Carolyn Grant On On Enabling Leaders To Manage Their Team’s Psychological Safety
Carolyn Grant is the CEO of People Plus Science, and creator of evidence-based tools founded in neuroscience and translated into practical business steps for organisational leaders to mitigate risk and drive growth.
People Plus Science tools and training provide organisational leaders with the “people + business intelligence” to measure, monitor, assess and solve “people issues” from boardrooms to frontline and remote teams with great impacts on the bottom line, well-being and risk.
Armed with deeper insights, leaders are more confident to lead in critical areas of growth including team performance and engagement, risk management, organisational resilience, change management, customer centricity, innovation and growth.
Carolyn is the researcher and publisher of Australia’s Boardroom Psychological Safety Benchmark and author of the Legacy Leadership – a new mode of leadership after two decades of leadership crisis. She is also a Certified Chair, Graduate of the AICD and Fellow of the Governance Institute of Australia.
Carolyn discusses innovations in organisational leadership, mitigating psychological hazards to manage mental health in the workplace and implementing best practice drawn from neuroscience research.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to this field?
[Carolyn Grant] - I'm the founder and CEO of People Plus Science, and we essentially use insights to give leaders better support for decision making. We translate neuroscience into practical business steps, so our leaders are confident about leading while our teams are in the right environment to thrive and perform at a high level. I love what I do, we've got a great compliance around what we do with creating a leading indicator around psychological safety and hazards. When you think about customer centricity, co-design, and innovation, those are the conditions we need to be able to have people thrive in those spaces. I have always been on the customer and innovation, product development, and management. I used to do a lot of customer experience boot camps with leaders where I saw a high turnover rate; just as you're teaching customer centricity, you'd have teams disappear. Then you're having to relearn, reteach retrain everyone. Customers and employees are frustrated by leaders changing; I started looking at what else is there? We're looking at net promoter scores from an employee perspective, but I just felt that wasn't defining engagement enough.
I ended up doing a neuroscience and leadership course, and I learnt about the term psychological safety. That's the deeper and actual lead indicator for where a lot of these issues are coming from. That's how we drive business and team performance, so I wondered what could I do more in that space? At the time I was on several boards, and I went to a few training programs because I love learning. I would dedicate probably at least one day a week to learning. I was funnily enough running late to an optimising board performance discussion, so I was just doodling, listening to people's conversations, and writing stuff down. There's this level of toxicity, like people complaining about their boards, the issues they're having and the challenges they have, and I just brought up how we're supposed to be optimising performance. We're supposed to be leading strategic thinking and providing the right resources for the organisation, yet we can't even get ourselves together. What chance does an organisation, CEO or a C suite have when they're coming to talk to us and ask for directions and advice if we can't cohesively work well as a team ourselves? I started looking at the psychological safety of boards and started researching this, and I did ask one of the groups I was studying with if they would you like to do this as an Australian benchmark. They said they don't think a board is a team, but I believed they are. I started doing it on my own and that created the Australian Benchmark for Psychological Safety. We're driving that more into wellbeing in the workplace; it had some startling information around it in terms of how that psychological safety in the boardroom hindered people's ability to speak up, participate and feel valued. When we evaluated or asked participants to assess their own effectiveness on that board, they evaluated it as low. When we asked, “how effective are you?” about 25 percent of the boards said they were highly effective in strategic decision making. When you put that into the context of a dream world of innovation, that's a real issue.
What have been the flow on effects of bringing these findings to your client bases?
It's been a slow burn. Amy Edmondson has been great in translating the 1970s research from founders around psychological safety and bringing it into organisations. But it hasn't been a primary concern until our workplace health and safety environment started to say psychosocial hazards are something we're going to focus on. This is a lag indicator; it doesn’t look at the environment early enough. Now suddenly everyone's asking about what impact does this have? It has huge impacts from an individual to a decision-making team or board. In the start-up and scale up space of course, we've got investors saying, "we've never thought about it before, but we want you to come in and validate what's coming through here.” From a neuroscience perspective, we look at the number of biases a founder and team could have early on. We use a validation tool to try and mitigate a lot of that confirmation bias so we can question who is your target customer? That's one of the tools we developed during COVID, because we found people were struggling to pivot and a lot of that was because when you go back to people and culture assessments. One of the things we measure is organisational resilience; that's looking at the resilience of your people, but also the organisational responsiveness to outside factors and whether the resources internally are ready enough to do that.
That was another tool which has that neuroscience lens, and of course fund managers are now saying we have a responsibility to our investors, and they're saying we want to make sure there's due diligence a boards performance is optimised. Have we got the right person in the CEO role, and how do we know it's fit for purpose moving forward? Are they fit for the purposes of their team? They're starting to look at the dynamics of those decision-making teams and boards, where there might be an investor who must sit there, and they haven't had a choice over who that person is. There's suddenly friction around the transparency of information and things like that. There've been some amazing products we've developed at different stages in being able to validate and give a little bit more of an early nurture to a lot of the start-ups for scale ups and growth for mergers and acquisitions, probably just a lot more of that due diligence is required.
