The Heart-J Center is very excited to announce its Winter 2020 lineup of retreats and workshops! For all you lifelong learners out there, if you’re interested in creativity, wellness, outdoor adventures, and a refreshing, relaxing experience, please check us out at www.heartjcenter.org/2020-programs.
Here’s the PDF of the program catalog to get you even more jazzed! Click image to open. See you soon!
The second point I loved about the Harvard Business Review article I wrote about last week is the critical role that psychological safety plays in any learning environment we find ourselves in — including at work.
Any engagement we have with a team or work group should be a learning experience. That’s why we’re putting our heads together — there’s something that we don’t know yet. If we leave a meeting without having learned something, I have to wonder why we bothered in the first place.
To fully realize the benefits that diverse thinking styles can bring to our teams, everyone has to feel safe. Safe to speak up, safe to offer a divergent opinion, safe to make a mistake or to not know something. Safe to learn. Because learning is risky. Trying new things is risky. Asking questions is risky. Good teamwork — and good learning — requires psychological safety. More than smarts, more than brilliant plans, more than any other single thing. Safety is the make-or-break.
There are costs to not being able or willing to do this. In their HBR article “The Two Traits of the Best Problem-Solving Teams,” authors Alison Reynolds and David Lewis write “When we fail to foster a high quality interaction, we lose out on the benefit of discourse between people who see things differently. The result is a lack of deep understanding, fewer creative options, diminished commitment to act, increased anxiety and resistance, and reduced morale and wellbeing.”
We miss opportunities for better ideas and solutions when we work only with people who think the same way we do. Worse, our discomfort with different thinking styles can leave us feeling threatened, and we can react in ways that negatively impact the whole team. That kind of chronic stress is not going to help your project.
You’ve probably been there, and you know: it can just get uncomfortable. A meeting can turn on a dime, and not in a good way, when this struggle is activated.The struggle plays out not only because we may work with people who aren’t aware of different thinking styles, but also because when growth mindsets and fixed mindsets tangle, there’s tension. And we’re often unaware that this hot mess is going on — that’s the problem. When it happens, learning is over.
So how do people behave when there’s psychological safety? What can we do as individuals to create and protect the safe space we need to learn, collaborate, be creative, and solve problems?
What are some other approaches you use to create a safe environment for learning?
To me, bottom line, this is a leadership issue. And we’re all leaders. Safety first! Great ideas await.
I think a lot about the environments we create for learning and how important they are. I imagine you’ve had experiences where learning was fun, playful, exciting — where you felt comfortable and confident. And then there were those other experiences. When you felt nervous. Anxious. Bored. Self-critical.
Not, as they say, conducive to learning.
Particularly as adults, we often bang into barriers to learning. These barriers mostly arise from our own beliefs about ourselves. Do any of these sound familiar?
I mean, ouch. And we’ve all been there. These barriers, these beliefs, are not trivial. But any learning experience we engage in is risky. Any learning experience requires us to acknowledge that there’s something we don’t know (yet). And we may very well not get it right the first time (or the second, or third …).
So to fully embrace our potential as learning human beings, we have to knock those barriers and beliefs down. Enter the growth mindset, developed by Dr. Carol Dweck and beautifully explained by progressive educator John Spencer:
The best learning environments are spaces that encourage a growth mindset. No matter what you’re learning — how to build furniture, how to become a more effective leader, how to speak Spanish, anything — you’ll only learn if you feel safe. How can we create environments where it’s safe to take a risk, try something new, even fail? Environments where we can move into a growth mindset? Think about:
We can’t learn if we’re afraid to try. Keep safety your number one priority in the learning environments you create. Here’s a parting thought from Mr. Edison, again: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”