Episode 154: Silence is not Safety

This week on the "Leading and Learning through Safety" podcast, Dr. Mark French delves into the importance of safety in fostering effective communication within organizations. He emphasizes that a safe environment is crucial for encouraging empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Dr. French discusses a compelling journal article from the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, which explores the relationship between weekly fluctuations in mental health and workplace silence. The article reveals how anxiety and depression can lead to either withholding important information (silence) or speaking only about safe, non-controversial topics (voice), impacting overall communication and safety in the workplace.

Dr. French stresses that safety is the foundation for meaningful interaction and organizational success. He shares insights from his own experiences and research, underscoring the need for leaders to create a space where employees feel heard and valued. Effective communication about safety issues is paramount, as it can prevent harm and improve overall morale. By addressing mental health concerns and fostering a supportive environment, organizations can break the cycle of silence and promote a culture of openness and safety.

Transcript

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This week on the podcast, we're continuing our conversation about voice in silence in how safety is the key to good communication within our organization. It all begins with safety this week on the podcast Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French marks passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now here is Dr. Mark French. Hello, and welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am so happy you've joined me. So very happy you have chosen to spend 20 minutes with me this week, talking about safety, talking about communication. And most importantly, we're talking about people and how we interact with people. And how we create the organization we want to Drew good leadership into good people practices. This week, we are continuing a discussion about a journal article that I came across that just blew my mind. I loved it. I loved reading it. I love the research behind it. And I can't wait to share even more about my just this article. I just can't wait to Marsalis Joe go right in the article title was too depressed and anxious to speak up the relationship between weekly fluctuations in mental health and silence at work from the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, most recent addition, phenomenal article, and I want to continue to talk about it in as the beginning. Last week, we covered it. So if you weren't able to catch last week's episode, go back and download it. First of all. Secondly, I will briefly kind of go back and talk about what it is. Again, we're going back to the fundamental human need, that there is food, water and shelter. And then secondly, their safety, physical and psychological, we got to have both to progress that next level of teamwork, or organizational teams or what we'll call organization, the research talked about silence and voice. That silence denotes that intentionally withholding information or ideas where voice can be it can be talking about things that are important. But it can also be just agreement speaking out so that you're heard, but saying safe things voicing a lot of safe things so that your your supervisor or your boss or the organization feels like you are involved, you're engaged and you are in behind the cause. One of the quotes that comes to mind when I was thinking about and reading through this article is the one where it used to be said you know the squeaky wheel gets the grease that if you talk about issues long enough or in you continue to bring them up that you would get what you needed, that someone would would do what needed to be done to help. And then it later evolved into sometimes the squeaky wheel gets replaced. And that's what the fear is that's why silence comes in about important issues. In voice which is about any issue would be increased to show that we're we're engaged in we're on board and we're part of the team. In this article looks at these weekly fluctuations in in organizational and the people in an organization of having anxiety, or having depression or having even not like full blown clinical but like increases in workplace anxiety or workplace depression. Even fluctuations in that measuring it and did that fluctuation within the week, also create a situation for lack of voice or high silence within the voice. I know that's getting confusing. But when I think about it, I see it, I have seen it so many. And it made so much sense, when I hear it that way that there are times I see people, and I interact with people who are talking a whole lot. It's all these great things, all these wonderful things, and how they're on board and how we're on the right path and how things are going so well. And I look to others, and I can see I can feel there's something more there that just isn't being said that there's just something more that needs to be said. I was working with some executive. And it blew my I felt heard very much. And I felt seen. And I think that's really important. And an organization is Do you feel like you were heard? And do you feel like you were seen we were having a conversation and I was giving voice to something. And I was on the edge of getting really into the weeds of the issue. And I kind of glazed over it just when I touched it to where it was enough that I put it out there. But it really wasn't the details or the real. The real nitty gritty, getting down into the to the work that needed to be done. Or as Brene Brown would say we weren't getting into the rumble yet. We were talking about rumbling but we weren't rumbling yet. And he looked at me. And he says, I don't think you're done. You're not You're not finished with that statement. What more are you trying to say? Say it. And I did. And it led into a great conversation. And it led into a really long, good conversation that I felt heard. I felt seen. And I felt like we did work to do thing. We broke the silence. He saw I was giving voice. He saw the silence. And he said something he called it out in a very productive way. Rather than just accepting that that's what it needed to be. It was insightful in it helped me align better with what I wanted to be as a leader in the article continues as it progresses to talk about what are these deliberate decisions to remain silent. And in an anxious environment, it may mean or in a depression environment where you're feeling a little bit more workers or you I say you or me, may feel down or a little bit more depressed from an organizational standpoint, we may feel like speaking up is pointless. And when it comes to safety, when it comes to being safe in protecting a human life, and protecting well being of a human, and making sure that we go home whole and we go home safe. The belief that speaking up is pointless as scary. Safety should never if there is one topic that we should believe has a point every time it should be physical safety. Let's begin with the very fundamental that if you're going to speak up, if we're going to have people speak up if our organization is not willing to speak up to protect a human being from harm. There's a lot of silence in that organization. It's not just safety. There's a lot going on there. There's a lot of missing information. Because if we can't agree not to stay silent, when it may protect a human being from harm. What on earth does quality matter? Does does really production matter? Does like yeah, making the profit? Of course everybody feels that one we're going to we