Fostering psychological safety in research environments [solo]

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better. In today's solo episode, I want to invite us all to reflect on what are the ways that we can each contribute to creating great research cultures. And in particular, I'm going to focus on this concept of psychological safety as a key requirement for creating research cultures that foster good science and good wellbeing. As a reminder in the last episode, we celebrated a prize winning research environment. We heard from Line and Nicklas who nominated their department for the prize that was awarded by the Danish Young Academy. And we heard from Nina from the academy. Who reflected on the patterns that the committee saw across the nominations for what makes for a great research environment. So just as a recap, let's hear from Nina.

The most common thing is that people describe that they have a sense of belonging to their research environment. That's the most important factor. To create that sense. So, um, So that includes having a common purpose or a common identity, a defined mission that people can jump onto. And also, ways of promoting diversity and ensuring that people can be their true selves, they feel comfortable as the person they are, it's having a shared set of values that people can agree to having clear expectations. So people know what, what is expected. It's having a way to foster and value creativity. Setting up structures where people have time to explore creative ideas and discussing new ideas in an environment where they're not afraid to express those ideas and they can get constructive feedback As Line and Nicklas also said that it builds on initiatives from the top and from the bottom. So everybody contributes in their own way to this environment.

As Line and Nicklas also said this connects to the concept of psychological safety. I asked them, what did they mean by psychological safety.

Yeah, it's, it's that you're feel safe in the environment you're a part of. That you you'll safe enough to make mistakes doing the process you're in that you don't have to do it the correct way every single time. And then feel the support both when you're succeeding with things, but also when you're not succeeding. So you feel like, yeah, you feel safe in, in things when you're doing things.

This concept of psychological safety and its association with, with notions of belonging and inclusion. Is so critically important to creating great research cultures, research environments. And before I go on to describe psychological safety in a little bit more detail. It's probably worth reflecting on what might be the research environments that could win the Razzie awards. The, uh, anti great research environment wards. And towards this, I can reflect on examples that I've heard from different people that I've talked with or, experiences that I've heard people share workshops that we've run. And also experiences that I've had myself. Though, I won't make clear in the following examples, which are mine and which are others, or which institutions are involved. So. Imagine you're in an environment where you're in a meeting. And this could be a faculty meeting or a group meeting or a project meeting. Maybe you're in a tenured position. But you're fairly new to the place. And you put your hand up to make a contribution and the person who's in charge of that meeting every time you try to speak, they deliberately or so it seems to you. They turn around in their chair to face away from you. And may get distracted on their phone or choose that moment to go to the bathroom. And you're sitting there feeling really red in the face and embarrassed because this is conveying a message, not just to you, but also to your colleagues. That your contributions are not just not heard, but also not valued in any way. And that you are not valued. So how likely are you going to be to speak up again at a next meeting? Or even attend in the first place to put yourself in that situation. Or imagine another situation where you've just presented something that you've been working on And, you know, it's work in progress and you really want to hear some good feedback and have some good discussions about the work so that you can help develop it collectively. But even while you're presenting the work, you can see the senior professor of the group raising their eyebrows and shaking their head. And instead of discussing your work, it ends up being roundly critiqued and criticized in the harshest of terms. And even taken to a personal level, telling you in front of everyone, that you've no idea what you're doing and it's just rubbish and you should start again. Or imagine a situation where you take a different methodological or epistemological approach to your work. And whenever you try to discuss it, it's just laughed off as there you go again, trying to push Y. And there are conspiratorial smiles all around the table. And with that quick dismissal, everyone moves on to discuss their own work and their own approaches. And if you're a young PhD student or an early career researcher and feeling insecure in any way. Then in both of these previous situations, you're not going to be wanting to bring up your work again to this group. You're going to be really reluctant to seek any feedback in future. Or present a different way of doing things, present a different point of view to what is the dominant model. Or imagine that you're sitting in your office and coming down the corridor are sounds of people yelling at each other. Not conversing, not communicating, not discussing, just yelling. A really tense, angry, toxic environment. Not good. Imagine having someone say to you, unsolicited. That so-and-so doesn't like you. And this could be a so-and-so who's in a position of power and this really comes as a surprise to you. You've no idea what might be the issue. You thought you had a fine relationship though? You didn't interact with them very much. And so you're not just wondering about the relationship with this person, but the fact that you've been told this means that you're left wondering, What are people saying about me behind my back? And what else don't I know. And who else has different perceptions of relationships than what I have. Imagine you're being critiqued because you want to go home at 6:00 PM to see your family. And that's even still late. And you don't want to participate in the competition to see who can work more hours. But there's attention