Got PS?

Episode 6 - You too can ask questions!

• Deanna Stanley & Kara Burgan • Season 1 • Episode 6

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Deanna:

Hi, this is Deanna,

Kara:

And this is Kara.

Deanna:

and this is the Got PS podcast, a podcast about psychological safety. I've got to ask you, Kara, how's the past week been for you?

Kara:

It's been interesting. I'm going to be starting on a new team. I wrapped up one project and I'm starting on another. That was perfect to get my mind framed into the conversation for this week. I'll be sharing a little bit about that probably as we discuss the topic for today. Other than that, I ran another race because I am psychotic.

Deanna:

Totally nuts.

Kara:

I am totally nuts. How about you?

Deanna:

I have not joined a new team but I am looking to move on from some of the work I'm doing. I'm looking around for somebody to join right now. Other than that, hanging with friends, playing Dungeons Dragons, you know, the usual. Ugh.

Kara:

stay afloat with all the rain that's happening in our area. It's supposed to be a whole week of rain coming up. Yep, and

Deanna:

not want

Kara:

It's supposed to be hot and muggy. The only thing that's good is if you have allergies, it's been pollen city lately, so it's going to wash some of that away. I'm sure the sufferers are going to be excited. But marginally, no, it's very true. It's been kind of a weird spring going into probably what's going to be a weird summer.

Deanna:

I'm not sure that most years don't have weird springs and weird summer. I think we tend to homogenize the weather in our memory, but I'm pretty sure most years qualify as pretty weird for one reason or another.

Kara:

We were lucky though, because winter. Wasn't nearly what it could have been. We didn't have any snowmageddon. We didn't have ice storms. It wasn't too bad. I'm not going to complain on the winter front.

Deanna:

I don't know. We actually got snow this year. I was grumpy.

Kara:

It wasn't snowmageddon. It was just snow. Ha ha.

Deanna:

One flake too many.

Kara:

Well, tell that to your dog.

Deanna:

Yeah, I know, he loves

Kara:

Yeah, you've, you've, Yeah, you've got the wrong dog for not liking snow. If you moved him to where you want to retire to, he'll not be happy with you.

Deanna:

Nah, he'd be pretty miserable, but I do not like the cold weather. Still, it could be worse. One year, the school districts in Colorado started the last day of school with a two hour delay due to snow. There's always worse.

Kara:

Yeah, no, I, I will never live in an area like that.

Deanna:

F that, yes.

Kara:

Totally F that. We're on to a new level of full stack psychological safety. Why don't you give us a recap of where we are, Deanna?

Deanna:

Quick 30 second recap. There are five phases of psychological safety in the full stack psychological safety model. It starts with culture, which has to do with how your corporation influences team psychological safety. Then comes community. Which has to do with starting up on a team and how you begin to build psychological safety. Then you move on to conversation, which is what we're going to be talking about today. And the other two layers are contribution and commitment. What exactly is conversational safety, Kara?

Kara:

Conversational safety is where members are able to start blending in with the team. They're able to speak up, ask questions, understand, Where they fit into the team We call it conversation safety because the first level they were able to on board and feel valued Now at this point they're able to ask questions get answers Feel the team is investing in them In fact what we say the catchphrase is for this level is everyone is worth investment

Deanna:

I would like to state that you can't get to conversational safety without first having community safety. If you don't have those building blocks, then everything is going to crumble at some point in time or another.

Kara:

A key ingredient to conversation safety is learning. If you read the four stages of psychological safety by Timothy Clark, his second stage is called learner safety. And he speaks a lot about when you're a student and how you feel in your relationship with your teacher. Have that in mind while we go through this stage. The thing to hammer on before we keep going is the exact thing that Deanna just said. Before people can contribute, they need to learn. Before they can learn, they need to reach out and ask questions. You can start to see how these levels, fit together and you move from one to the other and how they're building blocks, you need them to go from stage to stage to stage. When you join a team where Deanna and I work, you have to hit the ground running. If you have to hit the ground running, your fastest way to get a question answer or find the best resources to come up to speed is to ask people.