got to but how much extra effort? Is it just like man, I just got it survive another day? Not really, how can I thrive? How can I help the organization thrive? Speaking up can't be pointless when it comes to safety. And there's a lot of research and they cite the research and the article. The feelings of futility. Indifference is why employees would rehaul withhold their voice and maybe they feel like they don't they lack the capability to sustain the change or create the change. And when they look at depression or the character and then the way they characterize this as generalized feelings of disinterest or hopelessness. How many times do you fluctuate in a week at your workplace, of just feeling not interested anymore. Even minor like me, it probably doesn't stay static even for the day. My guess is from meeting to many meetings, from message to message from email to email, if you were to look on a scale of how disinterested you are, in your company, your work or your organization, or all three, and you were to plot it even on like a 10 point scale, my guess is that's fluctuating all the time. It's not just a weekly, but we had to draw the line somewhere and doing this research. For me. This showed how complex this situation can be. Let's take a quick break, and come back and talk more about the complexity of that communication. On the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. humanizing the workplace, it is the leading learning through safety podcast, DSD consulting, learn you lead others, traditional development focuses too much on weaknesses. They make you believe that the only way to find success is through improving your faults. strengths based coaching instead focuses on creating success through using your natural talents. Dr. Mark French at TSD consulting is an authorized Clifton Strengths Coach, your customized report and a personalized approach help bring out the best in you and your team. For more information, visit us on the web at TSD consulting.com. And welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So when we look at this idea of depression in the organization, which can be as simple as disinterest is losing interest in what we're doing, that we're losing our yield of positive returns according to the research, that's what it actually said. And that's complex when we think about how much we need to feed into our organization to assure that we are not only promoting safety, but the things that would create instability, the things that would create disinterest that we're getting rid of an example. A leadership case study was a leader didn't want to be bothered by a subordinate. And so what they did is every time the subordinate would come in with an issue or a question, the boss would give them some sort of menial task that they would have to do that would take significant time, but would basically keep them occupied. So that they would it was basically an idea to demotivate them from coming in to visit or demotivate from asking questions because they would always get a task assigned, like make a new chart, or update the spreadsheet or create a paper or get me the data in the idea wasn't the supervisor didn't need the data, they just wanted to make sure that every time that person came in, they were given a task in the hope of demotivating future interaction. Wow, real life, real case study, real leadership inaction right there. And I wouldn't, I would say, real negative leadership. I wouldn't say that's good. It's Lee. It's a style of leadership. I'm not necessarily saying I subscribe to that. Not at all. But let's move into the anxiety part. They define anxiety in the article is characterized by general feelings of self doubt, also, with the belief that actions will yield negative consequences. Therefore with that anxiety, feeling at work, they're going to avoid risk. And that's where we'll talk more about the good thing because it's safe. I need to communicate, therefore, I will give voice to the positive things that I'm seeing, or even just rah rah, everything is good, rather than talking about the real issues, or breaking the silence to talk about the real issues, because there could be increased anxiety. How much time or how many times does that fluctuate? In a day? A lot. And we're again talking about safety. We don't want people to feel that it's unsafe, or it's risky for your career, your job to bring up something unsafe. This is this is the birth of whistleblowing. When someone in an organization feels so unsafe to talk about it within the organization to bring up the issue and try to problem solve it and fix it, that they immediately have to go outside or at some point, they decided that they have need to go outside the organization to report something because they know that internally, they are at risk, or the organization doesn't want to listen. Or they feel the consequences to themselves would be too great. I worked with a wonderful leader that said, you absolutely have all the rights because they do legally the right to go to the Department of Labor to OSHA to all those things or their his his plead to everybody was, you have the right to do all of that. I just ask that you give me the chance to fix it. First. Give me the chance, come talk to me, let me be the place that you can talk to that we can find a safe that if anything, let me be the safe space. Powerful, we're still respect that that person, I think the world of them learned a lot from them. Let me be the safe space. Let me try give me the chance to see if I can make it right. Before we go further, that reduces anxiety that reduces the the ineffectiveness, the feeling that it may be pointless or ineffective, or that is not safe. single person made a difference. Huge difference. Imagine what if the entire organization embrace that, or multiple people. Or we begin that together that we begin to build the momentum that we build the snowball rolling and rolling bigger and bigger, how powerful that can be to give people the safe the feeling of safety so that they're communicating. because safety is not just getting to a destination of safe. It's has to be driving for improvement because our people are changing every day. Because they have different experiences that they've lived in and out of the workplace that are making changes, the technology is changing, the work is changing, the environment can change. There's always a state of change. Are we making it to our benefit? Or are we letting it change us to wherever it takes us, which can be very scary. And we need to control exactly what we can control. Now, what did the ultimately what was the discussion the final comment of this wonderful article. Basically, it is critical to theory and practice, that people understand the dynamic of creating voice and silence within the workplace. And that they do their best to create a stable workplace where people feel like that they are invested in and that they are listened to, fundamentally, are we creating an organization that feels like they're heard from an individual standpoint? Not that every time I always get this comment mark. Sometimes there's just bad ideas. Yeah, there are. I've had them. That's really bad ones honestly. But what I want to do is be able to say someone go I heard what you said. Not sure that's quite what not what we need to do. Let's try something else. I was heard at least I understood the fact that the message was the thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety Podcast. I'm honored that you have joined me and until next time that we chat, stay safe. Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online@www.ts da consulting.com. All the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice. This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast.