E031: The Human Side of Work

Mark McBride-Wright 0:01
Mark, hello. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I am your host, Mark McBride-Wright, and I’m delighted to be joined by Jade. Garrett. Jade is a leading expert in psychological safety, inclusive education and learning design. As Director of Education at psych safety, Jade brings together experience from across teaching, curriculum, design, leadership, coaching, research and consultancy to create inclusive and psychologically safe environments where individuals and organizations thrive. With a master’s in educational leadership and currently completing a PhD in education at the University of Nottingham Jade, combines academic rigor with a deep commitment to practical application, she has led transformation across higher education institutions, most recently as head of educational enhancement at Nottingham, and she is a recognized Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, whether working with schools, universities, public services or private sector businesses. Jade is known for creating learning spaces that are brave, human and empowering. She is also a qualified yoga teacher, trail runner and advocate for life long learning Jade. Hello, welcome,

Jade Garratt 1:16
Hello, Mark. Well, thank you so much for having me. That was a that was a lovely introduction to listen to. So thank you for that, for the start.

Mark McBride-Wright 1:24
Thank you for agreeing to join, to join today. So let’s, let’s get right into it. So tell us honestly. Do you know what I want to go straight in with? First yoga. I’m thinking of joining a yoga revisiting, you know, yoga practice as part of my practice, having not done it for over a year. So tell us a bit about yoga and what you what you do in that.

Jade Garratt 1:49
Oh, yeah, wonderful. So, so my yoga practice, I think, was what sustained me through teaching, which is, is it can be quite challenging, like a career profession to work in. And for me, my yoga practice was chance to check back in with my body, to be present in my body, rather than kind of always in my mind. I’m big thinker. I love thinking and reading and writing and thinking about concepts. And the yoga was a way of reminding myself that I had a body that I could look after that body. And actually, a lot of the techniques that I worked on through my own yoga practice and then in my yoga teaching later, were about just tuning in, you know, tuning into how I was feeling, allowing myself to be more grounded, to speak from. I’m doing it now as I talk to you, to speak from a place that feels physically more grounded. And I think this is so important, especially when we work online. Actually like to to be able to remind ourselves we’re not just these kind of floating heads, these avatars going from one back to back, meeting to the next, and kind of rushing around all the time and being very cerebral, which is wonderful, but we actually have bodies as well. And so the yoga was a way of reminding myself of that, but also a way of really actively practicing that.

Mark McBride-Wright 3:04
What made you, what made you decide to go from being yoga, just being something that you did as an attendee a class, to then actually becoming a teacher, a practitioner?

Jade Garratt 3:20
Yeah. So a few things. I never actually wanted to be a yoga teacher. That wasn’t part of the plan, and now it’s not, it’s not something I do for work. It’s not, it’s not how I earn money. But I, I knew that I loved yoga, and I knew that I wanted to explore something a little bit different. I felt when I was in teaching, I was on a very kind of linear career progression path, and then I moved into teacher education and leadership coaching. And one of the things that’s great about coaching is that you’re always asking people these big questions, you know, what do you, what are you passionate about? What do you what makes you angry? What do you really care about? And and I kind of realized I wasn’t maybe always speaking very honestly to what I was really wanting to do, and so I took the decision to take a bit of time to explore that, and doing more yoga was part of that at the time, which was, I don’t know, maybe 12 years ago or so, there wasn’t a lot in the way of ways to immerse yourself deeper in a yoga practice that wasn’t doing a yoga Teacher Training. So, so doing a yoga teacher training seemed like the next step, and maybe also just my inclination to do courses and training and want to learn more, sort of the geeky side of me meant that that made most sense to me to go in a sort of geek out about about yoga as well.

Mark McBride-Wright 4:38
The reason I’m asking is it’s selfishly from a place of personal ambition, desire as well, because I’m similar to you in that I think I then need to go and train up on something and then become the expert in something, but, but, but sometimes maybe there are things in life that I just need to be the learner. I don’t need to be the teacher. Sure, and I was actively practicing yoga three times a week for about six months before I left London to move to New York. And since moving to New York, I haven’t reactivated that. I haven’t found it’s not as easy to practice it as it was in London, because London had so many really accessible, you know, salons, not salons. Would you call them? You know, like gyms and places, studios, studios, thank you. So many more accessible studios that you could go to that really worked for a schedule. You know, you could just go on your app and choose which style of yoga you wanted to go to vinyasa was kind of the one that I really enjoyed the most. And, you know, it’s so so I’ve, I remember, you know, a year ago, basically reaching that level of self connection that you’re describing, always being very in your head when, actually, when you’re on the mat, doing the moves. Yes, you’ve got something physical to concentrate on, but your mind really does just dampen, you know? And, yeah, I don’t know. I think I’m probably speaking from a place of need to get back to it, actually,

