Podcast Episode 110 Transcript: Psychological Safety Is Not Soft: It’s the Difference Between Teams That Work and Teams That Don’t.

Psychological Safety at Work: Why High-Trust Teams Perform Better

Introduction

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Self-Reliant Team podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today.

Today's episode is brought to us in part by Cowboy Cuffs. Sporting my Cowboy Cuffs shirt today. Cowboy Cuffs: Elevate your style, elevate your life, elevate each other.

This bad boy here, see if I can get a close up of the Cowboy Cuffs custom cuff link I got there, if you can see that. Black cuffs, it's kind of a grayish black print.

Yeah, awesome shirt. This one is called the Black Sheep and I happen to know a little bit about sheep, being that my family was in the sheep business for several generations and I also know something about being a black sheep. Maybe you do too? Don't know.

Anyway, the Black Sheep by Cowboy Cuffs. Get you some Cowboy Cuffs. Some, I'm going for all of them. That's what I'm working for.

The Real Goal of Leadership

Today though we're talking about, you know, trying to get some stuff done here at the company, be a better leader, get more results and get basically get people to do what we're asking them to do so we can move this company forward. And you know why? So that all of us involved can increase the quality of our life. I mean, that's why we're all here. We just think that, a lot of times we think like horses, if I could just get you to do what I want you to do, everything would be great.

Today's topic is an important one and a big one. I'm just going to give the overview of it today because this is really what I focus in in my keynotes, my training, and what it is, is psychological safety.

It's the, now let me just, I'll just tell you right now, okay?

I'm going to begin with what it is and why it matters. But I'll tell you off the top, mean, it just sounds like, it sounds like a softball to me, right? Just some shrink topic, you know, just like some pop psych head medicine term, you know, just like it sounds like, look, I don't need, I just need to get some results. I don't need some psychology, but the truth of it is, is, it's anything but a softball. Okay, it's nothing but weak and it, it is what makes the difference in so many ways.

And here's why there's proof Google studied 180 teams and they found that the number one factor in high-performing teams was psychological safety the single most critical factor in team successes with psychological safety, so I mean, what does that mean?

What Psychological Safety Really Means

I don't know how much you've heard about or know about psychological safety. Or a lot of times what I have heard about it, they make it hard to implement and make it pretty vague. Okay. But let's just talk about what that means to you as a leader. Okay.

If you have a little bit too much, people drama, if you have a little bit too much people friction, if you have a little bit higher turnover that you'd like, if you have a few too many HR issues that you'd like to reduce or eliminate.

If you have any managers that you feel or they feel are spending too much time handling people problems, trying to emotionally manage people and get them to get along and the managers are so busy managing emotional drama that they can't get the work done, if you have any of that ever, or if you're just really frustrated because you feel like you can't create desire or just get people to do what you need them to do to get the results that you need to to move the company forward.

And so this, if any of that, excuse me, if any of that resonates or if you can relate to any of that.

Psychological safety is something that you are going to want to need, you are going to need to understand and learn how to implement.

Why Psychological Safety Matters

So let me just come back to the study about Google and talk about why it matters. What they found was as teams with psychological safety, what they deemed with psychological safety were 19% higher in productivity. That means that they completed projects faster and with fewer errors, almost 20%, 31% more innovation.

That means that people in these teams were more likely to propose ideas and more likely to implement ideas, more likely to see a problem, bring a recommendation, give you my thoughts, give you my proposal on it rather than zip it and say nothing. 20%, excuse me, 27% lower turnover. Okay, turnover is so expensive and I know.

Employees are just flat less likely to leave with psychological safety and here's one.

3.6, three and a half times more engagement. People just simply have higher morale and higher job satisfaction.

This isn't just an idea, a psychological theory that, for me, this is the real deal. I have worked on psychological safety in my own company.

In the beginning, I didn't know that that was the term for what I was doing, but I have worked on it.

I have worked on implementing psychological safety as a leader for quite some time now and I've seen the results and that's why I'm so excited to present the ideas to you.

