeling that we can activate our best self.
• 7:05
  Amy Silver: And I think that we all have a responsibility to create that for each other, Absolutely.
• 7:10
  Nicky: I also because what I'm hearing in this is, when you're talking about facilitating, it's not a leader necessarily facilitating this, it's the individuals stepping up and having that safe space and being able to be their unique, authentic selves.
• 7:25
  Nicky: And as I'm listening to this conversation, so my background is very sales oriented and sales leadership and we were kind of one of the first teams to introduce team targets as well as individual targets.
• 7:39
  Nicky: And that's the first thing that came to mind when you were talking about this, because in some sales environments, and especially maybe 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, and some today, it's very individual results focused, like it's me and I'm winning, and even some of the conversations we have.
• 7:54
  Nicky: We love Andy Meikle's definition of high performance, which is 70% about results, 20% about being a person of influence.
• 8:04
  Nicky: So who am I in the team?
• 8:05
  Nicky: How do I influence the team?
• 8:07
  Nicky: And that reminds me of this facilitation piece.
• 8:10
  Nicky: How do I show up?
• 8:12
  Nicky: How do I share?
• 8:13
  Nicky: Am I open and transparent?
• 8:14
  Nicky: And then 10% comes down to being a person of grace, in that I manage my emotions in an appropriate, healthy way.
• 8:22
  Nicky: And so I love this term of teaming and I love that we're bringing this in as a verb, as a doing and action, because I think that there's some teams and it's bringing it out of just the sales environment, but definitely for sales teams and all environments, and then the beautiful cherry on top, I suppose, around we all facilitate this together.
• 8:45
  Nicky: I mean, when that works well, I can imagine that's a very empowering autonomous team.
• 8:51
  Nicky: And I'm curious to know because I know in my experience just with targets, which is a little bit different, but it's the same premise there's sometimes a bit of pushback and I'm wondering what's the pushback that you've seen, or what are the barriers to individuals, teams, leaders, even perhaps against this approach, if any.
• 9:13
  Amy Silver: Look, I think you're right.
• 9:13
  Amy Silver: I think look, in my model of kind of helping high performance teaming, there's three things there's collective goals and then there's self-managed individuals and then there's the interactions, the quality of the interactions that we have.
• 9:26
  Amy Silver: So those are the three areas that we work on.
• 9:28
  Amy Silver: But I think you're right that there is resistance, and part of that is our historical kind of attachment to the way that conversations happen or the hierarchy that we defer to.
• 9:41
  Amy Silver: You know, a lot of people in the room would not want to interrupt the conversation by bringing in a facilitative kind of question.
• 9:47
  Amy Silver: Or there's a piece of sort of visit my place and I don't understand the acronym, but you know I'm sure everyone else does, so I won't ask, you know.
• 9:56
  Amy Silver: And there's these kind of things that we do to sort of inhibit our facilitation of the space because of preconceived ideas that we have around the way in which we should communicate.
• 10:07
  Amy Silver: And I think leaders are as susceptible to that as well.
• 10:11
  Amy Silver: I should be a leader and I should do these things, and good leadership looks like this, and so that kind of we start playing these roles when we get into work that sort of undermine and sort of counter our natural human instincts to communicate effectively, which we do when we're together, you know, in sort of non-work spaces.
• 10:31
  Amy Silver: So I think we have got a lot of resistance and I think that you know part of that.
• 10:36
  Amy Silver: Well, in my teaching I'm always talking about, you know, the way that courage impacts us and the way that fears get in the way of us being our best selves.
• 10:45
  Amy Silver: And in a collective, you know, often there are fears about, well, if I do this, will I be rejected?
• 10:50
  Amy Silver: If I do this, will people like me?
• 10:52
  Amy Silver: If I do this, will people think that's a stupid thing to say?
• 10:56
  Amy Silver: If I do this, well, people think that's a stupid thing to say.
• 10:57
  Amy Silver: People think I'm wasting their time.
• 10:59
  Amy Silver: So we're trying to help in my work.
• 11:01
  Amy Silver: I'm trying to help people realize, oh, that's just what my brain's doing, because it's trying to protect me, but actually what actually serves our collective goals is this and the other.