drawn to it and you get the sarcastic remark of Oh. Are you heading off already? Imagine being in one of those situations where you never know which version of your line manager, leader, supervisor, professor, you're going to get. Is it going to be the nice one or is it going to be the stressed out and cranky one? Or where you feel almost gaslighted, where you've been working on something that you believe is what you've agreed. And then when you turn up again to share that there's a dispute about whether that was agreed or not, or whether they'd actually asked you to do something else. And then of course, we also hear many stories of discrimination and harassment in the workplace. And I've heard this in terms of gender and ethnicity. And along other more subtle dimensions. So you can imagine again, feeling really marginalized and like you don't belong. You're maybe you're someone who doesn't drink at all yet all of the social gatherings in the group involve significant amounts of alcohol, where you're just not comfortable. Or where you're the only woman in a group. And everyone immediately turns to you and expects you to make the cake to celebrate someone's birthday or to take the notes. And I'm sure you could come up with loads of other examples where you just haven't felt at home in the environment. Where you haven't felt comfortable, felt like you belonged. Where you haven't felt free to offer an opinion or a point of view, or to just stand up for yourself. And I don't know about you, but my reaction in these situations is to withdraw and to hide. And what I'll often choose to do is to redirect my efforts to other communities outside of my research group or my faculty. Where I can feel like I'm more accepted and where I can feel like I belong, because why would I put my head on the block again only to get knocked down or hurt in some way. And that's what psychological safety is about. How do we create environments where these sorts of scenarios don't happen? Where people genuinely feel free to show up fully human fully themselves. Where they don't have to change to fit in. But where there is space made for everyone to be able to find their place, to find their voice. It means people being able to challenge the status quo to express opinions or preferences without fear of ridicule. And instead where those opinions and preferences are engaged with, with curiosity. It means people feeling seen and heard. Where their ideas are valued. And it doesn't always mean you have to be in agreement, but it feels okay to speak up and to make contributions and we can explore and understand our differences. And it means the embracing the fact that we're all human. We all make mistakes. And we're able to own up to them without fear of being critiqued or judged. Or without being shamed. And not just that, but that where the, the sharing of this is embraced and celebrated. And we then can participate in a shared learning journey about what we can take from this for next time. Psychological safety is just such a critical factor for our research cultures. So, where does the term come from? We can trace it back to Carl Rogers in 1954, who first turned the coin and it was brought into management studies work in the 1960s by Ed Schein and Warren Bennis. And they talked about it in terms of reducing interpersonal risk and where people feel accepted and worthwhile. And then in 1990, William Kahn also talked about psychological safety to describe conditions that were influencing personal engagement at work. And talked about it in terms of being able to show up and be yourself without fear of negative consequences to your self image or your status or career. However, the more recent resurgence of interest in psychological safety can be attributed to Harvard business school. Professor Amy Edmondson. Amy drew on this concept for her 1999 PhD thesis, to explain why the best performing clinical teams in a hospital were not the ones who made the fewest mistakes as they had hypothesized, but they were in fact, the ones who've made more mistakes. But what distinguish them was that they felt safe enough to own up to and talk about and learn from these mistakes. Amy defined psychological safety is a belief that "one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistake. And that the team is safe for personal interpersonal risk taking". And she's written about this in a 2019 book called 'The fearless organization. Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning innovation and growth'. And I'd highly recommend that book. And it's interesting in that title where she talks about learning innovation and growth. Because that really captures why psychological safety is so important. And how relevant. Our learning innovation and growth are for our research environments. On her webpage. Amy also talks about psychological safety being what is needed to clear blockages that will block innovation, collaboration, and risk taking. And again, that sort of terminology of innovation, collaboration, and risk-taking could be very much the terminology that we would use as basic definitions of what science is about. We embrace many of today's problems and try to address them and solve them through innovation, collaboration, and risk taking. Where we really need everyone to contribute in order to make a difference. We need people to be able to speak up. We need people to be able to take risks and to ask challenging research questions and to live with uncertainty and deal with trying different paths and see things not working and trying again. It's for these reasons that I really see it as a critical concept for research and research environments. So with co-author Zhike Lei. I'm not sure if I pronounce that correctly. Amy wrote an interesting paper that was published in 2014, that reviewed a lot of research that had been conducted on psychological safety up to that point. And I'll put a link to the paper on the webpage. And in that paper, they identified a number of what they call consistent relationships across the studies. So just listen to these and think about them through the lens of doing innovative research in a interdisciplinary collaborative teams. So, first of all, they identified that there's a significant relationship between psychological safety and performance. And they talk about this relationship between psychological safety and effective performance as being particularly relevant, where there is uncertainty and a need for either creativity or