Deanna:

That's because usually there's about 50 million documents and artifacts already existing that you can't wade through and understand. I just love it when I join a team and someone's like, all the information you need is in this folder. And you go to this folder and there's 70 documents. None of them are shorter than 20 pages. I sort of throw my hands up and say, I guess I'm not going to learn anything about this team.

Kara:

If I open a document and it's over 10 pages, yeah, no, even my brain shuts down and Deanna and I will both say that I write the wordiest emails on the planet and I don't mind a good document, but even I got my limits. People all learn in different ways and at different paces. Through some of the studies that I saw, the way that they could learn best in is one where they were socially accepted and they had time to create a network. The fastest way to get to information that is going to be useful for you as you're onboarding is by reaching out to people that you trust and you know that have the answers. That is such a key part to this whole process.

Deanna:

A lot of teams aren't willing to devote the time, not just your time, but the time of whoever you're asking questions of, to that learning phase. This ends up hampering everybody in the team. You cannot work at your best if somebody isn't at the same level of understanding as the rest of the team. You have to take a pause and say, this is going to slow us down for a couple weeks, but we want to make sure that you're up to speed. We're not going to throw you at it and expect you to learn on your own. Please ask questions. It's okay. We're going to slide our deadlines out because it's not going to happen otherwise.

Kara:

We as humans are very horrible at investing in recognizing that if we invest a little time now, it's going to pay dividends later. We're usually so busy and, all we can see is the next deadline anything that distracts us from getting to that deadline feels like it's a waste of time. We're just not good at it.

Deanna:

Screw deadlines. I do my best work at 7 a. m. the day after the deadline.

Kara:

I do too, because you have to go with your first thought and you can't second guess yourself or anything else.

Deanna:

That is so true. I think that anything that says close of business really means before 9 a. m. the next day.

Kara:

Fair. We hope that you're coming in with this understanding that investing in something other than just getting to your work deadline is going to benefit you by leaps and bounds later on.

Deanna:

That's really hard. Nobody wants to see this. They expect people to hit the ground running, I don't care how knowledgeable and experienced you are, there is always going to be a period of learning. Even if you've worked for this person before, even if you've been on this project before, Let's say you left on maternity leave. you're back. It's been two months. Same people, same project, same goals. Nothing has changed. You're still going to have to do some learning. Because the world has actually changed in those two months. It'll be subtle little changes most of the time that you won't even recognize until you're smacked in the face by them.

Kara:

You have to put effort and energy into onboarding, and we typically don't. We don't see effort put into anything other than the onboarding process. deadline as something worthwhile. But when you don't put that effort in, it can have serious consequences. One statistic I saw said around 20 percent of people. Now this was hired into an organization, but you can extrapolate this to. Being a new person on a team, 20 percent of people leave within the first three months. This was back in 2017, you can just imagine they didn't feel comfortable. They didn't feel wanted. They didn't feel invested in. And they're like, I'm going to take my special sauce and I'm going to go someplace else.

Deanna:

Yikes. I did once work for a company that had a really high attrition rate within about six months of starting. And that had to do with something very different. It was a very tiered work environment, which was not obvious until you actually started working there. Don't ask me why, but all the good work went to the Russian immigrants. Decent but not great work went to the Vietnamese immigrants and everybody else got the crap work that neither of the other two organizations wanted to deal with. A lot of people would look at it and say, I don't want to put up with this and leave. Personally, I stayed for four years because I was making more money than I knew what to do with.

Kara:

Well, there you go. Money's good. Sometimes money is good.

Deanna:

Yeah. Big surprise. I learned how to do with all that money.

Kara:

In that particular, situation, those groups probably had really great psychological safety within them. And then everybody else is like, eek, I'm not really sure how to fit in here and I'm only getting the scraps that they're giving me. That's a very odd situation.

Deanna:

It was very frustrating. Remember, investment isn't just investing the time to help teach people. It's also allowing them the chance to stretch and grow also, which is a form of learning in and of itself.

