The Importance of Interpersonal Skills in Safety Management

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Stephan Wiedner, an entrepreneur on a mission to abolish apathy in the workplace. He’s the cofounder of Noomii.com, the web’s largest network of independent life coaches and Skillsetter.com, a platform similar to a flight simulator for practicing interpersonal skills.

Safety management relies on trust, persuasion, and approachability, yet EHS professionals may not have been taught these skills during their training. In fact, there’s a common conception these qualities are inherent and can’t be taught.

Stephan presents an upbeat and convincing case for why Safety professionals can - and should - develop their interpersonal skills.

He explains that the key to improving nebulous concepts, such as empathy, is to break them down into specific learnable practical skills.

Stephan teaches HSE professionals how this is done - with a strong emphasis on the importance of psychological safety -  while dispelling ongoing misconceptions about interpersonal skills.

- [Mary] Hi there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." Some people are really great at making others feel comfortable. People consider them approachable, and some people are just awkward. They might have trouble conversing, they hate small talk, they feel like they don't know what to say. There's a popular view that these are personality traits, and that the mannerisms that combine to make someone approachable or trustworthy, you've either got them or you don't.

Safety management is very much a profession that relies on trust, persuasion, and approachability. But in most safety programs, these aren't taught. Many of us wonder if they even can be taught. Today's guest obviously believes that intrapersonal skills can be taught because that's what he does for a living.

Stephan Weidner is an entrepreneur whose mission is to abolish apathy in the workplace. He firmly believes that for great work to take place, everyone needs to have the courage to speak up and the confidence to know they'll be heard. His passion for unleashing the collective potential of people led him to co-found noomii.com, the web's largest network of independent life coaches, and skillsetter.com, a platform similar to a flight simulator for practicing intrapersonal skills.

Stephan has been a guest on multiple podcasts, and his writing has been featured in "Forbes" and "Entrepreneur," among other publications. In addition to his professional career, Stephan serves as a volunteer firefighter in his local community. He's married with two children and enjoys spending quality time in the outdoors, hiking, biking, camping, and reading.

Stephan joins us from Vancouver. Welcome.

- [Stephan] Thanks for having me, Mary. It's a pleasure.

- So, let's get to the fundamental question that a lot of people ask, which is, can interpersonal skills be taught? And even though we know that your answer is yes, I'm wondering what led you to focus on teaching these skills in your career. And is this something you've come to over the years, or something you've just kind of always known to be true?

- Well, that's a good question, and it is part of our journey, my journey. So my business partner and I, there's two of us in the company. We started Noomii, as you mentioned in the introduction, and it is a network of coaches. And so we've been in the coaching space for well over, gosh, dozen years, 15 years now. And as advocates for coaching, we've also had a healthy skepticism about why coaching works and how to improve coaching, and how to make sure people find the right coaches.

And so that led us to the research. And as you could appreciate, coaching being a relatively nascent industry, doesn't have quite the body of research that does companion or parallel industry of counseling or therapy or social work.

So, we started exploring the research about counseling and more importantly, what makes for effective counseling, why does it work? And first of all, we know that it does work. It's quite effective compared to many other comparable interventions, even a lot of medicine. So, counseling we do know works, and why?

Well, what we know is that within all of the different types of healers, if you will, that are out there, whether you're a counselor or a psychologist or psychiatrist, within every one of those modalities or disciplines, there are good practitioners and weaker practitioners. And those good practitioners, the research overwhelmingly shows that those who can deliver better and consistent outcomes for their clients, for their patients year after year tend to have better interpersonal skills.

And more recently towards the end of 2008 or '09, there was a paper published, and it was Tim Anderson, so Dr. Tim Anderson out of the Ohio State University, who developed an assessment called the FIS, also known as Facilitative Interpersonal Skills. And it's a performance-based assessment.

So, it's not a self-report thing. What people need to do is reply to challenging video clips, demonstrating difficult moments that you might encounter in a counseling session, and then record a response. And those responses were then coded because they had trained coders who were looking for certain behavior markers, and then they could score one person a high score, and then someone else a low score, and look at their corresponding client outcomes years later.

And it was predictive. So, that assessment proved to be predictive because that assessment was created with all of this other precursion knowledge that the best counselors have the best skills. And so now we're taking that same concept and applying it within business, applying it within the realm of coaching. We truly believe that these skills that have been identified by Dr.

Anderson and his colleagues are a really good proxy for interpersonal skills that are needed everywhere. And the way we like to say it is that the skills are like the ingredients of conversation, and all the ingredients are the same, it's the recipe that's different. So, maybe which ingredients you use when.

So, whether you're a doctor, or whether you're a friend talking to a colleague, or whether you're in work, a work situation, or if you're a counselor working with someone who's, you know, heaven forbid, suicidal or dealing with depression or whatever they might be dealing with, those skills are all the same fundamentally. And therefore, if we can assess them, and we can measure them, and we can break them down into their individual components, we can then practice them and improve them.

Bit of a long-winded answer to a very simple question.

- That's okay. It's all about conversation. I'm wondering then, like, if you can break it down and say you have these certain skills, there's still the element of context, right, where it's not just...like when you were mentioning the recipe idea, right? It's not just I've learned how to speak convincingly or something. It's knowing when to do it, right?

Like, there's two parts to that. It's the skills themselves, and then knowing when and how to use them.