Jade Garratt 6:17
yeah, but it’s interesting you say that, though about because I’ve come to a similar realization recently. I I had my daughter nearly three years ago now, and during my maternity leave, I picked up yoga teaching again. It was, it was kind of where I wanted to go, and it was, it gave me something that was a little bit outside of my new role, multi failing as a parent and and I really, I really enjoyed it at that point. And then as I’ve come more back into the world of work, and I’m, you know, working sort of a much more of a kind of typical, sort of nine to five sense, I realized, actually, I want to go back into the student role again. I at the moment, don’t want to be teaching right now. I want to be more focusing on that, being being a learner, that being my practice. So I think it’s kind of chapters like there’s, there’s chapters where it can serve one thing, and there’s chapters where it can serve a different

Mark McBride-Wright 7:14
purpose, in perspective, especially when you’re a director in a business like yourself, you’re you’re sometimes the one that’s always looked to for answers, or the one that has to have it all together, or the one that is providing the leadership of next steps or strategy, or being the visionary, or, you know, being the everything, when you’re in a small medium company, and then when you’re also a parent, and you’re having to do that for another small person, or people, it can just become a bit a bit much some type,

Jade Garratt 7:45
yeah, yeah, it can, and it’s okay for us to have different roles in different aspects of our life. I think I certainly realized I didn’t also want to be doing something which was my passion and the thing that I really enjoyed, but was also trying to run a website for it, trying to sell spaces, trying to deal with the admin side of having students coming to a class. So yeah, it’s a it’s an interesting one. It’s and I think it’s always good to just reflect on what purposes is serving right now.

Mark McBride-Wright 8:13
So teaching, then, has been one of the strong backbones of the arc your your career and your professionalism, and so I like going back to understanding people’s origin stories there and things that spark them up for why they do what they now do. So if we, if we go back to the young Jade and venturing through life, you know what? What are you doing now what you thought you would be doing a number of years ago.

Jade Garratt 8:44
So, hmm, it’s really hard to say I, I was always very drunk, drawn to education. I’ve always been drawn to working with people. That’s kind of, that’s, that’s the strand, I guess. And education for me has always been like, how do all these problems we have in society, all the things, all the great challenges that we face and the complexity of the world that we’re dealing with. How do we best support ourselves to deal with this, to adapt, to be in the best place, to to work with this and to do this with compassion and with empathy and taking care of each other on on this journey. And the only sensible answer I could ever really find to that was education like it has to be about education. We have to focus on our education. So that’s been, I would say the the theme through through my career, has been creating spaces where people can learn. I do see there being a bit of a difference between education and training. And although we talk about training like training is a much more acceptable term within the business world, within the world of work, we talk about, we like to talk about training and development. But actually, I think often what what we’re better placed to do is think more broadly about education and think about, how are we how are we asking. Really good questions, how are we reflecting on what we learn? How are we adapting things that we can find from lots of different fields, from lots of different domains, and adapting them to our context? So so that’s kind of where I’ve ended up. I don’t know that I had a really clear plan for where I wanted to be when I was tiny. I wanted to be either a ballet dancer or an astronaut, and so I’m not either of those, but I’m pretty happy with what I’m doing now.

Mark McBride-Wright 10:28
So when you I like that differentiation between training and education training now you bring it up almost sounds quite, quite not shallow, but like it. It might have a short term impact, or it’s some it’s quite transactional. You turn up, you do it, you might take something from it. Or you might have that learning decay, where you don’t remember what you did, you know, a month from when you did it, whereas education speaks more to really being deep, rooted and embedded and part of your practice and almost like rewiring, then how you learn and how you go about thinking about things, is that like, how do you differentiate between training and education?

Jade Garratt 11:18
Yeah, I think what you’ve just just described is spot on. I think you know, when we think about training, you might do some training in how to use a particular machine, or how to use a piece of software and how to use something, use a tool, maybe use an approach in order to have this output, something that’s that’s relatively clear, that’s relatively straightforward, where we can say this is good practice in this area. This is what we do. And the reality of most of what we’re working in today is not that it’s much more complex, it’s much messier, it’s much more human and and I would much rather give people things to think about, create spaces where people can reflect, challenge ways of thinking, ways of being in the world in a way that doesn’t actually necessarily always give straightforward, clear takeaways. You know, I like to be practical. I want there to be some tools, some approaches, some ideas, some things to try. But they’re always things to try. We never know what’s going to land in one context or another. We we can we can have a really good guess based on our experience and based on what we see in work elsewhere, and we can, we can be pretty confident sometimes that if we try something, the likelihood is it will work, or it will at least tell us something that gets us to the next sensible, best step. But, but to me, education is that piece. It’s that let’s be open minded, let’s be critical. Let’s be reflective about it. And as much as we want, and especially, I think, in leadership kind of domains, we want quick, simple answers. We want snappy solutions. We want the little sound bite that sounds great, but that’s not necessarily what actually helps you, turning up day in, day out, working on complex, messy problems, dealing with the unexpected fire that’s, that’s, you know, come in the middle of your beautiful Gantt chart. That’s, that’s nicely laid out. I’d much rather we think about, how do we, how do we position ourselves, how do we keep learning, how do we keep reflecting? And if we can be supporting people to do that, then that’s, that’s what I want to hear, I find that

Mark McBride-Wright 13:23
it sounds so simple, yet it’s also one of the biggest challenges with technical audiences as well, like engineers, you know, people who want that framework or that way of doing something that will then lead to An outcome. What is the probability that that outcome will be successful and realized? And can we rinse and repeat it and do it repeatedly and then get some gain through doing it this way? And what’s to say that, because it worked in that context, will then work in our context? You know, like, it’s highly technical people that think in that way when you then, but who also recognize that the system within which we do our work engineering is complex, like systems are complex, we don’t necessarily realize that the human side of relationship, management and leadership is also complex, And therefore we accept, like we need to accept more, that it is going to be, not a guaranteed outcome. You know, from the effort we put in,

Jade Garratt 14:29
no and this is just it. And I think you know what you say, makes me think of a couple of things. One is where our language really fails us. So it tells us things like soft skills, as if that’s easy, as if that’s the easy, the simple part, when actually, of course, it’s not. You know, the simple bit is, how we use the technical tool that we’ve got in a particular, tightly defined context and entirely defined domain. The complicated bit is, how do we work on that one? We’ve got teams of 50 different people who will see it slightly differently and maybe are working in different time zones. And maybe they don’t have the same tech setup that we do and and that’s, that’s hard, and how we have those conversations, how we facilitate those sorts of conversations, is, is really, really hard. It’s definitely not, you know, soft in the sense of soft being easy. So I think, I think language is tricky, and I relate to this as well, right? I my my degree, my first degree is in physics. I love it straight, simple, nice mathematical equation that we can look and go, this is all just adding up nicely. We can tie up all the loose ends. I spent a lot of my early PhD work with my supervisors being like, No, how do we? How do we prove this, though, how do we, how are we going to triangulate this? How are we going to make those sort of this is not qualitative research. This is a lot, a lot more complex. It’s a lot messier. It’s a lot more interpretive in how we need to interact with this data. And it was not what I was used to, and it was very uncomfortable. But it’s really, I think it’s much it’s a much more honest way of seeing the world

Mark McBride-Wright 16:02
that’s really interesting. I Yeah. I mean, my undergraduate and PhD were in technical subjects, and I’ve sort of moved into this leadership type area, and you still have that. I guess there’s always this feeling that, unless it’s hard and hard and technical, you know, anything other than that is sort of secondary or second best, or not as bona fide, because it’s less grounded, and you know, either empirical or other evidence That suggests and maybe we just need more interdisciplinary working between sociologists and psychologists. And what’s coming to my mind now is that I went to hear Stephen Bartlett talk at one of his tours, and he was talking about his skill stacking, you know, and looking at stacking up skills that are in different areas than what another person may have. So, you know, it would be like a physicist like yourself going and doing a more psychological type leadership degree, you know, and then you’re able to see the world through two different lenses and see themes and then maybe help build and cross stitch cross team communication. Do you see yourself pulling on those past experiences to help inform how you build teams now, or how you do your education and training?

Jade Garratt 17:40
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely so. So I think sometimes it’s recognizing that different ways of interacting, different ways of communicating, will connect and will land with with different people. And it’s also being open to the fact that people are also a lot more nuanced and interesting and diverse, and maybe we give them credit for and something I was told when I so I started working at the University of Nottingham, and I was in the Faculty of Science, and I was kind of told, if you want to communicate with this audience, they’re all scientists, so you need to, you need to talk about your physics degree a lot, and you need to use stats, and you need to use data on hard numbers. That’s, that’s how these people will engage with you, and then, and you know, I did, and I had data, and we did, we did research in terms of, like, student experience and course hack and, you know, all sorts of things, lots of satisfying spreadsheets. And I, what I noticed was, when you when we were sharing findings from surveys. When we were sharing things, I’d have the stats and the bar charts and all of that, but so often, actually, what really landed with people were the lines, the quotes, the direct words from students, where they’d actually filled in just that little open text comment box in the survey, where they actually spoke from their own experience. And that’s it’s hard to ignore when you see in a student’s own words, them saying, you know, this course, for me, was wildly different to what I’d expected. That that lands a lot more than, you know, 62% of students said they were satisfied with it. There’s a different level of engagement with that and and my experience was, even scientists, even people who are working with the data all the time can still, and do still often connect more with with those words sometimes. So, so I think we’ve got to be a bit slower to put people into their boxes and say, these sorts of people work in these sorts of ways and and I think that’s really hard for us, because for our education system, you know, from the age of and this isn’t the case in most sort of international education systems as well. I’m not just talking about England here, but from, certainly from the age of 11, if not much earlier. We say, you know, this is your maths, this is your English, this is your German lesson, this is your science lesson. And we. Separate this out, and then worse, we kind of go, you’re a science person, you’re more artistic, you’re more creative. Like, we can have wildly creative, sporty scientists like, this is okay, this is we, you know, I think we can be capable of much more than this. And I think sometimes our sort of way of educating people doesn’t, doesn’t always speak to that. So we get these, we can sometimes find we’ve got these kind of boxes that become part of our identity