Shane’s Definition of Psychological Safety

And so I'm going to give you my definition of psychological safety because I used to simply call it trust. And if you could sum it up in one word, it would be trust, according to me.

Now specifically, well, what does that mean, Shane? Who trusts who to do what for what? Are you saying that employees, the team trusts each other or we all trust the leaders and the this and that and who trusts who and to do what? What do we trust them to do or not do?

And the answer is that psychological safety means that we feel safe. We trust, we feel safe from value judgments. We trust that our value won't be judged, period.

That's my definition. Okay? It means that inside of this team, we don't judge each other's value. And when I know that things change. Okay.

Now we say things in the world like, “Hey, this is a safe space. Hey, this is a no judgment zone.” And things like that. But a lot of times people hear that, but they don't, they might not fully believe it or understand it or, you know, it's hard to kind of internalize that just because you said this is a safe space that that's the way it's going to be, particularly at work.

So, it's not easy just to take on the surface level and here's why is because human beings, all of us are making value judgments all the time, continuously, constantly going on right now.

You and I are both making value judgments right now and we're always evaluating where we fit in. What does this mean about me? How do we measure up in comparison to who we're comparing ourselves to, to the world? What other people think about us and what does that mean about me?

We're always making meaning about our value. This is constantly happening. It happens subconsciously. It happens automatically without our conscious participation. We don't have to do anything and it's just running in the background.

At work, these value judgments that our own minds make are amplified. Here's why. Because we deem what happens at work to be such a high stake because, well, it's our money. And we think that is so important. It's our survival. It's what we have. It's our temporal value. It's our stuff, right? It's our ability to, to buy and trade and sell in this world, it's money, it's money, okay, it's money.

And so the stakes feel so high that how we're looking at everything that happens in the workplace and how that relates to what it means about us as a human being amplifies.

Those are the value judgments that we're making in the background.

Emotional Needs at Work

And so at work, we wanna be liked, we wanna be thought of as a, you know, dependable, as loyal, as a high performer, as good at our job, you know, outside of just the work thing, I mean, human beings have, we want to be like just to start with, okay? Because that feels good because we feel like we belong. Okay, we want to be appreciated. We want to have a, we need, these are by the way, emotionally needs, a sense of belonging, a sense of significance. We want to feel important. We want to feel like we believe we're significant, like we want to feel like that we're connected and that people think we're important and they're that were valued by other people. Those are emotional needs.

And to the degree that we believe that our emotion, that we feel those emotions, that we believe that we have thoughts that create those emotions, those emotional needs for us, when we feel that way, we are able to perform at our highest level.

And we feel we're able to connect, able to feel significant and important when we feel that we're not being judged based on what we do. Okay?

And so that then when we feel like that we're not being judged or being valued, then we operate better. We just, don't have all this extra people stuff going on in the background. Like I wonder what she thinks about me or he or this, or they said this and all the things that it makes it mean.

And we get defensive when it comes to, somebody says, you need to do this different. And you're like, my goodness, you know, did I do it wrong? What do they think about me? What's it going to make a difference? And all of this stuff, it's very, you know, we're complex people, okay? Human beings are pretty complicated and that's just the way it is.

And we're able to eliminate so much confusion and chaos and conflict inside of our minds when we feel safe from value judgment. That's psychological safety. Okay?

"How Do I Create Psychological Safety?”

And you say, that's hunky dory, Shane. My people, my teams, my employees are going to operate based on how they feel. Well, how exactly, Shane, are you going to, how am I going to control how other people feel for Harold's sake?

So we know, okay, that we can't control how people think or how people feel. We know that, okay? So the question becomes, what can we do?

And there's quite a lot that we can do that we're going to change the environment. We can change, that we can do to create, that we can do and change to create psychological safety.

So I'm going to give you three things, okay?

1. Develop Yourself First

We'll go through all three of them today. I think fairly quickly, do the best I can. Here we go.

Number one, most importantly, we're going to take a look at ourselves. Okay? Number one is to develop myself and to continually commit to developing my own value beliefs.

