(199) How High Performing Leaders Create Psychological Safety with Kina Liungman

Kina Liungman works with high performing leaders, and on this show we went through some of the core components of leadership & team development. 

Some of what we covered: 

-        Improve psychological safety as a leader

-        What helps to build trust

-        One thing you see that leaders are not doing enough

And so much more! 

ABOUT Kina Liungman

Kina Liungman is currently exploring how to develop high-performing leaders at scale through her company High-Performing Leaders Institute. With a strong passion for leadership and team development she also works directly with leaders and organizations to develop psychologically safe teams and cultures to boost performance, innovation and engagement. 

She has a background as Chief People & Performance Officer at the Nordic insure-tech Hedvig, and has previously worked with employer branding and been part of IKEA Group’s Global People & Culture team.

CONNECT with Kina

Website: highperformingleaders.institute 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kina-liungman/

VIDEO of this episode:

YouTube Video 

ABOUT Katie Stoddart:

Katie Stoddart is an award-winning, international, leadership & performance coach. Katie started her career as a hydrographic engineer working at sea and she now supports business owners to thrive in their life & business.

As a keynote speaker, Katie frequently speaks at summits, conferences & podcasts. For her weekly podcast ‘The Focus Bee Show’, Katie interviews thought leaders, speakers and authors. 

Katie works primarily with entrepreneurs & executives through 1-1 coaching & corporate workshops on Focus, Leadership & Performance.  

CONNECT with Katie Stoddart, aka 'the focus bee': 

PODCAST: https://thefocusbeeshow.buzzsprout.com/

LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiestoddart

BLOG: https://thefocusbee.com/blog/

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/TheFocusBee

INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/thefocusbee/

FACEBOOK:  https://www.facebook.com/thefocusbee

Transcript

[00:00] Katie: Welcome back to the Focus B show. This is Katie Sudddhart here aka the focus b. And on this show, I interview high performers and leaders around the world to discover their secrets on peak performance, productivity, mindfulness, and leadership. So if you want to take your performance and your leadership to the next level, then you're in the right place. Listen up and connect with the magic.

[00:44] Katie: Such a joy to have Keena Liungman on the show today. Keena helps people to become high performing leaders and she's currently exploring how to develop high performing leaders at scale. Today we're going to dive into what is psychological safety. How can you have more psychological safety and build trust in your organization? Thank you so much for being on the show today, Keena. I'm so excited to have you here.

[01:11] Kina: Thank you so much for having me.

[01:13] Katie: This is the first offline podcast, so thank you for your patience and setting everything up before we and super, super excited to dive into today's topics. Me too. Amazing. I know you also work with high performance and leadership. That's very similar feel to what I do, but with your own touch and spin on things. And I'd love to begin with psychological safety. I feel that nowadays this is such an important topic, it's so important to have psychological safety within your organization. So what do you feel are some of the key aspects of psychological safety? How can we build psychological safety in an organization?