- Absolutely. And that is definitely one of the core principles around deliberate practice and how to improve skills is acknowledging that. Let's use the parallel of sports because I think the skills that are identifiable in sports are a lot easier for people to grasp or wrap their head around. So, let's just pick a sport like basketball, let's say. In basketball, when you are first starting out, you're going to learn how to do very simple skills like dribble the ball with your right hand, then dribble the ball with your left hand, then you're going to learn passing, you're going to learn a bounce pass, you're going to learn a pass that just, you know, doesn't bounce.

And you're going to learn all of these individual skills and practice them independently in the gymnasium, right? Then what happens is you get into a game, and in a game-like scenario, it's not like first you dribble with your right hand, then you dribble with your left hand, then you bounce past the ball, then you score a point. No, you have to know what to use and when to use it.

And the really, really skillful players, if you look at the pros, they all have those basic skills. They've all nailed them explicitly. No problem. And the best players are better able to react to what's happening in the moment, to use the right skill at the right time to progress closer towards their goals. So, the same thing is true of interpersonal skills, and we see it...what we see is individuals as they start to learn the skills, they're kind of grasping for a formula.

Like, what's the formula? You know, what's the magic? Do I do A, then B, then C, then D? And it's always, well, it depends. And so these interpersonal skills, while they can be learned, they're challenging because we as humans, we're very dynamic and there's all sorts of interpersonal issues going on that are kind of under the surface.

It's not like a math problem wherein there is an exact answer, and we know what that answer is, and if you deviate from the formula, you're going to get the wrong answer. It is not the case with interpersonal skills. It's a lot more subtle and nuanced.

- Just before I leave this point, out of curiosity, does anyone ever challenge you on the teachability of interpersonal skills? Or, I mean, obviously, your clients would come to you, they would believe in the teachability or they wouldn't be there, I imagine. But do you have people that challenge you, or do you think it's fairly well accepted?

- I definitely think that there's people that challenge it. I think there's also some that are maybe skeptical and they're not necessarily saying it. So, they might be going, okay, you know, following along, but not necessarily openly disagreeing with me. And I think if I could sum up all the conversations that I had with folks that have had objections or thoughts around this is that I think perhaps people believe there's a range of growth and development and ability.

It's sort of like intuitively, I think we all recognize that no matter how many hours I practice, for example, I will never be as good as Michael Jordan. Never. There's a bond between the level of skill that I might acquire in certain areas. And I think that we all have some of the strengths and weaknesses sort of built-in, and then, so the amount of range that we have is limited.

To give a bit of a parallel, again, coming back to sports or athletics or physicality, one of the interesting parallel levels of research that we're looking at is the way various physical strengths are characterized and measured. So, take for example if you have a dancer, they might have high levels of agility and they might have high levels of...yeah, I guess agility would probably...and balance, let's say.

And then whereas a powerlifter has a tremendous amount of power, strength, right? And they're going to be much lower in agility. And then, again, you might have someone who could run marathons, so their endurance is absolutely through the roof, but don't ask them to, you know, lift the heavy weight because that's not necessarily what they're good at. And so you can see how there's all of these different types of physical strengths, and we can assess them all independently.

And depending on what sport you want to play, you would want to look at, well, what are your strengths, and how can you best grow and develop the ones that are required for your sport. And so I think interpersonal skills, there's perhaps a parallel there. We're kind of looking at, like, what are the objective ways that we can measure interpersonal skills?

Because there's a bunch of different possibilities there that we're kind of exploring. And I think fundamentally, that's maybe where we're going to end up going is that we will recognize that some people have certain strengths in interpersonal skills and others...we're just different, right? We have a different mix. We all have a certain level of strength, endurance, agility, but our mix is a little bit different. And how much we can grow each one is perhaps there's some limits there, right?

It's going to be impossible for someone who's really thin and light to suddenly become the biggest, strongest bodybuilder in the world, right? For them to go from their starting point to their end point would be a lot more difficult, if not impossible.

- Okay. So, before we dive into more detail, just so that everyone's on the same page, can you explain specifically what skills you're referring to when you say interpersonal skills?

- Yeah. Well, I think for that, we can look at the inventory of dimensions that are used within the facilitative interpersonal skills assessment. So, what are we looking at there? There's eight dimensions, first of all. And the first one is verbal flow. So, it's the degree to which of the words come out of our mouth, and people can easily understand what we're saying and not only understand them, but they can easily follow along.

So, there's a porosity and rhythm. And the lack of verbal flow characterizes anxiety. So if there's a lot of verbal fillers, uh, eeh, mm, I'm not sure, [vovalization] you know, like, if there's a lot of those, it means we're anxious.

And for effective communication, generally speaking, what we want to do is we want to affect the other person, right? We want to have an impact on the people around us. So our communications, how we communicate will do that. So, verbal flow is the first one. I don't think we're going to have time to go through all eight to that level of depth. I'm just giving you a bit of a bax...

- It's great though, because, you know, I hadn't thought of it that way. So, please continue.

- Yeah. Okay. So, then the second one is persuasiveness...or actually, the second one is generating hope and positive expectation. I'll try to go in the right order. Not that it really matters. So in counseling session, as you could imagine, it's really important that you generate hope and positive expectation. So, you are instilling in the other person that there is a path forward and that they will be able to achieve it.

And this is different from what we would sometimes refer to as cheerleading. You might see that if you're trying to be a little bit more coach-like, you're like, "You can do it, come on." Well, that might come across as feeling somewhat empty because there needs to be a visible, or in my mind's eye anyway, a path forward. Oh, okay.