• 11:10
  Amy Silver: And then it's, you know, everybody has to be in on the game and understand that everybody's going to make mistakes and we need permission to sort of interrupt and get it wrong and you know, and whatever.
• 11:19
  Amy Silver: So there's the courage to speak into it and to take a different role from the preconceived ideas of how we team.
• 11:27
  Amy Silver: And then there's also the vulnerability side of courage.
• 11:30
  Amy Silver: So how do I let go?
• 11:31
  Amy Silver: How do I invite new perspectives?
• 11:33
  Amy Silver: Okay, so I'm really clear on what I think the conclusion of this conversation is, but I'm still going to pause and invite somebody that's new to the team to say what do you see and how did I do and where did I interrupt and where did I get too dominant?
• 11:49
  Amy Silver: And those are it's also courage, but in a more vulnerable space of acknowledging the impact that we have on each other and acknowledging the fact that we have these brains that sort of undermine some of our longer term goals, in the hope that it's saving us in the short term kind of social situation that we find ourselves in.
• 12:08
  Ness: So it seems to me that you know to arrive at that place, there's got to be a lot of intentional in the culture.
• 12:17
  Ness: It has to be intentional that that's how the business wants to run.
• 12:20
  Ness: So that you would talk to your team about teaming, that you would create a safe space for them, that you would encourage people opening up, that you would give them support to do that and potentially have somebody to facilitate to start with, to teach them how to do that.
• 12:35
  Ness: What, in your experience you know?
• 12:37
  Ness: If you're talking about going from a dysfunctional team to what you've just described, what would be the, I guess, the key moving point that would allow a team to get there?
• 12:48
  Ness: Or is it kind of impossible if you?
• 12:50
  Ness: No, it's not.
• 12:51
  Amy Silver: It's not impossible, it's really simple and you know the process essentially is look, I think a lot of the time we were used to talk about everybody having high functioning conversations at work because that was a nice thing to do and people you know would appreciate it.
• 13:06
  Amy Silver: But there is so much evidence to talk to this is actually an essential part of business that if we don't team well, we are losing money, we are missing potential innovations and we are making mistakes that we then repeat.
• 13:22
  Amy Silver: So there is so much, so much hardcore evidence that really all you have to do when you're wanting when I'm wanting to work with, say, a whole culture, is present.
• 13:34
  Amy Silver: The facts, you know we save money if we team better.
• 13:38
  Amy Silver: This isn't a nice and fluffy kind of nice to have.
• 13:41
  Amy Silver: This is a business imperative.
• 13:44
  Amy Silver: And the more disparate we become, the more global, the more hybrid, the faster paced, the more we have to focus on the skill of teaming, because it's so clear that none of us can do it on our own and the amount of internal friction that's created through people not teaming well it's just too expensive for us to sort of deny.
• 14:07
  Amy Silver: So, first up, the first thing is you save money by working on the teaming behavior.
• 14:14
  Amy Silver: So it's not difficult to get people to buy into that principle.
• 14:18
  Amy Silver: What's tricky is then the you know, the acknowledgement that that takes work internally often, you know, and so that's the hard work, but the sales pitch, for it is so clear, and, yeah, I think that that bit is the easiest, easiest bit.
• 14:37
  Nicky: I mean this would be taking care of so many basic hygiene needs around belonging, around feeling supported, around diversity.
• 14:45
  Nicky: There's so many stats out there around burnout and mental health and well-being, feedback, yeah, and everything.
• 14:51
  Nicky: Yeah, all of these problems, it's kind of like.
• 14:54
  Nicky: Sometimes it's like personally, you know, it's easy to take some action when a pain point has happened.
• 14:59
  Nicky: I was talking to a leader just yesterday.
• 15:01
  Nicky: He was like I know, I need better boundaries.
• 15:02
  Nicky: We've been coaching, you know, for a while, so I knew it.
• 15:05
  Nicky: But then when I was physically I couldn't physically walk and these, you know, all these things happened.
• 15:09
  Nicky: And now I finished work at 4.30.
• 15:11
  Nicky: I'm like okay so that thing needed to happen.
• 15:13
  Nicky: That was the leverage point, finally, for some change, and what we're talking about is this on a bigger scale, but it's almost like that's happening now.
• 15:22
  Nicky: The injury is happening because the statistics show us if it ain't happening in your team yet, then it could be around the corner.