Kara:

In another study, they interviewed people who left within the first six months of joining a new company. 23 percent said they didn't really receive clear guidelines for their responsibilities. 21 percent said they didn't have effective training. 17 percent said they didn't really feel like they had a friend or a mentor or a coworker that made them feel welcome. 12 percent said they didn't really feel like people saw that they had unique contributions to give, and 9 percent said they wanted more attention from their manager and co workers. A lot of these things fall into the first two levels of team psychological safety, community and conversation. This falls right into how do you get somebody on your team and really feeling like they belong and getting them up to speed.

Deanna:

People learn at different paces. I tend to pick up everything that I feel I need to know within the first week or so. It's not all that deep. Kara dives way deeper into things than me. I get enough that I figure I can muddle through everything within the first week or so. Other people, ah, cough Kara, ah,

Kara:

Definitely me.

Deanna:

spends a lot longer diving a lot deeper.

Kara:

There's a new project, both Deanna and I looked at it and I don't even have the requisite requirements. Deanna said, eh, I can do it. But she didn't have the same availability I did. I ended up taking this project and I already started taking Udemy course this weekend. I started learning about some of the skills I'm going to need for it where Deanna would have kind of picked it up as she went along. So it is very true that we are very different and everybody that you bring into your team, they're going to be very different.

Deanna:

I firmly believe I can fake it until I make it.

Kara:

And I dig deep and then up level thereafter. Some people can go from top and get the details as they work their way down over time.

Deanna:

Biggest struggle I have had in work is realizing that things that seem obvious to me are not obvious to other people. I once had a co worker tell me that I like to explain how to do something by going, here's step one. Here's step 2, here's step 3, and here's step 10. Steps 4 through 9 are obvious, I don't need to explain them to you.

Kara:

Oh yeah.

Deanna:

steps 4 through 9 aren't obvious and it just makes no sense to me.

Kara:

Yes. I've learned that over time. I make you back up a bit and explain the rest to me. So I make sure I

Deanna:

I apologize guys. I am probably that asshole you've all worked with who has no patience and doesn't understand why you actually need steps 4 through 9. My bad.

Kara:

What are a few things you can do? Either you as the new person on a team or if you are the team lead, what can you do to make people feel welcome? First and foremost, Everybody needs a grace period. We advocate for putting learning into your schedule, because if you make it a goal of your project to onboard new people and give them adequate time and make sure they, know everything that they need to know before they, start producing, it makes it visible, and it codifies that grace period that people need before they feel comfortable being on a team.

Deanna:

That's a really good idea. If you guys are managing, whether it's a work breakdown schedule, a Kanban board, or something beautiful inside your head, make sure that you're actually putting in learning time. Make sure you write that issue that says, learn about X, Y, Z, and put into this week's scrum. Leaders, you're going to have to be able to justify this to your management because they're going to look at it and say, why are you putting in this learning time? We all need to learn, not just because we're not up to speed on a team, but our. knowledge gets stale. There may be something that comes out new that would apply to our project if we could learn about it or just to keep us interested and engaged. Doing the same thing over and over and over again tends to be boring. Some people want boring because they've got a wonderful, exciting life on the outside. Then there's the rest of us. We actually want work to be interesting and our home life More boring.

Kara:

As technology changes and it's changing constantly now, the skills you were hired for are going to be stale. Technology is moving too quickly. for people to keep doing the same things they've always been doing. Learning is going to be a more important part of your project planning as time goes on, because Everybody's skills are getting stale. Technology is moving way too quickly for people to not have to learn something new. A lot of times Deanna and I, we might move on a project that has a customer that we've never worked with before. It could be a application that we haven't used before. It could be a number of things. Places like say Lockheed or Microsoft or whatever, those people are going to have to morph, change, grow new skills, everything else. You need to make sure that you are care and feeding people's learning. It means, Making it visible by putting it in your schedules. Do it. I think it's the best thing to do.

Deanna:

Work that is not visible is work that never happens. You need to put it in the schedule. Put it into your calendar. Put it into your kanban book. I don't care how you do it. But if that work is not explicitly called out, it's never going to happen.

