Alla Weinberg, CEO of SPOKE & WHEEL, says that the key to designing relationships that resolve (even avoid) workplace tensions is to have different conversations than the ones we’re currently having. Our relentless focus on the work, she explains, distracts us from focusing on the people and making sure that we have created an organization where they feel safe.

Alla is a culture designer who has incorporated her design background with the principles of neuroscience, positive psychology, and relationship research. She is also an author; in her book, A Culture of Safety, she applies these principles to improve workplace culture. In our chat with Alla, she defines psychological safety through these lenses.

“To create psychological safety,” Alla continues, “we need to intentionally find time for conversations that are drastically, even radically different than what we are doing right now.”

Yes, we are at work to perform a job, to deliver a solution for our clients. But there are times, she says, when not talking about work creates deeper connections and, as a result, more resilient teams. Creating these connections is an opportunity to practice leadership, by introducing (if not modeling) candor and vulnerability.

“Leaders need to get vulnerable first,” she adds. “If you’re a leader and you’re seeing evidence that people don’t feel safe, you need to say that. Then ask your teams, ‘what am I doing to create that environment?’ And when they tell you, don’t be defensive or try to justify your behavior.

“Show yourself to be vulnerable and say, ‘Yes, I am doing that and I’m going to try to be better.’”

Keep in mind: psychological safety and resilience are not the same. It’s only when leaders create a psychologically safe environment for individuals that we can create resilient organizations.

Looking for more tips from Alla Weinberg to build resilience in your organization? Be sure to listen to the entire conversation.

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Paul [00:00:19] Hello and welcome to Product Momentum, where we hope to entertain, educate, and celebrate the amazing product people who are helping to shape our community’s way ahead. My name is Paul Gebel and I’m the Director of Product Innovation at ITX. Along with my co-host, Sean Flaherty, and our amazing production team and occasional guest host, we record and release a conversation with a product thought leader, writer, speaker, or maker who has something to share with the community every two weeks.

Paul [00:00:43] Hi Alla, how are you doing today?

Alla [00:00:44] I’m doing well. How are you?

Paul [00:00:46] I’m fantastic. I really appreciated the conversation that we’re about to have. I think the thing that I’m hoping people listen in for is often we talk about psychological safety and resilience as if they’re the same thing. But often organizations miss the opportunity to realize the fact that it’s not resilient people that we need to create, it’s resilient organizations. Organizations need to be upfront, and especially the leaders, having the candor and vulnerability to admit when they’ve made mistakes and maybe impacted people in a way that doesn’t feel so good. What are some things that might be helpful for people to listen to as they’re getting into this for maybe the first time?

Alla [00:01:20] I think it’d be helpful for people to listen for the different types of conversations that people need to start to have with each other so that there’s more candor and vulnerability in that organization. And we talk about that most people just talk about the work, and we need to have regular conversations beyond that.

Sean [00:01:39] I agree. High-performing teams require vulnerability and psychological safety. Thank you, Alla, I can’t wait to share this awesome content with our audience. Let’s get after it, guys.

Paul [00:01:49] Let’s get after it.

Paul [00:01:53] Hello and welcome to the pod. Today we are delighted to be joined by Alla Weinberg. Alla is the CEO of SPOKE & WHEEL, a culture design and people development company that builds cultures of safety. She’s a culture designer and author who’s incorporated her design background with the principles of neuroscience, positive psychology, and relationship research to offer the most customized and compassionate cultural solutions available. In her book, A Culture of Safety: Building a work environment where people can think, collaborate, and innovate, Alla delves into the tools, practices, and rituals that help leaders create physical, emotional, and psychological safety. Alla, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this really important topic with us today.

Alla [00:02:30] Thank you for having me.

Paul [00:02:31] Absolutely. So I know this word, or phrase, rather, tends to come up quite a bit in product circles and the teams that we build. Can we maybe just get started at a high level and talk about, you know, how can we create psychological safety in the workplace?

Alla [00:02:46] So, psychological safety was first coined by Dr. Amy Edmondson, and she defined it as “the felt permission for candor.” So I feel like I have permission to be honest. I could share an idea, I could share a mistake, I could talk about a feeling, I could question something, and there won’t be negative consequences. And so I feel relaxed and okay to share, to speak up, to be honest with each other.