• 15:32
  Nicky: So now's the time to start taking some action, because what you said around okay, great, it's going to save money and there's going to be an investment of time right now to get it done.
• 15:37
  Nicky: We're in this busy culture where it's just hectic, so we've got to work through that.
• 15:42
  Amy Silver: Yeah, and I think you know it's very clear to businesses that have, you know, different business units or different departments.
• 15:50
  Amy Silver: You know if you kind of did a time check on how many conversations are about what they're doing, you know and how they've behaved.
• 15:57
  Amy Silver: And if only they did this, you know, and you just think what, like we're all supposed to be on the same team, Like it's so inefficient and given the amount of responsiveness that organizations have to have to the people that work there, people want to get things done, people want to feel proud of the work that they're doing, and when you have internal blocks to doing that, it's so demotivating and so it's just such a waste of time.
• 16:25
  Amy Silver: So I think that you know there are key messages that the whole organization needs to have, which is really around.
• 16:32
  Amy Silver: You know the impact of not doing this well and the role that courage has to play in it.
• 16:37
  Amy Silver: And then I think it's a team based sort of piece.
• 16:41
  Amy Silver: So you know working on what collective leadership is, working on how the team is doing, working out what it is that they're trying to do.
• 16:50
  Amy Silver: I mean, I was with a board recently and we had to actually spend, you know, two hours talking about what is the function of this board, you know.
• 16:59
  Amy Silver: So, apart from all the judicial requirements, they, you know, really needed to sort of think about what is this team doing?
• 17:07
  Amy Silver: You know, what are we supposed to be doing?
• 17:09
  Amy Silver: So it takes a long, you know, it's crazy, but that's sort of where we have to start is like, what is the purpose of this team?
• 17:16
  Amy Silver: What are we trying to do?
• 17:18
  Amy Silver: And then, when we can collectively, as you said before, bring people onto the same page and they see themselves as a unit, sort of creating something as opposed to a group of individuals, then we're into a well, how do we make these individuals team?
• 17:34
  Amy Silver: And that's a beautiful you know's, and it does open up kind of the whole sort of person conversations, you know, because, of course, you know, in real life, you know, you can't even get two people to live together for a few years.
• 17:50
  Amy Silver: So to get like a group of nine people or whatever, there's a lot to do and we spend so much time at work right.
• 17:59
  Ness: So the people that we're teaming with are the people that we might see more than what we see our own family at times so I think it's really important Do the Smart Growth Survey in under 60 seconds to get your hands on our Smart Growth Blueprint.
• 18:15
  Nicky: You'll get immediate access to our four favorite strategies for sales, profit planning and team, and you'll identify which phase of smart growth your business is currently in whether it's crisis, build growth or momentum mode, so that you can move your way to the next phase with ease.
• 18:33
  Nicky: All you have to do is click the link in the show notes.
• 18:38
  Ness: I'm curious, amy, this concept of psychologically safe cultures, how does what we've been talking about tie in with that?
• 18:46
  Ness: And in fact, probably even the first question is what is a psychologically safe culture?
• 18:51
  Amy Silver: So psychological safety has been talked about for a very long time.
• 18:55
  Amy Silver: Unfortunately, over recent years it's kind of got a bit conflated with the terminology around psychosocial safety.
• 19:01
  Amy Silver: So psychosocial safety is more around the kind of well-being, around the kind of what we can expect for a safe mental health workspace.
• 19:12
  Amy Silver: That's had a lot of recent legislation and organizations are having to really turn towards understanding how they monitor and respond to things like you know, working hours and difficult situations at work, where people are put in vulnerable situations.
• 19:26
  Amy Silver: So that's all good, but that's at a different end of the spectrum from psychological safety as it's defined in the literature and as it's defined in my world which is really around.
• 19:37
  Amy Silver: Can we move from a place of either high fear that kind of pushes us into defensiveness or prickliness, or siloed thinking, or pushes us into avoidance and politeness and being very kind of subservient, because those responses to fear, whether you're going down the sort of more you know fight side or the more flight side, when we're in that situation, that takes away from the performance of our team.
• 20:10
  Amy Silver: So a psychologically safe space or a psychologically safe team is one where we're not triggered into fear and that that fear prevents us from communicating or creating together in high performing ways.
