Why do you think it's so important to develop a culture of safety in the team? So I can show up as myself. That's the first thing that comes to my mind. Culture of psychological safety, yes, it makes me look forward to coming and being with those people. I'm thinking of a task force that I serve on now, and I actually look forward to going there. Because I know when I walk in the room, they're going to greet me by name, and I might have like some oddly different experiences from some of the other people in the room. But those experiences are like welcomed and I can share those ideas without any fear of negative feedback. I just feel like I can be myself. That is exactly what I was thinking. I would add to that when you can be yourself, life and work are just more fun. It's so much nicer to show up when you feel that you can bring your whole self, that you can be creative, that you can be whole, and that you're not going to be punished for trying to do the right thing even. A lot of times we shut people down even when they're not doing anything wrong, in inadvertently a lot of times. If you want the best out of your people, if you want them to bring who they are, it's got to feel like a safe space to be. I was just thinking to like it builds on itself. If I am feeling that it's safe, then I also feel like I can look around the room and see, who hasn't said something yet or who do we need to hear from? It's not just on the leader I think to build a culture of safety, but it's on every member of the team to build that. In possibly ironic way, so both of you have talked about bringing your self. But if we all are bringing ourselves, you feel where I'm going? But if potential for yourself showing up, being maybe not the self that I wanted to do, engage with in my self-presentation. Yes. It's interesting that you both been talking about how culture of safety allows you to show up as yourself. Because in a really complicated way, each of us showing up fully and being able to fully engage could create some dynamics within the team that maybe complicated or challenging. How does a culture of safety help with that or facilitate making that work? To me that's the point. The point is, you can show up one way, someone else can show up another way, someone else can show up a third way. Really this is where the role of the leader comes in, is to create the space to say you all can bring those perspectives, you can show up those ways, and let's have a conversation where we debate, where we dialogue, where we get into the weeds, and then let's add that allow something valuable to emerge. Cultures of safety doesn't just mean it's fun to work here and we know this. We're going to get really into this with Amy Edmondson definition of psychological safety, which is one of the most important and groundbreaking findings, if you will, in the world of work. It's a space where you are not punished unnecessarily for things that most of us are worried about being punished for saying the wrong thing, asking a question that's stupid, that's a real big one. When you make a mistake instead of sweeping it under the rug, everyone says, all right this mistake happen, let's figure out how to fix it and move forward, let's figure out what the problem was. I'm not saying it's easy. I was just having a conversation with someone the other day who's laughing and he was like, you know we teach all the psych safety stuff, but then we're dealing with stuff that doesn't demonstrate psych safety, and it's like what? That's the point. It's not going to be perfect, but we can try, we can make an effort. I think it gets back to this idea of building cultures. We talk so much in this course about building cultures. I think about that term almost like building civilizations. You think about how much time that takes to build these shared understandings and ways of doing things. How much time and effort and intentionality it will take to build this culture of dissent, disagreement. We're all showing up in our personal weird ways and we will necessarily have differences. Then there's hierarchy on top of that, we'll talk about that. I think what matters is knowing that it's going to take time and effort to develop. I love that idea of building. The civilization building, team-building, organization building, and building an environment by creating a safe space for people to show up or building an environment that allows the team to thrive.