So I get it now, right, as opposed to, you can do it, because that might just feel empty.

- Yeah. If a counselor were to say to, "You can do it," and that's all, then it would feel a little bit, yeah... As opposed to, I know you can do it because I have experience with people like you, and because of this and because of that, and I see this in you. And yeah.

- That's right. So, that's providing a rationale, right? It's not just empty, rah, rah, rah. It's, hey, I know you can do it because I've seen you do x, y, z, just as you said. And then the next one is persuasiveness. So to what degree are you able to have someone see a different perspective that is not their own? That's how we define persuasiveness.

And that's really important, not just in counseling because in counseling you can see how it's important, right? You're coming in, I feel stuck, I don't know what to do with my life, etc. Well, you want to offer a persuasion...you want to have skills of persuasion to offer a different perspective. Well, the same thing is true in business. Why wouldn't you want to be persuasive, right?

You want to be able to offer people fresh perspectives. The next one is emotional expression. So, emotional expression. What we see in business is a lot of communicators are relatively flat with respect to their facial expressions and their tone. So, those two things combine for emotional expression. And not only are we looking for you to be emotionally expressive is we want you to be emoting congruent with what's happening.

So, if someone is sad, you don't want to be smiling saying, "Gosh, that sucks." I feel sorry for you with a big smile on your face. That would be incongruent. And so that leads to the next one, which is empathy. Empathy is an expression of your understanding of where the other person is. It's not just something that you feel in your heart, it's about what's vocalized.

And to be really empathetic, you're able to not just observe what's happening in the moment, but you're able to articulate the underlying emotion or feeling that might be present for that other person, even if they're not saying it. For example, often people will come into a situation and they'll be emoting...they'll be demonstrating anger, and yet that anger underlying it might be a deep sadness around a missed opportunity, for example.

So, they're angry that they missed the deadline for applying for university or whatever, and really maybe what's underlying it is sadness. And if you're strong in empathy, you might, A, detect that, and B, be able talk to it, mention it, point it out to the other person. Then we get into alliance capacity. So, alliance capacity is the ability to demonstrate kind of this we-ness, we're in this together.

So, you mentioned earlier with hope and positive expectation, when you generate hope and positive expectation, part of that is, you know, I know you can do this because in the past, I saw you do this, and I know this is new, so I can support you, we can work on this together. I'm not just going to let, you know, be in the deep end all on your own kind of thing.

So, that ability to communicate the we-ness. And I think the other piece that's really important within business, a business context to generate that alliance capacity is the ability to zoom out and point out how your team fits into the broader organization or the department, right?

So, we're not just being kind of insular in our thinking, we're thinking bigger picture here, which is really critical for team orientation. That's where the same...I think it's the same skill, and yet in different contexts, the recipe's a little bit different, right? Because in counseling, that focus on kind of zooming out might not be as relevant, but I think it's very relevant in a business context.

And the last one is IR, or interpersonal responsiveness. This one is perhaps the hardest one and the core of all of these skills that we're talking about, which is the ability to approach potential ruptures or conflict within the team and be able to do so in a way that's productive.

So, you're not just vilifying those who maybe said something wrong, you're bringing a sense of curiosity and ability to approach it. I think, you know if you think about so many meetings where there's, you know, the, "elephant in the room," being able to name it is really core. And that urge to kind of want to move along, pretend like it didn't happen, that would be a poor use of interpersonal responsiveness because what we're looking for is for people to be able to approach it.

So, that's a quick summary of the inventory of skills that we're looking for.

- That's really interesting because some of them, you know, I think many of us talk about empathy is sort of in the popular discussion these days. And the last one that you were talking about the ability to approach conflict, a phrase came to mind that's used in the safety community or among safety practitioners.

And I'm sorry, I can't remember if it was Sidney Dekker or if it was Todd Conklin, but it's humble inquiry, right, which is that curiosity, that approach.

- I agree, right? And that humbleness requires a certain level of courage as, well, because you have in order to be humble, you need to be able to say, I don't know what's going on here, but I'm noticing something. I don't necessarily have the answer, I don't know how to solve it, but I'm noticing there's some sort of tension or conflict in the room.

And so you're shining a light on it, not just so that you can solve it, but perhaps bring a fresh perspective for the other members that are in the room, might be more than just one other person.

- Okay. So, I've heard them called soft skills and interpersonal skills. I prefer the term core skills because I think they're that important. Do you think it matters what we call them? Does it have any effect on how we perceive them?

- I think so. I think so. My objection to the word, soft skills, is that it perhaps implies that they're not measurable or concrete. And if they are not measurable or concrete, then perhaps that permeates...no, that exacerbate... No.

What's the right word? I'm sorry. It sort of encourages...

- Perpetuates.

- Perpetuates, thank you. It perpetuates the belief that these skills, you either have them or you don't.

- Right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I don't want to dwell on that too much. So, now when we last spoke, you compared learning a skill, like playing the piano to improve interpersonal skills. And you've used the sports metaphor today.

But the big difference you pointed out is that we don't go around playing piano all day, but we do go around talking to people. And because of that, lots of people have misconceptions about communication skills. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

- Yeah, exactly. So I think a lot of people, just as you said, a lot of people recognize that they might go into a workshop and learn how to use interpersonal skills or how to have crucial conversations or what have you, and then one hour later they're in a meeting, and they're using interpersonal skills. But there's a difference between using a skill and actually practicing them with deliberate thought and effort.