• 20:25
  Amy Silver: So it came out sort of like about 15 years ago a study by Google that found that psychological safety was the number one predictor of high performing teams.
• 20:33
  Amy Silver: So since that study came out there's just been so much attention on it.
• 20:38
  Amy Silver: A couple of real kind of key people to be across in terms of the literature would be Amy Edmondson, who's a professor, and Tim Clark, who wrote a book called the Four Stages of Psychological Safety, but they both have kind of elevated the importance of attending to this at work.
• 20:55
  Amy Silver: If people feel that they are in fear, they cannot perform well.
• 20:59
  Amy Silver: So it's the other end.
• 21:01
  Amy Silver: It's not the toxic kind of safety end.
• 21:04
  Amy Silver: It's an unfortunate name actually, because it's kind of got a bit confused in everybody's mind and everyone's talking about mental health really, as opposed to what it should be.
• 21:13
  Amy Silver: We're talking about is interpersonal friction.
• 21:16
  Amy Silver: That reduces the quality of our intellectual friction, and we need intellectual friction for us to be doing good work.
• 21:23
  Amy Silver: But if we get caught in the interpersonal friction then we are reducing the quality of what we can do together.
• 21:31
  Nicky: So it's almost like we're stuck in this fight or flight and therefore we can't be as productive, as efficient.
• 21:37
  Nicky: And that connection then, to taming, when we talked about facilitating, and to be able to do that you have to feel that you can be you, yeah, and you have to be able to go back and say, oh, I made a mistake, or sorry, I said that, but I actually mean this.
• 21:52
  Amy Silver: Or you know, when I did that, did I talk over you and stop you saying something?
• 21:56
  Amy Silver: Or I'm sorry that I did this thing.
• 22:00
  Amy Silver: So the way it's defined in the literature is that we're safe to take an interpersonal risk.
• 22:06
  Amy Silver: So the interpersonal risk required to apologize, to go back to something, to question, to be curious, to bring up a new idea, to talk about a failure, those are all moments.
• 22:18
  Amy Silver: They don't have to be like major interpersonal risks, but they're like a moment where you're having to kind of go oh, am I safe enough to say that, you know?
• 22:26
  Amy Silver: Am I safe enough to ask that, you know?
• 22:26
  Amy Silver: Am I safe enough to ask that?
• 22:28
  Amy Silver: And all the research and there's so much now says, if you don't feel safe, you're not going to do it.
• 22:35
  Amy Silver: And then we lose out.
• 22:37
  Nicky: And so is that the sign of a culture or team that is not psychologically safe.
• 22:43
  Nicky: Like what are the signs, you know, that people don't?
• 22:45
  Amy Silver: speak up.
• 22:46
  Amy Silver: Yeah, people don't speak up and there's a heap of measures.
• 22:49
  Amy Silver: I mean, I use a measure, that's really easy.
• 22:51
  Amy Silver: So you just ask.
• 22:52
  Amy Silver: You know people tell you but yeah, it's.
• 22:54
  Amy Silver: Do I feel safe enough to take a risk?
• 22:56
  Amy Silver: Do I feel safe on this team?
• 22:58
  Amy Silver: Do I feel safe enough to acknowledge a failure on this team?
• 23:01
  Amy Silver: Do I feel safe enough to ask for help on this team?
• 23:03
  Amy Silver: So you're just kind of asking all the time and it's not about feeling sort of kumbaya safe and kind of you know everything being really polite, it's the opposite.
• 23:15
  Amy Silver: It's actually are we safe enough for candor?
• 23:18
  Amy Silver: Are we safe enough for questioning each other?
• 23:21
  Amy Silver: Are we safe enough for feedback?
• 23:22
  Amy Silver: Are we safe enough?
• 23:23
  Amy Silver: So it's kind of got this bad rap that it's all about us sitting around kind of being nice to each other and it's completely the opposite.
• 23:31
  Amy Silver: If I walk into a team and everyone's being really super nice, I know they're not safe.
• 23:36
  Amy Silver: Wow, because they wouldn't be they, wouldn't you know?
• 23:40
  Amy Silver: there's no challenge, they're not challenging each other, and you might as well just have one person, and it's not that I don't want people to be polite, obviously yeah, that's really minimizing it, but it's like I want to be able to see the friction intellectually, I want to see the difference of opinion, and there's so much to say that there's a great study that talks about diversity obviously being essential to the quality of the work that we produce, but only if we have psychological safety.
