“In an organization where you’ve got true psychological safety… the thing that is valued is getting all the good stuff out of everyone.”
Kate Giarchardi, Head of Talent EMEA at Invesco
The phrase ‘psychological safety’ might be a little off-putting for some, perhaps sounding like buzzwordy industry-speak, but it is both important and – actually – pretty common-sense.
In this episode, Kate Giarchardi, Head of Talent at Invesco, sits down with Talking Talent’s Lucinda Quiqley to discuss what psychological safety is, why it’s important and how to implement it. The two also delve into how psychological safety impacts and is impacted by high-performance culture, as well as looking into what a psychologically safe workplace feels like.
Tune in to this fascinating and illuminating discussion and learn how to build an environment that fosters success.
Watch the interview:
Or read on for the transcript
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Hi everyone. Welcome to our podcast today. The topic is Psychological Safety at Work, and I’m delighted to be joined by Katie Giachardi from Invesco. Katie, do you want to introduce yourself?
Katie Giachardi: Hi, thanks Lucinda. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I’m, as you say, I am from Invesco. I’m currently Head of Talent there responsible for our talent acquisition and our talent development for the EMEA Region. So really big focus for me at the moment around our high-performance culture and that’s where the psychological safety at work piece fits in for me.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Brilliant. Thank you. Yes, we’ll come to that piece on the link between psychological safety at work and high-performance culture. I know we had a great conversation around that earlier in the summer and we wanted to hear more from you on it, which is why we’ve planned to do this podcast and share your really important and helpful views on the subject with our audience. So, we talk quite a lot about psychological safety, and we’ve done a few podcasts actually on it at Talking Talent, but I think it’s really important to hear your views and kind of start us off with what would you say is psychological safety in the workplace?
Katie Giachardi: Sure. I saw actually that you’d done a previous podcast really with I guess the academic perspective. So hopefully maybe I can bring you a bit of that but more the practitioner kind of in-house perspective as well. So, I always kind of hang my hat on the Amy Edmonson perspective of what psychological safety is given she kind of coined the phrase for us all. But the way I see it is psychological safety is not just the ability to be able to speak out and say what you think, share your ideas. It’s also the feeling of being almost expected to do that. So not just that candor is allowed, but almost that it’s almost expected of me within the context in which I work, and that other people wouldn’t be getting what they deserve from me or from you as an individual in that context if you’re not speaking out and sharing, sharing your thoughts. So, I think that that belief that it’s allowed but belief that it’s expected and attached to that the belief that’s speaking out and doing what you need to do isn’t ever going to be punished or have negative consequences for you within your organizational context.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah. So that piece around it almost being expected as part of being part of that company, that culture, that part of the role almost within whatever they do.
Katie Giachardi: Yeah. Almost that you wouldn’t quite be doing your best for your team, for your firm, for your clients, if you weren’t doing that. Whereas I think sometimes people feel like the best thing to do is to hold back, to minimize that risk. I love the way Amy Edmonson puts it to minimize the risk of being seen to be either incompetent, disruptive. All of us have managed those expectations of others with us all the time, but in an organization where you’ve got true psychological safety, managing those impressions aren’t the things that are valued. Actually, the thing that is valued is getting all the good stuff out of everyone.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): I love that, the way that you say that all the good stuff, because I think we’ll probably go into this is we go through, but that piece around actually using that word disruptive, I mean that’s going to be challenging for some people, isn’t it. I know that’s not what you are suggesting is to everyone to suddenly be disruptive. But I think that idea of even just the advocacy for yourself as an individual, that doesn’t always come easy to everybody in the workplace, does it?
Katie Giachardi: Absolutely. I think again, different people in different contexts find this easier or not as easy as others to create, and also to exist within a culture where this is present is sometimes easier or more difficult for different individuals, for different teams, and different broader cultural contexts as well. In my life, I’m very focused in my work life in the EMEA region, but I’m really conscious that some of this work that I do when I liaise with colleagues, maybe in other regions of the world, it doesn’t work quite exactly the same. We need to bear that in mind, I think as we work through these types of concepts.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah, really, really interesting. So, when psychological safety is present, what does that mean for an organization? And actually, I don’t know if you can say this, but what does it feel like to be part of that organization or what should it feel like?