Mark McBride-Wright 20:28
as well. Yeah, and those boxes stay as part of your identity even into adulthood, you know? And I, I found even like being aware of what those boxes are for you personally, and thinking, I’m going to challenge that. I’m going to I’m going to intentionally put myself in an experience that completely counteracts what I’ve been told I am and I am not, to then see if I actually am. You know, applying it to myself, it would be like enrolling in some sort of team sport based activity, because I’ve never really been into team sports, you know, or, and maybe the root cause of that has been having been told that growing up or being in physical education at school, you know, not being very good at football or anything that involves a team very much more lone sport, you know, skiing or swimming rather than and, you know, I was watching the lion essays when they’re there the UEFA World Cup over the weekend. And I just had this complete moment where I used to watch football with my dad growing up, but I was never into it, you know. And I said to my husband, I said, if you told me, however many years ago that in the future, I would be sitting watching women’s football with my daughter, and it’s my daughter who wants to, like, go to football, age five, and is asking me if I’ll come and watch her at games, and my son, who’s sat over here completely uninterested, not, Not, you know, same as me. Basically, growing up, I just had this moment over the weekend where I thought, wow, I would all the work I do in diversity, and I’m so good to see this positive representation and role modeling coming through. Because obviously she’s thinking, how can I do this? Can I get a sports t shirt? And I’ve gone off on a train of thought here, but, but, you know, my point is like role modeling and, yes, me challenging. I must admit, when my son was not really showing signs of interest in football and everything, I thought brilliant. I don’t have to like go. I don’t have to like be the sporty dad that’s pretending to like it, because I know I’m not in a

Jade Garratt 22:42
cold, rainy field on all those Saturday mornings,

Mark McBride-Wright 22:47
but now that my daughter’s shown an interest absolutely support it, I’ll do what I can. But yeah, I think we all, we all hold these things as adults, don’t we those boxes that we’re told we are and we’re not, and so the same will apply to people who are told that they’re not technical, or they’re they couldn’t be an engineer and or they’re bad at maths, and that stuck with them. Yeah. How can they challenge that as an adult?

Jade Garratt 23:12
Absolutely. I mean, I have a personal story chair about this, actually, if you don’t mind that, I had a conversation recently with with my mum. So my mum has, for all of my life, has said, I don’t know where you get your maths from. I’ve never been good at maths. It’s not, not my thing. I hate maths. Never been good at it. And then she sort of shared that she she did her maths a level, a year a year, really, and she got a C and it wasn’t worth having another go because, because she wasn’t good at maths anyway. And I sort of, I’d vaguely heard this story before and but something this time, I listened to it a little differently. And I just said, based on my experience in teaching and education, you don’t put students in a year really, if they’re no good at something, you put them in a year really, if they if they’re pretty good at it, to give them a chance to get one out of the way, a year, really. So that doesn’t sound to me like someone who’s not good at maths, and then, and she sort of brushed it off, but came back to me about a week later and said, You know, I’ve been thinking about that. It never occurred to me. It never occurred to me that, actually that does make sense. Maybe I put in for a year, really. And maybe, actually, the reason I didn’t do it again was because my dad had a certain view of what girls at the time needed in terms of math. Didn’t think it was that important that it got higher than the C grade. And, you know, with good intentions, I’m sure, like he had all the right intentions there, but, but actually, maybe that’s not my story. Maybe that doesn’t need to be my story. And I think there is always room for us to go back and kind of challenge some of these, these accepted internalized narratives we have about ourselves,

Mark McBride-Wright 24:44
of that I love, that go back and challenge the accepted internalized narratives we have about ourselves that is going to appear in the stone bite of the podcast, and know for sure that was brilliant. How do you see the differences, then, from when you’ve worked in schools and universities and also with businesses, because you do a lot of work now in the private sector, I believe,