Alla [00:03:18] Here’s the tricky part: psychological safety, the name itself is a bit misleading because it’s not psychological, it’s neurological. We all as human beings have nervous systems and our nervous system’s job is to keep us alive. We’re still, you know, pretty outdated as it goes from a biological standpoint. And what it’s doing is it’s constantly checking, our nervous system, is constantly checking our environment and also other people’s nervous systems: “Hey, is this person friendly? Are they going to attack me? Am I safe?” Right, And psychological safety is created when we feel connected to other human beings, we can communicate with other people and we feel connected to them, and our nervous system is picking up the cues: “These individuals in this group are safe.”

Paul [00:04:14] That’s a really great distinction because I think many times psychological safety is kind of lumped in with, I’m making air quotes, soft skills, right?

Alla [00:04:21] Right.

Paul [00:04:23] And it’s kind of lumped in with management techniques and tips and tricks for making effective teams. But this really is getting to the root of who we are as animals and thinking about what this network of people are on a team and how we’re responding to one another. It’s not often that I hear something like this, so I’m wondering if we can talk about top line, bottom line metrics, and all the great things that psychological safety can bring to a business. But how can we design work relationships to resolve problems that really have a persistent feature in our workplaces?

Alla [00:04:55] The key here is to have different conversations with each other than we’re currently having in the workplace. A lot of the conversations, meetings, even Slack messages that we have with each other are about the work, which is fine. We need to do the work, right? But it’s a status about the work, we need to present the work, we need to make a decision about the work. But very few or almost none of that is about the people.

Alla [00:05:23] And so to create psychological safety, we need to have really different conversations. Like, you know, “The tech industry has had massive layoffs this year; how are folks dealing with that and feeling about that?” and having conversations. Or, “what are folks worried about with regard to the work?” Maybe there’s something going on in the project that’s worrying folks, but they’re keeping it quiet because they don’t feel that there’s even space to talk about those kinds of things. And so actually creating intentional time, space, conversations that are drastically, maybe even, I would say, radically different than what we are doing day-to-day, right now. That’s really how to create psychological safety.

Sean [00:06:12] All right. So you mentioned Amy Edmondson’s work and she’s, I think, most famous for Project Aristotle, which she did with Google, right?

Alla [00:06:19] Yes.

Sean [00:06:19] She determined there’s like five major factors associated with teams that are hyper-successful. The most correlated in her research findings was what she called psychological safety.

Alla [00:06:29] Yes.

Sean [00:06:29] And you mentioned silence and you mentioned what happens when there’s not psychological safety and I love this concept of silence. Amy talks about this a lot in her work, too, that when you have a team that’s not speaking up, it’s largely because there’s something unsafe in the environment. So let’s pull on that thread a little bit more. So what kinds of different conversations, if you were to categorize them, are going to result in teams opening up more, being more candorous, and being more authentic in the context of their work?

Alla [00:07:00] Yeah, there are several kinds and it kind of goes again, back to our biology. We need to have physical safety. Meaning, “my body is not going to be discriminated against, harassed in any way, and my livelihood is not going to be jeopardized. So I can still take care of myself physically, right? Meet my needs as a human being.”

Alla [00:07:25] There’s emotional safety: “I can speak about my emotions,” and that needs to be available. Certain levels of it need to be available before psychological safety, which is, “I can actually speak up.”

Alla [00:07:37] And so the conversations we need to have are, managers need to talk to folks about, you know, how are they feeling regarding their job, especially in the current climate? Are they feeling worried having those conversations? Are they feeling discriminated against, harassed by someone in some way, harmed by someone in some way? And here’s the key where I don’t see this happening in a lot of companies: people will disclose something and they won’t be believed.

Alla [00:08:09] And so those conversations, if somebody actually does tell you, “Hey, I’m struggling here,” or, “My relationship with this person does not feel safe for me and I feel harassed in some way, I feel discriminated against in some way,” the leaders need to believe that individual, even if that person that’s harassing, is, you know, a top performer, for example, or high on the hierarchy, it doesn’t matter because they’re creating an environment where people no longer feel safe.

Alla [00:08:41] Then we need to have conversations about emotions. I think traditionally, organizations have said, “Leave emotions at the door; we have work to do here, it’s very technical.” Like, again, that’s impossible for people. Like scientifically, people that, you know, were like in a car accident and the part of their brain that deals with emotions was impaired can no longer make decisions. At the end of the day, decisions are emotional. Whether we want to believe that or not, that is actually scientifically true. And that is also how we create connection with each other. If I come to you and I say, you know, “I’m really feeling down this week and I miss a really good friend of mine that was let go,” and we have a conversation about it, you you don’t fix me, you just listen to me. And that’s a big one. A lot of leaders want to fix the emotions.

Sean [00:09:34] Hmmm.