[01:52] Kina: So I think first of all, I would just like to share why it's so important. I don't know if that's relevant at all. If we work in an organization today, most organizations need to have innovation. You need to have people that collaborate with each other. You don't have people standing on an assembly line just pushing buttons. You need collaboration. And in order to really access the full capacity of people, people need to feel safe. Because if we're not feeling safe, you have this whole amygdala response in your brain and it sort of hinders your working memory and your capacity to think. And by feeling safe, which is basically psychological safety is defined as members of a team feel that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, which means I won't be judged, I won't be criticized, I won't be punished for speaking up or for sharing ideas. Which means if I feel safe in an environment, I can share my perspectives and someone else can build on those perspectives even though they're not super great. Because very often people feel a lot of us have imposter syndrome and we might feel I need to be super certain of everything I'm saying before I'm speaking up. So if we have a psychological safe environment, we can actually access the power of innovation, we can access all the potential in everyone within the team. And I usually compare it to a water hose. I think that's what it's called in English. So if you have a water hose and there's a knot on it, you won't get any water out of the hose. If you don't have psychological safety, it's as if you had a knot on your water hose. So it doesn't really matter how much potential in terms of water people you put in the water hose because you won't get anything out of it. So psychological safety is literally the foundation for getting the greatness out of everyone in your team. And what you need to do in order to create psychological safety, which was your original question, is to make the team safe for risk taking. So how do you do that? It needs to start with the leader. It needs to start with a leader creating an environment where people feel that they can speak up. And as a leader, you do that by creating forums where people actually can speak up. So usually you have a leaders that are like, yeah, I'm very open to feedback. Just come and share with me. And it's like, that's just not what you do. You need to proactively go out and source feedback. You need to ask questions. You need to be genuinely curious and ask open and good questions. It doesn't matter if you say, you can tell me anything. You need to show like, oh, Katie, what do you mean by this? Oh, really, please tell me more. Have you thought about this? And really ask questions and come from a place of curiosity. It's also about when someone comes to you with concerns or feedback to never, as a leader go into being defensive. It's about when someone comes to you with sharing a mistake or sharing feedback. The first thing you should say as a leader is, thank you so much for sharing this. Like, you should really reinforce because if someone comes to you and say, I ****** up, and you say, what? And you become mad, or if you're not even encouraging that person addressing that to you, what are the chances that person will share that with you? Again? So those are some of the things you can do. A lot of things. And it has a lot to do with an interpersonal communication style and how you're actually being present in the conversation, et cetera. But I can go on about this forever.

[06:05] Katie: Love what you shared with the metaphor, with the host pipe, because I do feel that without this psychological safety, people aren't able, like you said, to open up. Maybe they'll stop blaming other people for mistakes. Maybe they'll criticize, they'll be defensive, they're less likely to share their ideas. And as you mentioned, the leader is the first person to illustrate that it's okay, that it's okay to mess up and to proactively seek feedback. Because I think what you shared is so common that people say, I'm open to feedback, tell me things, but go and ask questions. And it's so uncomfortable for people to share feedback, even positive feedback that validating it and appreciating it and saying thank you and not getting defensive and actually trying to see what the learning behind it really can create a safe environment. So this is coming from the leader, but how about in terms of a team? So if you want psychological safety in your team, let's say the leader is great, already proactively asking feedback, already role modeling this safety and opening and asking for feedback and helping people to grow in that way, how did they help also have psychological safety between different team members?

[07:17] Kina: That's a great question because very often people confuse psychological safety with trust. For example, I had a manager once and that person was great on building one on one trust. And I really felt that I could tell this manager pretty much everything. But our team meetings were quiet, we didn't share ideas. And when the manager asked a question, everyone was silent. So what this manager failed to do was to build interpersonal trust, which is then when everyone feels trust between each other, that's when you have psychological safety. So what you need to do is to actually that can arise from itself, but what you need to do is to facilitate that conversation. And one of the best ways to build psychological safety in a group environment is to share vulnerability, is to really connect human to human and show who you are. Because when we're open about who we are, people feel that they can trust you. And when people trust you, they are more likely to open up about who they are. And then you have this trust spiral. So as a leader, you can facilitate that conversation. You can facilitate, you can do group exercises. Also when you have someone who is in a way not contributing to an open environment or having a tone of voice that shuts down other people to also take that feedback with that person and also working with self development with everyone within the team to become aware of your communication style. So for example, when I coach leaders, what I very often do is that I look at do you have or actually it's not only leaders, but does your communication style open up the conversation or does your communication style shut down the conversation? So when you actually do like role play or you do specific exercises around really understanding, so how does my tone of voice impact how safe you feel with me? So I can say the exact same sentence. And I do this as an exercise sometimes, so I ask people to and you can do this at home, in your office. If you're in a group of maybe three or four people, everyone write down one statement on a piece of paper. You don't show it to anyone. And then you write down maybe two different kinds of emotions. Then you go around the group one on one and you share one by one, and you share your statement with the emotion you have chosen. So, for example, if I have a cup of coffee here, if I have written, what kind of coffee is this? So if I just choose an emotion right now, and I ask you, Kitty, what kind of coffee is this?

[10:29] Katie: Yeah, sort of anger, annoyance.