The same is true about playing the piano, right? I know for one, when I was young, we had a piano in the house, and every time I walked by it, I'd play "Chopsticks." So, I got really proficient at playing "Chopsticks," but that's it. My ability to play chopsticks did not extend to any other songs on the face of the earth. And so when it comes to those interpersonal skills, yes, I think there's some amount of improvement that may occur when one is using those skills on a regular basis.

However, unless there are deliberate efforts to notice that you do one thing and then try to do another thing, you're not going to improve. So, for example, if you know when you speak, you put in a lot of verbal fillers, this is often the easiest skill to improve upon is that verbal flow.

And folks recognize that they'll put in all sorts of verbal fillers ums, uhs, pauses, etc. And so if you can, for example, effortfully focus on just removing those by replacing an um, or an uh, with a pause, then you will likely get better at it.

- Yeah. When you bring attention to something, it's a lot easier to improve it because otherwise, you're just talking and... I put a lot of fillers in. I think that the editors probably take a lot out, and I thank them for that.

- Yeah. I think, again, so let's come back to empathy. That's another thing that we see again and again. People say, oh, I want to be more empathetic. You know, I'm really results-oriented. I'm analytical, tactical person, and so I want to demonstrate more empathy. It's not enough to just say, "Well, I want to be more empathetic."

We need to think about breaking that down even further. Well, what does it mean to be more empathetic? And the skill we specifically assign to empathy would be the skill of reflecting feeling. So, when someone says something, you just reflect back, "Oh, I'm noticing that you are a little frustrated with what's going on right here. Did I get that right?"

And you want to check out, you want to ask them, "Did I get it right?" Now, the nice thing with getting it wrong and asking them whether you got it right is it creates some alliance capacity there because you care enough to check in to see, did I get it right? And you give them the opportunity to say, "Well, no, it's not really frustration, it's actually disappointment."

Okay, I can go with that. So, just being able to name it is a skill. And we so often, especially if someone is really kind of results-oriented and analytical, they might focus on the content of the conversation and not so much on any underlying emotion that might be there.

And so that will boost your ability to be empathetic and come across as someone who cares is if you check out folks' emotions as they're communicating.

- So, is that how you approach teaching these things then, is sort of breaking them down from nebulous concepts like empathy into very specific practicable skills?

- That's exactly right. So, it's just like in sports, we're going to dribble with our right hand and we're going to dribble with our left hand. And the other thing we do with each skill, like that skill of reflecting feeling, is we have a rubric that we developed, a learning rubric so that we can say when this skill is used well, these are the three or four or five things that tend to be present.

And so then when people practice that skill in our technological solution, but you can do it outside of that, as a learner, you can self-evaluate. You can look at how you responded to someone and say, "Hmm, gee, did I use all these five things? Let me think about it and review my answer. And jeepers, I didn't do a very good job on the third thing, so I'm going to try again and I'm going to practice again."

So that's how it works is we provide people that specific rubric for each skill, so then it's as objective as possible as to how well you use that skill.

- And I think the beauty of interacting in the wild too is that you get pretty quick feedback if you're not using this skill well, or if you still need practice. Like, when you're talking about that reflectivity, you know, I sense that you're frustrated. Is that right?

Someone says, "No, I'm happy." Then you realize, okay, maybe I need to work on reading people's signs a little bit better.

- Exactly. And I'd add an extra point there, Mary, which is what we generally recommend for individual leaders if they're trying to improve their skills is be open and open about it. So, we'll use the example of empathy, right? So, if you're trying to be empathetic and you're trying to reflect feeling more frequently so that you can connect with people and have them feel heard and appreciated and understood, then you be objective about it.

Just say, "Hey, this is what I'm working on, and I would love your feedback." So, perhaps after a meeting and you can say, "Okay, how did I do with reflecting emotion? Like, did it feel awkward? You know, was it smooth? Did I get the emotion right?" Well, hopefully, you'll check in at that moment, but I think once you're open and transparent about how you're trying to improve, you'll get lots of great feedback. And that will help you adjust and try things a little bit differently, you know, every day, every week.

- Yeah, I think people in my experience, they're generally helpful and they really love to be asked what they think as well.

- That's right. And the nice thing with breaking it down and being more specific, like, I'm trying to be more empathetic. I know that about me, and the one way I'm trying to do that is by reflecting feeling. And this is what it means. And so, could you give me feedback on that? As opposed to, "I'm just trying to be a better leader. What can I do better?" And people are like, I don't know, right?

It's the difference between...and it's the difference between saying something like, name me one item in the fridge versus name me one item in the fridge that's yellow, right? So, if I add more specificity, it's easier. And they've done experiments with this where they know it's quicker. People will be quicker if you have a more specific request because there's only so many yellow things in a fridge, but it'll help people find it more quickly, even though there's...

So I think it's that same sort of idea rather than just, how could I be better? You're asking how could I be better with this one tiny little slice.

- So, I'm a little bit curious about how you developed skillsetter.com, and so it was described as like a flight simulator. So, obviously, it's meant to practice these skills. How does software help, like, when you don't have that immediate, or maybe you do get immediate feedback? It's not quite the same as out in the wild.

So, how does it help?