Jade Garratt 25:11
yeah. So I mean, you know, they are interesting and different contexts, schools and universities. So in terms of similarities, you get a lot of people working in most schools and universities who care deeply about education, who care deeply about people. I had a sort of idea that maybe moving more to work in sort of corporate organizations, businesses that you maybe wouldn’t find that so much, and that absolutely hasn’t been the case. I’ve come across so many people who are really, really caring about people and about developing people. And you know, whether they’re a team manager, team lead, maybe they they sort of work in a technical team, or whatever they do that they have this real deep care for people and how, how we support each other to be at our best. So, so that, I’d say, has been a theme through all of my work. Schools and universities are interesting and different beasts, though, I would say, you know, schools, certainly, when I was working in schools, I was a teacher, and then I was a middle leader, and I’m very much, felt a sense of belonging, a sense of being part of something within the school community. And then I moved to higher education, and I was in I wasn’t an academic. I was in a professional, managerial role, and I hadn’t appreciated before I started my work at the University, what a difference that made. So my experience of coming into that was a little bit confronting, in a way to almost there was a message that maybe your voice on teaching, on education, doesn’t matter as much because you’re not an academic, you’re not within this job family. And that really surprised me. That wasn’t something I’d come across so much within school teaching. And I think it shifted during my time there as well, and maybe I started to worry less about it. You know, I kind of got all of the messages up front about what I was and wasn’t allowed to say what I was and wasn’t allowed to have opinions on and as I, as I sort of spent longer in the organization, and also moved up a bit through the organizational hierarchy, I became less bothered about that and more willing to stick my neck out and say, I actually have some reflections on this. I have a perspective on this, and I think it might be useful. So that was an interesting difference, I think. And the other thing that really struck me moving from moving out of schools is that so I worked in the English state system, which is heavily under the spectrum, Specter, rather of a very punitive inspection regime, which is Ofsted. There’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of anxiety. And in teaching of a new policy or new processes brought in, teachers will moan for sure, I might say, you know this, this is unreasonable, this is awful, but broadly speaking, we’ll get on with it, because there is such a fear that if we don’t, then we will be punished by Ofsted, we will get in trouble. And it was really quite eye opening and refreshing to move out of that and to realize that there didn’t have to be so much fear in a workplace that actually once you, once you take that away, there are ways of working which are perhaps more collaborative, which are more open to challenge, to thinking about doing things differently, and I’m sometimes more honest about what is reasonable and what is manageable. You know, there is a reason I think that most teachers, I believe that started something horrendous, like leave within the first three years, or certainly the first five years, but I think it’s three so, so this is not a sustainable work environment. And it’s been really eye opening to me to see that, oh, there are different ways of doing things. It work. Doesn’t have to feel like that. And there are lots of places. There were also, I want to be clear, lots of places where work feels really hard and really incredibly pressurized, but it is possible to do things differently.

Mark McBride-Wright 29:10
So you so you didn’t find in the university environment the regulator, or whoever it is that oversees, like the UK ref and the TEF, you know the that intense ear wasn’t really there, still want to get good marks, obviously, and good, good, good grades and good, good scores to because it affects funding and screens and so so on, so forth. But it fear wasn’t a leading emotion.

Jade Garratt 29:37
No, i There are undoubtedly still pressures, you’re exactly right. There are still regulatory influences, and there are still targets, and, you know, National Student Survey, there’s things that colleagues were focused on and we’re working towards. And I’m definitely not trying to sort of position higher education as a fear free environment. I actually think, since. I’ve left it sounds with my colleagues who work in the sector, like things are more difficult now than they were, but I think the the difference is something around the intensity of that fear. You know, I remember my first ever Austin inspection, and at the time I was I was living in a house with with a few friends, A flat, actually, with a few friends and then, and I was so nervous the night before, you know, staying up late, kind of marking my books, double checking everything, really, incredibly anxious. And my housemate, who was a little bit more senior in their career, sort of further on, said, you know, just I’m going to say to you what I’d say to anyone in my team, if you’ve been doing all of the right things, it will be fine. You’ve got nothing to worry about, but we kind of in teaching, we knew that wasn’t the case. You could be doing all of the right things, and it was never quite enough. And there was always this guilt and always this fear that because the sort of the standard was, I don’t want to say standard, but the expectations were so wildly out of line with what was actually possible in the messy, busy, overloaded reality of teaching and the inspection process was so far removed from the day to day reality of working in the school, so it was a kind of that’s a really nice idea, and I wish that were the case, but I know it’s not, and I know my colleagues will will back me up on that, that there is actually something to worry about here.

Mark McBride-Wright 31:20
Yeah, so bringing it into how you currently spend your time then, and what you the types of organizations that you that you work with, tell us about your role at psych safety, and you know what, what exciting programs you’ve got going on, and what you’re, what you’re passionate about in the work that you’re doing now with, with corporates and business and industry.

Jade Garratt 31:43
Yeah. So I think the reason I was so drawn to work with psychological safety is that it really speaks to this point about fear. And this is Demings point eight. I think that if you drive out fear, everyone can work effectively for the organization, that if we don’t need to incentivize people through making them more scared, through making them more fearful, through putting these punishments and these sort of punitive processes in place that actually, if we are creating we can really create incredibly high performing teams, incredibly high performing organizations, by making sure that we are creating spaces where people can have conversations about what, what can I What can I experiment with here? What can I try? What would be the next sensible experiment, and then when it fails, because it will fail at some point, how can we be honest about that? How can we be open about that, in part to mitigate the immediate effect of that failure, but also so we can all learn, so we can all get the benefit of this experience and and so this is what, this is what I love doing. I love working with people, with teams, with organizations, on how we can create team environments, ways of working, ways of being, ways of communicating with each other that speak to this recognition that we are human, this recognition that the world of work that we are working in is complex and messy, and there are no there’s no beautifully planned out project plan that’s going to have every level of detail and is going to predict every possible emphasis and circumstance that we’re going to come across. There is going to be a level of us having to try something, see how it goes and respond to it, and and how do we make it so that people are able to do that, so they’re able to do their work, to do their best job at their work, and then to reflect on it and to think, how do we get better next time as a team? How can we learn from this? How can we improve our systems? So that’s that’s really at the heart of what we do. We do workshops. We have toolkits and action packs and things that have kind of takeaway resources for people to come and try themselves. We run online, open enrollment workshops where people from all sorts of different, diverse organizations and businesses, but also independent consultants and coaches and facilitators will come and we work on this. We explore these ideas. We look at this in practice. We look at how it works in different industries. We look at disasters and where this has gone wrong and historical events. So, so I love it. There’s always something more to learn. There’s always, you know, every training session results in, like, another few tangents to follow up on and another few avenues to explore. But that’s, that’s what I get to do now, which I feel incredibly lucky.

