Lessons from Elvis.
If you feel your teammates see you as competent, you perform better.
When we don’t get feedback, we tend to do the opposite.
Years ago, I was a backup singer in an Elvis cover band.
The King gave feedback to everyone, paying as much attention to the backing vocals as the lead guitar.
Elvis understood that for the stage show to pop, everyone needed to shine.
With so much feedback we were only getting better. By the time the big show day came around we were one slick unit.
The band were all professional musicians. I was just happy to be included.
Without realising it, I had completely obliterated any thoughts of ‘I’m not a professional musician’.
With so much real-time feedback, there was simply no room.
Elvis created psychological safety.
When people feel they belong in a group, they experience a phenomenon known as psychological safety.
Psychological safety is a term to describe how you personally believe you are viewed by a group, and how that makes you feel.
By providing feedback in a group setting, and in private, the King was signalling to us: you belong here. We can pull this off.
This meant in every rehearsal, someone got something out of it. Come show day, everyone got on that stage and rocked it, in unison.
Why is psychological safety so important?
The basic gist of psychological safety is, if everyone perceives their contribution as valuable, they’ll bring higher quality thoughts to the table.
And all the data on high performing teams say that groups with a high degree of psychological safety perform better.
Why?
When someone shows they see and value us, it signals to us that we belong. And when we feel like we belong, we’re motivated to execute at a higher level.
How do we know if we have psychological safety at work?
This one can be answered pretty easily: do your teammates and boss see you as competent?
How do you know?
They’ve either told you, or they’ve shown you, right?
In a group, it’s easy to be overlooked.
So much so that you don’t often get that feedback. As a result you have no idea, really, how others see you.
If you don’t know if your boss or peers actually see you as competent there's a reason for that: you’re not getting feedback you’re on the right track, and equally you’re not getting feedback that matches where you need to grow, in a way you can easily grasp it.
As a result, the loudest or grumpiest sometimes can hog the spotlight in a group.
Those small, seemingly innocuous behaviours can start to affect the dynamic of the group.
Like the time the Bad Apple went to work.
In The Culture Code, Author Daniel Coyle tells this story about an actor whose job is to go into teams, to show what a lack of psychological safety can do to a group.
He does this by playing the role of Bad Apple. He’s eerily good at this. But there was one time he really struggled.
There was someone else in the group who kept pushing him off his game. A Good Apple.
Every time Bad Apple was negative Good Apple would instantly diffuse the tension, resetting the tone.
How?
Every time negativity snuck in, Good Apple reset the tone.
Good Apple redirected the spotlight by asking for other people's input.
They weren’t relying on people to be ‘brave’ or confident to share their opinion in a group. Instead, they facilitated the microphone, so people didn’t need to.
The result was diverse perspectives shared and heard by the wider group.
Elvis and Good Apple did the same thing in two different ways.
Both Elvis and Good Apple facilitated two-way feedback, an essential part of creating a psychologically safe team. They let people know their contributions were valued.
Good Apple personally asked for everyone's opinion in the group. Elvis did it in private, by giving feedback to each musician, and then in public, to the wider group.
These examples show us how we can ensure people know the group sees them positively by explicitly showing and/or simply telling them.
The tool they used was feedback.
And why should I care about this?
In absence of feedback people in groups tend to behave in two distinct ways:
Attachment to old plans that don't work.
Without feedback, many people experience epic self doubt. As a result, we attach ourselves to ‘the original plan’, even when things are clearly changing around us.
We dig our feet in, unwilling to bend. This gets in the way of the group collectively moving forward. As a result, it creates groups within groups, all with different rules and hierarchies.
Zoning out.
When we don’t get feedback, we tell ourselves we don’t care. It’s a defence mechanism to make sense of feelings we experience when we don’t get attention from people we want to impress.
Without feedback, we mentally tap out. As a result, others in the group feel we’re not contributing, which then creates a crack in how the group collectively sees us.
Both of these behaviours exacerbate a lack of psychological safety, which means poorer results over a longer period of time.
‘But we’ve got one person who’s the star, it doesn’t really matter that much’.
It’s actually the inverse.
What most studies on the topic are discovering is that relying on one star performer (like the salesperson, the coder, the doer, the dealmaker or idea generator) is no indicator of a team collectively succeeding, sustainably, over a long period of time.
It’s actually the sum of the entire team.
If we choose to accept that, we stop trying to do everything to make up for poor performance while keeping the star happy.
Instead, we invite our peers to really contribute. The star doesn’t need to dim their light by any means. Instead, they have competent peers that they can rely on to enjoy the spotlight with.
And I bet you, that’s a team any high performer would want to be a part of: one that actually makes them better.
Influencing psychological safety in your team.
As we learned earlier, psychological safety is not about how we see the group. It’s how we believe members of the group see us.
We now know the pathway from low psychological safety to healthy teams is heavily influenced by a presence of feedback.
How people think influences how they see the group as seeing them. And one way we can influence how they think is by making it explicit how we see them.
Feedback is the tool here. It really can transform our experience of work.
Appreciative and directive feedback.
I personally define feedback as anything that signals you’ve noticed someone else. At work this might be their behaviour, contribution, or their impact.
There are two types of feedback that I teach: appreciative and directive feedback.
These are:
Appreciative feedback affirms people.
Directive feedback grows people.
If you and I want to encourage people to take positive action, we need to use both. Not just one, both.
Why appreciative feedback works.
Appreciative feedback affirms people. It reminds them they are valued as the baseline. It is predicated on their talents and gifts being present independent of us.
Childhood experience experts have shown us that when an adult positively affirms us, it tells our brain it is safe to grow. Self actualisation becomes possible with a basis of inner security.
Affirming someone is training someone to remember how you think of them: positively and capable. When you give appreciative feedback, you’re being explicit: ‘how I see you is positively and inherently valuable’.
Remember that psychological safety is how we believe we are seen by a group? This is a tangible way you can create a positive narrative for them.
How directive feedback works.
Directive feedback is teaching someone how to think for themselves in your absence.
It outlines the behaviour required to achieve a goal and helps someone take a positive step forward. As a result, it helps them grow. (Read more on directive feedback here).
We need both types of feedback to train our brains to trust that our group and peers see us as competent.
If this resonates with you, try it on at work.
The next time you’re in a meeting that seems a little off, ask yourself: are there ways I can contribute to resetting the tone?
Examples might be:
Giving small doses of appreciative, specific feedback after someone speaks.
Validating someone’s perspective when they introduce themselves.
Ask for clarification on the facts, when emotions take the steering wheel.
Come back to the agenda.
Admit when it seems we’re not able to make a decision based on evidence just yet.
Ask people by name for their perspective.
Invite them to contribute ahead of time so they can prepare.
If online, share in the chat that you’d love to hear someone else's opinion.
These small, seemingly innocuous actions don’t seem like much on their own.
But over time, the sum of these parts can be powerful.
Bringing these ideas to your team.
Psychological safety is sometimes viewed as an abstract concept, impossible to control.
But what I’ve learned, when a group shares a language for feedback (such as feed forward as we often call it at Happiness Concierge), people are so much more confident doing it.
As a result, the group gets better. They sharpen their pens.
Is everyone up for the same kind of feedback? No. But over time, people grow their confidence and the group starts having some really decent conversations, solving bigger problems.
We run workshops to help teams with the fundamentals of giving feedback.
Before we do, we meet with you privately, to talk about what sort of culture you want to reverse engineer.
This gives us a clear scope to help the team focus on the right things in the workshop.