[10:31] Kina: Exactly. And then you get to reflect, okay, how does this impact me? How do you experience me and reflect that back to me? And then I choose another emotion and I say, what kind of coffee is this?

[10:44] Katie: Yeah, sort of curious inquisitive.

[10:45] Kina: Exactly. And I'm saying exactly the same thing, but my tone of voice impacts the way you feel about me and your likelihood of sharing things with me. So when people really become conscious of how they're communicating and how that impacts other people, that really changes conversation. And a leader can facilitate these kind of exercises in a group setting so that people become mindful of how they're communicating and also really stress the responsibility that everyone has on contributing to the team environment.

[11:24] Katie: It's so interesting. And I'm reflecting on a previous episode where I interviewed this neuroscientist and we have these different neurosignatures and people that have a strong dopamine. And maybe I was thinking testosterone neurosignature. They're more likely to have a sort of harsh or direct way of expressing things. But for them, it's perfectly natural and they just want to get to the point. So they don't realize that their communication style impacts maybe how much people share with them, how vulnerable others are willing to be, and that's just their way of communicating. So what you're essentially saying is having the self awareness around your communication style can really then impact, well, one on one, trust, but also psychological safety as a whole.

[12:05] Kina: Yeah, exactly. And I think neuroscience here is very interesting. There is some research by a guy named Paul Sack who has during ten years I don't know if you're familiar with this, but he has basically done research on trust and the neuroscience behind trust and what you're saying exactly with the testosterone. So testosterone inhibits oxytocin, and oxytocin in your body leads to trust. And you can also see this by if you induce oxytocin in your body from, what do you say, artificially, that actually leads to people having behaviors that are more trusting than if you don't inject that oxytocin. For example, the way you design a work environment can actually inhibit or foster trust. One thing that actually creates testosterone in your body is competition. So by having a competitive environment, you actually decrease trust because the level of oxytocin decreases. So there is a lot of interesting research going on in this field because very often when you talk about psychological safety and topics like this, some people are like, yeah, but these are like soft things. You can't really measure them, but they are very much measurable.

[13:31] Katie: Yes, it's interesting. And it's all about having that balance because some people might thrive on a bit more competition at a given moment. Maybe they have a sprint when maybe they have a competition for a month. Maybe that's exciting and it puts adrenaline in. But maybe if that's always the case, then other people will feel less psychologically safe, other people will feel too much pressure, get overwhelmed, get burned out. So maybe it's also about that rhythm, right? Overall, from time to time, maybe with the OD, like high level energy, testosterone, dopamine all of that, but maybe not continuously. And it also doesn't suit all the different types of people personalities, neurosignatures. So it's finding that balance. What is one thing that you see that leaders really don't do enough of? So something where you just think, oh, I wish leaders did that more. Aside from maybe asking proactively for feedback though, that was a great one.

[14:23] Kina: Let me think about this. I would say one thing, and this especially goes for more junior leaders. If I dare to generalize it's to say I don't know.

[14:37] Katie: They don't say that enough.

[14:38] Kina: No, to just be really open about that you as a leader, and especially today when you hire specialized people who have specialized skills, like if you hire someone who to your team today, you usually hire someone who knows something more than you do. You're not supposed to have all the answers. You're supposed to ask the questions and find the way forward. So there's really a shift here and just saying I don't know, and also being honest, very often I have leaders who say, so I feel like this and that in this relationship and I'm not sure how to address it. And I'm like, have you told the person? Have you just said, you know what? I think this is super hard, I don't know what to do. What would you need instead of figuring out all the answers on your own, just being open about your own fallibility, about your what do you say? Like just being vulnerable about how you feel about things. And then just say, can we find a solution together that's really important.

[15:48] Katie: That's amazing. This is exactly a topic that came up yesterday in a coaching session and it was around just having this ability to say I don't know, and not be expected as a leader or as the manager to be the one with the answers. Because especially what happens is even if originally they might have a technical skill that leads them to that managerial position, then they're so focused on the managing side of things that obviously their technical skills end up being not as extensive as the actual people they're managing. And so for a lot of managers, this leads to a bit of an impostor syndrome feeling because they feel that they should know more than the people managing because it's their job to tell them what to do and how to do it. But it's not it's to guide them, it's to help them find solutions, is to see how they're growing, to see how well they fit in in the team. And so it's really that shift in mindset from I need to be the expert here so I can tell everyone else what to do, versus oh, I need to just be good at communication, understanding, showing them the overview, guiding them, helping them grow. And it's not about them having all that expertise.