What does that mean?

That means that I, first of all, that I recognize and I commit to the idea that what I believe about me is an ongoing thing. It's not a one and done, hey, I got that. I feel pretty good about me. What's next?

And that's not something that, you know, I have a quote unquote an issue with.

Here's the thing. It's happening ongoing what you believe to be true about yourself is being formed and is being added to and changing and evolving every second of every day based on all your mind's input, everything that happens that you cause to happen and everything that happens to you.

So therefore, if you recognize that and commit to the idea that you want to commit to the idea that you want to have extremely high value beliefs for yourself.

Basically you want to have unconditional love for yourself, which means that based on no matter what you do, okay, it's not based on anything that you do that you always have perfect worth, okay?

And so unconditional love, just like you can picture that with your kids or somebody that you really love, that you're gonna do that for yourself that you're going to separate what you do, all the things that you do and don't do, from your worth as a person. And you're not going to judge yourself based on what you do or don't do. And that you're going to work on always holding yourself in high regard and having lots of self-respect and lots of regard for yourself, lots of self-love, self-respect, self-esteem, self-confidence, all of it. A high self-image. And that you're not going to base any of that on what you do or don't do.

So that's number one, that you commit to personal development with the idea that you value yourself 100%. You are a priceless, perfect individual who sometimes does things well and sometimes doesn't, but nothing, your value is non-negotiable, nothing can ever change that.

Once you agree to that and agree to commit to an ongoing development of your own beliefs and you work on internalizing the beliefs, the foundational beliefs, is behavior does not equal worth or your value has nothing, has no, what you do, your behavior has no effect on your value, those foundational ideas, and that you commit to the idea that you are an exceptional human being regardless of what you do, you don't do.

That's number one.

Because here's the thing, everything starts with us, okay? So we need to hold ourselves in high regard because the way that we relate to ourselves is the way that we're going to present to the world because it's the way that we relate to the world, the same way that we see ourselves.

So that is, this is an ongoing work, it's not a one-done, one-time deal. So, yeah, that's, that helps us easier when we think and feel that way about ourselves. We can think and feel that way about the people that we lead.

So that's why it must begin with ourselves. It makes it easier to regard, to have a high regard for other people and to respect other people.

And it makes it easier to not judge people based on what they do or don't do. We can only judge the work when we're practicing that inside of our own lives. Okay.

That is the key.

2. Create the Environment

Number two, number two is that we create the environment for psychological safety.

Well, how do you do that?

We establish norms. We establish the culture. We establish a way of doing things. This is how we do, this is how we roll here. Okay.

We have ideas and policies like judge the work protect the person. We always only judge the work and we do judge the work, but we always protect the person. Okay, that means judging the work not judging the person. Okay, so we establish rules we also and, and ways of doing things and so let me talk a little bit more about that.

We educate people because here's the thing, this idea of separating what we do with who we are is a foreign idea. Not very many people have even heard about that, okay? Because we get conditioned, we're raised, we're taught to believe, we're socialized, it's normalized that what we do equals who we are.

How good we, how well we do this or that or the other determines where we fit in society, how good we are in comparison to the world, the world is set up and our brains are set up to judge what we do and determine that's what determines our worth.

So we educate people and encourage them in their own personal lives and certainly at work that they get the idea that we're separating everything that we do from who we are.

This is just what we do. Now what we do is not just what we do because it matters, but it doesn't matter to our value, our worth as a soul, as a human being, a human, as a person on this earth.

It has no impact on it, no value.

So we talk about that. We clearly state, like I said, judge the work, protect the person, and what it means.

That means that we always hold people in high regard. We always respect people.

never use words about value judgment. You're not a certain kind of way because this or that or the other. Because of this doesn't make you this.

We don't call people names. We don't have any of it.

And by the way, as in the leadership, we have accountability for that. We have systems set up where we don't tolerate disrespect. We don't tolerate value judgments. And when it happens, we require repair, we cry out apology, we require recompense, and we act quickly.

And if you can continue to treat people and make judge people and be disrespectful in any way then you don't get to work here very long.