Mark McBride-Wright 34:20
Do you find yourself running sessions that people will come to then learn about the theory and the reason behind why it’s good to think in this way and work in this way, and or do you also work with organizations on like live projects where you’re almost being there, not a counselor, but you’re there to almost like help as a trusted third party advisor, to like guide the team, almost facilitate the psychological safety be architected within, I don’t know, maybe some sort of transformation or transition or so you’re actually working with a customer. Are on live problems,

Jade Garratt 35:02
yeah, so a bit of both. So I’d say a lot of our work might be these, you know, one off sessions or a series of sessions where we are workshopping something and while we’re working on something, maybe we work with groups of managers or groups of team leads, or maybe we work with teams on, like a team piece on, what are their ways of working, what’s their agreement? And also, sometimes we, and this is some really satisfying work, is where we get to partner with an organization over a longer period of time and have multiple touch points with the organization and with the team, and where we get to see change, and we get to kind of go, Okay, we talked about this last time. Let’s check back in with this. Like, where’s this going? What are we working on at the moment? What? What’s on top for us right now? And this is, you know, this is where the work is really, is really satisfying, and which is not to say, actually, I’m not, you know, I think sometimes workshops and kind of one off sessions can get a bit of a bad rep. And sometimes there can be a sort of sense of, Well, what can you possibly do in an hour? And, I think, but sometimes in an hour you discover the thing that’s going to inspire your professional learning journey for the next 10 years. You know, sometimes like that avenue that’s opened up. And actually, how often do we give ourselves an hour to reflect on how we’re working and and what we’re doing. So So those one off spaces can be can be really profound. And I also appreciate opportunities where we can sort of check back in and kind of let something be a little bit more evolving and a bit more fluid.

Mark McBride-Wright 36:35
Well, what are some of the themes or trends that you’re seeing come up now, then across your your consulting work, that you’re able to share, what are some of the current predicaments that are occupying the minds of leaders or people in the business world, and also some of the opportunities that are exciting people and that are focusing their minds on,

Jade Garratt 36:58
yeah? So, um, so a few things come to mind. So So one is, so often what we end up working on and talking about in workshops is power gradients, and where we have steep power gradients within organizations. So you know where it’s very, very difficult to speak up, to challenge an idea, to say, I’ve got an idea for how we could do this differently, or to say I messed up there, I made a mistake. If there is a steep power gradient between yourself and the person you’re trying to speak up to. So a lot of what we what we end up working on, is how we reduce that power gradient. We can’t necessarily flatten it. There are lots of different forms of power in organizations, even if we absolutely flatten the organization, which is often not a great idea anyway, but we would see more the informal power structures emerging. And so we wouldn’t have actually necessarily got rid of it, but there are things that we can do around that. So that’s one thing that I find really interesting. The other big piece is, and this exact phrase comes from human and organizational performance and work in this area, which comes from the world of safety, but is the idea that that how we respond matters. So, you know, sometimes people say, Well, you know, people don’t, don’t speak up. And how do we make them, how do we get them like they just need to be braver. They just need to be more bold and and, of course, the problem with that is that the risk of speaking up is different for different people, we don’t often know exactly why they’re not speaking up, and what we need to do is make sure that whenever someone is speaking up, whenever they are sharing their idea, whenever they are challenging something, questioning something, sharing something that’s gone wrong, we are really thinking about our response, and we’re really making sure that our response is inviting more good responses. You know, more more sharing, more talking, more communication. And that’s, I think, where, where some of this work gets really interesting. I think sometimes just looping right back to the start of our conversation about about the yoga and the kind of presence in the body bit. Sometimes it’s also the bit where, especially if we are the person in the power gradient with more power, if we are a leader, if we are Team Lead, if we are sort of working with people in that way, it’s also where we really have to kind of check in with ourselves and know when our default very human response is like, Why the hell did you do that? What were you thinking? And actually sort of giving ourselves a moment to ground ourselves and think that might be my first response. It’s not my most helpful response. It’s not my most constructive response, and it’s not going to be the response that makes this person and everyone else who either sees or indirectly later hears about this interaction more likely to speak up next time. So so this is after this is the work that I thought I get really quite sort of interested in and engaged with is, is how we, how we help people to look after themselves sometimes and check in with themselves, through this, this world of work and through the way that we communicate, like it’s okay not to, not to always get this right, like we can also go, I messed up there. I didn’t do that right like you we can, we can engage in that process of rupture and repair and acknowledge when, when. Maybe we haven’t been, you know, maybe we’ve been kept up all night by our toddler, or, you know, something’s going on at home, or we’ve just had a really rough day and we haven’t responded in the way that we might hope to that we can, we can still go back. We can still work on that relationship.