Katie Giachardi: So, I think when you feel it, I think it is that feeling of expectation within yourself that by making a full contribution and not holding back your ideas, not holding back your questions, giving of your whole thoughts and feelings about situations that would be the feeling that you’d have that, that was the expectation. And it would feel that that would be done as I said, without any risk to yourself. Within this, there’s often a misunderstanding, I think of what psychological safety is and I think that can be when things get a bit tricky when you’re trying to describe to people what will it feel like. I don’t know whether you’ve heard this from any of your previous people before, but I think psychological safety isn’t about niceness.
So, it’s not about just being unilaterally nice all the time. It’s not about agreeing on everything. It’s not about applauding every idea that comes up or making sure that people feel that their performance standards don’t matter. Actually, it can be quite a tough feeling, more tough love than soft love. It is about having healthy conflict and so if you were in a team environment or a corporate environment where there’s good psychological safety, the feeling would be one of actually good, robust conversations. You wouldn’t be having boring meetings; you’d be having interesting meetings so people who are debating. In a very personally sensitive way, this isn’t about personal attack ever when it comes to having psychological safety. But it also isn’t about just the nodding and the yessing and the niceness that maybe people sometimes think is what we’re talking about when we mention psychological safety. They misinterpret where it fits in.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah. I think you are right. There can be that sense of, well, it’s so everyone feels warm and fluffy and safe.
Katie Giachardi: That isn’t the thing. It’s saying actually warm and fluffy isn’t what you’d feel. You’d feel challenged. You’d feel a feeling of expectation upon you to contribute, to offer maybe a contrary view, which isn’t always comfortable, is it to offer the contrary view when you are in a situation in a group. But yet if there’s psychological safety, the expectation is that you will do that and that you will not be in any way, as I say, humiliated or punished for that. That would be appreciated. Those ideas would be explored, drawn out, and worked on together. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be done.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah.
Katie Giachardi: That’s the other thing as well, people sometimes again, in the misinterpretations, it can be, but I made the contribution. I shared my idea, but my idea wasn’t done and it’s not necessarily saying every single idea will always be actioned. But it is saying that all ideas can be shared safely.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): And heard.
Katie Giachardi: And absolutely heard, acknowledged, explored, understood. But like in everything, we always have to make choices and decisions about what we do and don’t do.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah, absolutely. Now I’m sure you’ve maybe come across some of these opinions before, but there will be some opinions to say, well, why, what does this matter? We’ve existed. Businesses are successful. I have a successful business, my people are happy, etc., etc. What does it matter? So, what would you say to them?
Katie Giachardi: I can understand why people come at it from that perspective. My perspective is that actually, yes, a business can be successful in the absence of that psychological safety. I would say it would be impacting the longevity of that success. So, you can be successful more short term without this existing, but over time, I disagree that that success would necessarily be sustained. You may be being successful in spite of not having it, but how much more successful that the good to great opportunity that people have within their businesses that they’re maybe not exploring or making the most of because they’re just not hearing, like I said, all the good stuff that’s hidden inside.
All these fabulous people we have in organizations. That’s why it matters and why it matters so much more now in the types of organizations we work in, where nobody knows the answers. Everything is uncertain and we’re making things up and it’s all knowledge workers. In businesses where that wasn’t the case you could absolutely get away without it, but nobody in the firms I’m in, nobody’s making widgets, nobody’s following rules. Nobody’s just putting pieces together. They are using their own ingenuity and their own discretionary efforts and that’s what you’re getting to with the psychological safety. So, if people are doing well, how much better could they do still if they were to work on greater psychological safety?
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah, and what came to mind when you were talking is that sense of you may be doing what you’re doing and doing well but you may only be exploring 10% of actually the talent and the knowledge and the thinking within your organization. But by creating psychological safety, you could explore so much more, maybe not 100% but you could certainly explore so much more and reap the benefits of that from your business.
