Solo Cast: Creating Psychological Safety

In this episode Forest talks about creating psychological safety. She gave a related presentation at the Lesbians Who Tech and Allies Pride Summit. This episode gives tips of how to create psychological safety with examples. 

Psychological safety is important in order to getting honest and accurate information.  It also improves retention and belonging.

Forest discussed how to avoid group think, reduce conformity bias and reduce authority bias. She also gites tips for retrospectives and 1:1s.

Music credits:

• The opening music is Like a Prism by Miyagisama .
• The closing song is Something About You by Marilyn Ford .

Thanks for listening. Please rate, subscribe, and share. Join the conversation in the Practical Leadership Cast Discord server: https://discord.gg/ewhPY6akRF

Transcript

• Hello leaders, welcome to this episode about creating psychological safety. 
• If it’s still June when you hear this: Happy Pride.
• I’m excited to chat today with you about creating psychological safety. I gave a related presentation at the Lesbians Who Tech and Allies Pride Summit
• The Purpose of today's episode:
  • Giving Tips of How to Create Psychological Safety with Examples
  • Why psychological safety is important:
    • Getting honest and accurate information
    • Retention and Belonging
• Overview:
  • About avoiding groupthink, reduce conformity bias and authority bias.
  • Tips for Retrospectives, and 1:1s

• Body:
  • Groupthink:
    • Irving Janis's team pioneered research on the topic. He wrote books that sometimes people make shockingly bad decisions as a group
    • Imagine you are asked by a researcher to take part in an experiment in the perception of line length.  You are seated with four other subjects.  You are the fifth subject.  The researcher shows you all a line that is next to three labelled lines.  The researcher asks the first subject which of the labelled lines matches the size of the unlabelled line.  You see that line B is the same length as the unlabelled line, but the first subject says A.  At this point you probably think the first subject is ridiculous, or has vision problems, but then the second subject also says A.  The third and fourth subject also say A.  At this point you probably wonder, are you the one that is ridiculous?  Are you having vision problems? 

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Did you misunderstand the question?  When it's your turn

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Do you say a for b what I just described is the ash experiment and conformity developed by psychologist Solomon Ash.

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All of the subjects, except for you were actually actors, and told to say.

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Okay.

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Told us, hey! The experiment was found out was to find out if you would conform to what everybody else had said.

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The experiment found that 75% of real subjects, informed at least once and 25% never conformed.

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Conformity was reduced when the group was smaller than 4, but was always consistent with numbers greater than 5.

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When one person disagrees conformity, afterwards drops 80%.

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One solution is to have yourself play a role of devils, advocate question things, question assumptions that the team is making.

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But you can also have that as a rotating role.

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Perhaps have somebody each sprint take on that role for meetings, trying to limit the time for playing the role as it is a very stressful position to be in before we jump into authority bias.

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I want to talk about something a little bit related. Strong personalities.

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I'm sure you've all been in a meeting where feels like there's somebody that's taking up all the oxygen in the room.

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You feel like you can't get a word in edgewise.

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You feel like.

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They're just gonna run out the clock and you're not gonna have chance to say anything.

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Or if you do, have a chance to say something that they're just gonna talk you down.

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Well as a leader. You absolutely want to have a private conversation with this person about how they're being perceived.

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Why are they acting that way and tell them the impact that they're behavior is having suggesting them that they think about a meeting where, if there's 5 people, they show, only be speaking a fifth of the time at Max, there's 10 people, you should only be speaking a Tenth of

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the time at Max also suggest to them that they should call on people that are speaking less.

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They should try to bring in other ideas and other thoughts.

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But also you wanna talk to those people as well. The people that aren't talking up in meetings and say to them in private, are there ways that you can help them?

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Can you call on them in meetings? Not everybody is comfortable being called on in meetings.

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If they're not comfortable being called in on meetings find other ways that you can get information from them and share it with the group.

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Perhaps you talk to them ahead of time before a meeting. Perhaps you have them. Text.

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You during the meeting. You could even have a conversation with them after the meeting about what they thought it made me bring up that information to the rest of the team.

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Asynchronously.

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And then, of course, you know, credit that those ideas to the person that gave it to you.

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When it comes to authority. Bias Nixon is the exemplar in my mind.

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When information was starting to break about the Watergate scandal, Nixon gather together all of his team and said.

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We need to cover this up. This is really bad. It's gonna get so much worse if we don't cover it up.

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I think we should do that.

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And in that meeting nobody contradicted him in that meeting, because nobody contradicted him.

