This podcast features a conversation between Mark McBride-Wright and Tom Geraghty, the founder and CEO of Psychological Safety Powered by Iterum. Tom shares his background transitioning from an experimentalist in ecological research to becoming a recognised authority on creating safer, high-performing, and more inclusive workplaces. He discusses his journey of discovering the concept of psychological safety about 10 years ago and evangelising it through his blog and community. Tom emphasises the importance of making psychological safety practices accessible globally, not just in wealthy countries. He also highlights the need for more research and application of psychological safety in non-western, non-white collar, and diverse contexts. Overall, the conversation covers Tom’s work, the evolution of the field, and the exciting future opportunities in advancing psychological safety.
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:01
Mark, hello and welcome to the next podcast of the safe leader podcast with me, your host, Mark McBride Wright and I’m joined today with Tom gerati, who is founder and CEO of psychological safety powered by iterum. Tom Garrity is a recognized authority in creating safer, high performing and more inclusive workplaces. And founder and CEO of interim limited, a company dedicated fostering safety cultures and psychological safety, Tom is now an award winning psychological safety consultant and researcher for multinational corporations, healthcare organizations, academia, government and more. His mission is to make the world of work a safer, higher performing and more inclusive and equitable place outside of work, Tom spends much of his time as possible outdoors, mountain biking, hiking and traveling, and as a father to a wonderful young daughter, Tom Nice to meet you.
Tom Geraghty 1:08
Thank you so much, Mark. It’s wonderful to be here. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 1:12
it’s, it’s the Yeah, we’ve, I think we’ve probably been connected for a while on LinkedIn. And you know, through doing this podcast, this new project, I’ve actually now met people that, you know, we’ve just been in one another’s feeds and never actually know the sound behind the voice, you know the voice behind the face. And as I’m reading your biography there, I’m like, my goodness, why have we not connected sooner or met? Yeah,
Tom Geraghty 1:43
well, it’s nice to be finally able to do so
Mark McBride-Wright 1:45
Absolutely, absolutely. So I like when these podcasts to understand the story behind the entrepreneur, behind the person that we’re talking to. And I think it’s good when we start that by going back to the roots, back to the past. And so one thing that really caught my eye out when researching your background was you say that you began your career as an experimentalist, and you’ve since transitioned into the world of psychological safety. So tell us a bit about the young Tom and, you know, the journey that got you to where you’re at now,
Tom Geraghty 2:24
yeah. So, yeah, experimentalists. It’s the coolest job title I’ve ever had, and it was the very first one I had, and it’s so I’ve kind of, I kind of stuck with it since I kind of kept it remained identifying as experimentalists throughout the rest of my career. But yeah, so that was so my my degree was in ecology, and I after, after my degree, I then went into ecological research and sort of related kind of fields. Worked at a research station, designing and running experiments. That was the experiment, experimentalist job title. In fact, I was in in a department called Weed Science, which is weed, we science, right? So, like, like an 80s movie, yeah, and so. So that was, that was that was really good, really great experience. But I, for various reasons. I take a I took a sideways step into technology, and began to and through that, sort of began to manage teams, manage people and teams, and create teams. And sort of worked my way up as you do, and and yeah, through that journey, became, well, sort of remained passionate about creating the conditions in which people can thrive and and I think so my my ecological kind of thinking was kind of coming to the fore there. Like, how do you instead of just, you know, instead of, instead of trying, instead of telling a tree to grow harder, yeah, you know that obviously, obviously, that doesn’t work. How do you create the conditions in which that can grow and thrive? And so I kind of tried to apply the same thinking to teams and people and and that led me to psychological safety. Because, yeah, almost about 10 years ago now, I came across the term psychological safety, and that, for me, was the moment where that was the actual light bulb moment where I realized, this is the stuff. This is this the substrate. This is the underlying foundation of of high performing teams and success, right? So, um, all that stuff I’ve been doing, turns out had a name. It was a real thing. I wasn’t just, yeah, I was making up. I was, I was definitely making it up, but, but, but it was also real, so, and that was, that was the moment for me when I was able to sort of put a put a name to it, and put wrap it around something, and that enabled me to structure it and start talking about it and evangelizing about it, really. Yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:59
And how and how. I mean, it’s really picked up in the last, you know, five years or so so, I mean, I’d imagine you were a bit of an early adopter, in the sense that, you know, Amy Edmondson coined the term, and then her work started to reach out there and started to impact business management and leaders and start to be looked at. So to have a business, there a brand already using the language, being available to be a consultant, come in to support, to give people guidance on how to use your tree analogy. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s the soil, isn’t it? And if it’s unfertile, if it’s, you know, to make things really grow, you need to give nutrients and nourishment and create the right conditions and water it when it’s dry and put, you know, fertilizer on it when it when it needs fed, and give it nitrogen and infuse it with microbes and blah, blah, blah, you know, and that that’s what makes the tree go to being a blossoming apple tree or cherry blossom and flower, because some trees don’t flower, you know, if they’ve not got the right condition. So tell us a bit about your application of like, how you then, when that light bulb went off, what you then went on to create, and how you saw it then being used in businesses, and what role you played and in being that messenger.
Tom Geraghty 6:32
Yeah, so it’s an interesting sort of part of the journey, really, I because when I, when I discovered the term, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t set out to create a business around it, or I, I, I was so, I was a, so at the time, I was CTO, I think I was, yeah, something like a CTO. I was, later on, I was definitely a CTO and CIO. And so I, that was my career, and that was how I envisioned my career would always go. And so I just, I just started to talk about psychological safety, do meetup talks and, and Wright blog articles and things about it, and, and I was just excited about it and evangelizing it, and telling everyone I could about this idea and how to put it into practice, and, and, and at some point along that journey, I thought, you know, I should probably put all this in one place, because I thought it’s all just all part of that. Part of the rationale for that was just so I knew where to look for, yeah, I was creating all this stuff, and I was like, where’s the best place to put it? Well online so I can find it, and other people can find it. Let’s put it in one place. And so I started up a blog called psych safety.com and and just started to put it there. And through that, yeah, the that it rather quickly emerged over the next couple of years. That’s amazing. Yeah, that
Mark McBride-Wright 7:57
people, you know, because you, you’ve got, like, what is it, 10,000 subscribers or something I read, yeah.
Tom Geraghty 8:02
So we’ve, in fact, you know what we’re We’re just a couple 100 people, under 10,000 um, actual subscribers over the over the past few years, we’ve had 15,000 people subscribe, but obviously some people unsubscribe,
Mark McBride-Wright 8:13
yeah, yeah. Like that tree analogy. You need to cultivate your mailing list. Otherwise, yeah, not very good read,
Tom Geraghty 8:23
but yeah, so, yeah, and so it’s grown, like it’s, it’s we. When I first created the website, I, in fact, I was super pumped when we hit 35 subscribers, because I was like, This is real thing now and then. And then the website initially would get, you know, 100 visits a week, or something like that. And now we’re, we’re sort of 25,000 visits in a couple of weeks, or something, wow, like a million impressions a quarter or something. Yeah, and it’s, it’s huge. It’s, it’s almost scary to think about, and I but yeah, and that, and that and that has crept up over over the world. Not even crept up. It’s increased quite rapidly over that time.
Mark McBride-Wright 9:07
And what advice? What advice can you give to entrepreneurs then? And I’m selfishly asking this for myself, because I’m sort of at the start of this journey with my independent thought leadership and setting up newsletters and all that. How do you then overlay that community with your sales funnel? And you know, do you even use it with that intention or that that you know because, because the people that are going to buy from you in the next three to six months are more likely to be those that are already consuming your content, and, you know, feeling that. So how do you activate then that purchasing decision, and what are the sort of things that you then do with people? Is it one to one, coaching? Is it? Is it, do you do workshops and corporates or keynote talks or Yeah?
Tom Geraghty 9:57
So, so cool, yeah. So there’s a lot. Yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot there. So we, so we do, we do a lot of corporate work. And when I say corporate work, I don’t really, I don’t mean just corporate I mean a lot of our work is with organizations like the NHS, yeah, private companies, manufacturers, aviation firms, or local government and everything else, everything in between. So we do a lot of that work inside organizations, training and consulting inside organizations. We also do a lot of work. So we provide a lot of training to individuals who are probably part of organizations but might not be, and for one reason or another, just need to sign up themselves and skill up themselves, but to come back to all of that. So our mission, which you so eloquently described at the start, is to make the world of work safer, high performing, more inclusive and equitable place. Essentially, whenever we make a decision, whenever we do anything, we ask ourselves, does this, does this thing we’re doing or planning to do align to that mission? Does it help move us a little bit closer to that mission? And, um, so I’ll be honest, we don’t worry. We don’t really. We certainly don’t think of our community as a sales funnel. Yeah, our community are the people that are doing much of the work of that mission, right? Okay? And the more we can help that community, our community, achieve that mission, you know, because we’re all roughly aligned on that mission, and you know, the better. So, so when it comes to anything we’re doing, we always come back to that mission, and that’s why we have things like we have the affordability based pricing for our for our workshops online. Okay, if, if someone is from a so if they’re unwaged, or they live in a lower income country, like Nepal or India or somewhere, then they’re entitled, they’re able to sign up to the workshops on a very low rate. If, if you’re in a westernized, wealthy country, and you’re paying for yourself, then you sort of have middle rate. And if you’re if your organization is paying for you, like, let’s say you work for McKinsey or someone, then you’re going to pay the top corporate rate. The principle being that the big the higher rates pay for ones, yeah. And we also have things like scholarships. So we provide some, we provide some, some places free of charge completely. And I know various other things we provide, and we provide whatever we can for free. So we provide loads of free resources, templates, tools, articles, all the community stuff, all of that is for free and and that’s because genuinely our mission, that is our mission, and and we do whatever we can to achieve that. And a key port, a key point of that, is that that making the world we shouldn’t not just making the world of wealthy work, or, you know, rich countries, yeah, safer and more inclusive and equitable, it’s this is we should be doing for everyone, yeah. So it’d be unfair to exclude some people just Yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 13:28
So with having such a broad user base, a broad community, how do you find do you get feedback from people who’ve signed up individually, let’s see and then how they’re applying what you’ve taught them locally or in local projects. Or, yeah, it must be really rewarding, really satisfying. It is rewarding
Tom Geraghty 13:53
and satisfying. It’s also, it’s also sometimes quite hard to hear, even it can be quite uncomfortable, which is, you know, the nature of feedback sometimes, but yeah, we there are some fantastic people in our community trying out using some of our tools and practices and templates and things like that and and we get a lot of feedback about things that have worked really Well, things that haven’t landed so well things that or and a lot of the time it’s about how to apply or how people have applied it successfully in different contexts, yeah, yeah, because a lot of these practices are pretty ubiquitous, right? You know, we’re all fundamentally people, yeah, but we work in different contexts, and a manufacturing context is really quite different to a healthcare context. Yeah, very true. But fundamentally, some of these things can be, you know, the same thing can be applied, but how you do it, and the nuance of how you do it could be quite different. So that might be like a manufacturing versus healthcare. It might be Eastern versus Western culture, yeah, yeah. And so there’s. A lovely community and a lovely debate about a continuing debate about how successful, or, you know, how we continuously improve. And that’s, that’s the key. We continuously improve. You know, if we waited till it was perfect, we’d never publish anything.
Mark McBride-Wright 15:16
Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. So inviting that real time feedback helps you improve. And I noticed in your in your bio, that you’re a big yoga fan. You’ve got background in yoga mindfulness, and you know, in the work, even in the work that I’ve been doing in safety, I have a colleague who’s a practicing Buddhist, and I’ve realized, like some of the similarities between her practice and, you know what, the angle we’ve taken with physical safety and psychological safety in engineering and engineering culture. And to your point, it’s ultimately about just being a better human, you know? So having been a wannabe Yogi probably about five or six times in my life. And going to, maybe, I don’t know, 10 classes, and then stopping, I am vaguely familiar with the world of yoga and the practice, and you know, the physical aspects, just one part of actually being a full practitioner in yoga. So how deep is your practice, and how much of it, do you bring into work, or does it influence your work? Yeah. So
Tom Geraghty 16:25
there’s, Oh, yeah. So there’s some really good points here. So absolutely, like you say yoga is, for one thing, yoga is a practice. And I really like the term the point is called practice. Not A, not A, not a goal. You don’t sort of win yoga. You just practice. You just so, you know, there is no such thing as being good or bad at yoga. You’re practicing or you’re not. And so I love that. And yes. And just like you say, there’s a physical practice and a spiritual or non physical practice, the some of the yogic philosophy, I think is really useful to think about when we’re doing some of this work. One of the key, one of the things I find really interesting is so there’s in yoga. There are the yamas and niyamas and and. And there are two key points here. One is Ahimsa, which is non violence and and another is Satya, which is truth. So Ahimsa asks us or instructs us to always try to be non violent, always be kind, always be compassionate, always try to cause the least harm have a positive effect on the world. And Satya is just being truthful. We should always strive to be truthful. Now, what’s interesting is that Satya comes after non violence, because sometimes being truthful could cause harm. Being truthful isn’t always the necessary or kind thing to do so, and this is this is, this is directly relevant to psychological safety, right? Because, yes, psychological safety means we can speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, mistakes, we can speak our mind, we can suggest things. But it doesn’t mean just having no filter. It doesn’t mean speaking up without any regard, yeah, consequence of what we’re saying. So we should always try to be truthful. But a hymns, more importantly, be Be kind, be compassionate, and try to have the greatest positive impact with our words. And that’s like that there’s lot, right? There’s a lot we can take away from yogic principles. But that’s, I think,
Mark McBride-Wright 18:39
you know, I think where I said to my editor, like, when we edit podcasts, like, I want a little section at the beginning of the intro. And I think that the sort of 15 seconds you just said there will be that bit for this episode. I love that. I absolutely love that that’s, that’s, that’s really, interesting. And when you worked in in companies, then how did you find, like, what, what was the journey of being in a corporate in full time employment with the safety of a regular income? And then, you know, you know it’s like when you’re not, when you’re found, or an entrepreneur, you you start the deflection strategy a certain point in and then, then eventually, this is your, the thing that runs your life, you know. So what? What was that process for you to where you are now? So,
Tom Geraghty 19:36
yes, that’s a good question. The thing I know two points to that. One was that, like so many other people, during what actually prior to and during the or the COVID pandemic, and everything associated with that, so I took redundancy twice from from two different roles, and that taught me very. Powerful lesson, which is that having a salaried role doesn’t necessarily provide you with the with the security and safeguards that that it used to Maybe, and maybe that’s particularly in tech, but I think it’s pretty much across the board, really. So there, there is a pervasive belief in it, and I can understand this as a belief that running your own business is more risky than than being employed. But actually, I’m not even I’m not sure that’s completely true. There are different risks, but I’m not sure it’s more or less one or the other. So so that that was one lesson for me, instead of realizing that and and in realizing that shortly before our daughter was born, that was the the impetus to take the leap into being self employed or running our own business, running my own business, because that was because I wanted to make sure that I was that I had the control and flexibility to Yeah, to be a father as Well, to be an active father as well as be beholden to my employer on a eight or six basis, or whatever it is.
Mark McBride-Wright 21:07
Yeah. I was, yeah. I mean, yeah, I was the exact same. The flick, the flexibility that came with running my own business was, was just, well, I put in the whole request to go part time, which was approved, and I then went part time, and I set up a company in my own name in in the UK, which I didn’t quite feel comfortable with. It felt a little bit too, you know, front and center, although ironically, now that I’m in Brooklyn, New York, I’ve set up an LLC in my own name, but, but anyway, back in 2017 I was, yeah, I just, I just, I used it to, you know, do some initial contracts that I’d won, but then I landed on the idea for equal engineers and building out this, you know, business that focused on minoritized talent, and would do training and consulting for engineering companies and and everything. But the day that I went full time self employed was the day that my husband and I found out that we had been paired with a surrogate, or someone you know a couple had shown an interest to work with us. So basically, my time that I thought I was going to have fun working in coffee shops, drinking flat whites and networking with people and going to the gym and being healthy and walking around London, that was replaced with a new project, which was Project Family and, you know, the whole kettle of fish that that bring along very, very intense period of life, but loved it, and it would have been really hard to have done if I’d been in in full time employment, but I had the privilege of having, you know, my husband’s salary, was able to cover the mortgage and stuff like that. So I realized there’s an element privilege when you move into entrepreneurship, that some people aren’t able to take those sort of risks, or they’re forced to take that risk through redundancy, you know? But yeah, certainly running a, yeah, well, running a business with young kids is I always call equal engineers, like my third. Well, when I had my first kid, it was my second baby. You know, they were both born at the same time. And yeah, now it now, it feels like my third child, because I’ve got a daughter now as well. But it’s yeah, it takes all the hours, doesn’t it? It
Tom Geraghty 23:38
does. It certainly does. And I mean, I mean, yeah, like, we’re still having sleep issues and things like that. So it’s, it’s, you know, your nights are tiring, your days are tiring. How old
Mark McBride-Wright 23:49
your daughter? She’s two, two. Wow, okay, very, right, you’re there, you’re there, you’re at potty training and this. And, yeah, yeah, wow, yeah, yeah. Must admit, I my, yeah, my daughter’s, she’ll be five, and in January, so we’re a little bit further along in the age, but, but that’s really impressive, you being I think it’s really good for our kids to have, like, to see, like the men in the household, you know, help balance it out and be primary carers. And I wanted to, the reason I went on that point there was, I wanted that was a question, what to ask you was around masculinity, manhood, parenthood, like, how you see that playing out and in terms of equity. So
Tom Geraghty 24:39
this was, and this was actually a big, a big part of our decision, because we wanted to, like I very much, and my partner is my partner, Jade is fully on. She was as enthusiastic as I am about making sure that our daughter saw us as equal. All equal parents, two parents, equal in capacity and role and different, obviously, but but, but equal in that sense, and but, but also the both of us were. We had careers, we had jobs, we had lives, yeah, and ambitions. And we have lives and ambitions, and, and, and, you know, and we do valuable work, and it’s so we didn’t want, we wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a, there wasn’t any reflection of, sort of some gender, gendered, yes, roles in that sense, and, and, and so. So running, running a business like that, and so we’re where we can engineer that a bit a bit better, where you never hear, you’re never fully in control and and things will always you know your the path is twisty and windy, and you only really know where you are right now, but, but, but you can running your own business. You have a certain degree of control over that, and at least being able to make decisions and
Mark McBride-Wright 26:10
your time as well. You know, when slot in workshops and factoring in the nursery drop off. Yes,
Tom Geraghty 26:17
exactly all that, all of that, you know, and I and so from the very start, both my partner and I knew that we, we would work, we wouldn’t work five days a week. I don’t, I don’t. I don’t really like the the distinction between full time and part time working, because, yeah, there’s this, you know, full you know, in quotes, full time is, what five days a week and part time is anything less than that. But that’s just some arbitrary that’s just, so, yeah, we just, when
Mark McBride-Wright 26:44
you run your own business, you’re, you’re you’re, you know part well, you know, maybe if you’re a yoga practitioner, you’re good at, you’re better than me at setting boundaries. I try and set boundaries and not let them blur. But sometimes it has to blur because you’re the only person that can do payroll at the end of the month when you’ve been waiting for that invoice to come in. And you know, as much as you’d love to disconnect when you’re off on your one week holiday that coincides with the end of the month, you’re the only one with the bank access. So guess what? You have to get online and do that, or else people don’t get paid.
