Higher Purpose Podcast 92: Psychological Safety at Work with Adair Cates
What kind of energy do you bring into your workplace? Joining us today is Adair Cates, Self-Mastery Coach, Insight Facilitator, and Founder of First Lead You, and today we’re talking about employee experience, employee engagement, and the massive impact your workplace culture has not just on your organization, but on the people you serve.
Culture
Culture is the energy of the place and the people that you work with. It’s very intangible in a lot of ways, but one of Adair’s favorite questions to ask is: are you the type of person who lights up a room when you walk in or when you walk out?
When it comes to employee engagement and experience, it’s become really clear that when people feel inspired, cared for, and connected, they are willing to go to the ends of the earth for the organizations they work for. Conversely, think about how much time, energy, and money is wasted when your employees are unhappy. There’s so much more that can be generated from a positive place.
Ripple effects
Everything is connected. When the energy of the culture is good, then the energy of the people is good, and they’re going to be productive and engaged. You can tell that a company has a good internal culture by the way they treat their customers: take great care of your employees, and they’ll take great care of your people.
Psychological safety
What want psychological safety. If you’re a CEO or leader of a team, make sure that everybody feels like they can come to work, be themselves, and be fully accepted for that. If they can’t, they become stifled, and their full creative energy is no longer available to them.
So create that psychological safety by listening, believing that people inside your business are the best source of ideas, and taking out your ego. Once you become authoritarian and think you have all the best ideas, your culture will erode.
Engagement tools
Engagement tools are just that — tools. They aren’t solutions. So you can’t put something like TINYpulse in place and expect it to fix your culture. That’s like expecting a thermometer to bring down a fever. You need to have a solid, positive culture in place, and then measure it so you can make it next-level. You can’t just gather data without doing anything about it.
Happy companies
One of the organizations Adair was part of won an award for being the happiest company. Their CEOs had read a book called The Dream Manager about helping people achieve their personal goals at work.
They implemented this shift in the company and put a lot of energy on helping people achieve their personal goals, and as a result, people were so invested in the work they were doing that they went above and beyond all the time — not just for their roles, but for their team, and other teams in the organization.
There was a care and concern to help one another achieve their goals, which benefited not just themselves, but the business, too. They won Happiest Company through TINYpulse. They grew so much that they went from 65 employees to 100.
When people feel like they can show up as their full selves, it’s unbelievable what happens.
Final thoughts
Are you doing your best work? Are you being the greatest version of you? How are you becoming your best self every day? Because when we can be our best selves, we put ourselves in a position to make a massive positive impact for others.
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