• 24:08
  Amy Silver: Yes, we don't have safety, then the diversity reduces the the quality of the work because we're actually getting one person less or two people less or whoever you know.
• 24:19
  Amy Silver: You're kind of pulling away from the potential of the collective.
• 24:22
  Amy Silver: If people haven't got safety to ask questions, to bring up new ideas, to question, to say that's wrong or I don't believe in that or I disagree, or all of those things.
• 24:34
  Amy Silver: Tiny little interpersonal risk, that becomes massive in a group where you don't feel safe.
• 24:40
  Nicky: Yeah, so having an opinion and being able to show different emotions as well, so you don't have to be the happy or the false polite all the time.
• 24:49
  Nicky: And also, it's not a tick and flick.
• 24:51
  Nicky: So the diversity checkbox you know it's sort of this is a reminder to just take a little moment.
• 24:57
  Nicky: But what I love about this conversation is so much let's be honest understanding that difference and also it's actually the starting point can be quite simple to see if you do have a psychological safe space for your team.
• 25:12
  Nicky: Yeah, because if, for some reason, your team are not able to be honest with you, look into that.
• 25:18
  Nicky: Or you're not able to be honest with them or you're not able to be honest with them.
• 25:22
  Amy Silver: Yeah, it's not just them to lead us.
• 25:24
  Amy Silver: I think it's all of us.
• 25:26
  Amy Silver: And again, it's just pointing back to this idea that we share this space and the quality of our work depends on this climate that we're operating in.
• 25:35
  Amy Silver: And if we don't feel if I don't, if I feel like I and you know this is a massive problem for leadership of the now and and really going into the future, I feel like really concerned about this.
• 25:48
  Amy Silver: But leadership is lonely, yeah, and it's hard, and the only well, not the only but a great way to get through that is to remember that you have a team and that that's therefore the.
• 26:06
  Amy Silver: The space to nurture is not me to the individuals in the team, but us as a team lifting it.
• 26:12
  Amy Silver: And how do we do that?
• 26:14
  Amy Silver: And how do I?
• 26:15
  Amy Silver: How do I be honest about my own fears and my own things, so that that I'm encouraging others to step into that?
• 26:22
  Amy Silver: And, yeah, I feel like we're all in this.
• 26:25
  Amy Silver: We all have a massive.
• 26:27
  Amy Silver: So, yes, I think leaders have a responsibility to nurture the psychological safety and, due to the fact that we are a little bit biased in terms of sort of power and control sort of issues, leaders do carry a lot more weight in the responsibility to alter it.
• 26:42
  Amy Silver: Obviously, it's still a shared principle.
• 26:45
  Amy Silver: We still need to sort of think about this and I think just again, just tapping sort of think about this and I think just again, just tapping into something that you just said, I think, acknowledging that the starting point is that none of us feel safe, as opposed to are we safe and we fix something it's just like well, no, none of us do, because that's the way our brain is designed.
• 27:05
  Amy Silver: You know we have this brain that is designed to sort of look for fear.
• 27:07
  Amy Silver: So that's the starting.
• 27:07
  Amy Silver: Our brain is designed.
• 27:07
  Amy Silver: You know we have this brain that is designed to sort of look for fear.
• 27:08
  Amy Silver: So that's the starting point is, let's assume we are feeling unsafe to, yeah, some of these things.
• 27:15
  Amy Silver: So let's kind of think about where and what we could do, as opposed to are we broken?
• 27:21
  Nicky: yeah, yeah, I love that, I love that because then all then, already actually it almost takes the judgment out of it it's completely's completely.
• 27:27
  Nicky: We're all starting from the same point.
• 27:29
  Nicky: We're assuming that we're psychologically unsafe and that conversation's done.
• 27:33
  Amy Silver: Yeah, or where can we get better?
• 27:36
  Amy Silver: Yeah, great.
• 27:37
  Amy Silver: Or what's the next thing?
• 27:38
  Amy Silver: And I think it's the same.
• 27:38
  Amy Silver: You guys know this as well, but you know that's the same thing.