collaboration to accomplish that work. So psychological safety enables us to deal with the uncertainty and own up to all of the risks that's involved in that. And isn't that the definition of research, engaging with uncertainty in order to make new contributions, to knowledge and to society. And the collaboration aspect too enables us to deal with the importance of needing lots of different contributions. And working out how to best mobilize those contributions and negotiate all the challenges that arise from recognizing that collaboration involves difference, different opinions, different points of view, different personalities. And how we negotiate, navigate those differences. And the importance of us all being free to speak up and offer our opinions and so on. So the second theme that they talk about is in relation to learning. And again, what is research, if not an ongoing learning journey? So to quote directly from their article. "Much learning in today's organization takes place in the interpersonal interactions between highly interdependent members. And learning behaviors can be limited by individual concerns about interpersonal risks or consequences, including a fear of not achieving one's goals and learning anxiety created by feelings of incompetence that in that occurred during the learning". End of quote. And here I'm reminded from this lovely quote from Pat Thompson, a researcher from Nottingham university who talks about us as academics, needing to get comfortable being learners on the path to becoming professional not knowers. I'm not sure if I've got that totally correct. But don't you love that? We're always going to be learners and we have to be just come comfortable with being professional not knowers. So that means that learning is always about that gap, that uncomfortable gap between what we know now and what we need to know. One of the common ways that we bridge that gap is often through trying things out by trial and error that doesn't work. And reflecting on it and trying something else or by making mistakes. And I think in that learning, it's also about just being human and having good and bad days. And they go on to talk about how the fact that "people are more likely to offer ideas, admit mistakes, ask for help, or provide feedback if they feel safe to do so". Again, this is so important for being able to come up with our best research solutions that have impact on society and the challenges that we're trying to solve. And that's the very reason why we're doing research in the first place. And the third strand that they're identified across their studies is about people needing to feel prepared to speak up to power in a way. So they, to quote them "Individuals who experienced greater psychological safety are more likely to speak up at work. Upward communication can be a vital force in helping contemporary organizations learn and succeed. By speaking up to those who occupy positions to authorize actions, employees can help challenge the status quo, identify problems or opportunities for improvement. And other ideas to improve their organizations wellbeing". End quote. We can think that through for many situations where it feels particularly risky to speak up to some sort of power or authority. Especially if they seem to know much more than what we know, or if they're really under stress and pushing, delivery on the project, because they're concerned about producing results for the funding agency or the next publication for their CV or for their promotion case. And so on. And it's this safe feeling that you can speak up. That's going to be so important. If we're going to see a decrease in the number of retracted papers, say due to methodological problems that aren't being honestly reported. Or the fudging of results. You know, And often junior researchers not feeling brave enough or safe enough to actually say there was a problem with the particular performance of an experiment. So that was their three themes. And it's interesting that an internal study at Google that started in 2012 and actually involved significant amount of data studying 180 of their teams identified psychological safety as the most important factor to explain what made the most successful teams. And this was in a project that they called project Aristotle. So it wasn't about having the best technical superstars in the team. And in fact, their top five factors also reflect very much what Nina said about the patterns that they saw at the academy across the nominations for what makes a good research environment. So those top factors that made for that Google's most successful teams were 1. Psychological safety that people felt safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. 2. Dependability that people got things done on time and to a high standard. 3., that there was structure and clarity around roles and plans and goals. And remember Nina talking about clear expectations. 4. About the work being meaningful. And personally important in some way. And 5. Impact feeling like their work and contributions matter and help create change. Now I know that in a research environment, we have a lot of structural problems that are implicated here in the pressures that we might be experiencing that lead to a lack of psychological safety in some way. You know, our highly competitive performance culture are very metrics driven environment. And I don't want to discount the work to be done at this structural level. But I still think it's an 'and' situation It can have implications for all of us. So I'm just going to focus here for the rest of this episode what I think of particularly the implications for those of us who might be in some position of leadership or authority, and this doesn't have to be a formally recognized big L type leadership position. It's any of us who have interactions with others that may involve some power difference. So, whether you're a project leader or a research group leader, or a supervisor advisor of students, As a leader, I think we have a particular responsibility to set the tone. And to role model the sorts of behaviors that we want to see. So I can go through a few things here. One is role modeling, what it means to be real. In the workplace, like showing up as ourselves. It means role modeling when we've made a mistake. And that means owning up to the fact that we can have good and bad days. So we may get cranky. We may speak to someone in a way that we're not happy about. We may engage in some non-verbal behaviors that convey some sort of disapproval or critique. But I think we need to be big enough to go and apologize and say that wasn't good enough rather than just let it hang, because if we let it hang, that becomes a standard of behavior that's acceptable around here. That we can have a bad day and take it out on people. It means role modeling that we don't know something. And that it's okay not to know everything and to invite input and opinions and perspectives from other people. It means role modeling, seeking feedback for ourselves. Genuinely interested in how we can improve, even if it's hard. And showing that we are also on a learning journey as well. And wanting to know how we can be better, how we can do better. And not just inviting the feedback from others, but also responding to it with curiosity and grace. And showing that we actually value that feedback by making changes and reporting back, how are we going And so we, we need as leaders to be so much more self-aware. Of how we react or respond in situations and to be aware of how our actions and reactions can be perceived by others. That even if we don't intend to knock people down, that may be by spinning around on a chair and not giving attention to the person who's speaking, where inadvertently. Whether deliberately or not communicating that this person's point of view is not important. So self-awareness and self reflection I think is really key to thinking about how we show up and how we role model, what are the behaviors we value as part of a psychologically safe supportive research culture. Second bundle of things I think is very much around, Requiring us to get to know people as individuals. Because belonging is really a core underpinning for psychological safety. And, belonging is about. Being seen and heard and valued. For who we are. And that means as leaders, our responsibility to get to know who people are and to understand what each person's strengths are and what they can bring in what they can contribute to the group. And also how we can best support different people. And this requires deep listening skills and deep empathy skills. Another class of activities can be around how we engage with difference and how we run our groups, how we invite seriously invite different voices, different opinions and engage with disagreements in our groups. And treat them as sites for productive engagement. For, um, opportunities for learning. And this becomes really important in terms of not just what we say, but what we do. So we may invite people to bring up problems. And then it becomes really important that we don't focus. On the problems in terms of looking back or seeking. To blame or whatever, but that. We really learn how to facilitate the discussions where we can. Move it forward. And what can we draw out from this? What can we learn from this for next time so that we can get better together? So it's about inviting the voices and, and rewarding people for speaking up and making it a learning. How do we learn? And it's the consistency in how this plays out. And in terms of clarity around roles and responsibilities as was brought up previously. So psychological safety is created by enacting and enabling belonging and. Inclusion. Now that are both sort of like the basic requirements for psychological safety, as well as outcomes in a way of having a psychologically safe environment. So I think there's this sort of mutually reinforcing relationship between psychological safety and belonging and inclusion. And we can also connect here to definitions of research culture. Where research culture is often talked about as encompassing the behaviors, the values, the expectations, attitudes, norms of what we expect around here and what we accept. It's how we do things. And there's this lovely quote by professor Tom Welton in a UK Royal Society report that talks about the way in which cultures are enacted. That we enact culture there. So let me start that quote. "Cultures are not set by policy documents or by distributing a leaflet, but through the people with whom we meet in thousands of seemingly insignificant interactions on perfectly ordinary days. And we should all ask ourselves whether we display the characteristics that we value. And want to see embedded within the cultures in which we work. Some people are more visible than others. [And here I can interject that this would be the leaders that I've just talked about. And to continue the quote]. But none of us are invisible. And we all have a part to play in developing an inclusive and supportive research culture for all". End of quote. And this connects beautifully to what Line and Nicklas and Nina said. About everyone having a role in contribution to creating great research cultures. And this means we all have a part to play in contributing to making that a psychologically safe culture. Where people can show up as their authentic selves and without fear of rejection or ridicule and so on. So what might be some examples of these seemingly insignificant interactions on perfectly ordinary days? In closing here I invite you just to reflect on what might be some examples for you. Of the seemingly insignificant interactions on perfectly ordinary days. And it's an invitation to reflect on how you show up. And how you contribute to creating a great research environment. That you may one day want to put forward for a research environment prize as an example of how to do great work. And we know that these great research environments, aren't just about feeling good and everyone being happy. But they're actually about creating the conditions in which we can do our best work. Our best creative thinking our best collaborations for the benefit of great science. And psychological safety is really key for that. Not just for great science, but also for enabling the wellbeing and development of people and learning processes that support the production of that great science and taking risks. Culture matters. It really matters. And we create and co-create culture together. By our choices and by our everyday interactions. We can make it better. You can find the summary notes, a transcript and related links for this podcast on www. changingacademiclife. com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts. And I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently. And you can contribute to this by rating the podcast and also giving feedback. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues. Together, we can make change happen.