- Well, you're right. There are some limitations with what software can do as opposed to out in the wild. Like that concept of a flight simulator, what is a flight simulator? You sit in a room and it feels like you're flying an airplane and there's all kinds of inclement weather, and you have to fly through that inclement weather to make sure you land the airplane. And all the while no one got injured, even if you crashed into the ocean, right?

So, same sort of thing, we have these scenarios that we put people in, wherein there's some sort of conflict or there's a challenge, and they have to practice responding to these stimulus videos in a way that uses one or perhaps two or three of the skills that they've been practicing and learning.

And so the very first form of feedback that they get is the ability to watch themselves because we ask them to record their responses to a particular stimulus video, and when they do so, they can then watch themselves. And that's something we don't often get to do. We get to see ourselves, like right now we're talking using video conferencing technology, and I can see myself and I can see you, and it's different to record it and then watch yourself afterward, especially if you're looking for specific skills that may have been used in that moment.

So, that's the first level of feedback. The second is we provide folks with the rubric that I mentioned, so this evaluation rubric, so they can evaluate their performance based on these questions, and that allows people to be a lot more objective about it. Because so often when we review our own work, you know, your little critique on the shoulder, you know, your little saboteur is going to be sitting there going, "You're so dumb. You're not good enough. My God, you sound like a real ding dong."

So, that quiets the saboteur a little bit so that you can look more objectively, how did I do in this particular response to this scenario, this situation that was given to me? And then now interestingly, once you're happy with the result because first of all, you can rerecord a response, you can try again and again, just like you can in music or sports.

So, you can try again, rewatch yourself, try again, rewatch yourself, reevaluate until you're happy with your response. Then the feedback that you get is external. So, you can submit your response and you either get feedback from peers because we can put learners within small cohorts within the system, and they can give each other feedback, or you get feedback from a facilitator or instructor, whoever is leading the training that you're participating in.

So, those are the two types of feedback. And thirdly, we're working on technology to be able to do some of that. So, we're looking at AI that will look at the words you say, the tone with which you communicate, and the non-verbals on...your facial expressions. And combining those to provide a richer perspective of how well you communicate it because the words are not enough.

I can say the same thing in two different ways, and they'll be interpreted completely differently, right? So, that is work in progress. I think we've got some really promising results, and the speed with which AI is improving right now is a little bit mind-blowing. And so we anticipate some really interesting technology in the coming months. We have a project that's likely to complete around September, early September, and that will possibly be, you know, very revolutionary for our company anyway for what we're trying to do.

- So, yeah, I've had a couple of guests, safety professionals who are using sentiment analysis, which I think is what you're talking about in terms of going through...now this is in learning about after an accident or an incident, maybe learning about the context, how things were working before, or just sort of gathering stories as a way to kind of look at "culture," the culture of the workplace, and see, you know, okay, well, everyone is saying that their team leader is great, but the sentiment analysis is showing that the words they're using or the facial expressions or that sort of thing.

Like, I think that there are different applications and exciting applications, specifically within the safety profession, that are happening there. So, that's an interesting tie-in.

- Yeah, I'm glad you're bringing the conversation back to the safety piece. I'm curious now, you know, as we just spoke, perhaps in depth around interpersonal skills and how to assess them and how to improve them, like, so what? Who cares? Why does this matter to safety, in your perspective?

- Well, I think, I mean...so full disclosure, I'm not a safety professional, but I've spent over a year now interviewing them and talking to some extremely interesting and thoughtful people about safety. And when it comes down to it, you can look up the rules for handling a confined space in a book or online.

As you probably know, you can't just look up interpersonal skills and, you know, safety managers, they need to bend the ear of leadership to get more resources sometimes. They need to develop trust with people. They need that...when you were talking about that we-ness, I was thinking about, you know, it's really hard to lead a whole company towards more safe attitudes if everyone thinks you're the safety cop.

And you're there to, you know, throw the book at people, that that's all you care about. One of our guests, Clive Lloyd, talks about trust and saying that that's sort of the base component of safety. If people don't trust you, they're not going to change their behavior. They need to know that you are on their side, right? That this is a team effort and that sort of thing. So, I think all of these are relevant, as well as safety professionals do a lot of training, right?

They train in safety procedures, and on the other hand, they also can't be everywhere all at once. They're in that position of...actually, I had a question about this later. Like, they can't meet everyone at a work site often, maybe if it's a small one, but they can't meet everyone.

And so they're an integral part of the work without actually doing the work. And so they really need that interpersonal connection to learn about the work, to learn about what people call weak signals. Like, yeah, that machine's been making a funny noise for the last week, or...you know, and having people speak up, right?

So, psychological safety is something that's important to your work. So, yeah. How do you know...we sort of define psychological safety broadly, and this is, again, I'm not an expert, is just that people will speak up, but I think when I spoke with you last time, you said that there's a second part.

So, speaking up is the first part, but then the listener has to do something, right?

- What we said, the definition we use in a lot of our training is the courage to speak up and the confidence to know you'll be heard. So, that is the responsibility of the listener, ultimately. That I need to feel confident that when I do speak up, you're going to acknowledge and appreciate what it is that I have to say.

And so that came to us, that definition came to us because we were thinking of psychological safety as being synonymous with, I guess, you can say a speak-up culture. And it was at the beginning of the pandemic, and then that's when the Black Lives Matter rioting was happening. And we thought, well, those folks have the courage to speak up, protesters in the street, but something's missing, right?