Alla [00:09:35] But you listen to me and you see me as a human being that’s struggling, and not wondering, “Oh, when is this person going to go back to work? How long is this conversation going to be? We’re wasting time and money.” Then I’m building that connection with you as a human being. I can trust you, I can feel safe with you, and I can start to speak up.

Alla [00:09:55] And lastly, at the psychological safety level, leaders need to get vulnerable first. If you’re a leader and you’re seeing silence on your team, then you need to say that. You need to say, “I’m seeing that folks are not feeling safe to speak up. What am I doing to create that? And then when people tell you, you don’t justify and defend yourself, you say, “Yes, I am doing that and I’m going to try to do better.”

Sean [00:10:27] That’s awesome. I met this woman, Michelle Curran, who was the lead pilot for the Thunderbirds a while back and we had this conversation about high-performing teams and vulnerability. And I think there’s a direct correlation between vulnerability and the psychological safety problem. And she said the top performing teams in the world, the ones she’s been involved in, you know, some of them don’t thrive well if there is a lack of vulnerability, that’s one of the things that they even have started to teach at that level.

Alla [00:10:58] Yes.

Sean [00:10:58] That concept of vulnerability. So modeling the behavior of vulnerability is a good way to open people up when there is silence on your team.

Alla [00:11:06] Yeah. And I think people also misunderstand vulnerability. Vulnerability doesn’t mean, “I need to reveal my entire life history to you.” That’s not what that means. That can actually be too much at work. Vulnerability, and this is what Dr. Brené Brown speaks to, she says vulnerability is revealing what is happening for me cognitively and emotionally in this moment right now, in this conversation that we’re having. So just to say, “Hey, as we’re talking, I’m noticing I’m starting to feel scared about the direction that we’re heading,” and being able to say that. And when that becomes normal on the team, that’s when you have psychological safety.

Paul [00:11:53] I’d like to share with folks one point that you actually had a teachable moment for me when you and I were chatting prior to the show. I’m going to paraphrase a little bit, but I brought up the topic of resilience in our conversation, and you mentioned something. I’m probably going to mangle your much more eloquent thought in my own way, but the way that you put it was, we often talk about resilience in business circles as we need to create resilient people. We need, you know, grit and drive and productivity and throughput. And what you responded with was something to the effect of, we don’t need resilient people, we need resilient organizations.

Paul [00:12:26] And that was a lightbulb moment for me. I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms because people, by definition, at one point or another, are not going to be resilient. Even the grittiest, leave your feelings at the door kind of person is going to have a moment where there’s a loss of, you know, full capacity or self-actualization or something that slips. And I’m wondering if you could expand on that a little bit for our listeners just to share, what is this sort of counterintuitive balance that we need to strike between vulnerable people and resilient organizations?

Alla [00:12:57] What happens a lot in organizations that I’m seeing frequently in the work that I do is something organizationally changes. Let’s say there’s a round of layoffs, and what organizations tend to do is they push the solution down to the individual. “Well, we have an employee assistance program as an individual, go use that, we have ERGs, you know, go get help there,” rather than saying, “Hey, we as leaders made some maybe bad business decisions earlier and there’s an organizational issue and we need to address it and look at it together and we need to name it.” And we actually need to say, “Hey, we made mistakes and there’s something going on organizationally that wasn’t checked as a result of that, meaning we’re not having enough of the honest conversations that we need to have.” And all organizations and all individuals face setbacks, face hard times. Life gets hard, but we need to be able to name, “Hey, this is hard. We did do some things that were wrong, but what’s happening structurally that allowed that to occur and what changes can we make as a result of that?”

Paul [00:14:18] Yeah. I love the way that you put that. I think it’s a really fresh take and the way that it does tie back and I think has, you know, a bit of a compelling case to be made for. If we could just go through some of those numbers of what are the actual tangible benefits from a business line perspective, you know, the measurements of energy and productivity and engagement, retention, absenteeism, all these numbers. What are some of your favorite things to look at in your coaching and guidance of organizations? What comes to the top of your radar right away when you see numbers like that? Do you have any litmus tests that are your favorite or go-to that you like to check in on early in your conversations with teams?