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Everybody thought that everybody else thought that Nixon's idea was a good idea.

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In fact, everybody thought that it was a bad idea, except for Nixon, but because Nixon had talked first because Nixon was known to be a bullet, because Nixon was their boss.

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They did not feel safe. They did not feel comfortable bringing it up, and because they thought that they were alone in that idea, they also didn't bring it up.

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Irving Jones quoted White House aid, John Ehrlichman is saying, one necessarily regrets not having said the word that would have deflected the course of history.

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When I'm in a meeting. I'm often thinking to myself, am I being Nixon here?

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I try to make sure that if I have ideas, then I let other people get the first shot at talking before I bring them up, and even if I do bring up ideas I try to make sure that people understand that I'm open to criticism and I'm open.

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To hearing other ideas, and that maybe my idea isn't the best idea.

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Oftentimes companies have things that they do to look back at projects.

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Sometimes they call these retrospectives. Sometimes they call them post-mortems, sometimes they call them incident reviews.

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These are very critical meetings when it comes to learning how to improve and cycological safety is absolutely critical.

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In these meetings one way that in computer science.

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People have been trying to verify the cycleological safety in a meeting like this is to do a safety check.

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But really any type of meeting like this beforehand, you can do a safety check.

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Before we all went virtual and distributed. When you mean in person the way this would be done is you write a number from one to 5 on a piece of paper, and you fold that piece of paper up, and you put it in a hat, and so that number indicates how safe you feel one being you know feel safe.

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At all. You feel like if you're honest, you're gonna get blamed.

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You feel like you wanna avoid talking as much as possible in this meeting.

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Or as a 5 means, you feel pretty safe, and you can say pretty much anything that you're not going to get blamed for.

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Whatever you say in that meeting.

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So once. All these numbers are collected in the hat. The moderator for the meeting should then sort them.

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You know. Mix through the hat and then pull them out, and if there are any ones, and possibly even any twos, there's no point in having that meeting, because you don't have the cycleological safety, at least one person feels unsafe in that meeting, and they're not going to be able to show

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up fully for you. They are not going to be able to be honest in that meeting, and you want everybody to be able to be honest in this meeting to get the best information.

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Maybe, instead of having the meeting you take that time to talk about safety and try to figure out how people feel unsafe.

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Do people feel like they're going to get blamed?

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Do people feel like their careers are unlucky in this meeting?

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It's also critical in one on ones to have conversations that relate to.

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One time I was leaving a retrospective where?

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One time I was reading a retrospective where we hadn't gotten as much work done as we had intended, and one of the people in the meeting came in and said, one, you get this done when you get that done, once you get this other thing done, which was not at all the process in which these

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meetings went. Usually these meetings would be about talking about things like start, stop, continue. What went.

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Well, what didn't go? Well, it wouldn't be about.

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Blaine wouldn't be about what this person was doing.

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In the meeting. I had to take him aside, and I asked him to not be in these meetings again until he could change how he was presenting himself in these meetings, and not to be about blame, but to be about finding information and working with everybody.

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And one on ones there are a couple of things that you can do for psychological safety.

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One idea I got from Harvard Business Review is having a 10 scale conversation about how people feel when it comes to.

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The company that they're at, so one would be.

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They don't feel comfortable at all. In fact, they're they're probably leaving like quoting right then in the meeting.

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Whereas a 10 would be that they really like the company, and they hope they can be there until retirement.

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So this question helps you identify. Who has potentially might be a flight risk.

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Who might be thinking about leaving, and then you can think about how to help that person and how to make that person happier at work, and you can continue talking to them and ask them what would a 10 look like now you can't expect somebody to go from a 6 to a 10 or even a 7 to a 10

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it's far easier to do a more incremental approach.

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So say, somebody said that they're at a 6. Ask them, what would it take to get them to a 7?

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What would it take to get to plus one? So just asking, what would it get?

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What would? It take to get you one higher? Now, when I've had these conversations sometimes it's things that are out of my control.

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Sometimes it's it's something about the executive team, and I'm nowhere near the executive team, and I'm nowhere near the executive team.

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Sure maybe I can pass information up, but you know I probably am not gonna have a big impact on the executive team.

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If I'm a frontline manager in a very big company.

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I've also had a time when somebody said, Oh, well, I to get me to a plus one, I want someone so to come back from vacation like well, that person's gonna come vacation.

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So great, but you know sometimes it could be things like, you know.

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I wish we had more fun in our meetings. I wish I was learning more.

