We're back!

It's been forever, but Kara and Deanna are back to talk all things Psychological safety.

We'd love to hear from you! Send us an email at gotps.pod@gmail.com

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0:04

Hi, I'm Deanna. And I'm Kara. And this is the Got PS podcast, where we talk about all things psychological safety. Only we haven't really been talking about psychological safety in a while, have we, Kara? No, we haven't. We've had to take a mental health break for, wow, almost a couple of years at this point. Yeah. There were some medical issues, there were family issues, and then 2025 happened, and work exploded, the world got on fire, and we're only now just feeling up to podcasting again. It's true. Sometimes you gotta look out for number one, and any extra energy you have, you have to use it to just take care of yourself and those closest to you. And so extraneous stuff has to go away for a bit, and that's okay. It's not that we don't love you.

Deanna 0:52

We needed to Put our oxygen masks on first before we gave them to anybody else. That's 100% true. So Deanna, what has been going on with you in these, one and a half to two-year timeframe? There was a lot of scrambling to make sure I could actually keep my job, and then there was a bunch of fun surgery stuff going on. But in the psychological safety side of things, I've been really disappointed by how DEI has become stigmatized throughout the corporate world. How about you? I'm gonna say we're definitely putting a pin in the whole reversal of DEI protections, and that's something we totally wanna talk about in future podcasts. But for me, I had a child that needed a lot of extra care and attention, so a lot of my energy went there. Deanna and I work at the same place, so we were kinda going through the same struggles. We work in government support roles. As DOGE came through, and there was a lot of cutting and hacking and uncertainty in the government space we were struggling with, Keeping afloat, keeping as many people as we could, hoping that things would change, the tide would turn. But the mass chaos was exhausting. I mean, Deanna, how exhausted are you from 2025? Honest to God, i'm mentally exhausted, I'm emotionally exhausted, and I am physically exhausted. Let's face it, to be an adult is to be tired, but this is like turning it up to 11. It was. Deanna and I are both, first-line supervisors where we work, and we had to see friends let go. We struggled with the, feeling of being responsible for trying to keep them for as long as possible. With all the cutting and hacking, there was a lot of contracts that dried up, and there was almost nothing we could do. We could do everything in the world, and it just did not save some people. In situations like that, a lot of our friends that we had to let go were extremely gracious in giving us grace and psychological safety where we felt really bad, and they're like, we know you did everything you could." How did you feel about the whole, reduction in workforce and letting friends go during that time, Deanna? It was really hard, especially because different organizations seem to put a different level of care into, how they chose who to let go, and some really depended on who you knew as to whether you got to stay or go. In others, it's what you knew that got to keep you. And then there's a handful of people where you just scratched their heads and said, "Why?" It was challenging. It was hard. I know a lot of people felt hurt or betrayed or like they lost some of their worth when they got laid off, and this is a normal thing, and it's something we really ought to talk about in a later episode. I know when I was laid off, it really impacted me because especially in the US, we tend to really define ourselves by our jobs and our careers, and being let go basically leaves an entire part of our personality and our identity- missing, we feel like we're a failure, and we struggle to cope. And I want you to know it doesn't matter if you're employed or not. It doesn't matter if you were laid off. You are important as you, and you really need to think about identifying what more of you exists outside of the career. One thing that I have really mentally worked on over the past few years with my career is, not to bring up The Five Love Languages, but I am 'cause I have problems with the book or whatever, but I do believe that people communicate how they care in those languages. And my language is definitely acts of service, so I tend to go to work and do a lot of extra things. And sometimes that can burn me out, because I tend to say yes too much. So one thing I've really tried to do lately is only say yes to things where I don't expect it to help advance my career, I just expect it to give me something back that I would like. I feel like I'm helping people that I really care about with their careers, or I'm learning something, or there's some other kind of feedback I'm getting from it. And then I'm trying to say no to everything else because- there just, it is so much uncertainty to whether or not I'm gonna advance, whether or not I'm even keeping my job. Both you and I have had so much going on that I didn't have anything extra to give. So I'm just trying to be a lot more mindful about what I say yes to. I'm not trying to let career define me, but if I do extra things, I do realize that I make friends at work too, right? We're friends. We made at work. Any place that you have to be at a third of your life, if you can't make friends there, then that's a problem. Think about it. Eight hours a