That's not characteristic of what we're trying to aim for here, right? We don't want people parading in the halls of your work holding up signs because they feel unheard. So, that second piece then was added to our definition where it's the courage to speak up and the confidence to know you be heard.

Given all of that, like what you just mentioned, I would say it like this, so thinking about safety and the responsibilities of a safety officer, let's say within a construction site or within a manufacturing setting, or wherever it may be. Ron Heifetz is a researcher and explorers leadership, and he has this thing called adaptive leadership. And I haven't gone too deep into his work, but so hopefully I'm not misquoting any of his work, but he gives the example of a surgeon or doctor wherein there's a technical problem, and then there's what he calls an adaptive problem, hence the phrase, adaptive leadership.

And when you do knee surgery, the technical problem is, you know, how to go in, cut things open, fix it and close it all back up, and you're done, right? That's the technical challenge. And a lot of doctors want to focus on that, and it is a very important aspect of the work. No doubt about that, right?

And then there's the adaptive problem. What's the adaptive problem? The adaptive problem is having that person recover from the surgery. Maybe they have to do physio, maybe they need to take some medicine thereafter, pain meds, whatever. And so there's this whole adaptive process that takes more time, that is more inexact and takes into perspective, you know, feelings and emotions and, you know, "Why didn't you take your medicine? Gosh, like I said, take your medicine every day for two weeks and you stopped."

You know, what's that about, right? So, within safety, there's the technical problem, right? You mentioned confined space, right? You can look up all the technical details and there's this whole adaptive problem. People need to adhere to the safety precautions. People need to speak up when there are some sort of potential safety risk or issue.

And these are all the adaptive problems that are a lot harder to become expert at, and I would argue are the conduit to solving those problems are these interpersonal skills, especially when you consider that these interpersonal skills are linked to the original work around counseling.

And what is a counselor trying to do? A counselor fundamentally is trying to have someone sitting across the table from them, change their behavior. And if someone walked in the room and said, "I want to quit smoking," and all you said is, "Well, it's pretty easy, just throw out your cigarettes, like, stop smoking, duh. Problem solved. Thank you. That'll be $100. Next."

That doesn't work. That doesn't work. There's whole process of connecting with the other person, having them feel heard, understood, generating hope and positive expectation, persuading them to try on a new perspective. You know, all of these pieces fundamentally result in the other person changing their behavior. And that's not an easy thing to do.

And we need to do the same thing at work, especially around safety. We need to engender these behaviors of speaking up, of pointing out, of comfortably nudging the person saying, "Hey, I'm noticing, you know, there's a bit of the flooring is a little bit broken there. It's a tripping hazard now. So you better replace that." Or, you know, like, how do we do all these subtle little communications while also maintaining trust and not pissing people off and making them feel like you're just a safety cop?

Nobody wants a safety cop.

- Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of team building and persuasion involved, I think, or at least for, I think, effective outcomes. And you talked about, you know, you're persuading people to change their behavior for better outcomes. Well, that's fits safety perfectly. So, where humans are involved, , which is everywhere, the message spoken isn't always the message received. And that can be very frustrating in real life.

And it's also the fundamental plot point of many, many misunderstandings on fictional shows. How do you work with that common mismatch if you're teaching people to communicate more effectively?

- I mentioned the skill of reflecting feeling. There's a skill that we typically teach before that, which is reflecting content. That's the one that comes to mind. Reflecting content is just paraphrasing what the other person said. So often what I'll see in meetings is someone's saying something, they're explaining, and then the response is, "Yeah, yeah, okay, I get it."

And then person B wants to interject and offer their opinion, and they haven't perhaps established what it is that person A is saying or confirmed that they fully appreciate and understand where person A is coming from. Because person A might be saying one thing and they might be intending for a slightly other thing. So, it's always really important to check in with them and summarize or paraphrase what it is that they just said.

So, that's one of the skills that we really advocate. And sometimes that slows things down, right? It feels like in that moment you want to just go, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, and move on. However, if there's a misunderstanding, you're going to be dealing with a much bigger problem later on. So, why not check it out right now? It might only take you 20 seconds, but just confirm that you got it right, and the other person can say, "Yeah, you do understand correctly. Thank you."

Okay, now I'm more receptive to what you are going to add to what I just said. So, it also builds that team cohesiveness. And one of the constructs that I think many leaders will confound in some of the work that we do, especially around psychological safety, is they'll think of that notion of having the courage to speak up and the confidence to be heard means you have to agree with other people.

Well, if I'm trying to get clear on what you're saying, it's not because I have to agree with you. In fact, I may be have a completely different perspective. And what's valuable about me validating yours is that you'll be far more open to learning my perspective. And then if you know what I'm thinking and I know what you're thinking, now we can come to a better result much quicker.

So, it saves time in the end.

- Yeah, absolutely. And also I've noticed the phenomenon of people arguing with each other when they actually have the same opinion. And being a third party, just being like, okay, but what you are saying is actually exactly what this person is saying. You're using different words, different metaphors, you're focusing maybe on different parts, but fundamentally you're agreeing.

So, I think that kind of checking in can help with that sort of thing.

- Yeah. And if you look at things like hostage negotiations or any sort of negotiation, it's very much about, okay, so I'm going to get you X because that's what you want, and therefore I'm going to get Y, which is what I want, you know, fundamentally that's what you're really trying to do.

So, your curiosity and your conversation needs to lead toward really knowing what person A...you know, what that other person across the table wants. And sometimes that takes a little bit of effort. Like, they might not come right out and say, this is what I want, or this is what I'm trying to say because people are formulating their thoughts as they're conversing sometimes.

