I’ve had an action at the top of my to-do list for four days and haven’t started it yet. It’s not urgent, but has a deadline and it is important to me. The negative consequences of not doing it, or not doing it well are significant. So why on earth have I spent the morning shredding my confidential waste?

A definition of psychological safety

Psychological Safety is the belief that we can speak our mind without negative consequences. We can offer our ideas, ask questions, raise concerns,
communicate mistakes and speak truth to power, without being sanctioned, punished or humiliated.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Human beings are fundamentally social animals. Social exclusion tells  our emotional brain that    social relationships are threatened or damaged. Exclusion tells us there is a crisis; we experience a visceral emoptional reaction that stays with us for a long time.

What if the post- pandemic organisation needs something very different from our leadership?

The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have. The last year has taught us this. We have faced challenges we could never have imagined and many of our beliefs about work have changed for ever. Our teams have faced into sudden and dramatic changes that disrupted the rhythms and patterns of their lives. We have found depths of resilience, creativity, empathy and kindness that we never knew were possible.

On the plus side, we have largely welcomed not having to commute for hours every day, dinner with the children and the productivity of uninterrupted desk time. On the other hand, the pluses come at a cost; screen-fatigue, work-home life boundaries challenged, tensions around space and Wi-Fi, lack of social interaction with colleagues.

Most of the organisations I work with are looking forward to a future with less office space, more remote-working, and extensive use of technology tools for communication and training. They are designing the future of work around what the last year has taught them; but is that going to be enough?

As leaders during a crisis, it has never been more important to connect emotionally with our people and co-workers. If we cannot help them to understand their own reactions and needs, we cannot help them to navigate through. Although we might not be able to fix everything, we can help ourselves and others to make things a little better.

From my work with leaders over the years, many find making emotional connection difficult. They have drawn a mental (and emotional) line for themselves demarcating what is “appropriate” at work. In this work, I have noticed that understanding the science of emotion can help to sign-post us to something that feels appropriate and supportive.

Back in the 90s, I was working in a global change team, implementing a huge system change across all three regions of the corporation. During the programme, we had a travel ban. Faced with the need to collaborate across 23 countries to develop, commission and train the users of the system, we turned to technology.
I won’t lie, it was more difficult and our ideas didn’t always work, but we did deliver on time.
Here is what I learnt about designing and running virtual workshops;