Kara:

I know I want to be contributing like day one. I put a lot of pressure on myself to hit the ground running. When you put in the schedule, that takes some pressure off of me. it can be very helpful to make somebody understand who might be a little too crazy and wanting to contribute too quickly to say, Hey, take your time and ramp up a bit. It takes a little bit of that pressure off.

Deanna:

People learn at different speeds. You may want to be doing learning off and on for 60 days. I am probably done by the end of the second week. Please, let me go do things.

Kara:

The next thing you can do, if you're a new team member, or if you are a leader, is ask questions. one of the articles that I read, they said that, managers and team leaders, they're very busy. When new people come on, managers and team leads will ask questions. Touch base with a new employee and ask, how are things doing? How is it going? Do you have any questions? How about this particular aspect of your job? Do you have any questions about this? There's a lot of checking in. As time goes on, it will taper out because managers are busy and because we don't give enough time to this kind of activity.

Deanna:

One of the best ways to learn is to teach., if you've got somebody Like me, he thinks they've learned everything in a couple weeks. Having them mentor somebody else may help them realize what they don't know and force them to learn that

Kara:

There are people, their comfort zone is not to reach out. They're very, very introverted. They're not going to want to reach out all the time. They're going to want to be independent and they're going to want to be learn on their own. If you're one of those people, you're. Going to want to force yourself at least a couple of times to reach out. It signals to your team lead and your manager you still have things you need to learn. Your manager your team leads need to make sure I'm continuing to invest time in that person They really still do need my help. The manager or the team lead should also, set up regular times in their calendar to meet with people who are new on their team or new in their department. If you put it on your calendar, like Deanna said, you make it visible and you make time for it.

Deanna:

or assign a mentor if you're too busy or The person is too intimidated to talk to their manager. Assign them a mentor who's a little bit more close to their level of experience, who will then feel safer for them.

Kara:

That harkens back to something we already talked about before, People learn best when they feel like they're welcomed, they have a network, and they have people that they can reach out to. Assigning a mentor is just growing out their network from the beginning and putting those building blocks in there for them. So they have a multitude of people to reach out to. And when you have a lot, if you are one of those people that feels a little uncomfortable going back to the same well over and over again, Giving them a mentor gives them a few people they can reach out to, and they don't feel like they're overwhelming any particular person. Something I usually do is when I'm joining a new team, and I'm trying to ramp up and figure things out and everything, I usually try to find small ways that I can contribute. My big thing is, is building an acronym list. We work with, government customers, they love themselves an acronym and it is easy to get lost in the alphabet soup that happens. I often make acronym lists for my teams. It's great to have it. It also is a way that I start engaging and learning in the customer that I'm going to be serving. Another thing I do offer is if there is a team meeting, I don't want to get in the habit of doing this. This is a thing as women, Deanna and I are very sensitive to do not always offer. To type up team meeting minutes, but I will do it near the beginning because by doing that I know for me it starts to make it go into my brain as well it is something in the beginning I will not allow myself to do it from here on out but that's That's a whole nother story

Deanna:

Meanwhile, I once worked on a project for six years and I still don't know what some of the acronyms mean.

Kara:

It's not a surprise and they've probably morphed and changed over time as well. The very first project that Deanna and I were on, they're not even called the same thing anymore. The organization, has changed names two times since we left.

Deanna:

I don't remember what the acronym means anymore, but it was self referencing.

Kara:

I just came from an army contract and they had one that was self referencing as well. It's just like GNU.

Deanna:

I love that.

Kara:

Hopefully this has been helpful to you in coming up with ways that you can make the learning environment more welcoming, more approachable for those that are joining your team, be it a small team or your department

Deanna:

remember, everyone should feel that they are worth the investment and that means you have to be willing to put that investment in each and every person.

Kara:

joining us. Next week, we will give you some more tools for how to establish conversation safety within your team. Until next time!

Deanna:

talk to you later.

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Deanna Stanley

Host
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Kara Burgan

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