Jennifer McCusker, a long-time friend and highly respected leader in the organization and leadership space challenges us all to be accountable and champion psychological safety.
Jennifer has joined Duly Health and Care as Chief People Officer and is significantly ahead of the curve in a changing field of healthcare.
Since our last newsletter was centered on the topic of well-being, I thought it was appropriate to remind all of you about a wonderful book that Jennifer, Dan Radecki and Leonie Hull wrote called, Psychological Safety.
I caught up with Jennifer recently to congratulate her on this new exciting role and thank her again for inspiring us to celebrate “brain-conscious” cultures. I asked her about how she is applying these concepts in her new company.
Here is what Jennifer shared:
What I have found is that we can apply the concepts from Psychological Safety in two ways. One is to explicitly teach our teams about psychological safety and have them lead others with great tools in order to navigate change more effectively. Secondly, we can implicitly influence our work, due to the deep research and methodology about psychological safety and what it means for our cultures. These concepts have become a filter that I use every day in designing an approach or processes looking at and understanding the needs of our leaders, employees and teams.
One example is looking at onboarding. It can be a daunting time when new hires join an entirely new team and learn an unfamiliar culture in order to find their way. They have left behind their familiarity of how things work. With the lens of psychological safety, I can design an onboarding process that minimizes the threats of this new experience and offers security early on. We want new hires to feel welcome and be successful on the journey ahead.
With all the research and deeply integrated concepts and outcomes of creating security, autonomy, fairness, esteem, and trust, I believe we have an obligation to embrace this model and be intentional in infusing this into how we work and inspire other leaders.