Tom Geraghty 27:15
Well, this is it. This is it. And I think, and I think the the power is ensuring that where those because those boundaries are blurred, they are necessarily blurred, but, but that it goes both ways and and we, yes, you know, we, we work in quotes in the evening and at weekends, but, but we also take a lot of time during the week, and sort of it’s flexibility both ways. We, we take some really fantastic holidays. We’re able, we’re able to make to combine work with the holidays. You know, we delivered some work in New York recently. So New York, we’re living in Brooklyn for a while. Yeah, we love Brooklyn. We stay in we always stay in Greenpoint.
Mark McBride-Wright 27:55
Oh, yeah, yeah, right, yeah. I’m still getting to know the area. Yeah, we’re in Brooklyn Heights. So sort of near the, yeah, I think I can see the Manhattan Bridge from, from, from my room.
Tom Geraghty 28:08
So you’re a bit you, a bit lower down. I think is that a bit further south? Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 28:12
sort of just when you come over the two bridges from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge, you then get into Dumbo and, yes, that to the left and down is Brooklyn Heights, and then you get into, like, Carroll Gardens and and everything so and prospect parks further south,
Tom Geraghty 28:31
lovely. Yeah. I love Yeah. I love Brooklyn. I like, I love working in Manhattan, but I always like retreating back out of Manhattan to get into Brooklyn, because Manhattan’s a bit wild.
Mark McBride-Wright 28:39
Yeah, totally, yeah. My kids are at school in Manhattan, and so we’re, we were friends with the F line right now, going in and out.
Tom Geraghty 28:50
Yeah. So my line is so mine’s a G train. That’s my
Mark McBride-Wright 28:55
Yeah, yeah. How long were you in New York for then? Oh so.
Tom Geraghty 28:59
Well, on occasion, I’ve worked. So I worked out in New York for a while. So as I was CTO was I was head of tech ops at a company called uni days, right? And we opened an office in Brooklyn. I worked, I lived and worked out there for a while, and, and, yeah, we were just recently there for a few weeks this summer, actually doing some work. And when it was really hot, yes,
Mark McBride-Wright 29:22
yeah, yeah. My gosh, tell me about it. I love the air conditioning. Yeah, it’s
Tom Geraghty 29:28
full, yeah. We spend a lot of time in the in the water parks around you
Mark McBride-Wright 29:32
know, even today, it’s well, this, this has been recorded on the seventh of November, Twitter, at four. It is 25 degrees outside. Yeah, it is, it is, you know, it’s just abnormally warm for this time. Yeah,
Tom Geraghty 29:47
I mean, it’s November, so in and so in a month or two, you’ll have, you know, five feet high snow drifts.
Mark McBride-Wright 29:54
Yeah, yeah, supposedly, but right now, the the furry hats are still in the cupboard. Yeah? Yeah,
Tom Geraghty 30:00
but, yeah, yeah. So, and this is, you know, and this is part of the beauty of of running our own business, that we get to travel for work and combine holidays with it, because, because we can do that, we can work, you
Mark McBride-Wright 30:12
work together, you and your partner, work, working. Oh, amazing. Yeah,
Tom Geraghty 30:15
yeah. So, actually, that’s a good that’s good point. So Jade, Jade joined the business full time, full time in no
Mark McBride-Wright 30:25
other job, apart from, no
Tom Geraghty 30:26
other job, apart from, apart from parenting, which is absolutely work in itself. But yeah, so Jay joined like full time about a year ago, and and so and that, yeah, and that makes life a lot, a lot better, and we’re able to, and it really gave a big boost to the business, because we’re able to do a lot more, a lot more powerful stuff. And Jade brings so much of her expertise in education, curriculum and leadership, management and stuff like that to it. So that was super exciting. But yeah, and it’s, and it’s and it’s absolutely, yeah, it’s fantastic. We absolutely love it. Oh,
Mark McBride-Wright 31:01
you have to help. Let me ask one more question, what’s it like working with your partner? Oh,
Tom Geraghty 31:06
it’s absolutely fantastic. We, yeah, we, we genuinely, really enjoy it. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s really like it. I guess it helps that it’s something that we’re both really passionate about and interested in and and in that sense, you were talking about boundaries earlier. Like, in essence, it actually is a little bit harder to set those boundaries and be like, Okay, we’re going to stop talking about work now. Yeah, you know. And if we, if one of us wakes up on a Saturday morning with an idea, like, Oh, I’ve had an idea. We should do this thing. We start talking about, okay, it is Saturday morning that we should stop talking about work and go and have some fun. So, but it is fun. And, yeah, I wouldn’t change it for the world. It’s, I genuinely, really, really enjoy it.
Mark McBride-Wright 31:59
So the extent to which you’re able to share what are some exciting projects that you’re working on right now?
Tom Geraghty 32:06
Oh, yeah. So that’s good question. So we have a few little secret projects in the pipeline that probably knock and key there’s like, there’s the natural evolution of what we already do. So we we do a lot of work with organizations, workshops in organizations, helping with management and leadership development and all that sort of work. We so we can always continuously evolving those we’re always also continuously evolving our online workshops, our open enrollment, public online workshops. We’ve got a few more of those in the pipeline. We’ve, we’ve got one, I can tell you this. We’re so we’re working on, yes, there it is. It’s on the wall there. So we’ve just, we’ve just ran some education workshops. So So workshops specifically about psychological safety in education contexts. Oh, brilliant. Which is interesting, because there’s, there’s psychological safety in the classroom and psychological safety in the staff room. And, yeah, teachers, educators tend there’s like a natural, it’s almost an obvious kind of correlation between psychological safety and learning in the classroom. Unless students feel psychologically safe they’re not learning is prohibited. Or, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 33:34
yeah. Fear of saying the well, fear of getting it wrong, or being told that they’re silly or something, or question,
Tom Geraghty 33:41
you know, and even in some contexts, you know, putting a hand up and answer, answering a question, and and then, and, but there’s so there’s a classroom context, and there’s a staff room context, and it can be very different. And what’s interesting is, in education settings, there’s not always such a focus on psychological safety between teachers in their teams, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 34:06
oh my gosh, totally, totally with our the work that some work we’ve done through equal engineers, you know, we work with some universities, and we Used to, you know, work with universities, essentially to get better access to students for our careers fairs and the other things that we do to support students. But then when we are talking to universities, and they then find out what we do with industry and the training that we do on safety culture and stuff like that. They’re like, Oh, we’re an employer. We could benefit from, from some of this, some of those issues that you’re saying that are downstream of, you know, where our students are going to flow into, oh, actually, we could. We could do with some of that. Could Can you so all of a sudden, had this new sort of customer base in in universities. In the academics. And,
Tom Geraghty 35:03
yeah, yeah. And that’s exactly, exactly, that’s it. Because we do a lot of work with universities we’ve there’s quite a, you a few UK universities that we work with, and there are, so there are, you know, there are certain unique challenges in a school setting around psychological safety, including things like Ofsted and inspections and compliance, both in terms of the classroom compliance and sort of rule and standards sort of components, and then a different sort of set or similar in a university context, because they are, I mean, academia in itself, we could this is, I mean, I find this fascinating, because academia in itself is almost it has some real challenges around psychological safety in in the sense that scholarly work is often framed and set up to be quite adversarial. You, you, you, you, if someone publishes some research, basically everyone’s job is then to try and break it down and find holes in it. You You know, you defend a thesis, you defend your PhD using those words and this, this leads to, quite often, leads to cultures in academia where some people, the more privileged folks in academia, might just might simply frame this as robust discussions, and the other people who are more subject to who have less power and a more junior or whatever else they they, they would not frame it as simply a robust discussion. They would feel very on occasion, often feel very attacked and spot lit and and unfairly treated. And it doesn’t need to be that way, and that those sorts of cultures, those sorts of behaviors, bleed out into into into other settings where that’s not at all appropriate, like management and leadership and teamwork, especially,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:05
yeah, especially where, if that that’s been your you know, if I’m thinking about an engineering student, and that’s what you’ve been exposed to As the style, you then carry that with you as you come into into industry. Yeah, and you know, in engineering in particular, not many academics have actually had industry experience, so it’s a bit of a skewed reality for the students to think that how their lecturers and professors practice engineering is what it’s like out in the, you know, in industry or the wider world. That’s completely not right, you know, yeah, so there’s, there’s, there’s definitely benefits there of trying to break that down, and then when you bring in the minoritized group lens to it, you know, the experiences of, you know, global ethnic majority, or the LGBTQ or even women in academia. It’s still a lot of cultures all still sort of modeled around that white, dominant, masculine, sort of, you know, aggressive, yeah, exactly, patriarchal, yeah, it is near and dominance,
Tom Geraghty 38:26
yeah, control, yeah, and very individualistic. You know, in academia, whether whether as a student or a or postgraduate doctor or scholar or whatever it’s the it is very individualistic. It’s you know you are. You Yourself scored and measured on how many times your papers are cited and how much impact your papers and research has had, and and, and as a student, you’re measured on great individual grades and individual achievement and and things like that. And of course, as we enter the world of work, in most cases, certainly in engineering, what matters is how, how much you can contribute to the team, how much you can help your team achieve great stuff. And even if that means actually not individually achieving. The greatest engineer is the team that helps their team deliver amazing things without writing a single line of code, but, but that, but that’s quite a difficult thing. That’s a big shift from that sort of very, very individualistic approach to a more team based approach,
Mark McBride-Wright 39:38
especially when so I recorded a podcast this morning, and the point the guest made, which I completely agreed with, was, we’ve got a lot of people in leadership roles that just are there by virtue of tenure, and they have never had any sort of essential skill training or leadership training, you know? And so where you’ve earned your. Striped through technical rigor and everything, there’s this sentiment of a softening or lowering the bar, such that that engineer who’s never written any code that you’ve just described, you know, their their credibility and being in that role would be brought into brought into question. You know, are they capable?