Katie Giachardi: So much more and I think again if you look back at more the original research around psychological safety, it was often in professions where there were more like life and death scenarios that Amy Edmonson’s research was in. Lots in the medical profession, lots in aviation with decisions genuinely hanging life in a balance. Now in my life, in the firms I work in that doesn’t exist, so you’ve not quite got the same things on the line. But I guess when I look at it, I’m less focused on the avoidance of mistakes, which is one thing that psychological safety can help with, and we all want to achieve that. But the avoidance of mistakes, it’s just avoidance. The thing that’s the benefit in the kinds of firms that I would work in, in the big knowledge economy type firms is all the stuff that could be that we need to find out because ideas are not known yet.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): The potential.
Katie Giachardi: Absolutely.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah. We touched on this at the beginning, but that link between psychological safety at work and creating a high-performance culture, because that sort of underpins what we are talking about here, doesn’t it? Tell us more about your work and what you’ve been doing and, and, and that link that you believe exists between psychological safety and high-performing teams.
Katie Giachardi: I mean, I think for me, it’s the foundation of the ability to create sustainable high performance. So, I think back to your question on, can you perform well without it? Sure. Can you perform brilliantly without it over the long term and in a creative, innovative way? I don’t think so or not as well as you could. So, for me, the way that certainly within our organization we position this is that psychological safety is the foundation upon which we build our high-performance culture. So, we have characteristics of the culture that we want to achieve around inclusion, empowerment, just a couple of examples. If you think about what psychological safety creates logic will tell you that you can’t really have an inclusive experience if you don’t feel that you can speak up or if you don’t feel that you can experiment and make mistakes, that you can share your ideas.
Similarly, empowerment, can you get on and do things in maybe a bit more of an ask for forgiveness rather than permission style? Can you do that if you didn’t feel safe that you wouldn’t be punished in some way shape or form for things that didn’t work out perfectly? Hard to do that. So, that’s how we’ve positioned this. We’ve said focusing on the interpersonal behavior and the more processed strategies that help to create psychological safety will enable the characteristics that we want to see in the culture to emerge. For me, that’s the responsibility of everyone. Yes, it’s the responsibility of leaders, managers in the organization, but I think everybody can play a part in making somewhere more psychologically safe.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah. We’ll go back to that because I think that is helpful to maybe explore a bit more is the different parts that people can play either from a sort of a manager or a colleague perspective, and how leaders within businesses can maybe support that. But for the people that are listening today, I suppose one of the things that maybe they’re wondering is, okay, well, this all sounds really good. What do I do? So, what would you say, and maybe sharing some of your own experiences and the sort of quick wins that managers can put in place to start creating this climate of psychological safety?
Katie Giachardi: So, for me, it comes down to your own behavior in the workplace and the choices that you make in terms of the behaviors that you demonstrate with your team, with your colleagues and we talk about three particular interpersonal skills that make the biggest difference and that’s around humility. So, making sure that people realize, you don’t know all the answers either, because none of us do. Making sure people realize the complexity of the work that you know that it’s not easy. We don’t know all the answers. Just setting that stage with that humility as an individual. I think that makes a huge difference that also comes down to things like admitting when you make your own mistakes so that people know that it’s okay to do that. Because if you role model that, then they know that that’s okay.
Curiosity is the second one. So, once you’ve got that kind of foundation of humility in how you operate, then that curiosity to really explore. That comes down to what we were saying earlier about when people share ideas, those ideas don’t necessarily all get implemented, but they all get heard. They get explored, they get understood, and that active, inviting ideas out of people and then exploring them together. Great listening. The fundamental piece for all of this is the genuine listening and I’m sure your listeners on your podcast have seen a lot of content previously about that kind of listening continuum. But really, we worked a lot on encouraging leaders to think about that truly active, even empathetic listening where you’re not just listening for what people say, but for what people don’t say and the feelings that are underpinning things, and that curiosity blends from an interpersonal behavior point of view. That’s where that comes in.
That’s also where we recommend people that they might use more what I would call listening processes. So, facilitation processes, things you’d be familiar with from the kind of sessions that people would run make to make sure that through a structured approach, you almost enable more people to be heard. Some of the classics like the devil’s advocates in your meeting or using the thinking hats or even more simple things like talking rounds or the Post-it Note affinity diagrams, rather than everybody having… Those more tactical things we try to help people with when it comes to curiosity too.