[16:53] Kina: And now you're actually saying something that I think many organizations would benefit from really taking to heart, which is when you have someone who is an expert on something, that doesn't mean that they will be a good leader. I actually talked to a lot of founders and CEOs about what are the main challenges as they grow and several mention our leaders are too junior or we have the wrong people in leadership positions. And you need to understand that being a leader is a skill in itself. It's a competency that you have to nourish and that you have to develop. Just because you're really good at architecture in terms of coding, that doesn't mean that you're great at developing people. It doesn't mean you're great at setting a direction and inspiring people to follow that direction doesn't mean you're good at creating clarity or building psychological safety. So really dare to put people in leadership positions that are great at leading people, not necessarily who are the best at their given field?

[18:02] Katie: Absolutely. And I think this is a major flaw in organizations in general. The way to evolve and grow in their career leads to managerial positions. But there's some people who are excellent in their technical skill who don't even want to lead people because they're like the coding or whatever. So there needs to be a sort of parallel track where people can just grow and be more and more the expert in that field. And for others who are then interested in the more managerial leadership type positions, they can go that route. But I think it's a flaw to see that the necessary evolution has to lead to leadership positions. It's not for everyone and everyone enjoys it.

[18:37] Kina: No, that's very true. And in addition, not only do you risk ending up having a poor leader, you also end up losing a high performer in that field, whether it's a salesperson or a software developer or a performance marketer, whatever it is, you lose that competence when you put that person in another position where they might not thrive.

[18:59] Katie: So it's a lose lose double aspect. I think it'd be great to just come back briefly to that idea of trust and psychological safety because it really is the core of today's episode. I remember that when you did your workshop, which is how I found Akina fantatic her workshop here in the coworking space. You mentioned the three pillars of logic empathy and authenticity. For trust. Maybe you could say a few words around this because I thought that was a really fascinating approach to what makes a trust people.

[19:30] Kina: Yeah, I think this trust triangle, if you will, it's developed by two researchers at Harvard University named Francis Faye and Anne Morris. And what they have done is basically codified what are the main characteristics of how you build trust. And what they say is you have three elements, hence the triangle. So I'm a very visual thinker, so I really like frameworks that are simple and that you can illustrate on a piece of paper. So usually when you talk about trust, people think about logic. And that is one element of trust. Basically saying, like, I trust that what you're saying is true. I trust your judgment. I trust that your judgment is sound, that what you're saying is making sense. So that is one element of trust and that's super important. But the other two elements of trust are what you would say, maybe more soft elements of it. And one is empathy. Basically, I feel that you care about me as a person. And the other one is or the third one is authenticity. I experience the real you. So when we have all of these three so, Katie, if you and I work together and I feel like you say you will do something and I know from experience that, yeah, if you say you will do something, you do it. And if you have a problem, you come to me. I trust that you have the abilities to do this task, whatever it is. I also feel that you care about me as a person and I feel that I experience the real you. There is no hidden agenda because very often as human beings, we sense, and perhaps we cannot really say, but you usually have that gut feeling when you're like, I can't really trust this person. I can't really say why. Usually there is something about the authenticity aspect. So these three elements are, according to Francis Faye and Anne Morris, how you build trust.

[21:30] Katie: It's so interesting. I just think the authenticity and the empathy, how sometimes we just feel them, it's hard to measure it's sometimes just this idea or impression that something is off or something's a bit behind, or there's a hidden gender or there's some form of it's, like a veil. It's as if they're sort of hidden behind it and you can't really see who they are. And that makes it very hard to trust someone. And sometimes it's just the people that are struggling to be vulnerable. Sometimes that mask drops after a few times you see them. Maybe it's just in a protection. Sometimes it stays. And then it's very hard to build that trust with those people.

