Reading the air: high and low context communication in teams Picture the scene: you’re in a meeting with your new team. You ask what you think is a reasonable question, and knowing glances are exchanged across the room. A couple
Not Feeling Seen: Eye Contact and Psychological Safety There really is some bad advice and research around in respect to psychological safety, in particular how it relates to aspects of neurodiversity and culture. In this piece, we’re going to dive
It’s no good having a great culture if you’ve gone out of business. Psychological safety is the foundational factor in ensuring teams and organisations are as high performing as possible. It’s also ethically the right thing to do. People deserve
Verbally Speaking Up at Work Speaking with a client this week, we surfaced an interesting organisational antipattern to psychological safety. Sometimes, within an organisation, there exists an unwritten rule: voice your concerns, but only do it verbally in a call or meeting where
Welcome to the Psychological Safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You’re amazing. Having tried switching to a biweekly pattern, I’m now experimenting with alternating short-form and long-form newsletters each week. This week is a short form newsletter and highlights Just Culture,
1- Artefacts. These describe any overt, visible, describable aspects of the organisation. Think things like branding and logos, office design, dress code, policies and tools. Things that you can see.
2- Espoused values. This is how people would describe the organisation, in current or aspirational terms. These include missions, goals, value statements, and social contracts.
3- Underlying assumptions. These are unconscious, unspoken, hard to articulate elements of the organisation, particularly from within.
Whether organisations like to admit it or not, toxic work culture is still a major problem. A study from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that any workplace, which holds some form of toxicity and hostility, will likely see
Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions The 6 Cultural Dimensions is a framework in cross-cultural psychology developed by Geert Hofstede. It elucidates the influence of a society’s culture on its members’ values and behaviors using a structure derived from factor analysis. This theory
Weaponisation of Psychological Safety This week was a bit rubbish to be honest. We had a nasty experience when we were the victims of a rather sophisticated fraud attempt. It could have been awful, but with the help of various
I’ve had managers who said this to me in the past, and I’ve said it myself. It seems, on the face of it, to be a wise suggestion. Ask your people to think about solutions to the problems they encounter
This week we have ethics, productivity, kindness, systems convening, meetups, podcasts and spiritual teachings. I hope you enjoy it!Also: Would you like to measure and survey psychological safety in your organisation? I’m looking for a test case in order to create a
Introduction Thanks for subscribing to the psychological safety newsletter! This week we have some interesting controversies in leadership approaches at Basecamp and Away, how to measure and build psychological safety in short lived teams, and how to use humour to
News and opinion: This week, psychological safety seemed to really hit the mainstream business world. Maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s just about time, but either way, it’s a great thing: A fantastic piece from Brian Proffitt at Red Hat’s Open Source Program