Mark McBride-Wright 40:23
Yeah, and I mean, this is the intersection of like diversity, equity and inclusion, with with safety and psychological safety, and encouraging leaders to be more vulnerable, to lower their guard down a bit, to learn in real time and see if they’re unaware of their impact on others, etc, and accept corrective measures that may verbally be given to them with grace. And you know, yeah, I am a technical engineer, safety engineer by background, so used to help organizations create physically safe working environments. And I just I am, I absolutely love the parity, the equivalence that in engineering anyway the physical safety, technical safety world has, and the understanding that engineers have, and how we can kind of extrapolate different elements of that across into the psychological safety domain and create lots and lots of aha moments of Oh, right. It’s that way, because calling out unsafe acts without fear of retribution is all part of active safety management, of physical safety management, you know. But if you have a culture of blame and fear and shame and repercussions and then people aren’t saying if something’s going wrong or something’s failing, then you know, you’re just sitting on a on a on an earthquake becoming a massive, massive incident, potentially, you know. So it’s good risk management strategy to have a psychologically safe working environment, because it keeps your risk of, well, risk of hazards manifesting down, but bullying and harassment, whistleblowing, all those sort of claims down as well. Yeah,

Jade Garratt 42:14
yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s a, you know, there’s a number of reasons this is really challenging for us. Like, I think there’s a very, a very sort of human drive to blame, like that. We want that sort of straightforward, simple. I think it’s Todd Conklin says it blame is emotionally important, not operationally important. And I think sometimes it’s important to acknowledge we have that sort of emotional urge. Like, I am, I am cross about this. So like, I do. I do want you to know that this was wrong, and at the same time to be able to hold in our minds like actually what that person did or was doing felt reasonable to them at the time, or was the best thing they could do in the set of circumstances that they had. And we need to get more curious, but often like organizational processes and ways of responding to incidents don’t support this way of thinking. And I think this is where the broader world of work can learn a lot from safety. I think the world of safety and physical safety has come a long way in recognizing that when we review incidents, we look to the systems, we look to the processes. We ask what happened? Not who did that? And, and, and then I see worlds where things can also go wrong, teaching, education, classrooms, and things where, still the tendency is to go, oh, is this misconduct, though, you know? And there’s a sort of jumping to that before we before we really, really just find out what’s happened before we really explore? Yeah,

Mark McBride-Wright 43:45
I like that, yeah, the the just culture movement and safety, like just finding out the facts and the language and the movement in that space really has happened a lot in the time that I left technical safety engineering and started doing all my diversity work and building out equal engineers. And it’s only really since coming back in the last year or so to technical safety and understanding the evolution of technical safety management, just how much of a shift from behavioral based safety into more this idea of just culture work, that there’s an even stronger thread between the work that I was starting to discover as a diversity practitioner and the world of safety and how we scale this up communicate. This is, I guess, part of my bigger mission now, with the safe leader and my my framework on share acts, feel empower and getting more male leaders to be vulnerable and open up about their difference in their story, which then gives greater empathy for for everyone. You know, and relatable understanding to try and learn about the needs of underrepresented groups. So we start fusing in diversity into into safety, and it’s a way to kinda still make progress despite the, well, the pendulum swinging back and forth every month at the moment. You know, I

Jade Garratt 45:22
know. And this, to me, speaks to, you know, your excellent point about about diversity, and you’re right about the pendulum as well, and kind of this where, where even are we with this? But I think it speaks to a lack of understanding about why diverse teams are higher performing and, and, or have the, sorry, have the potential to be high performing. And this isn’t just because, oh, this is some nice dei initiative. And wouldn’t, wouldn’t that just be nice? Although, you know, yes, it would. But it’s also because actually having more diverse perspectives makes us better. We are all limited by our narrow little kind of lens on the world and our way of seeing things, and I don’t see everything I would like to be able to see. That’s why I work with people. That’s why I have teams of people. That’s why I’m part of communities of practice. We are stronger for actually having this genuine diversity of perspectives. We’re safer. We’re better performing. We come up with better ideas. We test our ideas more effectively. We have the conversations earlier about what’s going to potentially go wrong and how we can mitigate that. So I think it speaks to, you know, this is, this is all part of the same story, but when we get a bit muddled about why we’re doing things and think, oh, maybe we’re just doing it because it’s a dei initiative, that’s where some of this kind of deficit language comes from. And this idea that we would have inclusion and we would have diversity at the expense of performance, which is absolutely not the case. I