And so it might take a little bit of patience to sort of tease out what exactly they're trying to get at.

- If you had a safety professional come to you and say, okay, look, I've just been hired into this new company. I've got in, and I don't know what the last safety person did, but, you know, nobody likes safety here. Everyone thinks that we're the bad guys. We're here to catch them doing something wrong. So, you start to work with this person, you coach them a little bit, how would you recommend that they start to notice?

Like, how would they know if and when they're making a difference in starting that shift? What sort of signs would they look for? Maybe that's too broad, but...

- I mean, that is a broad question, and I would want to take a systematic approach to it. Like, okay, this is problem. How do we solve this problem? And I like being data-driven, hence my desire to even take this broad scope of interpersonal skills and break them down into more objective, measurable components. I would want to take a similar approach with this, where I think fundamentally, we want to build psychological safety.

So, if people see the safety officer as, you know, the safety cop and someone that we can't really trust, well, I would start with assessing it. That's what I like about psychological safety, not the concept itself, although it is quite appealing to me, it's the ability to measure it. The fact that we can objectively measure it. And measuring it only gets you so far.

What's really valuable after measuring it is putting the results in the middle of the room, and saying, let's have a conversation about this.

- So, you can say, okay, look, I've been assessing this team, people, folks, and this is what I'm finding.

- That's right. And you can even go so far as to look at the seven questions that are used to assess psychological safety. And you can say, okay, these are the seven questions, and in order to produce a psychologically safe environment, we want everybody to be able to answer these questions in the affirmative. And right now we're not. So, what might we do different here?

So, for example, one of these questions is, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized by members of this team. So, if someone says, no, my skills are not being utilized, there's a disconnect there, right? The team members aren't gathering information about how they're unique and different and what skills they bring to the table so that they can be leveraged. And so, how might we solve that problem?

Next thing you know, it might be, well, let's do a lunch and learn. And every week we'll have a different speaker who talks about what their scope of work is and how they fit in with the bigger picture here and what they love to do, you know? And so you start to realize, oh, you know, Nancy, she's just really, really good at, you know, documenting things.

That's just something she loves doing. So, next time I have a documentation problem, I know to go ask Nancy.

- Yeah, and I think that's a wise approach too, and you can't...I'm sure there's some metaphor here, like you can't eat the whole elephant at once or something like that. But essentially going after it bit by bit. And because things are interconnected, I would think that with each improvement you make on one part, it's going to at least somewhat improve elsewhere.

Do you know what I mean? Like, one aspect of psychologically safety if you get it a little bit better, it will affect other aspects and the whole, there's a cumulative effect.

- Yeah. Well, and I would also...I like to think of it like like dominoes. And there's different sizes of dominoes. So, what you want to do is move the smallest little thing that will then cause the biggest ripple effect. And so I think the smallest thing at the foundation, what we know about the research is that the best, most effective teams have psychological safety.

And there's a parallel theory there that psychological safety is a gateway for all these other good qualities and traits that you see among effective teams that we don't necessarily correlate or associate with psychological safety, but if you don't have psychological safety's have those other things. And Google did their big project Project Aristotle.

Are you familiar with that research project that they did?

- No. It's a short answer.

- Okay. Well, yeah, I'm sure there's other listeners who aren't familiar with it either. Project Aristotle is a research project that Google, they created this project internally to look at 180 Google teams, and they ranked them all. So, they knew, okay, here's our top team, here's our bottom team, and everybody in between. And they rated them using really great data.

And some of it was objective data, like, did you make more sales than the other team? And then there was subjective data, which was, how well did this team perform based on the executive's opinions, right? So, some of it was subjective, some of it was objective. It's hard to compare, say, a sales team to a customer support team.

They have different metrics. So, they tried to create an objective measure that was an aggregate of a bunch of results, and they had their top teams down to their worst teams. And then they tried to look at correlating factors. So, they identified 250 factors. So, they went around, they walked into the halls of Google saying, what matters for an effective team?

And people said, oh, well, it's definitely all about the size, and oh, you need to have a good mix of people, different ages, and, you know, all these different factors. So, they threw that into their big machine to analyze the data, and nothing correlated. So, then they went back to the academic research, they came across Amy Edmonson and her work, "Psychological Safety." Then they ran the data, and lo and behold, it was the number one factor, number one factor correlating with success in a team.

And then they identified four other factors. The other four were dependability, clarity, impact, and meaning. So, the teams felt like they were dependable. Good quality to have, right? I think we all want that. The teams had clarity about what their work was, how they fit in, all that sort of stuff. Then there was they felt like their work had impact on the organization and their work was meaningful to them.

Those are the other four factors. And I would argue that it's hard to have those four factors if you don't have psychological safety.

- Absolutely. And there's a lot of overlaps as well between safety and quality, like good operations and safety. And so they were looking a little more at operations, but I hesitate to say they're the same thing, but I would say they're very much intertwined. So, I have a question that I ask every guest, a few questions. I'm going to break it down a little bit for you because we've been talking about interpersonal skills this whole time.

So, you've broken them down into these, I don't know if you want to call them micro-skills, but the more measurable skills. If you could choose only one of those skills to be taught to future safety professionals in, you know, post-secondary training, that sort of thing, what would it be?

