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Ricardo (4s): Hello, everyone. Welcome to the five minutes podcast. Today I'd like to talk about psychological safety and I don't want, of course, I'm not an expert in psychology or human behavior, but in practical terms, we leave in a conflict because what do we aim in our projects? In our initiatives, we aim and we focus on agility. We focused on moving fast. We focus on being adaptable, change, adaptability, creativity, experimentation. So we think about this fluid organization in this fluid product development or project management, but at the same time, we struggle to bring a certain level of safety in mostly the psychological safety for our teams.
Ricardo (53s): So what is that? So if we go back and try to understand a little bit more, what psychological safety is I want just to use and quote, professor Amy Edmondson from Harvard business school, where she say psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. So feeling psychologically safe means that you can speak up. You disagree. You can experiment. You can think out of the box and you will not fear a sense of punishment or sense of losing your job or being, you know, humiliated or suffer any kind of discrimination based on your ideas.
Ricardo (1m 39s): So this is the environment. So what happens today is most of the time we ask our teams to deliver something, but we don't provide this psychological safety to them to flourish. So basically I would recommend you in a very simple way, three basic steps to make this psychological safe, a more safer environment for people to flourish. The first one is being human. Remember if you're in the leadership position, you must be human. You must understand that people have fears even more now, when we think about COVID-19 and all this pandemic people are scared.
Ricardo (2m 19s): Everybody is scared. So you need to be human and sympathetic to this. So people need to understand that they don't work, or they are not managed by a machine, but by a human being. The second is to accept adversity. It's understanding I recorded a podcast about that, but it's to understanding that cannot control everything. You cannot transform your product development, your projects, or your initiatives into mathematics, because there is no sharp solution or a sharp path for every single step. So you need to accept that things may not work the way you have initially planned it and accept that.
Ricardo (3m 1s): And not just punish because punished someone because it was not according to the plan. And the third one is inclusive management. And what is that? It's not, for example, for me, I completely disagree on the top-down management, you know, I manage and you do. I think you do. I decide that you just execute. You need to understand that you losing a great opportunity to have opinions and have insights from those who are close to the problem. So you need to have inclusive management. So when you decide things, when you decide the best approach you use the collective knowledge, and people, even with the most strange ideas, they are welcome to speak up.
Ricardo (3m 45s): They are welcomed to disagree. They are welcomed to say, look, I don't think this is a good idea. No matter if it's coming from your CEO or if it's coming for your next intern. And this is the environment that produced this safety environment that will allow you to flourish. If you don't do that, people will always opt for the safest path. You know, the road that other people passed before even knowing that that road, that everybody walks in will not take your organization, to where it should be. So think about that and think about this psychological side and apply it in your projects and your initiatives.
Ricardo (4m 28s): See you next week with another five minutes podcast.