Alla [00:14:54] I really like to understand people’s stress levels, and not just stress levels, but how long that stress has been going on, how chronic is that? And again, it’s okay and it’s normal for work to be somewhat stressful. We actually need, as human beings, to have some stress to be able to get into action and do things. But if it’s chronic stress and you’re getting a lot of people taking mental health breaks, going off on, you know, sabbaticals or vacations because they’re so stressed out, and just generally the level of stress in an organization is very high for a long period of time, that tells me that it’s not psychologically safe. Because when we are feeling psychologically safe, again, it’s a state of our nervous system, we’re feeling relaxed. High levels of stress indicate that we’re in fight or flight or freeze mode, and chronic amounts of that creates a lot of disease in people. It creates high blood pressure, heart problems, mental health issues. So I also want to see, you know, like, what are those numbers in your organization? What are those percentages in your organization? And also break it down. Are there historically oppressed groups that are suffering more than other people? I want to see about the well-being because that’s really going to indicate to me how safe someone feels.

Paul [00:16:21] That’s great.

Sean [00:16:21] Yeah, I would argue that candor is probably the easiest to see. Amy Edmondson has this awesome diagram that I saw where she asks a couple of questions about when people are silent versus when they’re candorous and the reason why the problem is so pervasive in business and it gets more pervasive when you don’t have safety. And the questions are, like, how much effort is required to be silent? None. It’s like, very little. It takes definite work and effort to be candorous. So people are going to be much more likely to be silent if you don’t have psychological safety, even just a little bit.

Sean [00:16:54] The second question she asks is, who wins? Who wins when you’re silent? You do because you didn’t say anything and you get to be the the winner. You get to be the one that says, “You know, I knew that, but didn’t say anything because I, you know, I didn’t want to deal with all the politics associated with it.” Whereas when you’re candourous, everyone wins, not just you. So you’re the winner. And then the third question is around the certainty of winning. And if you’re silent, you win 100% of the time when you take that perspective. And when you’re candorous, winning is very uncertain and it’s always risky, like, you’re taking a chance when you speak up. And as leaders, we’ve really got to be the vulnerable ones to speak up ourselves and demonstrate that candor right out of the gate.

Alla [00:17:31] I 100% agree. And I think every individual on a team makes that risk calculation. How risky is it for me to speak up right now? And what’s interesting is a lot of times people will try to assess psychological safety in a survey, but I’m actually completely against that. I don’t think surveys work at all to assess psychological safety. And I’m also aware Dr. Amy Edmondson has a seven-question survey to assess it, but I just worked with an organization where they had off-the-roof top scores for psychological safety and then one of their leaders left because of stress and some mental health issues. And suddenly they realized people just put down what they thought the leader wanted to hear, but it was not actually what was going on.

Paul [00:18:22] Hmm.

Sean [00:18:22] Paul knows I’m not a big fan of surveys, and that’s the reason why, they’re so subjective. You know, it’s like people change their behavior significantly when there’s a survey in place, especially right around the time of the survey. But anyway. All right. So a couple of other questions for you real quick. One is, how do you define innovation?

Alla [00:18:40] That’s a really good question. I define innovation as taking things in the world or concepts that already exist, but putting them together in a completely new way so that something new emerges with that combination.

Sean [00:18:58] Awesome.

Paul [00:18:58] Love it. In addition to your own book, I’m wondering if we can pick your brain a little bit more. Many of the folks listening to this are product managers in their career trying to break into the field, maybe a designer or just a general business leader. What kind of books or sources of inspiration would you recommend be on their bookshelves for how to build teams and organizations that really embed these concepts that we’ve been talking about deeply and meaningfully?

Alla [00:19:22] Well, I definitely recommend Dr. Amy Edmondson’s books. That will give you a great foundation. She has a book called The Fearless Organization. She has a book called Teaming that’s all about, you know, her research and her concept of that. What I’ve done is I’ve taken her research and I’ve combined it with the research of Dr. Steven Porges, and he created what’s called polyvagal theory, which is how our nervous system works. And so he even has a book called Safety. And so I would also read about our nervous system and what really helps us create safety in that sense.

Paul [00:20:00] That’s awesome. Great recommendation. Thank you so much for taking the time today. This has been a really great reminder to check in, check in with ourselves, check in with our teams, and think about how the work is not always the work. Sometimes it’s the feeling or the organization that really needs the attention and not just throughput and velocity that tend to be the metrics that we look at. So I really appreciated this reminder, and I know this can really help people out there too. So thanks again for taking the time. Cheers.

Paul [00:20:30] Well, that’s it for today. In line with our goals of transparency and listening, we really want to hear from you. Sean and I are committed to reading every piece of feedback that we get, so please leave a comment or a rating wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Not only does it help us continue to improve, but it also helps the show climb up the rankings so that we can help other listeners move, touch, and inspire the world just like you’re doing. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next episode.