day. Okay, it's only five days a week, I hope, but still, that's close to a third of your life. If you don't have a friend at work, maybe you need to look around and reach out to somebody. Previously when Deanna and I were podcasting, we were starting to go through our full stack model for psychological safety, and the very first part of the stack that we were talking about was, the corporate culture, the culture of the employment landscape writ large. If you read anything on Amy Edmondson and, others that are very popular in this space. They go to, that more narrow focus. I think last year really spoke to the layer that we added in, which was, corporate culture, the employment landscape and all of that. That is true. No matter how much you tried to protect people within your team, you still had this huge force from the outside impacting everybody's psychological safety. You need to think about how the company and the decisions within the corporate culture are affecting your team. There's only so much you can do, and sometimes that means that you're already starting at a deficit. We're kinda energized, and there's some things that we wanted to talk about. So let's go into some of the things that we think we're going to explore in the upcoming podcast. So first off, Deanna, there was a couple things you pointed out. Do you wanna dive into those a little bit more? Sure. I also wanna say that we're gonna change the format of the podcast this season. Instead of talking about the various different layers specifically, we're going to actually look at articles from what's going on in the world now and discuss how that impacts psychological safety and how you can improve psychological safety when you're dealing in this world. For example, DEI is now a bad word for most companies. So how are you going to handle this? Whether you are the traditional white male or if you're a minority, female, LGBTQ, how are you handling it when suddenly you feel the entire world is against you? This is really hard, and as a team lead, you're going to have to spend a special time trying to create a level of psychological safety for those people who now feel completely unsafe, not just at work, but within their lives, and you need to be aware of that. We've always said psychological safety isn't just what you do, but also what everyone within your team does. There are some people who may never feel psychologically safe with you, no matter how hard you try, simply because what is going on in the world around. You need to give them and yourself some grace if you're having that problem. Exactly. Another aspect that we are looking at is what's new in the landscape of corporate culture that we're seeing in headlines, in Forbes, in Harvard Business Review, in those types of spaces. I know one that caught my eye is the. 14, I believe, leadership principles that the CEO of Amazon uses. That's way too many. No one's going to remember that many freaking principles. If you can't count them all on one hand, then there's too many. We're gonna have fun going through those- and ranting and raving about them, because not only are there 14, there's deep dive videos explaining what each of those 14 are. Ugh. Yeah, it's a mess. We're gonna have a good time with that one. But Amazon's not unique- in that kind of space of thinking that they have a handle on, what leadership means, and kind of messing it up, making it hard. And signaling that, "I'm setting the bar so freaking high that almost nobody can match it," and, what does that do for psychological safety? We've gathered up some good ones, so we have a lot to talk about, don't we, Deanna? Yeah. We wanna talk about layoffs and how they impact you and the people who are around you. We wanna talk about AI and how this upcoming apocalypse, is affecting you. I would like to talk about the 996 work culture trend, which I think is one of the most evil things on the face of the earth. There you go. You just got a sneak preview as to what I'm going to be talking about. Well, and when we talk about that, we've also talked about the counter idea of, 32-hour work weeks, and what that might look like, and compare and contrast. So yeah, we have all kinds of stuff. The breadth of what we are thinking we're going to talk about shows how something that you wouldn't traditionally think is impacting psychological safety, it all does. It's not just what we say, it's what our policies communicate, and the environment that they make. We're gonna kinda get into all of it. And sometimes it's what you don't say. Because when you don't say something, people are going to put their own words in their heads. It's one of the reasons why we advocate for transparency so much. If you don't say something, it's not that people will just accept there's nothing to be said. Nope, they're going to fill it in with their own thoughts, and those tend to be way more negative than reality. We have lots coming up, Deanna. I'm super excited. I felt for a while when we first started talking about psychological safety that, everybody was talking about it, and so it felt like we were blending in. But I feel like now the discussion needs to be pushed forward again. There's just been so much backward momentum against psychological safety, or things that impact psychological safety. We need to be speaking out and really advocating for it again. So tune in. We're going to be dropping these every other week, because on a weekly basis is just too much for us at this point in time, and we would love to have you join the conversation. next time, everybody. Take care, and bye.