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I wanna take on some harder tasks. So those are things that are totally.

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In your wheelhouse to work on with that employee, and to help them be more happy when it comes to the company that they're at.

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I think that it's also critical to have exit interviews with employees.

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Now many of you might work at a company that does exit interviews in Hr.

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I've been in a few companies that Hr. Does exit.

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Interviews, and unfortunately they've never shared that information with me, and because they've never shared that information with me, the information from the exit interview I can't improve. I can't have the team improve based on that information.

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So for exit interviews. One of the reasons that it can be really valuable to get information is because there, already planning to move on you no longer are going to impact their career in terms of giving them promotions, giving them raises and giving them work, assignments, sure maybe you'll give them

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a Linkedin review. Maybe you'll talk to people that they work with in the future.

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But for the most part they're going to feel very psychologically safe in their last one.

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-on-one with you. And so the questions that I think are critical to ask are, first, did you feel like second?

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Did you have the resources you needed to do your job? Third, did you feel included?

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Fourth, what could we have done better? And fifth, what did we do? Well?

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Sometimes when you're trying to get information about how to help somebody right when you're a manager, you're not going to see everything that's happening in a team and.

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You know, people aren't necessarily gonna wanna share like, oh, so and so struggling because they don't wanna get other people in trouble.

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But what they might be willing to do is answer questions like, Hey, how could I better coach Kai versus?

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How is cognitive doing? And you see that difference?

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You know. How can I better coach Kai like?

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First of all, you know, I want Kai to excel.

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High exceling means the team excels, and that's in the best interest of everybody.

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Now, how is Kai doing like that could have more negative connotations?

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So really, it's about, you know. How do I help Kai?

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Because that's one of my responsibilities as manager.

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When your planning on changing careers, when you're planning on changing jobs, when you're interviewing at a company, you might want to think about psychological safety at the company.

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You're going to. I think the best way to figure this out is to ask our employees, do you know any employees that already work there, especially close to the groups that you work in?

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Perhaps you can talk to your peers in interviews if you don't feel like you have up here in an interview to talk to, especially appear that if you're from an underrepresented population, if you haven't in interviews talk to anybody from a similar underrepresented population.

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I would recommend that you ask the person that is running your interview.

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Coordination, say, hey! I'd like to talk to somebody that's so.

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And so that weren't at this company, and you know, try to find somebody that's peer, because they're much more likely to be honest about how it is to work.

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There!

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When I gave this talk at the Lesbian Ctch and Allies Conference, somebody asked, What about people that wanna weaponize psychological safety?

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And yeah, that is definitely something that you need to be careful of.

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And you need to. You think about. And really, before that question was asked, I'm not sure that I had thought about it, but I have definitely heard of Erg's being weaponized where employee resource groups are sometimes created in order to find the dissenters in a company so that when a

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layoff is coming. Those are the first people to go.

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So similarly.

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Psychological safety could be weaponized in order to pick people for layoffs.

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You know, you get somebody feels safe. You get somebody to open up.

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You get somebody to be honest, and then you blame them, and you use that to remove them from the company.

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That's clearly horrible thing to do. But you know it is certainly something possible that you have to be careful about.

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I think another reason that psychological safety could get weaponized is, there's some managers that think more about how they look to the people above them.

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These are the type of managers that tend to take credit for things that they're employees do, and blame employees for any mistakes that happen.

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I think that if you are working for one of those managers, then you can't really trust them when it comes to cyclical safety.

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Obviously, I hope that nobody listening here is one of those people I really want people that listen to this podcast.

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To understand how critical it is to.

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Lift up the thoughts and ideas and the work that your employees did help promote them.

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So when you are talking to your management team, it's about the successes of the individuals on your team.

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Those aren't your successes. They're the successes of your your individual contributors, and when it comes to things that were wrong, well, you're the manager.

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So obviously the buck end stops with you, you know it doesn't matter that, you know so and so drop the ball on something like as the manager.

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You're responsible. So you should be calling the the the people in upper management that you know it was your fault.

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In conclusion, group think, and authority bias can reduce valuable input from the team.

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And make people feel excluded performing regular safety checks can give you a pulse on retrospectives.

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And incident reviews.

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Give people a way to reveal.

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I hope this episode helps you to create psychological safety for your team at work.

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Think about how to reduce group, think, and get everyone's ideas included, and reduce the impact of authority bias, implement safety checks.

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Use one on ones to conduct, exit interviews, and ask Tensale questions.