Okay so we're serious about this idea here. That's the way we roll. Okay because what you do is not who you are.

Okay even though we've been conditioned to believe that we are setting in our organization here this is like, as if the leader speaking in your group, “This is the new standard of how people relate with each other. And this is the new standard of an environment where we operate, which is how we create psychological safety.”

And what happens is, is as the trust goes up, as the trust goes up, the people problems start to go down, defensiveness and so on. We encourage people in this to work on their own value beliefs. We work on, we encourage people to improve how that they see themselves. And that is basically we set the foundation and create the environment with the setting the guidelines of how we roll here and the education.

3. Love Who You Lead

Number three, creating psychological safety here, psychological safety in, defined by me is high trust, trust that you're safe here from value judgments period. Cause we respect and everybody's the same.

And that's what number three is.

Love who you lead.

You hearing me?

This is how we relate to people. That's why it's so, number one is so important that we work on this ourselves. So that, because how, that's how we come out to other people. Okay.

We always treat people with respect, which is easier to do when we respect that more than we respect ourselves.

We always treat people fairly. We do our best to be fair with accountability, with incentives, with everything. We try to be equitable, to treat everybody. Everybody's on the same ground. Everybody's equal. Everybody is 100% value, not 99, not 101. Everybody is 100% value here, period.

And we only ever judge the work and we always, always protect the person.

Which means part of that is showing empathy. I mean, part of that is prefacing correction or instruction or when I need to correct you, I preface it by saying, hey, just let me tell you, I have the utmost respect for you. This does not have anything to do with you personally at all. All we need to do, I'm here just to look at what's happening, what you're doing, because we need to change that for the benefit of everybody.

If you believe that you buy that you trust that I'm telling you the truth and you trust that I'm being open and honest with you, you will not be defensive and you'll be able to focus and objectively look at that work and be able to make that correction without a whole bunch of pushback. Or any defensiveness.

We set the expectation that mistakes and imperfection is going to happen. We just say that's the way it is.

We expect that this project is going to have, there's a lot of uncertainty involved in it. We expect that we're not 100% sure what the future is going to be. We expect that people are going to make some bad decisions on purpose and we're going to make plenty of mistakes along the way.

And so that's the expectation that we set, not that that's okay. We just want you to know that it's okay.

with your value, it doesn't have any impact on your value. That's why it's okay.

And it is okay to mistake because it doesn't change your value.

When you do make a mistake, we can look at it. And if you believe this, you're open to fix and change that error or make a correction and change the way.

As leaders, as love and who we lead, we show up with humility. Humility equals strength. We show up with the strength to be open to see ourselves as the same way as everybody from the top to the bottom.

We also are gonna make mistakes. We're gonna do things wrong on purpose occasionally. And sometimes we're just gonna be off course. We're gonna make a bad decision. We don't want to, but we're human beings and sometimes that happens.

And when we do, this is how we go about fixing it. This is open, this is human, and this is we're gonna open ourselves up and show our vulnerability.

That is the strength and that helps increase the connection and the trust in this deal.

Because again, three is to love who we lead.

I mean, we really have to love who we lead and we have to try to love them unconditionally.

Meaning, regardless of what they do.

Are you hearing me now?

I mean, regardless of what they do.

Okay. But we're not gonna make that mean anything about them. We're gonna respect and hold them at high regard. We're gonna protect the person no matter what they do or don't do.

And that can be hard, especially when it's not normal, it's not natural, it's not what we're used to.

But these principles work.

What Changed in My Company

I can guarantee you that. I, in my own business had such high turnover and defensiveness or people just shutting down, not listening and then nothing changes. They agree to the change, but then they don't change or a lack of ownership or accountability or responsibility. It's like, well, I was told, you know, all this excuses and blaming other people and all kinds of stuff.

And I'm not saying that everything's perfect in my company because it's certainly not.

But here's what I can tell you. The change has been significant. It has been profound. I mean, it is it's really been quite incredible to see and people just come with a better attitude when they trust that you're going to hold them no matter what they do or don't know.