• 27:41
  Amy Silver: For my talking about courage and fear, I think let's just lay it on the table.
• 27:46
  Amy Silver: We're all frightened, it's okay.
• 27:48
  Amy Silver: We don't need to pretend we're looking for and hunting for kind of ways to twist this a little bit, to shape it, an acknowledgement that it's hard but we're in this together.
• 28:02
  Amy Silver: And back to your point again.
• 28:03
  Amy Silver: You know, collective goals mean that we really need to sort of focus on this, so it's a really justified space for us to speak to.
• 28:11
  Nicky: And also the collective goals would help offset the loneliness.
• 28:14
  Nicky: You know we hear that a lot in our coaching and then our guest speakers share statistics on loneliness with CEOs and leaders and you know we hear it a lot.
• 28:23
  Nicky: So that team goal, it helps solve that problem.
• 28:25
  Nicky: I feel like this is a good point and we're kind of on the precipice of an action.
• 28:30
  Nicky: So we like to wrap up, of course, for our listeners to be able to take one actionable action, preferably within the next 24 hours.
• 28:38
  Nicky: So I feel like a good jumping off point could be.
• 28:41
  Nicky: We've all assumed that our work environment, our team at the culture, is psychologically unsafe.
• 28:47
  Amy Silver: By the way, I think that's I wouldn't.
• 28:48
  Amy Silver: I probably wouldn't phrase it like that.
• 28:50
  Amy Silver: Okay, great you tell me.
• 28:51
  Amy Silver: I just think it's not that we're unsafe, it's just that there are going to be fears.
• 28:56
  Amy Silver: Yes, that kind of inhibit our collective, okay great.
• 29:00
  Amy Silver: So, whatever our high performance, we all have fears, and there's maybe some fears between us as well.
• 29:06
  Amy Silver: So let's look for those fears so that we can learn to manage them.
• 29:10
  Nicky: So yeah, that's so.
• 29:11
  Nicky: It's almost the assumption, rather than that there's areas of improvement.
• 29:15
  Amy Silver: Yeah, and just the assumption and just the language around it is just sort of let's be honest about it and kind of not feel ashamed of it and not feel self-critical, or you know, and it's it is sort of the leader's sort of place to kind of just be really scientific about it and just go let's just explore these.
• 29:35
  Amy Silver: You know, it's not, it doesn't have to be like really deep and it doesn't have to be that.
• 29:40
  Amy Silver: And there's a another actionable thing would be to look at Amy Edmondson's questions on how to discover whether a team has got psychological safety, because they're just nice little prompts for people to use to have a conversation.
• 29:52
  Amy Silver: It doesn't have to be a huge thing, it's just a positioning of it and maybe using one of her questions as a starting point to have a conversation.
• 30:01
  Nicky: Amazing.
• 30:02
  Nicky: So we've got the mindset shift has already happened listening to this.
• 30:06
  Nicky: That's, it's done.
• 30:07
  Nicky: The actionable action is to go and look at amy edmonston we might put a link in the show notes to make it really really easy for you and, of course, go and check out dr amy silver's work as well.
• 30:17
  Nicky: I'm going to put that as an equal next step, which brings me to if any of our listeners and viewers would like to friendly stalk you, where might, might they find you?
• 30:26
  Nicky: Where's the best way to connect with you?
• 30:28
  Amy Silver: Oh, linkedin, instagram, wherever you want, or you can just write to me, Amy, at DrAmySilvercom, and I have a blog and all the things, so I'm not difficult to find Excellent and you've got a very easy name it's just Amy Silver.
• 30:46
  Ness: Thank you so so much for joining us today.
• 30:48
  Ness: I've taken so much out of this and I know that others will as well, and I love being in your presence to hear your message.
• 30:55
  Ness: This isn't the first time we've had conversations and I just look forward to the next one again, and we hope to share even wider with this message today.
• 31:03
  Ness: Thanks for listening and watching everyone, and we will catch you soon.
• 31:06
  Ness: See you later.
• 31:07
  Ness: Thanks for listening to watching everyone and we will catch you soon.
• 31:10
  Ness: See you later.
• 31:10
  Ness: Thanks for listening to today's ep.
• 31:11
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• 31:17
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• 31:25
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• 31:37
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• 31:44
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• 31:46
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• 31:50
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