Your greatest risk is going to be around your people, that's where it's all going to come from. We are seeing what insights we can give you to help mitigate that risk, but also to identify which teams need the help immediately, or where your greatest opportunities are to perform well.
There are so many applications; we have one board that was able to use it because it had great results for their nominations committee. They wanted to prove how great they've been and how cohesive they are. They only decided to do this after they got the results. We also have had organisations which work with sensitive issues where we found that a lot of what they were reading was a hazard, but their work from home routines mitigated that. When we were talking about boards wanting CEOs to start directing people to come back to work, we told them that's going to raise a huge risk, because what your people have done is mitigate a lot of that vicarious trauma through processes at home. They've got their dogs, exercise, and access to support. If you suddenly put them on a train to come into the city for work, that's not going to be conducive to them to manage a lot of the stuff they're going to be reading at work. Other indicators are of course our trust diagnostics, which are a great way to identify what is your intention? Is it integrity? Is it your skill set that's the problem? That forms a great process and foundation the competency frameworks for your team, leaders, and board. There are many ways it keeps evolving, and as I said, it's giving leaders that insight to enable them to confidently lead instead of constantly second guessing themselves.
What are some key takeaways people leading teams or working within teams could benefit from being aware of?
The one that I like is that leaders influence 70% of the cohesion and environment of teams. That is important, and when we talk about looking after yourself and having emotional intelligence and self-awareness, it's because you have that influence. I think there's a duty of care there to get to know yourself better and understand how you're responding to things.
As a founder, the latest research from start-up snapshot (which was only just issued in 2023) was saying 72% of founders have a mental health impact from the work they're doing as a founder, but 81% won't speak up about it. That's a real concern because the impact you could have on your team and relationships are quite negative.
The second thing is that to look after yourself, it's the whole oxygen mask principle. Look after yourself first, and then you can look after everyone else as well. It's more about understanding yourself so that you know what reactions you're having. If you know that going into a boardroom churns you up and makes you sick, what can we do to fix that? What can we do to have that difficult conversation, which is probably the third thing. I think the level of our conversational intelligence is dropping. We just don't seem to be able to have them, and the next lot of generations will come through workplaces where they probably have less feedback, personal face to face training, and more online self-paced learning and texting as the communication of the day. This reluctance to have a face-to-face conversation is going to be posed with difficulty and create more concerns and problems in the workplace.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive social change?
Impact Boom is one, I love the positive change which comes from this. Recently we were at CSIRO in their accelerator program, which was just sensational. The introduction of a topic like founder resilience and well-being was sensational because it's putting a focus then and there. Uniquest is talking about how we can do the due diligence around the psychological safety of a boardroom to make sure our founders and our boards are performing well. We've got new start-ups and founders in home care trying to do things differently and make sure every supply chain connection is delivering the best level of care possible. Some of the overseas teams we work with in India and America are using Australia because we are accessible, available, and cheap. They're looking at how they can bring more cultural awareness?
The more we can do around diversity, inclusion, and a sense of belonging is critical. I love the organisations which spend time and effort on their onboarding processes and making sure their training programs are more specific and personalised.
There are some organisations out there going from strength to strength, which is good.
What books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
One of my favourites is The Dopamine Nation. It is sensational with talking about the impacts on the brain of everything from too much chocolate to illicit drugs. It provides a comparison, but also how desensitised we become as a result. Some of it is quite shocking the way it's delivered, but it is one of the most interesting reads. I think my walking went on longer in the morning because I didn't want to stop listening to the book! I'm a huge podcast listener to anything that's professional, and that is a just a sensational book to read around the impacts of addiction to dopamine. Amy Edmondson’s teaming book is a great one, they're probably my top two picks. I always love Simon Sinek's Start With Why, but I would say Amy Edmondson's book around psychological safety is great. I believe she just released her second book too, which is about failing right. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to reading it next. I download anything, and there are so many free courses available from university professors. Now I'm doing cognitive behavioural therapy and the neuroscience of leadership again. I can't even stop talking about half the things I read!
Any final thoughts on the next phase of organisational leadership?
I'm concerned about where organisational leadership is going with business ownership. A lot of businesses are struggling with the amount of compliance that's out there now, and the cost of compliance is putting an additional pressure on them. That's reflected in that mental health report, which says hard is just getting harder. I do see that throughout our industries harder is getting harder. For mental health and resilience, whatever we can do to build up some of those reserves is critical for everyone. Also, arming we with that ability to be able to help others is important, because that's the other concern,
15% of our leaders are saying they feel comfortable working within their teams when they express, they're suffering from mental health issues, because they don't know what to do.
It goes back to giving them the confidence, which doesn’t become another pressure for them to try and juggle, avoid, or ignore. I've got a great concern for organisational leadership, but not a few years ago it would have been concern because we had a real leadership crisis. We had leaders who just weren't doing the right thing, and I think if you asked people how much they trusted that leader in their business, then it would have been quite low. Now it's more the resilience of our leaders is more concerning.