Tom Geraghty 40:21
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, in fact, in fact, they’re some of the most valuable people, some of the most valuable people in organizations, and let’s say in tech departments, are the glue people, the people that connect ideas and people and things together in in new and innovative ways to make great things happen. Yeah? And, and so, but, but, of course, if we reduce people down to spreadsheets and metrics and numbers and sort of lines of code written, or number of commits or or whatever it is then, then was, then, we’re not actually measuring the value that they’ve had. And we often, and we see this, you know, we often end up with organizations letting letting go, another one of those quotes, things, losing some of the most valuable people because they’re not on paper the most again, in quotes, productive. My
Mark McBride-Wright 41:14
understanding is that Ukri is with the Research Excellence Framework coming out in 2028 they’re shifting the balance the focus. So there’s going to be less of a focus on, I think it’s called your H index, which is, you know, the number of citations, number of publications you’ve had as a researcher, and more of a balancing towards the culture that you create, and how that’s going to be quantified, measured, I don’t know, but the purpose of it is to shift away from what you’ve just described as being the primary motivator of behavior to then one which is more, you know, collaborative and inclusive and bedded in, in empathy and what have you.
Tom Geraghty 42:04
Yeah, exactly so, which I think is fantastic. And of course, I’ll withhold judgment until I see how it’s how it’s actually measured, because the moment we start to measure these things in it all starts to get a little bit difficult, or wild or Cobra 50,
Mark McBride-Wright 42:23
yeah, set out with the intention to have something different, but then it still comes back to some sort of metric, and that someone wants to badge an ROI against for X, Y and Z, which is hard for businesses like ours, that then helps impact intangible culture, intangible stuff. You know, if you’re then your impact is then boiled down to, well, what’s the ROI on taking a training course with you, for example, you know, how do you have metrics that you use to quantify that?
Tom Geraghty 42:56
So we, we sort of do but, but actually, a lot of the time it’s, it’s, we’re reliant upon the metrics that organizations already use. Yeah, because we we do we do a little bit around measuring psychological safety. We actually do it. We actually do a lot less than than you may think most of our work is, which kind of makes sense to me. Most of our work is built on most of our work focuses on building and fostering and teaching psychological safety behaviors, practices understanding than measuring it. Yeah, yeah. But, and so, yeah. So we often end up relying on the internal organizations existing metrics. But, but what we try to push people, try to steer people towards other metrics, more outcome based metrics. What is this? What is this team achieving more of or better of as a result of doing this work? Oh, excellent. You know, rather than, like you say, some sort of or some awkward, arbitrary productivity metric that, yeah, be gamed or something. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 44:05
totally, yeah. So what excites you the most, then about the future of psychological safety? You know, you’re an experimentalist by definition. So where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation for this field. Are you experimenting? And you mentioned some exciting projects on in the developments, or you have you got some things underway for your Yeah, I think you in that experimenting? Yeah. So
Tom Geraghty 44:32
we’ve got some, there is, so there’s a huge amount of research that needs to be done. And we’ve got a, we’ve got a sort of, almost a list of research that needs to be done that hasn’t yet been addressed in the in the domain of psychological safety, a big part of that is so psychological safety, typically, you know, it’s a fairly young field to begin, if you look at how it’s grown over the past few years, and the vast majority. Of the work has been so far in very white collar, westernized and neurotypical contexts. So and in fact, and this is, this is understandable. That’s where the researchers, academics exist, that’s where they that’s where they’re going to look. It’s like the street light effect. But, but what, what needs to happen is, is more and weird we’re doing work in this in this space, the more work needs to be done in non western, not white collar, so blue collar, and, and other other contexts, and, and, and what it means in a newer, diverse world, because, you know, you see sort of advice, like you see advice around psychological safety, like maintain eye contact and shake hands like, No,
Mark McBride-Wright 45:51
I must admit, I was on a briefing call this morning for a client workshop that I’m doing in a few weeks. And they went through a good presentation style, 101, and had a slide on, you know, body posture, maintaining eye contact, verbal projection, you know, X, Y and Z. And I, just part of me was thinking, Oh, this is really neurotypical, you know, if I, if I was not comfortable having my camera on or etc, you know, would I still be able to be a presenter at this, you know?
Tom Geraghty 46:24
And this is, yeah, and this is a fantastic point, because, you know, many people, whether they consider themselves neurodivergent or neurodiverse or not, find eye contact really difficult to or so maybe uncomfortable, difficult or nearly impossible. And so by maintaining, by putting all the effort into simply maintaining eye contact, the expending so much cognitive it’s so cognitively burdensome that they spend any cognitive effort on anything else, let alone listen to the thing that the whoever’s talking about. So, yeah, it’s not helpful. It’s not helpful advice. And it comes from effectively. It comes from the fact that a lot of this work has been done in these in these contexts so far, and so more work needs to be done outside of those contexts.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:13
I love the idea of doing international research in contexts that don’t really have much information on them, or research, or maybe research is being done, but it’s not then surfaced up and spoken about and distributed and known about. So even just amplifying that helps, and I remember, so I’m a visiting professor at UCL in inclusive engineering education, and one of the design projects we did last year as part of the how to change the world project was all the second year. So about 900 undergraduate engineering students were given different contexts to improve water quality, or water sanitation, or even just access to water, to clean water. And one of the contexts was London. So they had an urban, Western, developed, you know, context, and then they had a developing nation context, where it was more get your water from a well type set up. And, you know, I felt really as an external advisor coming in to support the students doing, you know, equality impact assessments and what have you I mean, I’ve grown up in a western world, in a city, you know, I’ve not no idea what it’s like growing up in Ethiopia, or wherever, you know, and having to go and go and get, get a well, get, you know, to get your water. So, so I imagine research like what you’re describing that looks in these developing areas, in these modes of management that we now use, like psychological safeties, become it would be really useful to understand that that local context. I remember some work that Stonewall did on CEO briefs for the local LGBTQ context of the country that they might be about to go and visit. So they could have something quick in their pamphlet or on their iPad. They could pull it up and they could read about what it was like for the community locally there where they were about to arrive, because sometimes their frame of reference might have been, you know, joining a float with the pride network, pride in London, and thinking it’s all lovely, you know. But when they’re about to fly out to, you know, another country where Uganda or somewhere, yeah, they might not really understand. So it’s about it’s about helping people understand the there you’re inherently limited by virtue the frame of reference you’ve got in the world. You will only ever be you, and you have to proactively seek out diverse. City for it to enrich your frame of reference. It, you know, it doesn’t come naturally. It doesn’t
Tom Geraghty 50:06
so that’s a beautiful opening. I love that. Yes, yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:10
It’s, yeah. I mean, I could talk for hours, but this, I’m a big I’m a big believer in, like in energy, in engineering, we were very familiar with safety, physical safety, but it’s only really something now, this is something I’m really trying to push with my work with the safe leader, is extending that into psychological safety, so leveraging the familiarity the engineers have with physical safety and getting them to think of it as a psychological safety so they’re empowered to call out unsafe acts without fear of retribution. It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO or a new apprentice who’s just started, you have authority to stop work on that manufacturing floor if you see someone about to do a task that’s against the standard operating procedure, that will put someone’s life in jeopardy, or could cause an incident, you know, so it’s, it’s the exact same calling out non inclusive behaviors, microaggressions, micro inequities, because what we’ve had in a male majority sector is this gradual normalization of non inclusive behaviors, because we’ve lacked that diversity to help, well, balance out, I guess, equilibrate. So it’s, yeah, I think there’s, I think you’ve got a huge market ahead of you with the sectors where you’re working, like even when you talk about health care and the education setting and industry, and then in different geographies, you’re you, you and is it Jade, you said your other half, you’re both going to be very, very busy. There’s
Tom Geraghty 51:45
a lot of work to do.
Mark McBride-Wright 51:47
Yeah, maybe we need to collaborate on some stuff. Yes, we should.
Tom Geraghty 51:52
I need to get going in about in three or four minutes, because,
Mark McBride-Wright 51:57
well, then we’ll get straight onto the quick fire questions. We’ll do it. We’ll do five of them. Okay, so beautiful. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Tom Geraghty 52:05
Um, pause,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:09
what’s your proudest professional achievement,
Tom Geraghty 52:13
creating a helping to create a great, fantastically great, psychologically safe team that I’m still proud of to this day.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:22
What’s the one skill every leader should have?
Tom Geraghty 52:27
Empathy, making and making the key point that you can that it’s possible to learn and get better at empathy. It’s not a it’s not a fixed, innate trait, tea or coffee, coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. What’s
Mark McBride-Wright 52:40
one piece of advice you’d give to your younger self?
Tom Geraghty 52:44
Be patient. I’m going
Mark McBride-Wright 52:47
to squeeze another one in. What’s the one book or resource you’d recommend to someone interested in psychological safety?
Tom Geraghty 52:53
Yeah? Good. Yeah. So Amy Edmonton canonical book, The fearless organization, is the one go to book on psychological safety. There are loads more books you can read, but, yeah, read that one first.
Mark McBride-Wright 53:07
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Tom really enjoyed talking to you today. If our listeners want to get in touch with you, find out more about the work that you and your business are doing. How do they do that? So,
Tom Geraghty 53:17
yeah, head over to psychsafety.com there are loads of resources, tools, communities, meetups, training courses, loads of stuff you can get involved in. There. Lots of it for free. And you can also just drop me an email at Tom, at tom@psychsafety.com, and ask questions. Get stuck in like, Yeah, I’m always, I’d love to hear stuff,
Mark McBride-Wright 53:39
fabulous. Well, we’ll put all that information in the transcript and the show notes in that as well. Thank you very much for your time. Really enjoyed it. Thank you
Tom Geraghty 53:47
so much. Mark, that was fantastic. Thanks. Bye.
