Leaders Reflections

How do you create psychological safety?

Be intentional with inclusion and create a sense of belonging for EVERYONE!

Are you benefiting from ALL the talent in your team?

Not only are you wasting your recruitment efforts if your culture is not psychologically safe, (because if it’s not your people will up and leave), but you’re also missing opportunities for growth by ignoring some of the talent on your team. How do you create a sense of belonging in your leaders role?

Let’s take meetings for example, what are your meetings like?

Are you hearing from the same voices all the time?

Are some voices louder than others?

Do you notice who gets interrupted, or who does the interrupting? Does everyone always agree with what the boss says? How do you manage this?

If you aren’t encouraging an environment where people feel confident to speak up without the fear of judgement or humiliation, then you are missing out on the contribution of all your talent. 

Leaders – be intentional about hearing all contributions – including those that do not agree with you.

Next time you’re leading a meeting be vulnerable by asking, ‘What am I missing?’ This will encourage people to come speak up and contribute. 

If all you’ve heard are agreements, encourage people to offer a different point of view. For example, you could say, ‘Let me hear some dissenting views, or I’m keen to hear alternative viewpoints to this…’ This will ensure you have covered all possible angles, improve your creativity and enhance your problem solving and decision making capability. 

So, do you know how much time & money you are spending on recruitment and training of new staff? Is it too much?

Whats the impact of you having to recruit more often than you want to?

As well as the obvious, time and money, there’s also the impact on your bottom line, performance, corporate knowledge the team and working relationships.

Do you know why you are recruiting as often as you are?

To what extent are you analysing your exit data?

So how can you avoid having to recruit more people? 

Not losing the talent you’ve got would be a good start by creating a psychologically safe environment. 

There are loads of great ideas to create a psychologically safe environment in ‘The Psychological Safety Playbook’ by Karolin Helbig and Minette Norman – if you’re leading a team, you must read it!

Until the next time, Wendy