Then the final one is empathy.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah.
Katie Giachardi: So, people respond productively when people make contributions. There’s nothing more off-putting if you make a contribution than a subtle eye roll, sigh, whatever that people think they’re hiding those reactions, or they don’t think they’re noticeable. There’s nothing that will shut down individuals wanting to make contributions quicker than just the tiniest negative reaction on the receiving end, particularly if it’s from somebody more senior.
So, that empathy to respond productively in the moment and empathy to destigmatize failure is a real biggie. I love the example of Alan Mullaly who was the Ford Motor CEO and he talked about this concept of, in their project management they would have the red, amber, green status on projects and people would historically in that organization maybe have hidden when things were edging on the red status because they thought that wasn’t what the bosses wanted to hear. He talked about transforming that to say, actually the red is the gem. The red is the thing I want to know about because, at that point, I need to step in. I need you to be honest with me so that I can come and help resolve and move things along before we’re too late. That’s quite a big shift to get people to feel… You probably do project management methodologies in your work. It doesn’t feel great. Even if you feel psychologically safe, it doesn’t feel great to put a red.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah.
Katie Giachardi: So, making it really officially part of the strap line, red is the gem. I love that.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah. I really like that, and I think also big org organizations as well when it’s that the role of maybe having to challenge or say this isn’t going to work or this needs to be done in a different way. It’s not always done with the people that you necessarily have a relationship with. Do you know what I mean? Its sometimes people have to come in, matrix organizations. So, it’s about creating that whole culture where it’s not just about the individual team working well, but that way of working is accepted and acknowledged across the environment, and I suppose that’s what we may be mean by that sort of climate of psychological safety.
Katie Giachardi: You’re hitting on a fabulous point, and I think that’s where that intersection of what is trust, which is maybe between you and I. Do I know you well? Do I understand who you are and where you’re coming from to have that kind of vulnerability-based trust? Things you would talk about in the high-performing teams, the vulnerability-based trust. That’s great, but that’s kind of more between individuals and within smaller teams, and that psychological safety can’t rely on that, because it has to be in that broader corporate climate. So, it has to be more an accepted practice that is not dependent on, do I know you? Have I spent time with you? Do we know about each other, and do I therefore trust you? So, you’re spreading that more broadly without having to make an individual relationship with all what 8,000 people in our firm, for example. So, I can’t have an individual relationship with all of them, but I want to know that people can feel safe in all the contexts that they find problems in.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): And I think to me, that adds to what we are talking about from the spectrum of inclusion. I used to work in the media and how often the relationships that you had with people in the way that you got things done, or if you needed favors or if you needed support on something, it would be who you hung out with. I don’t know. I didn’t play golf, but maybe who you played golf with or as you say, who you’d built that relationship with. But that could also be excluding for people who don’t have those relationships or find it harder to do that in the more traditional way. So then when you have that climate where those behaviors are there already and accepted across a business, it then supports the side of making it a more inclusive workspace.
Katie Giachardi: Yeah. I don’t know whether I’m right here. I don’t know if we’d ever get rid of the benefit of those real personal relationships. I think there’s nothing that’s proved that more to me than our return to being able to work together in real life sometimes than just remotely. But it shouldn’t be the only way and being without it should not preclude that you would be able to contribute, feel safe and make every contribution that you have inside yourself. I think thinking about the inclusion point, it is often the case, for example, that people lower down in an organizational traditional kind of hierarchy, as you would measure it, you would see they just have less psychological safety. So, they just feel a little bit less safe sharing their opinions than people higher up the hierarchy do.
That’s actually remarkably uncomfortable for people higher up the hierarchy and everybody forgets that they are scarier than they think they are and that particularly once you’ve made it up a hierarchy, you just forget what that felt like. You think everybody feels like you do, and you just can’t conceptualize why they would not share their ideas. That’s why the responsibility is on you as the leader to be able to set that tone and make it feel that there is that ability to contribute no matter who you are, no matter where you are in that organizational positioning that your views are as important as anybody else’s. I think that speaks to that inclusion piece well, because it’s probably not the people at the top who have the best ideas. I hate to say it, but I believe that to be the case. The ideas of the future are highly unlikely to be inside the people who are already at the top. They’re far more likely to be in the people doing the doing.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah.
