Psychological Safety in the World

Soft Skills
Whilst I’m not really keen on the term “soft skills” (because really, the soft stuff is the hard stuff), this is a good article by Rebecca Knight on improving your soft skills as a remote worker. Rebecca suggests these 6 key tips:

Do

• Assess which soft skills you need to work on and create a development plan that includes activities that stretch and engage different parts of your personality. 
• Be curious, practice active listening, and take note of important details about your colleagues to show you pay attention.
• Proactively seek feedback to avoid the missed opportunities for improvement that can be a consequence of virtual work.

Don’t

• Be a passive conversationalist. Make an effort to connect with your colleagues by asking probing, meaningful questions that get beyond simple answers. 
• Disappear for hours leaving your team to wonder where you are. Be reliable and responsive to build trust and prove your work ethic.
• Overlook the importance of spending some time in-person with your colleagues. It’s essential for professional growth and soft skills development.

Resilience
“…organizations that you inhabit and you work at right now have sources of adaptive capacity, in fact a huge variety of it. Why do I know this? Because you are almost entirely from almost every standpoint, successful.” This is a great presentation by John Allspaw titled “Resilience Hides in Plain Sight“, about what resilience is and why it’s incredibly hard to recognise it, and I like this phrasing of what resilience means in practice: resilience is “people with expertise calling upon resources” to solve problems and learn from them.


Metaphors
“Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argues that metaphors are not merely a linguistic device but that they fundamentally shape how we perceive and interact with our surroundings. They suggest that metaphors influence not just how we communicate, but also how we think, solve problems, and understand the world around us. An excellent read.


Boeing, again.

Not a headline that one would typically expect to read. I wonder if the similarities between Boeing now and De Haviland in the 1950s, or even McDonnell Douglas before the Boeing merger, are being reflected on in Boeing boardrooms…


Education
Here’s a good piece by Damen Scott, principal of Achievement First Brooklyn High School in Brooklyn, New York about learning how he’d inadvertednyl caused a colleague to feel psychologically unsafe in a meeting, and how it forced him to reflect on his privilege to “disrupt and interrupt patterns of inequality and inequity”.


Safety on the Roads

I was honoured to be invited to speak at the National Highways Road Risk Conference this week, titled “Vehicles don’t crash, people do”, and it was an excellent event! More details in next week’s newsletter, but for now, this video shared by Mark Cartwright is a powerful reminder of the superpowers we all possess as individual drivers and as managers in organisations to reduce the risk of fatal road crashes.

This week’s poem:

All of Us, by Kit Wright

All of us are afraid
More often than we tell.

There are times we cling like mussels to the sea-wall,
And pray that the pounding waves
Won’t smash our shell.

Times we hear nothing but the sound
Of our loneliness, like a cracked bell
From fields far away where the trees are in icy shade.

O many a time in the night-time and in the day,
More often than we say.
We are afraid.

If people say they are never frightened,
I don’t believe them,

If people say they are frightened,
I want to retrieve them
From that dark shivering haunt
Where they don’t want to be,
Nor I.

Let’s make of ourselves, therefore,
an enormous sky
Over whatever
We hold most dear.

And we’ll comfort each other,
Comfort each other’s
Fear.