[22:09] Kina: Yeah, it is. And it takes a lot of self development because authenticity is I usually make the comparison. Like, if you have a very big discrepancy between your work self and your private self, then people will most likely feel that you're not very authentic because you have one face in the workplace and one face at home. And that's not to say that you need to be all private and personal at work, but being authentic with your emotions, with your strengths, with your weaknesses, being able to self regulate and all those different elements of being authentic and knowing who you are, people sense that. And as a leader, very often, as I mentioned before, in terms of saying I don't know, very often as a leader, we focus on the logic side of things, but the most powerful side of things are authenticity and empathy.

[23:07] Katie: I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised that the authenticity and the empathy are sort of the core pillars here. So what would be to sort of finish on an implementable actionable tip? What would be your advice for a leader in a company who wants to build more psychological safety, who wants to build more trust with their employees, who's noticed there's maybe a bit of competition between people or a bit of a toxic environment? What could be like three key things they could put in place? Maybe we covered them today. But just to sort of summarize, what could be the actionable tips? Very coaching like actionable tips at the.

[23:42] Kina: End of the we love those checklists, don't we? I would say, first of all, start by showing the way, by modeling trusting behaviors. So being open. When you talk about authentic leadership, there is one element that is about relational transparency and that's basically to build relationships based on honesty, vulnerability, showing who you are, daring to be, fallible, sharing mistakes. So showing people that it's okay. So that's one thing. The other thing is to let's see what should be most important here. Creating to really I know this is a summary, but I want to just put in a metaphor here because there's the same with culture. I usually see this as a garden. So if you plant something in the soil, that's not enough, like you need to be there and water it and nurture it. But you also need to take out the weeds and it's the same here. So as the manager, you need to make sure that you go in and address the behaviors that are not in line. So if you want to prevent a toxic culture and if you want to build psychological safety, you also need to be there and address and have consequences for bad behaviors and then also really model. Now, I focus a lot on the leader, but really model encouragement when people do speak up, when people share mistakes, when people give you feedback to really show I really, really value this. So one thing that I do, almost in any situation that I'm in, I ask for feedback if I have an interview. When I was leading the people team at a scale up. When I had recruitment interviews, I almost always ended the interview saying, if I were to do this interview again, what would you have me do differently? Or if I had a meeting, I would be, okay, so I had this presentation. I really want to work on my visual skills in my presentation. What would be one thing I could do differently? And when you're proactively asking for feedback, what happens is that people actually dare to come up to you and say, hey, can I share some feedback? Because you need to demonstrate it over and over and over and over again that you really want feedback. Otherwise people won't come to you. It doesn't matter if you're like, hey, I'm open to feedback. You need to really have that genuine will to develop and for people to feel safe. So even though someone shares with you something really hard for you to hear, you just smile and you say, thank you so much for sharing this. I understand that must have been really hard for you.

[26:35] Katie: It's true. And it's sometimes harder for the person sharing than the person receiving. So it's also acknowledging that for them, it might be even more out of their comfort zone, especially if they're not used to sharing feedback.

[26:46] Kina: And especially if it's because one thing you need to think about is if you're the manager and if someone in your team shares that feedback, it's also a hierarchy thing. So it actually is even harder.

[26:58] Katie: Definitely. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much, Keena. This has flown by. It's been so wonderful and it's such an important topic. Where can people find you if they want to know more about this, if they want to know more about psychological safety and leadership skills, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

[27:13] Kina: I would say LinkedIn. I'm not really big fan of other kind of social medias. Maybe I should, but you find me on LinkedIn. I'm Kirna Yungman Youngman is very hard to spell. Liungman yes.

[27:28] Katie: Amazing. Thank you once more for today. Love that interview. Thank you for being here.

[27:33] Kina: Thank you so much for having me.

[27:38] Katie: Thank you so much for tuning in today to the Focus Bee Show. I would absolutely love to hear your feedback. So let me know in an Apple review or YouTube comment what was most valuable for you, and feel free to share this episode with a friend or a family member. Wishing you a wonderful, magical and focused day ahead.