E006: Psychological Safety and Thriving Teams
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:01
Mark, hello and welcome to the next podcast of the safe leader podcast with me, your host, Mark McBride Wright and I’m joined today with Tom gerati, who is founder and CEO of psychological safety powered by iterum. Tom Garrity is a recognized authority in creating safer, high performing and more inclusive workplaces. And founder and CEO of interim limited, a company dedicated fostering safety cultures and psychological safety, Tom is now an award winning psychological safety consultant and researcher for multinational corporations, healthcare organizations, academia, government and more. His mission is to make the world of work a safer, higher performing and more inclusive and equitable place outside of work, Tom spends much of his time as possible outdoors, mountain biking, hiking and traveling, and as a father to a wonderful young daughter, Tom Nice to meet you.
Tom Geraghty 1:08
Thank you so much, Mark. It’s wonderful to be here. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 1:12
it’s, it’s the Yeah, we’ve, I think we’ve probably been connected for a while on LinkedIn. And you know, through doing this podcast, this new project, I’ve actually now met people that, you know, we’ve just been in one another’s feeds and never actually know the sound behind the voice, you know the voice behind the face. And as I’m reading your biography there, I’m like, my goodness, why have we not connected sooner or met? Yeah,
Tom Geraghty 1:43
well, it’s nice to be finally able to do so
Mark McBride-Wright 1:45
Absolutely, absolutely. So I like when these podcasts to understand the story behind the entrepreneur, behind the person that we’re talking to. And I think it’s good when we start that by going back to the roots, back to the past. And so one thing that really caught my eye out when researching your background was you say that you began your career as an experimentalist, and you’ve since transitioned into the world of psychological safety. So tell us a bit about the young Tom and, you know, the journey that got you to where you’re at now,
Tom Geraghty 2:24
yeah. So, yeah, experimentalists. It’s the coolest job title I’ve ever had, and it was the very first one I had, and it’s so I’ve kind of, I kind of stuck with it since I kind of kept it remained identifying as experimentalists throughout the rest of my career. But yeah, so that was so my my degree was in ecology, and I after, after my degree, I then went into ecological research and sort of related kind of fields. Worked at a research station, designing and running experiments. That was the experiment, experimentalist job title. In fact, I was in in a department called Weed Science, which is weed, we science, right? So, like, like an 80s movie, yeah, and so. So that was, that was that was really good, really great experience. But I, for various reasons. I take a I took a sideways step into technology, and began to and through that, sort of began to manage teams, manage people and teams, and create teams. And sort of worked my way up as you do, and and yeah, through that journey, became, well, sort of remained passionate about creating the conditions in which people can thrive and and I think so my my ecological kind of thinking was kind of coming to the fore there. Like, how do you instead of just, you know, instead of, instead of trying, instead of telling a tree to grow harder, yeah, you know that obviously, obviously, that doesn’t work. How do you create the conditions in which that can grow and thrive? And so I kind of tried to apply the same thinking to teams and people and and that led me to psychological safety. Because, yeah, almost about 10 years ago now, I came across the term psychological safety, and that, for me, was the moment where that was the actual light bulb moment where I realized, this is the stuff. This is this the substrate. This is the underlying foundation of of high performing teams and success, right? So, um, all that stuff I’ve been doing, turns out had a name. It was a real thing. I wasn’t just, yeah, I was making up. I was, I was definitely making it up, but, but, but it was also real, so, and that was, that was the moment for me when I was able to sort of put a put a name to it, and put wrap it around something, and that enabled me to structure it and start talking about it and evangelizing about it, really. Yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:59
And how and how. I mean, it’s really picked up in the last, you know, five years or so so, I mean, I’d imagine you were a bit of an early adopter, in the sense that, you know, Amy Edmondson coined the term, and then her work started to reach out there and started to impact business management and leaders and start to be looked at. So to have a business, there a brand already using the language, being available to be a consultant, come in to support, to give people guidance on how to use your tree analogy. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s the soil, isn’t it? And if it’s unfertile, if it’s, you know, to make things really grow, you need to give nutrients and nourishment and create the right conditions and water it when it’s dry and put, you know, fertilizer on it when it when it needs fed, and give it nitrogen and infuse it with microbes and blah, blah, blah, you know, and that that’s what makes the tree go to being a blossoming apple tree or cherry blossom and flower, because some trees don’t flower, you know, if they’ve not got the right condition. So tell us a bit about your application of like, how you then, when that light bulb went off, what you then went on to create, and how you saw it then being used in businesses, and what role you played and in being that messenger.
Tom Geraghty 6:32
Yeah, so it’s an interesting sort of part of the journey, really, I because when I, when I discovered the term, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t set out to create a business around it, or I, I, I was so, I was a, so at the time, I was CTO, I think I was, yeah, something like a CTO. I was, later on, I was definitely a CTO and CIO. And so I, that was my career, and that was how I envisioned my career would always go. And so I just, I just started to talk about psychological safety, do meetup talks and, and Wright blog articles and things about it, and, and I was just excited about it and evangelizing it, and telling everyone I could about this idea and how to put it into practice, and, and, and at some point along that journey, I thought, you know, I should probably put all this in one place, because I thought it’s all just all part of that. Part of the rationale for that was just so I knew where to look for, yeah, I was creating all this stuff, and I was like, where’s the best place to put it? Well online so I can find it, and other people can find it. Let’s put it in one place. And so I started up a blog called psych safety.com and and just started to put it there. And through that, yeah, the that it rather quickly emerged over the next couple of years. That’s amazing. Yeah, that
Mark McBride-Wright 7:57
people, you know, because you, you’ve got, like, what is it, 10,000 subscribers or something I read, yeah.
Tom Geraghty 8:02
So we’ve, in fact, you know what we’re We’re just a couple 100 people, under 10,000 um, actual subscribers over the over the past few years, we’ve had 15,000 people subscribe, but obviously some people unsubscribe,
Mark McBride-Wright 8:13
yeah, yeah. Like that tree analogy. You need to cultivate your mailing list. Otherwise, yeah, not very good read,
Tom Geraghty 8:23
but yeah, so, yeah, and so it’s grown, like it’s, it’s we. When I first created the website, I, in fact, I was super pumped when we hit 35 subscribers, because I was like, This is real thing now and then. And then the website initially would get, you know, 100 visits a week, or something like that. And now we’re, we’re sort of 25,000 visits in a couple of weeks, or something, wow, like a million impressions a quarter or something. Yeah, and it’s, it’s huge. It’s, it’s almost scary to think about, and I but yeah, and that, and that and that has crept up over over the world. Not even crept up. It’s increased quite rapidly over that time.
Mark McBride-Wright 9:07
And what advice? What advice can you give to entrepreneurs then? And I’m selfishly asking this for myself, because I’m sort of at the start of this journey with my independent thought leadership and setting up newsletters and all that. How do you then overlay that community with your sales funnel? And you know, do you even use it with that intention or that that you know because, because the people that are going to buy from you in the next three to six months are more likely to be those that are already consuming your content, and, you know, feeling that. So how do you activate then that purchasing decision, and what are the sort of things that you then do with people? Is it one to one, coaching? Is it? Is it, do you do workshops and corporates or keynote talks or Yeah?
Tom Geraghty 9:57
So, so cool, yeah. So there’s a lot. Yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot there. So we, so we do, we do a lot of corporate work. And when I say corporate work, I don’t really, I don’t mean just corporate I mean a lot of our work is with organizations like the NHS, yeah, private companies, manufacturers, aviation firms, or local government and everything else, everything in between. So we do a lot of that work inside organizations, training and consulting inside organizations. We also do a lot of work. So we provide a lot of training to individuals who are probably part of organizations but might not be, and for one reason or another, just need to sign up themselves and skill up themselves, but to come back to all of that. So our mission, which you so eloquently described at the start, is to make the world of work safer, high performing, more inclusive and equitable place. Essentially, whenever we make a decision, whenever we do anything, we ask ourselves, does this, does this thing we’re doing or planning to do align to that mission? Does it help move us a little bit closer to that mission? And, um, so I’ll be honest, we don’t worry. We don’t really. We certainly don’t think of our community as a sales funnel. Yeah, our community are the people that are doing much of the work of that mission, right? Okay? And the more we can help that community, our community, achieve that mission, you know, because we’re all roughly aligned on that mission, and you know, the better. So, so when it comes to anything we’re doing, we always come back to that mission, and that’s why we have things like we have the affordability based pricing for our for our workshops online. Okay, if, if someone is from a so if they’re unwaged, or they live in a lower income country, like Nepal or India or somewhere, then they’re entitled, they’re able to sign up to the workshops on a very low rate. If, if you’re in a westernized, wealthy country, and you’re paying for yourself, then you sort of have middle rate. And if you’re if your organization is paying for you, like, let’s say you work for McKinsey or someone, then you’re going to pay the top corporate rate. The principle being that the big the higher rates pay for ones, yeah. And we also have things like scholarships. So we provide some, we provide some, some places free of charge completely. And I know various other things we provide, and we provide whatever we can for free. So we provide loads of free resources, templates, tools, articles, all the community stuff, all of that is for free and and that’s because genuinely our mission, that is our mission, and and we do whatever we can to achieve that. And a key port, a key point of that, is that that making the world we shouldn’t not just making the world of wealthy work, or, you know, rich countries, yeah, safer and more inclusive and equitable, it’s this is we should be doing for everyone, yeah. So it’d be unfair to exclude some people just Yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 13:28
So with having such a broad user base, a broad community, how do you find do you get feedback from people who’ve signed up individually, let’s see and then how they’re applying what you’ve taught them locally or in local projects. Or, yeah, it must be really rewarding, really satisfying. It is rewarding
Tom Geraghty 13:53
and satisfying. It’s also, it’s also sometimes quite hard to hear, even it can be quite uncomfortable, which is, you know, the nature of feedback sometimes, but yeah, we there are some fantastic people in our community trying out using some of our tools and practices and templates and things like that and and we get a lot of feedback about things that have worked really Well, things that haven’t landed so well things that or and a lot of the time it’s about how to apply or how people have applied it successfully in different contexts, yeah, yeah, because a lot of these practices are pretty ubiquitous, right? You know, we’re all fundamentally people, yeah, but we work in different contexts, and a manufacturing context is really quite different to a healthcare context. Yeah, very true. But fundamentally, some of these things can be, you know, the same thing can be applied, but how you do it, and the nuance of how you do it could be quite different. So that might be like a manufacturing versus healthcare. It might be Eastern versus Western culture, yeah, yeah. And so there’s. A lovely community and a lovely debate about a continuing debate about how successful, or, you know, how we continuously improve. And that’s, that’s the key. We continuously improve. You know, if we waited till it was perfect, we’d never publish anything.
Mark McBride-Wright 15:16
Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. So inviting that real time feedback helps you improve. And I noticed in your in your bio, that you’re a big yoga fan. You’ve got background in yoga mindfulness, and you know, in the work, even in the work that I’ve been doing in safety, I have a colleague who’s a practicing Buddhist, and I’ve realized, like some of the similarities between her practice and, you know what, the angle we’ve taken with physical safety and psychological safety in engineering and engineering culture. And to your point, it’s ultimately about just being a better human, you know? So having been a wannabe Yogi probably about five or six times in my life. And going to, maybe, I don’t know, 10 classes, and then stopping, I am vaguely familiar with the world of yoga and the practice, and you know, the physical aspects, just one part of actually being a full practitioner in yoga. So how deep is your practice, and how much of it, do you bring into work, or does it influence your work? Yeah. So
Tom Geraghty 16:25
there’s, Oh, yeah. So there’s some really good points here. So absolutely, like you say yoga is, for one thing, yoga is a practice. And I really like the term the point is called practice. Not A, not A, not a goal. You don’t sort of win yoga. You just practice. You just so, you know, there is no such thing as being good or bad at yoga. You’re practicing or you’re not. And so I love that. And yes. And just like you say, there’s a physical practice and a spiritual or non physical practice, the some of the yogic philosophy, I think is really useful to think about when we’re doing some of this work. One of the key, one of the things I find really interesting is so there’s in yoga. There are the yamas and niyamas and and. And there are two key points here. One is Ahimsa, which is non violence and and another is Satya, which is truth. So Ahimsa asks us or instructs us to always try to be non violent, always be kind, always be compassionate, always try to cause the least harm have a positive effect on the world. And Satya is just being truthful. We should always strive to be truthful. Now, what’s interesting is that Satya comes after non violence, because sometimes being truthful could cause harm. Being truthful isn’t always the necessary or kind thing to do so, and this is this is, this is directly relevant to psychological safety, right? Because, yes, psychological safety means we can speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, mistakes, we can speak our mind, we can suggest things. But it doesn’t mean just having no filter. It doesn’t mean speaking up without any regard, yeah, consequence of what we’re saying. So we should always try to be truthful. But a hymns, more importantly, be Be kind, be compassionate, and try to have the greatest positive impact with our words. And that’s like that there’s lot, right? There’s a lot we can take away from yogic principles. But that’s, I think,
Mark McBride-Wright 18:39
you know, I think where I said to my editor, like, when we edit podcasts, like, I want a little section at the beginning of the intro. And I think that the sort of 15 seconds you just said there will be that bit for this episode. I love that. I absolutely love that that’s, that’s, that’s really, interesting. And when you worked in in companies, then how did you find, like, what, what was the journey of being in a corporate in full time employment with the safety of a regular income? And then, you know, you know it’s like when you’re not, when you’re found, or an entrepreneur, you you start the deflection strategy a certain point in and then, then eventually, this is your, the thing that runs your life, you know. So what? What was that process for you to where you are now? So,
Tom Geraghty 19:36
yes, that’s a good question. The thing I know two points to that. One was that, like so many other people, during what actually prior to and during the or the COVID pandemic, and everything associated with that, so I took redundancy twice from from two different roles, and that taught me very. Powerful lesson, which is that having a salaried role doesn’t necessarily provide you with the with the security and safeguards that that it used to Maybe, and maybe that’s particularly in tech, but I think it’s pretty much across the board, really. So there, there is a pervasive belief in it, and I can understand this as a belief that running your own business is more risky than than being employed. But actually, I’m not even I’m not sure that’s completely true. There are different risks, but I’m not sure it’s more or less one or the other. So so that that was one lesson for me, instead of realizing that and and in realizing that shortly before our daughter was born, that was the the impetus to take the leap into being self employed or running our own business, running my own business, because that was because I wanted to make sure that I was that I had the control and flexibility to Yeah, to be a father as Well, to be an active father as well as be beholden to my employer on a eight or six basis, or whatever it is.
Mark McBride-Wright 21:07
Yeah. I was, yeah. I mean, yeah, I was the exact same. The flick, the flexibility that came with running my own business was, was just, well, I put in the whole request to go part time, which was approved, and I then went part time, and I set up a company in my own name in in the UK, which I didn’t quite feel comfortable with. It felt a little bit too, you know, front and center, although ironically, now that I’m in Brooklyn, New York, I’ve set up an LLC in my own name, but, but anyway, back in 2017 I was, yeah, I just, I just, I used it to, you know, do some initial contracts that I’d won, but then I landed on the idea for equal engineers and building out this, you know, business that focused on minoritized talent, and would do training and consulting for engineering companies and and everything. But the day that I went full time self employed was the day that my husband and I found out that we had been paired with a surrogate, or someone you know a couple had shown an interest to work with us. So basically, my time that I thought I was going to have fun working in coffee shops, drinking flat whites and networking with people and going to the gym and being healthy and walking around London, that was replaced with a new project, which was Project Family and, you know, the whole kettle of fish that that bring along very, very intense period of life, but loved it, and it would have been really hard to have done if I’d been in in full time employment, but I had the privilege of having, you know, my husband’s salary, was able to cover the mortgage and stuff like that. So I realized there’s an element privilege when you move into entrepreneurship, that some people aren’t able to take those sort of risks, or they’re forced to take that risk through redundancy, you know? But yeah, certainly running a, yeah, well, running a business with young kids is I always call equal engineers, like my third. Well, when I had my first kid, it was my second baby. You know, they were both born at the same time. And yeah, now it now, it feels like my third child, because I’ve got a daughter now as well. But it’s yeah, it takes all the hours, doesn’t it? It
Tom Geraghty 23:38
does. It certainly does. And I mean, I mean, yeah, like, we’re still having sleep issues and things like that. So it’s, it’s, you know, your nights are tiring, your days are tiring. How old
Mark McBride-Wright 23:49
your daughter? She’s two, two. Wow, okay, very, right, you’re there, you’re there, you’re at potty training and this. And, yeah, yeah, wow, yeah, yeah. Must admit, I my, yeah, my daughter’s, she’ll be five, and in January, so we’re a little bit further along in the age, but, but that’s really impressive, you being I think it’s really good for our kids to have, like, to see, like the men in the household, you know, help balance it out and be primary carers. And I wanted to, the reason I went on that point there was, I wanted that was a question, what to ask you was around masculinity, manhood, parenthood, like, how you see that playing out and in terms of equity. So
Tom Geraghty 24:39
this was, and this was actually a big, a big part of our decision, because we wanted to, like I very much, and my partner is my partner, Jade is fully on. She was as enthusiastic as I am about making sure that our daughter saw us as equal. All equal parents, two parents, equal in capacity and role and different, obviously, but but, but equal in that sense, and but, but also the both of us were. We had careers, we had jobs, we had lives, yeah, and ambitions. And we have lives and ambitions, and, and, and, you know, and we do valuable work, and it’s so we didn’t want, we wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a, there wasn’t any reflection of, sort of some gender, gendered, yes, roles in that sense, and, and, and so. So running, running a business like that, and so we’re where we can engineer that a bit a bit better, where you never hear, you’re never fully in control and and things will always you know your the path is twisty and windy, and you only really know where you are right now, but, but, but you can running your own business. You have a certain degree of control over that, and at least being able to make decisions and
Mark McBride-Wright 26:10
your time as well. You know, when slot in workshops and factoring in the nursery drop off. Yes,
Tom Geraghty 26:17
exactly all that, all of that, you know, and I and so from the very start, both my partner and I knew that we, we would work, we wouldn’t work five days a week. I don’t, I don’t. I don’t really like the the distinction between full time and part time working, because, yeah, there’s this, you know, full you know, in quotes, full time is, what five days a week and part time is anything less than that. But that’s just some arbitrary that’s just, so, yeah, we just, when
Mark McBride-Wright 26:44
you run your own business, you’re, you’re you’re, you know part well, you know, maybe if you’re a yoga practitioner, you’re good at, you’re better than me at setting boundaries. I try and set boundaries and not let them blur. But sometimes it has to blur because you’re the only person that can do payroll at the end of the month when you’ve been waiting for that invoice to come in. And you know, as much as you’d love to disconnect when you’re off on your one week holiday that coincides with the end of the month, you’re the only one with the bank access. So guess what? You have to get online and do that, or else people don’t get paid.
Tom Geraghty 27:15
Well, this is it. This is it. And I think, and I think the the power is ensuring that where those because those boundaries are blurred, they are necessarily blurred, but, but that it goes both ways and and we, yes, you know, we, we work in quotes in the evening and at weekends, but, but we also take a lot of time during the week, and sort of it’s flexibility both ways. We, we take some really fantastic holidays. We’re able, we’re able to make to combine work with the holidays. You know, we delivered some work in New York recently. So New York, we’re living in Brooklyn for a while. Yeah, we love Brooklyn. We stay in we always stay in Greenpoint.
Mark McBride-Wright 27:55
Oh, yeah, yeah, right, yeah. I’m still getting to know the area. Yeah, we’re in Brooklyn Heights. So sort of near the, yeah, I think I can see the Manhattan Bridge from, from, from my room.
Tom Geraghty 28:08
So you’re a bit you, a bit lower down. I think is that a bit further south? Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 28:12
sort of just when you come over the two bridges from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge, you then get into Dumbo and, yes, that to the left and down is Brooklyn Heights, and then you get into, like, Carroll Gardens and and everything so and prospect parks further south,
Tom Geraghty 28:31
lovely. Yeah. I love Yeah. I love Brooklyn. I like, I love working in Manhattan, but I always like retreating back out of Manhattan to get into Brooklyn, because Manhattan’s a bit wild.
Mark McBride-Wright 28:39
Yeah, totally, yeah. My kids are at school in Manhattan, and so we’re, we were friends with the F line right now, going in and out.
Tom Geraghty 28:50
Yeah. So my line is so mine’s a G train. That’s my
Mark McBride-Wright 28:55
Yeah, yeah. How long were you in New York for then? Oh so.
Tom Geraghty 28:59
Well, on occasion, I’ve worked. So I worked out in New York for a while. So as I was CTO was I was head of tech ops at a company called uni days, right? And we opened an office in Brooklyn. I worked, I lived and worked out there for a while, and, and, yeah, we were just recently there for a few weeks this summer, actually doing some work. And when it was really hot, yes,
Mark McBride-Wright 29:22
yeah, yeah. My gosh, tell me about it. I love the air conditioning. Yeah, it’s
Tom Geraghty 29:28
full, yeah. We spend a lot of time in the in the water parks around you
Mark McBride-Wright 29:32
know, even today, it’s well, this, this has been recorded on the seventh of November, Twitter, at four. It is 25 degrees outside. Yeah, it is, it is, you know, it’s just abnormally warm for this time. Yeah,
Tom Geraghty 29:47
I mean, it’s November, so in and so in a month or two, you’ll have, you know, five feet high snow drifts.
Mark McBride-Wright 29:54
Yeah, yeah, supposedly, but right now, the the furry hats are still in the cupboard. Yeah? Yeah,
Tom Geraghty 30:00
but, yeah, yeah. So, and this is, you know, and this is part of the beauty of of running our own business, that we get to travel for work and combine holidays with it, because, because we can do that, we can work, you
Mark McBride-Wright 30:12
work together, you and your partner, work, working. Oh, amazing. Yeah,
Tom Geraghty 30:15
yeah. So, actually, that’s a good that’s good point. So Jade, Jade joined the business full time, full time in no
Mark McBride-Wright 30:25
other job, apart from, no
Tom Geraghty 30:26
other job, apart from, apart from parenting, which is absolutely work in itself. But yeah, so Jay joined like full time about a year ago, and and so and that, yeah, and that makes life a lot, a lot better, and we’re able to, and it really gave a big boost to the business, because we’re able to do a lot more, a lot more powerful stuff. And Jade brings so much of her expertise in education, curriculum and leadership, management and stuff like that to it. So that was super exciting. But yeah, and it’s, and it’s and it’s absolutely, yeah, it’s fantastic. We absolutely love it. Oh,
Mark McBride-Wright 31:01
you have to help. Let me ask one more question, what’s it like working with your partner? Oh,
Tom Geraghty 31:06
it’s absolutely fantastic. We, yeah, we, we genuinely, really enjoy it. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s really like it. I guess it helps that it’s something that we’re both really passionate about and interested in and and in that sense, you were talking about boundaries earlier. Like, in essence, it actually is a little bit harder to set those boundaries and be like, Okay, we’re going to stop talking about work now. Yeah, you know. And if we, if one of us wakes up on a Saturday morning with an idea, like, Oh, I’ve had an idea. We should do this thing. We start talking about, okay, it is Saturday morning that we should stop talking about work and go and have some fun. So, but it is fun. And, yeah, I wouldn’t change it for the world. It’s, I genuinely, really, really enjoy it.
Mark McBride-Wright 31:59
So the extent to which you’re able to share what are some exciting projects that you’re working on right now?
Tom Geraghty 32:06
Oh, yeah. So that’s good question. So we have a few little secret projects in the pipeline that probably knock and key there’s like, there’s the natural evolution of what we already do. So we we do a lot of work with organizations, workshops in organizations, helping with management and leadership development and all that sort of work. We so we can always continuously evolving those we’re always also continuously evolving our online workshops, our open enrollment, public online workshops. We’ve got a few more of those in the pipeline. We’ve, we’ve got one, I can tell you this. We’re so we’re working on, yes, there it is. It’s on the wall there. So we’ve just, we’ve just ran some education workshops. So So workshops specifically about psychological safety in education contexts. Oh, brilliant. Which is interesting, because there’s, there’s psychological safety in the classroom and psychological safety in the staff room. And, yeah, teachers, educators tend there’s like a natural, it’s almost an obvious kind of correlation between psychological safety and learning in the classroom. Unless students feel psychologically safe they’re not learning is prohibited. Or, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 33:34
yeah. Fear of saying the well, fear of getting it wrong, or being told that they’re silly or something, or question,
Tom Geraghty 33:41
you know, and even in some contexts, you know, putting a hand up and answer, answering a question, and and then, and, but there’s so there’s a classroom context, and there’s a staff room context, and it can be very different. And what’s interesting is, in education settings, there’s not always such a focus on psychological safety between teachers in their teams, yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 34:06
oh my gosh, totally, totally with our the work that some work we’ve done through equal engineers, you know, we work with some universities, and we Used to, you know, work with universities, essentially to get better access to students for our careers fairs and the other things that we do to support students. But then when we are talking to universities, and they then find out what we do with industry and the training that we do on safety culture and stuff like that. They’re like, Oh, we’re an employer. We could benefit from, from some of this, some of those issues that you’re saying that are downstream of, you know, where our students are going to flow into, oh, actually, we could. We could do with some of that. Could Can you so all of a sudden, had this new sort of customer base in in universities. In the academics. And,
Tom Geraghty 35:03
yeah, yeah. And that’s exactly, exactly, that’s it. Because we do a lot of work with universities we’ve there’s quite a, you a few UK universities that we work with, and there are, so there are, you know, there are certain unique challenges in a school setting around psychological safety, including things like Ofsted and inspections and compliance, both in terms of the classroom compliance and sort of rule and standards sort of components, and then a different sort of set or similar in a university context, because they are, I mean, academia in itself, we could this is, I mean, I find this fascinating, because academia in itself is almost it has some real challenges around psychological safety in in the sense that scholarly work is often framed and set up to be quite adversarial. You, you, you, you, if someone publishes some research, basically everyone’s job is then to try and break it down and find holes in it. You You know, you defend a thesis, you defend your PhD using those words and this, this leads to, quite often, leads to cultures in academia where some people, the more privileged folks in academia, might just might simply frame this as robust discussions, and the other people who are more subject to who have less power and a more junior or whatever else they they, they would not frame it as simply a robust discussion. They would feel very on occasion, often feel very attacked and spot lit and and unfairly treated. And it doesn’t need to be that way, and that those sorts of cultures, those sorts of behaviors, bleed out into into into other settings where that’s not at all appropriate, like management and leadership and teamwork, especially,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:05
yeah, especially where, if that that’s been your you know, if I’m thinking about an engineering student, and that’s what you’ve been exposed to As the style, you then carry that with you as you come into into industry. Yeah, and you know, in engineering in particular, not many academics have actually had industry experience, so it’s a bit of a skewed reality for the students to think that how their lecturers and professors practice engineering is what it’s like out in the, you know, in industry or the wider world. That’s completely not right, you know, yeah, so there’s, there’s, there’s definitely benefits there of trying to break that down, and then when you bring in the minoritized group lens to it, you know, the experiences of, you know, global ethnic majority, or the LGBTQ or even women in academia. It’s still a lot of cultures all still sort of modeled around that white, dominant, masculine, sort of, you know, aggressive, yeah, exactly, patriarchal, yeah, it is near and dominance,
Tom Geraghty 38:26
yeah, control, yeah, and very individualistic. You know, in academia, whether whether as a student or a or postgraduate doctor or scholar or whatever it’s the it is very individualistic. It’s you know you are. You Yourself scored and measured on how many times your papers are cited and how much impact your papers and research has had, and and, and as a student, you’re measured on great individual grades and individual achievement and and things like that. And of course, as we enter the world of work, in most cases, certainly in engineering, what matters is how, how much you can contribute to the team, how much you can help your team achieve great stuff. And even if that means actually not individually achieving. The greatest engineer is the team that helps their team deliver amazing things without writing a single line of code, but, but that, but that’s quite a difficult thing. That’s a big shift from that sort of very, very individualistic approach to a more team based approach,
Mark McBride-Wright 39:38
especially when so I recorded a podcast this morning, and the point the guest made, which I completely agreed with, was, we’ve got a lot of people in leadership roles that just are there by virtue of tenure, and they have never had any sort of essential skill training or leadership training, you know? And so where you’ve earned your. Striped through technical rigor and everything, there’s this sentiment of a softening or lowering the bar, such that that engineer who’s never written any code that you’ve just described, you know, their their credibility and being in that role would be brought into brought into question. You know, are they capable?
Tom Geraghty 40:21
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, in fact, in fact, they’re some of the most valuable people, some of the most valuable people in organizations, and let’s say in tech departments, are the glue people, the people that connect ideas and people and things together in in new and innovative ways to make great things happen. Yeah? And, and so, but, but, of course, if we reduce people down to spreadsheets and metrics and numbers and sort of lines of code written, or number of commits or or whatever it is then, then was, then, we’re not actually measuring the value that they’ve had. And we often, and we see this, you know, we often end up with organizations letting letting go, another one of those quotes, things, losing some of the most valuable people because they’re not on paper the most again, in quotes, productive. My
Mark McBride-Wright 41:14
understanding is that Ukri is with the Research Excellence Framework coming out in 2028 they’re shifting the balance the focus. So there’s going to be less of a focus on, I think it’s called your H index, which is, you know, the number of citations, number of publications you’ve had as a researcher, and more of a balancing towards the culture that you create, and how that’s going to be quantified, measured, I don’t know, but the purpose of it is to shift away from what you’ve just described as being the primary motivator of behavior to then one which is more, you know, collaborative and inclusive and bedded in, in empathy and what have you.
Tom Geraghty 42:04
Yeah, exactly so, which I think is fantastic. And of course, I’ll withhold judgment until I see how it’s how it’s actually measured, because the moment we start to measure these things in it all starts to get a little bit difficult, or wild or Cobra 50,
Mark McBride-Wright 42:23
yeah, set out with the intention to have something different, but then it still comes back to some sort of metric, and that someone wants to badge an ROI against for X, Y and Z, which is hard for businesses like ours, that then helps impact intangible culture, intangible stuff. You know, if you’re then your impact is then boiled down to, well, what’s the ROI on taking a training course with you, for example, you know, how do you have metrics that you use to quantify that?
Tom Geraghty 42:56
So we, we sort of do but, but actually, a lot of the time it’s, it’s, we’re reliant upon the metrics that organizations already use. Yeah, because we we do we do a little bit around measuring psychological safety. We actually do it. We actually do a lot less than than you may think most of our work is, which kind of makes sense to me. Most of our work is built on most of our work focuses on building and fostering and teaching psychological safety behaviors, practices understanding than measuring it. Yeah, yeah. But, and so, yeah. So we often end up relying on the internal organizations existing metrics. But, but what we try to push people, try to steer people towards other metrics, more outcome based metrics. What is this? What is this team achieving more of or better of as a result of doing this work? Oh, excellent. You know, rather than, like you say, some sort of or some awkward, arbitrary productivity metric that, yeah, be gamed or something. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 44:05
totally, yeah. So what excites you the most, then about the future of psychological safety? You know, you’re an experimentalist by definition. So where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation for this field. Are you experimenting? And you mentioned some exciting projects on in the developments, or you have you got some things underway for your Yeah, I think you in that experimenting? Yeah. So
Tom Geraghty 44:32
we’ve got some, there is, so there’s a huge amount of research that needs to be done. And we’ve got a, we’ve got a sort of, almost a list of research that needs to be done that hasn’t yet been addressed in the in the domain of psychological safety, a big part of that is so psychological safety, typically, you know, it’s a fairly young field to begin, if you look at how it’s grown over the past few years, and the vast majority. Of the work has been so far in very white collar, westernized and neurotypical contexts. So and in fact, and this is, this is understandable. That’s where the researchers, academics exist, that’s where they that’s where they’re going to look. It’s like the street light effect. But, but what, what needs to happen is, is more and weird we’re doing work in this in this space, the more work needs to be done in non western, not white collar, so blue collar, and, and other other contexts, and, and, and what it means in a newer, diverse world, because, you know, you see sort of advice, like you see advice around psychological safety, like maintain eye contact and shake hands like, No,
Mark McBride-Wright 45:51
I must admit, I was on a briefing call this morning for a client workshop that I’m doing in a few weeks. And they went through a good presentation style, 101, and had a slide on, you know, body posture, maintaining eye contact, verbal projection, you know, X, Y and Z. And I, just part of me was thinking, Oh, this is really neurotypical, you know, if I, if I was not comfortable having my camera on or etc, you know, would I still be able to be a presenter at this, you know?
Tom Geraghty 46:24
And this is, yeah, and this is a fantastic point, because, you know, many people, whether they consider themselves neurodivergent or neurodiverse or not, find eye contact really difficult to or so maybe uncomfortable, difficult or nearly impossible. And so by maintaining, by putting all the effort into simply maintaining eye contact, the expending so much cognitive it’s so cognitively burdensome that they spend any cognitive effort on anything else, let alone listen to the thing that the whoever’s talking about. So, yeah, it’s not helpful. It’s not helpful advice. And it comes from effectively. It comes from the fact that a lot of this work has been done in these in these contexts so far, and so more work needs to be done outside of those contexts.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:13
I love the idea of doing international research in contexts that don’t really have much information on them, or research, or maybe research is being done, but it’s not then surfaced up and spoken about and distributed and known about. So even just amplifying that helps, and I remember, so I’m a visiting professor at UCL in inclusive engineering education, and one of the design projects we did last year as part of the how to change the world project was all the second year. So about 900 undergraduate engineering students were given different contexts to improve water quality, or water sanitation, or even just access to water, to clean water. And one of the contexts was London. So they had an urban, Western, developed, you know, context, and then they had a developing nation context, where it was more get your water from a well type set up. And, you know, I felt really as an external advisor coming in to support the students doing, you know, equality impact assessments and what have you I mean, I’ve grown up in a western world, in a city, you know, I’ve not no idea what it’s like growing up in Ethiopia, or wherever, you know, and having to go and go and get, get a well, get, you know, to get your water. So, so I imagine research like what you’re describing that looks in these developing areas, in these modes of management that we now use, like psychological safeties, become it would be really useful to understand that that local context. I remember some work that Stonewall did on CEO briefs for the local LGBTQ context of the country that they might be about to go and visit. So they could have something quick in their pamphlet or on their iPad. They could pull it up and they could read about what it was like for the community locally there where they were about to arrive, because sometimes their frame of reference might have been, you know, joining a float with the pride network, pride in London, and thinking it’s all lovely, you know. But when they’re about to fly out to, you know, another country where Uganda or somewhere, yeah, they might not really understand. So it’s about it’s about helping people understand the there you’re inherently limited by virtue the frame of reference you’ve got in the world. You will only ever be you, and you have to proactively seek out diverse. City for it to enrich your frame of reference. It, you know, it doesn’t come naturally. It doesn’t
Tom Geraghty 50:06
so that’s a beautiful opening. I love that. Yes, yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:10
It’s, yeah. I mean, I could talk for hours, but this, I’m a big I’m a big believer in, like in energy, in engineering, we were very familiar with safety, physical safety, but it’s only really something now, this is something I’m really trying to push with my work with the safe leader, is extending that into psychological safety, so leveraging the familiarity the engineers have with physical safety and getting them to think of it as a psychological safety so they’re empowered to call out unsafe acts without fear of retribution. It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO or a new apprentice who’s just started, you have authority to stop work on that manufacturing floor if you see someone about to do a task that’s against the standard operating procedure, that will put someone’s life in jeopardy, or could cause an incident, you know, so it’s, it’s the exact same calling out non inclusive behaviors, microaggressions, micro inequities, because what we’ve had in a male majority sector is this gradual normalization of non inclusive behaviors, because we’ve lacked that diversity to help, well, balance out, I guess, equilibrate. So it’s, yeah, I think there’s, I think you’ve got a huge market ahead of you with the sectors where you’re working, like even when you talk about health care and the education setting and industry, and then in different geographies, you’re you, you and is it Jade, you said your other half, you’re both going to be very, very busy. There’s
Tom Geraghty 51:45
a lot of work to do.
Mark McBride-Wright 51:47
Yeah, maybe we need to collaborate on some stuff. Yes, we should.
Tom Geraghty 51:52
I need to get going in about in three or four minutes, because,
Mark McBride-Wright 51:57
well, then we’ll get straight onto the quick fire questions. We’ll do it. We’ll do five of them. Okay, so beautiful. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Tom Geraghty 52:05
Um, pause,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:09
what’s your proudest professional achievement,
Tom Geraghty 52:13
creating a helping to create a great, fantastically great, psychologically safe team that I’m still proud of to this day.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:22
What’s the one skill every leader should have?
Tom Geraghty 52:27
Empathy, making and making the key point that you can that it’s possible to learn and get better at empathy. It’s not a it’s not a fixed, innate trait, tea or coffee, coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. What’s
Mark McBride-Wright 52:40
one piece of advice you’d give to your younger self?
Tom Geraghty 52:44
Be patient. I’m going
Mark McBride-Wright 52:47
to squeeze another one in. What’s the one book or resource you’d recommend to someone interested in psychological safety?
Tom Geraghty 52:53
Yeah? Good. Yeah. So Amy Edmonton canonical book, The fearless organization, is the one go to book on psychological safety. There are loads more books you can read, but, yeah, read that one first.
Mark McBride-Wright 53:07
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Tom really enjoyed talking to you today. If our listeners want to get in touch with you, find out more about the work that you and your business are doing. How do they do that? So,
Tom Geraghty 53:17
yeah, head over to psychsafety.com there are loads of resources, tools, communities, meetups, training courses, loads of stuff you can get involved in. There. Lots of it for free. And you can also just drop me an email at Tom, at tom@psychsafety.com, and ask questions. Get stuck in like, Yeah, I’m always, I’d love to hear stuff,
Mark McBride-Wright 53:39
fabulous. Well, we’ll put all that information in the transcript and the show notes in that as well. Thank you very much for your time. Really enjoyed it. Thank you
Tom Geraghty 53:47
so much. Mark, that was fantastic. Thanks. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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