3 Essential Ingredients To Start Building A Psychologically Safe Working Environment
Updated: Jan 20, 2024
Written by: Dave Sewell, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
How often have you found yourself in a meeting where you are choosing your words carefully for fear of retaliation, maybe even defaulting to saying nothing just to be on the safe side?
These environments are not psychologically safe they are what we know as being psychologically aggressive, putting our flight or fight system on high alert, this situation is caused by one or more people in the meeting having stressors in their life that they are struggling to cope with.
Staying in Balance
Everything in life is about balance, there is day and night, hot and cold, dry and wet to name but a few balances that nature has in place. In these balances no side is right or wrong, it just is, each side having advantages and disadvantages depending on the needs of everything impacted by them.
This also holds true for our body; to keep it balanced, we have the autonomic nervous system split into two parts, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. You may know the sympathetic nervous system as your flight or fight system (motivation and action) and your parasympathetic nervous system as your rest and digest system (restoring and recuperating). We need to feel both physically and psychologically safe to stay in balance. Many organizations have the physical safety sorted but not many have the more intangible psychological safety under control.
The Challenge
The stressors in our lives that we struggle to cope with, send these systems into a state of imbalance, often manifesting in unhelpful behaviors, attitudes, or performance in the eyes of those around us, preventing us from being the best version of ourselves. We do this because the brain has only one stress response system (the fight or flight system) which is designed to get us out of danger. When you think about it when we are in danger, are we happy? No, we are not, we get tense, serious, and even angry which are completely appropriate behaviors when facing down a predator, and here in lies our problem.
Our brain does not differentiate between a predator that is about to eat us and a to-do list that we can’t get on top of, both stress us out and both use the same stress response system. That is why, when we struggle to cope with the stressors around us, we go a little bit ‘primal’ and are not very happy, to others we may come across as moody, aggressive, aloof, or difficult to get on with.
3 Things You Can Do to Maintain Balance
In a nutshell, to help us develop and sustain a psychologically safe environment around ourselves we should be doing things we love to do, minimizing the things that suck the life out of us and holding a certain mindset that will reduce the chance of activating our stress response system. Sounds simple right, here is a little bit more detail on each of those 3 areas.
1. Do the Things We Love
Dr. Edward Hallowell, the author of Crazy Busy, talks about 2 states of mind; the first is when we do things that ‘fill us full of energy (things we love to do, people we love to talk to and environments we love to be in) it puts us into the ‘C State’. In this state, it is easy for us to collaborate with others, be curious, hold high levels of concentration, be more careful, be calm and ultimately be courteous and civil to others around us. In this state, we are happy and much more likely to see the positive in any given situation and significantly more tolerant of others. In ‘C State’ we are the best version of ourselves. When we are in ‘C State’ our brain can hold this place for longer periods of time, indeed this is where we can get into the ’zone’ where time flies by and we don’t notice. For me that could be walking in the hills, playing on my Xbox, reading neuroscience research, or presenting on stage. My question to you is, what puts you into ‘C State’, and are you doing this daily, if you are not, what could you be doing to get yourself into this space?
2. Reduce the Friction
Again going back to Dr. Edward Hallowell the other state of mind he talks about is the ‘F State’, this state sucks the life out of you and depletes you of energy. In this state, we can find ourselves feeling frenzied, frenetic, frustrated, frantic, fearful, or fucked off!! This is the state that triggers our stress response or ‘fight and flight’ (hmmm more f words, a coincidence, probably not!) In this state we are anything but courteous or civil, indeed we can be quite forceful and intimidating to others. To use me as an example, things that put me into ‘F State’ are administration tasks like accounting or building PowerPoints, rule breakers, being told I’m useless at something that I have put all my effort into, and curve balls being thrown at me and having no time to prepare. We all have activities, people, and environments that suck the life out of us, again my question to you is this; what are those things for you, and are you doing everything you can to minimize the impact of those in your day. (Note – it’s impossible to go through life completely avoiding the ‘F State’ the key is to be aware of what puts you into that state and do what you can to minimize it.
3. Choose your Mindset
When people are unhelpful towards us, our brain sees that as a threat and goes through a process of putting a label on those people so that it can then create a strategy to deal with the ‘threat’. An example of that could be “Sam is never on time to work or meetings”, the threat could be “Sam is stopping me from doing my job which s making me look incompetent”, and the label might be “Sam’s just Lazy” or “Sam is useless”. When someone gets an undesirable label put on them, this can lower their status in the tribe and that is a big threat if the status drops too low the tribe will take action to remove them and that is a threat to the individual’s ability to survive. A better approach might be to hold a mindset of “everybody is inherently good”, when we can hold this mindset, it encourages us to get curious “I know Sam is not trying to be unhelpful, but I wonder why he is always late in the morning, I wonder if I can help him with anything so he can get here on time?”. This may not be the only question you could ask Sam but believing that no one is getting up in the morning to deliberately upset you allows you the ability to ask the right questions, provide a better level of support to people like Sam, to help them which will ultimately help you.
If you want to start creating environments where everyone feels ‘safe’ to be themselves, feel ‘safe’ to contribute and share ideas we first need to look inward, become aware of those three points above and once we can get ourselves in to a better space, we will be ready to look after those around us.
Dave Sewell, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
“Every child deserves a home where they feel safe and loved.”
This is what drives Dave Sewell’s research and approach to executive education and facilitation.
Sewell’s own life story has led him to question everything he understood about leadership, from the beatings and shame from his own father to the near-complete psychological breakdown at the hands of a ruthless Area Manager in his early twenties. The question burning inside him, “Why do people behave this way?” and “How do we change this?”.
Sewell’s research built a deep understanding of human behavior and our need to feel physically and psychologically safe. None of us are at our best when we are under continued levels of stress beyond what we can comfortably cope with. It is when we are in this space that we are often not helpful to others, indeed we can be quite uncivil, causing us to be more aloof, more confrontational, and less tolerant of others.
No one wants to be this person in the workplace or this type of parent when we get home, but it is all too common.
Having published the learning of his research in his book Safe Leadership – beating stress to drive performance, Sewell is on a mission to make more workplaces psychologically safer so that every worker can go home with enough emotional and mental capacity to spend quality time with their family, creating that psychologically safe space in the home. He does this through a series of leadership workshops, a longitudinal program, and one on one executive coaching.