- The skill that I would focus on would be one that we haven't yet mentioned, so that's a good thing, I suppose, which is we already talked about reflecting content, reflecting feeling, and there's a third, which is reflecting process. So, you mentioned what if there's a scenario where two people are kind of arguing, and yet they're arguing the same thing?

So, what's happening at the process layer? What's happening in that process layer is what you just said. I think they think they're arguing for the same thing, and yet their metaphors and perspective are just different. And so just pointing that out, naming what you're observing at that process layer will help solve the problem because you're bringing a perspective to the conversation that certainly those two people that are just ping-ponging back and forth are likely not going to see because they're very much in the content layer, right?

They're in the content layer, not in the process layer. And so what that requires is to...if you can imagine those two people are on the dance floor dancing to the music, you want to go up onto the balcony and look down and notice, oh, gosh, I'm noticing you're both moving in this funny way. And just point that out and just name it.

So, that's making a process comment or reflecting process. And what that does is it's effectively naming the elephant in the room, and allowing the team and the other people in the room to see things from a different perspective so that they can then work on their process, not just on the content, right?

So, it's not just how are we going to resolve this particular debate, it's how are we going to resolve debates in general within this organization, right? Or how do we handle when we have differences of opinion? And so that I think is the real critical skill to learn. And tying it back to the FIS, the Facilitative Interpersonal Skills dimensions that I mentioned of interpersonal responsiveness is interpersonal responsiveness requires you to, I think, make process comments to reflect process.

That's the way to resolve ruptures and disagreements without just pointing the finger and blaming people.

- Yeah. It occurred to me as you were saying that, that's a really fundamental leadership skill, and safety professionals are leaders, right? A leader is someone who can step back and look at the dynamics and say, okay, let's talk about the dynamics and that sort of thing.

- Yeah. And let's face it, a safety officer, as you mentioned, is someone that doesn't do the work, right? You facilitate the work, but you're not doing the work. So, it's a really critical piece to, I think, put into your toolbox, if you will if you're a safety officer.

- Okay. So just a few more here. One is, if you could go back in time to the beginning of your career, what is one piece of advice that you might give to yourself? This is the tough question I ask.

- That is a tough question. Wow. It's a good question. I think for me, the thing that I've been not necessarily struggling with, like, but if I can recognize an interpersonal skill, I suppose, that has slowed me down or a leadership skill maybe that has slowed me down, is being decisive.

So, it's both a strength and a weakness. I think I operate really well in environments of uncertainty because I'm really good at collecting data and adjusting, and yet that can sometimes result in indecisiveness because I'm processing lots of information and trying to make sense of it all and I'm struggling for wanting to get better information.

And so being able to be decisive in the moment and sticking to a decision that's made is an area where, you know, if I could go back 15 years, I would, you know, advise myself as an older, more mature person, speaking to a younger, less mature person, I would say your zest for and desire for better data will almost never be satisfied.

And you want to couple that with the ability to just move forward and make decisions with imperfect data and stick to it. So, that would be it for me.

- Yeah, most skills have sort of..there's a spectrum, right? You go to either extreme, some people make decisions, but they don't gather data, which is the opposite of what you're saying and also not super helpful. So yeah. Interesting. How can our listeners learn more about any of the topics in our discussion today? Are there books or websites, tools, anything that you think that you would point people on where to start if they want to explore this a little more?

- Well, they can check out skillsetter.com, and we have some information on there. Other really valuable resources are...I mean, it's a little bit nerdy, but if people want to read papers, you know, I would read the paper, it's by Tim Anderson, I think it was 2018 or '17 when it was published, which is just Google, FIS, or go to Google Scholar and search, FIS Tim Anderson predictive of outcomes.

That paper is really in my eyes pretty foundational for this work that we're doing. I wish there was a better book out there for all of this that was a little bit more approach...like not approachable, but a bit more accessible, I guess, for folks because some of the books that we've been using to guide us along are a little bit on the academic side and, you know, kind of dry reads.

Perhaps the best one, which is not about interpersonal skills, but in general about deliberate practice, the idea of getting better at Skills is the book by Anders Ericsson called "Peak." And he researched for 30-plus years. He's since passed away.

But he was I would say the world's really leading researcher and thinker around this idea of improvement and mastering skills that are outside of sports and music because he recognized that those two domains, in particular, have really great coaching and skills assessment. Like, there's something different about psychological skills versus physical ones.

And so it's a great read, and it will hopefully persuade people who do read it that interpersonal skills can be learned.

- And where can listeners find you on the web if they wanted to reach out?

- The best way is to connect with me on LinkedIn. My URL for LinkedIn is just linkedin.com...I think you'll put it in the link, but just search for my name, and you should be able to find me, friend request me, or connect with me there. I'd love to have you be part of my network, and then we can communicate through private messages or what have you.

And I'm not super duper, duper responsive, so be patient. If you message me, it might take me a couple of days or even a week because I try not to go in there every single day because otherwise, I'd be in there and never come back out.

- I know what you're saying. Well, thank you, Stephan, for joining us today and having an enlightening conversation.

- Mary, it was a real pleasure. Thank you for all your great questions and it was fun.

- Good. Well, that's our show for today. Listeners, we love to hear from you on LinkedIn as well. Head over to our page by searching for Slice, Inc., and let us know what you'd like to hear more of or less of, and especially if there's any new insights that you've gained from listening to the show. My thanks, as always, to the "Safety Labs by Slice" team.

Bye for now.