🌹🌱🌵; 15–21 June, 2020
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker
I’m feeling: 😌
🌹Roses:
🤗 Something that went well this week:
I almost didn’t write this, but here it is, I wrote something. I know this was my ‘what went well this week’ last week as well, but the fact that I’ve actually done this for 2 weeks in a row now, means I’m making progress.
💌 Something I’m grateful for: Rest
I had Tuesday to Friday off work this week, and I’d intended to spent majority of the week learning. By Tuesday afternoon I’d spent a considerable amount of the day reflecting on situations at work that came to mind when reading about Psychological Safety in The Culture Code. I quickly realised that if I spent everyday reading and learning, that I’d spend next to no time switching off from thinking about work. So, I changed my plan and allowed myself to take more time for rest with bursts of learning amongst it instead of the other way around.
😮 Something that happened I wasn’t expecting: the prominence of the topic of ‘Psychological Safety’
Both the Culture Social and the first part of The Culture Code were centred around the topic of Psychological Safety. I’m not sure what I’d expected the focus to be in a week of learning about culture, but I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be focused first and foremost on Psychological Safety. I’ve heard about the importance of this for creativity and innovation before. When I worked with the People & Culture team at Red Badger on a project around feedback, we ran a survey to measure psychological safety. What I didn’t understand at the time, was the concept of belonging cues and how they play a role in growing psychological safety.
Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.
🌱 Buds:
🌄 Something that I’m excited about/looking forward to: 2x Culture Amp webinars and my 1:1 with Sean
I’ve registered to two webinars this week about employee experience and organisational culture. The first is about what employee experience is, what the drivers of it are, and how to create a culture first employee experience. The second is about the post-Covid workspace and how we might rethink organisational culture and wellbeing. Sean and I also have our 1:1 this Thursday, which I always look forward to and enjoy.
💡 An idea not yet fully formed: Design thinking and culture design go hand in hand (?)
One of my main assumptions about culture change and design is that the double diamond or design thinking process could be applied in order to diagnose the problems that need addressing and test possible solutions. Something I’ve begun doing is plotting some of the concepts relating to culture that I’ve been learning about to this scrappy piece of paper on my wall. I suppose my thinking is that if I can identify a process to follow, when an opportunity arrises for me to work on a culture focused project, I can review this and test my assumption.
📚 Something I’ve learned: the foundations of Psychological Safety and an actionable link to last week’s learning
I could go into great detail here; but instead I’m going to touch only on the really stand-out things from The Culture Code. The first is that the foundations of Psychological Safety are:
- Signs of investment (energy / being present)
- Feeling unique and valued (listened to / having your ideas actioned)
- Perceiving the potential for growth (both in the person, and in the relationship)
The second links to what I learned last week around high expectations and deep devotion, and made it more actionable for me:
Feedback followed by “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them” are a way of signalling belonging cues.
You are part of this group. This group is special; we have high standards here. I believe you can reach those standards.
🌵Thorns:
😟 Something I’m worried about: When I’ll see my family again
I spent as much of my week as I could this week hanging out in the park outside my flat. The weather is really warming up in London and the parks are filling with groups of people playing Bocci (otherwise known as Boules) and having picnics. It’s made me feel incredibly nostalgic for the backyard of my parent’s place in Brisbane. Ben and I had originally planned to return home in August this year to switch over to a new visa and attend my sister’s wedding. At the moment it’s still unclear whether we’ll need to do that before October when our current visa ends. It’s been over two years since I’ve been home, and while I love living in London, I was really looking forward to that trip.
🤔 Something I’m struggling/struggled with: Psychological safety through a screen
The list of distinct interactions that help identify a group with high psychological safety in The Culture Code were primarily things that happen in close physical proximity. Coyle also mentions the Allen Curve in the chapter “How to Design for Belonging” and says:
Get close, and our tendency to connect lights up.
This has raised a few questions for me:
- How does the world being forced to work remotely affect our ability to form connections and grow Psychological Safety?
- What can we do to bring back the sense of closeness when we can’t be close?
🤦♀ Something that didn’t go how I planned: Coursera
I’d hoped to find some helpful courses on Coursera to learn more about organisational psychology and culture. Unfortunately the courses I stumbled across weren’t as closely related or as engaging as I’d initially thought. I’ll have to look for something else.
🎹 What I was listening to while writing this:
I browsed around a bit until I landed on this Peaceful Piano playlist