Katie Giachardi: Noticing change.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah. So, just to pick up on that and something you said earlier because I think it’s really important is you said the word role model, but I think it is about those senior leaders’ role modeling these three behaviors, which you talked about. I did ask you about the quick wins and first steps and this might not be a question you can answer, but I just wondered out of those three behaviors for a business who is starting off on this journey where should they prioritize? Which one should they prioritize?
Katie Giachardi: So, my advice would be, and for each business to find out where their people actually would experience the most challenge. So, I did that in our organization. So, I worked with our senior leaders, and I mean, this is not a statistically valued approach of doing this, but I did a lot of polling in lots of conferency-type environments to try to get a sense of where is it hardest for people to operate. This is self-assessment. This is not other assessments, self-assessment. So, for example, we found in our environment that it was curiosity, which was the hardest interpersonal skill from the self-assessed perspective of our leaders so that’s where we started. So, that would be my advice. I think there’s a one size fits all. I do think those are the three key areas and find out in your organization thematically which one people are finding the most challenging and start there.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah. Great advice. I love the sense of curiosity and being curious. I mean, for me as a coach whenever anything is very sticky or there’s a real sense of not being able to move forward or conflict may be which needs to be explored is really about, well, how can you be curious about that?
Katie Giachardi: It does. It fits so much with that coaching ethos, the skills that go with curiosity fit so much in that kind of coaching culture, coaching mindset which I know you guys are all about. But I think that’s the way of leadership of the future that we need and it’s very much the enabler of the psychological safety for people to know that people are going to draw them out rather than shut them down.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): So, we talked about the leadership, and I suppose the quick wins. But it is important that obviously this is contributed to by everybody. So, what can colleagues do to help co-create this culture of psychological safety?
Katie Giachardi: I actually think those core skills are the fundamental skills for everyone and I fundamentally believe that culture is supported and created bottom up not top-down. I think it’s a both am situation, but I think that bottom-up is incredibly powerful and it’s kind of be the change you want to see is probably an overused strap line, but I absolutely stand by it. So, I think if we all took responsibility for our own selves being humble, being curious, being empathetic, then it would all be sorted wouldn’t it because we’d all be doing it and we’d all be role modeling it and reinforcing it with one another. I think waiting for somebody else and particularly that kind of waiting for the higher-up to do something is not empowering. It’s much more empowering to do that behavior yourself. We articulate some of it particularly within some core behaviors for our organization and we have ours. They are- speak up, let others speak up, and listen, So, that’s our strapline for that and give respect, get respect. We have others, but I think those are the real fundamentals that really speak to those psychological safety behaviors.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah. Fantastic. Very, very interesting and what I really love about what you’ve said is I think there are some clear takeaways for the people listening here today. I think it’s really helpful for people who are listening to just have some things which they can go and weigh and explore with their companies. What’s your next bit that you are exploring Katie? You might not know that yet, but I’m just wondering if there’s this sort of, for you in your journey with psychological safety. Where do you want to take it?
Katie Giachardi: Yeah, I think for us it’s actually sustaining attention. So, it’s all good to do a campaign, to do a whole load of education and engagement and yet repetition and sustaining that. It’s often what doesn’t happen in cultural movements. We do it and we think it’s done. So, it’s actually not something new, it’s continuing the focused attention that it will be for us. I think we noticed that there’s more and more interest more broadly from around our organization. As I say, the work we started with was in EMEA but more broadly around the organization we get a lot of curiosity, people intrigued and wanting to learn and share things more globally, which is fantastic.
Lucinda Quigley (she/her): Yeah. Real good sign, isn’t it? That it is sort of trickling through in terms of that campaign, as you say and starting to embed which is what you want. Thank you so much for your time today and all of your insights. I’ve found them really interesting, and I know our listeners will as well. So, thank you very much, and thank you to all of you who’ve listened today, and do come back and tune in again soon to see what we’re talking about. Thank you.