They just you know, that's why the safety, you know, people do when they feel safe from value judgment and that they trust that no matter what they do, you're going to be with them and you're going to give them perfect respect, and you don't think you're better than them and it's okay to make mistakes.

They're going to be more honest with you. They're going to try harder. They're going to show up with a better attitude. They're going to be more loyal because they're getting more of their emotional needs met.

Now, just let me tell you something and you know, behavior matters. mean, that's why we're here is to judge the work.

And it's going to be, we set the expectation. It's going to be ongoing judgment work. I mean, it's never going to be perfect work. So therefore, we're always going to be working on improving the work.

So just expect that we're going to judge the work. It's important. I mean, it's why we're here, but we're also all here for the same reason. And that is, is to improve the quality of all of our lives. I'm here for the same reason, you and you and you and you and all of us. Okay.

But no matter, even though that we do judge the work ongoing and we must, because that's why we're here.

We never tie what the work, what they do or don't do, what anyone does or not does to their value or their worth as a person. Okay.

And you can, you can see when people feel safer, when they feel like they belong, when they feel like they're valued, not just because you say it, because they actually believe it when they still, when the trust goes up. Okay.

And when we as leaders and managers behave that way consistently and we don't judge the person, we don't do it publicly or privately, we don't do it at all.

What happens is people are more open. They participate more. They bring their ideas. They bring their recommendation. They engage more. The climate changes, you know, the climate changes.

This is true. This is the new standard. The worth work standard is the new standard of how we do things in companies.

And I think it is what makes the biggest difference because there's so many amazing leaders and managers and they're doing everything that they can do, but at the core, at the basic of it, the very, you boil it all down to why we don't get lasting results and why things could be so much better and why some of the initiatives and ideas and systems and all that doesn't work, don't work as well as they could because at the core, those emotional needs are not being met.

When you can create an environment by doing these three steps to increase the psychological safety with your teams, you will see the same as Google saw in your own companies, in your own organizations, the increase in all the things that I listed and more because it just feels better.

You're going to feel better too, okay?

Final Thoughts

So psychological safety is not a softball. It is, again, remember it is the highest indicator of team performance. It depends on, it determines how people show up when they come to the work, how they participate and how they perform.

And it just so happens that this is what I speak on all around the country. And this is what I have trainings for. This is what I specialize in.

So if you want better performance and less friction and more engagement, this is the deal.

So it's my invitation for you to connect with me on anywhere and check it out. Go to shanejacob.com and schedule a time to chat with me there.

Appreciate you taking your time to be here with me today.

Remember my friends, your value is non-negotiable.

‍

Bring Shane Jacob In To Speak Or Train Your Team

Shane Jacob teaches organizations how to create high-trust, high-accountability teams using The Worth Work System.

His training focuses on:

• psychological safety
• accountability without shame
• reducing defensiveness
• feedback conversations
• trust inside teams
• leadership communication
• separating behavior from identity
• building self-reliance at work

This is practical leadership training built from real business experience, real employee problems, and real workplace friction.

If your managers are spending too much time dealing with emotional reactions, repeated mistakes, conflict, or low ownership, this training directly addresses those issues.

Bring Shane in for:

• leadership events
• company training
• management development
• HR and culture initiatives
• team communication workshops
• keynote speaking

Schedule a conversation at ShaneJacob.com.

‍

How to Create Psychological Safety in the Workplace

In this episode, Shane Jacob explains why psychological safety is one of the most important factors in workplace performance and team trust. Business owners, managers, HR leaders, and operations leaders will learn why employees become defensive during feedback, why accountability conversations fail, and how The Worth-Work System helps teams become more honest, engaged, and easier to lead. Shane breaks down practical leadership principles like “Judge the Work. Protect the Person.” and explains how separating behavior from personal worth reduces conflict, turnover, people drama, and repeated mistakes at work. This episode is especially valuable for companies dealing with low ownership, difficult feedback conversations, employee disengagement, and workplace trust issues.