Mark McBride-Wright 46:47
always, I did a webinar the other day there for a large engineering society based in the US and the you know, we were careful about language and how deep we went with some things, etc, but we didn’t really have to be worried about that, because the example I always use to engineers is, you know, imagine you’re in a design team with engineers who all went to similar institutions in North America. You all studied similar subjects. Maybe you all went to the same university, actually, and you’ve now all been employed by the local engineering company, and you’re all working away, and you’ve kind of, you’re not not just work colleagues, you’re also friends, and there’s familial relationships there as well. And it’s all all like that context, versus working in an organization, working in a team where you’ve got an engineer who’s studied and worked in mines in Australia, who’s worked in offshore in the North Sea, who another engineer who’s worked in the Middle East on on some LNG projects, you know, lots of different energy type examples. When you bring the two teams together and you’re having to tackle a new problem where you know, you’re going to have a much larger frame of reference of experience, from the diversity of experience for the engineers that have worked in different geographies and different cultures, worked with different standards, different approaches to, you know, Solving the technical problem, versus the group that are all where you’ve got a narrower range of diversity of experience. So usually when you frame it in that way, and obviously caveat with the context that with more diverse teams come the risk of conflict, and actually you need to have an inclusive leader that can challenge that and channel that story forward for the greater good, and that’s how the team tends to outperform homogeneous teams where there’s more likely group think less likely to challenge, keeping it away from demographic based relations to diversity and Keeping it contained within diversity of experience and perspective, etc, is a non threatening way to still be talking about diversity in the fields that still need it to be spoken about the most.

Jade Garratt 49:11
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I absolutely agree. And explaining it like that as you’re talking it just it’s so clear why, actually, we need to invest a bit more in being really purposeful, being very explicit about our ways of working, about the approach that we’re taking to a problem, about about our norms. Because we haven’t all come from the same university. We haven’t all got the same cultural background. We haven’t we can’t, sort of start assuming that we will all think the same things and work in the same way we’ve which is often not true anyway, but, but we have to actually, and we want to take a little bit of time to think about that sort of thing and recognize that initially this might feel uncomfortable, like that’s okay, it’s okay to feel uncomfortable and and to be a bit challenged in that that’s that’s probably going. To be a good thing for the long term outcome of the of the work.

Mark McBride-Wright 50:04
Okay? Quick Fire questions. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received about teaching or leadership?

Jade Garratt 50:12
They want to learn. So it was a teaching one. But I think it’s true. Generally, people want to learn.

Mark McBride-Wright 50:18
What’s one book that changed how you think about learning. Paulo Freire,

Jade Garratt 50:23
I might be saying that wrong, but Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Mark McBride-Wright 50:27
What’s a skill you think every

Jade Garratt 50:28
leader should develop? Listening,

Mark McBride-Wright 50:32
coffee or tea, tea. What’s your favorite go to learning resource

Jade Garratt 50:36
or platform, sub stack, except when it’s lots of people writing about how to write on substack, the actual long, long content I really like.

Mark McBride-Wright 50:44
What’s one thing you do to reset or recharge after a big session or training day,

Jade Garratt 50:49
get outside, be under the sky.

Mark McBride-Wright 50:53
What’s the most powerful story you’ve heard about psychological safety in action?

Jade Garratt 50:57
I had one today. Actually. We had a Lean Coffee with the community, and someone shared a story about someone in the team who hadn’t ever spoken up in the team meeting, except when absolutely pushed to and they actually, for the first time, spoke up and said, I don’t say anything because I haven’t got enough work. You’re not involving me. You’re not sending me enough work. And I think it’s it’s so important to recognize these small success stories that are actually someone’s very big story then, then they were able to work better with that person.

Mark McBride-Wright 51:31
What’s one topic you’re currently nerding out on?

Jade Garratt 51:36
Oh so many right now, concepts of space and place.

Mark McBride-Wright 51:43
What’s a misconception people often have about psychological safety,

Jade Garratt 51:47
that it just means being nice to each other.

Mark McBride-Wright 51:50
And finally, what advice would you give your younger self just starting out?

Jade Garratt 51:56
Just keep going. Just keep

Mark McBride-Wright 51:59
going. Good advice. Good advice for any, any phase of life. Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. Jade. Really enjoyed that chat. And if people want to get in touch with you, find out more about your work, the business’s work, how can they do that?

Jade Garratt 52:17
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the chat Mark I am So our website is psych safety, so psychsafety.com and so you can get in touch with us through that. I’m also on LinkedIn, Jade Garrett, or you can email me, jade@psychsafety.com and I’d love to hear from

Mark McBride-Wright 52:35
you. Fabulous. Well, thank you very much. Jade really enjoyed that and speak to you soon.

Jade Garratt 52:42
Thank you so much. Mark, thanks you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai