So What? Federal News Roundup on Psychological Safety

Carolyn Ford:

Welcome to Tech Transforms, sponsored by Dynatrace. I'm Carolyn Ford. Each week, Mark Senell and I talk with top influencers to explore how the US government is harnessing the power of technology to solve complex challenges and improve our lives.

Carolyn Ford:

Hi, I'm Carolyn Ford. Thanks for joining us for So What? Tech Transforms, and Tech Transforms first ever live episode. So I'm joined by my co-host Tracy Bannon, Senior Principal at MITRE. Hey Tracy, how are you?

Tracy Bannon:

Hey. I am excited to be experimenting live, right? So this is all about getting things out there and trying in front of everybody. Let's see if we succeed or fail today.

Carolyn Ford:

I know. I'm a little bit nervous. I've never done the live thing before. All right.

Tracy Bannon:

As long as you told your family and nobody kind of walks behind in a towel or something, you should be okay.

Carolyn Ford:

Right? I know, because I don't do the weird backgrounds. So yeah, hopefully none of that will happen. Today we're going to be talking about psychological safety, and our guest, Duong Hang, has been delayed, so when he joins us it'll be great. And we're going to just roll with the psychological safety topic right now, and hopefully Duong will be able to join us. So, go ahead. Ah! Yay! Hi, Duong.

Tracy Bannon:

Yay, there's Duong. Perfect timing, dude.

Duong Hang:

I am so sorry, ladies.

Tracy Bannon:

No.

Duong Hang:

I was looking at the time. I'm like, "Okay, I've got a little bit of time." And then, I just was like, yeah. I'm so sorry.

Tracy Bannon:

Oh, wait a minute. Are you being human and authentic with us that you were delayed because you were not balancing your calendar well? Okay, I love it. I love it.

Duong Hang:

Yeah.

Tracy Bannon:

We're just getting started and it's awesome. We are live.

Duong Hang:

Oh, my goodness.

Tracy Bannon:

This is the first time that we've done this live. We normally record and play with it just a little bit, and we're not today. And actually, I was thinking about how that is so perfect in the spirit of psychological safety. We're putting it out there. We are trying this right now. If we have an epic failure, we'll own it.

Duong Hang:

Okay. Good.

Carolyn Ford:

I know. Usually, I tell myself, "If I say anything really stupid, we can edit it out post-show," so I'm going to really try. But welcome, Duong.

Tracy Bannon:

We're going to be authentic today.

Carolyn Ford:

Yeah.

Duong Hang:

I can handle it.

Carolyn Ford:

Welcome, and thank you so much for joining us. And I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself and tell us what you're doing these days.

Duong Hang:

Big question. My name is Duong Hang. I'm the Deputy Director for Platform One. It's an Air Force organization that provides development, security, and operations platform capabilities for people that want to build great software for the DoD. And so, we are super busy right now. We're actually in the middle of a... We do have an internal monthly get together, I call it cohort, because a lot of our teams are very much virtual. They're in many places across the US. And so, we feel that one of the things that we needed to have more human-to-human face time to work on the challenges that we have within the program or within our organization, right? So it's working on the business. So that's why it's been kind of crazy. But I know that this is something that we've been scheduling and planning, and I'm super excited about it. So I was able to step away and actually come talk to you fine people.

Carolyn Ford:

Yeah. And we really appreciate it. And the topic that we're going to talk about today, the term in this context, psychological safety, it's kind of new to me. And as I started unpacking it, I realized it's really not new at all, right?. This has been around a long time and I even have thought about my career and how psychological safety has played within my career.

Carolyn Ford:

just give the definition from: 1990

Tracy Bannon:

Oh my gosh, that's a giant week-long conversation.

Carolyn Ford:

It was a big spew. I know, I know.

Tracy Bannon:

So Duong, I'll ask it differently. Distill it to, "What does psychological safety mean to you, period?" Just that little phoneme right there, that little bit right there.

Duong Hang:

Yeah. I think ultimately, psychological safety is almost like having your psychological needs met so that you don't have to be concerned about what you do, why you do it. And it's not a concern anymore, it's become so transparent that you know are heard, you can be authentic and not be judged, and that you can just focus on being who you truly should be and who you are and be authentic in working, and be able to be yourself with other people. Intellectually, it's a-

Tracy Bannon:

I want to double down-

Duong Hang:

I'm sorry.

Tracy Bannon:

... on a word you said, Duong, double down on it, authentic. I heard you say it at least twice.

Duong Hang:

I know.

Tracy Bannon:

If I had to put together a definition, I would just start with "the ability to be authentic," because we're scared of that, right? We're scared of putting ourselves out there. And it could be anything from any part of ourselves, whether it's hair color, the way you dress, where you grew up. It could be all kinds of different things, but we are trying to get people to be more authentic across the board, and that includes putting out their opinions and letting them know that it's safe to have those opinions out there.

Tracy Bannon:

That's, I think, why it's cropping up so much in our work these days, because we've been heads down trying to get stuff done, and, "I don't want to hear your opinion because I just need you to do what I told you to do." And so, it's kind of shifting a little bit. We're learning a little bit about that. Are you seeing that as well, where we need to bring that authenticity into our daily lives, into our workplace, too?

Duong Hang:

Yeah. I think ultimately, everyone strives to be, they want to be authentic. I think it's a natural inclination as a person that wants that, but you also bring other biases and stuff. And you come into an organization as complex as Platform One, or a lot of other organizations that have a lot of different types of people with different backgrounds, and then suddenly, you can be authentic to your friends pretty easily because you have the same context and history, but then when you come to a work environment where you have a lot of different people and different backgrounds, suddenly it's like well, your authentic self may not be something that someone feels safe.

Tracy Bannon:

That's interesting.

Duong Hang:

Yeah. So I think it's a very complicated scenario when you start building up upon a smaller tribe. And I remember, I was listening to NPR, and they talked about how people, we are naturally... There's only certain sets of people that we know very well, because of just the limitations of time and just physicality of being next to someone. There are some people very well, and then people that maybe not as well, and so forth.

Duong Hang:

The challenge is, you go back when we were growing up as humanity, we were in small tribes, and so everyone knew each other. You kind of built that rapport, and you could be authentic in that context, and that was it. And then, when we started having these societies kind of bridge these tribes together into larger tribes, and then suddenly it became less personal, then all of a sudden, there's a lot of different interactions, right? The comm system of people and organizations kind of come into play. That scaling of what you do as interpersonal relationships being authentic doesn't scale.

Duong Hang:

And so, that is a challenge that I find for both just in places I've been to, but also going back to your original question, Carolyn, about Platform One, we're about almost three years old now. And when you're a startup organization, and it was a very small group of people that worked together, and they were of like minds. They came together because they believed in the mission, and so voluntary, and they knew each other very well before they got together, right? They had an established rapport. They could be psychologically safe with each other, be authentic, and actually do great things.

Duong Hang:

As we scaled, we got more people, contractors, civilians, government, military, whatever. Now you're bringing in other elements of different perspectives, backgrounds, motivations, and so now you can't really achieve the same things in terms of being authentic in that environment, in this new environment versus when it was before.

Carolyn Ford:

What do you to foster the psychological safety as the leader of this team?

Duong Hang:

Yeah.

Carolyn Ford:

Do you do things consciously, driving towards psychological safety?

Duong Hang:

Yeah. I'll be really vulnerable right now, and I talked to Tracy about this, just to kind of answer your question but not directly at first, is it's been tough to be that leader in this environment. We've gone through a lot of changes within Platform One, in terms of not just the people that I mentioned but also the missions. The expectations have grown, right? They were successful. The people that did the work were very successful, got a lot of attention. And now you have the weight of the world now on you, because when you started off, there was not a lot of expectations, right? You're just a rag-tag team of people, and if they didn't really make a dent in the world, no one would have heard about them, right? And not a big deal.

Duong Hang:

Now that we actually have great successes, that comes with the baggage of actually maintaining and actually exceeding the expectations. That comes with a lot of pressure. And so, that is something that quite frankly, we've been struggling with, is trying to make sure that we have enough of the work to do... Making sure that people don't get burned out, right? That's really the first place of where we're trying to make sure we temper expectations in terms of how much work we're supposed to do.

Duong Hang:

Fortunately, we hire a lot of motivated people that come to Platform One, or if they're not necessarily, they don't know what's going on, we try to kind of get them to understand the mission and really feel like this is where they want to be and why they're doing God's work to be a part of Platform One.

Duong Hang:

That being said, once you have that, whether they're with that motivation or being still that motivation, it's really difficult to try to say, "Hey," when things are happening and you're like, "Hey, we need help," people will step up to the plate and work the extra hours after hours, on the weekends, things like that, which is great in the short-term, but long-term, it burns people out.

Duong Hang:

And then, what happens is you add that pressure on people and that burden, plus, yeah, we won't work in-person all the time, so maybe a lot of the work that we do, maybe we get together, it's transactional. I'm only meeting with someone when I have something to talk about, like a meeting. I don't necessarily meet with everyone, not me personally, because I have so many different people I've got to interact with that I don't necessarily have the time to spend quality time with people as much as I could in some areas.

Duong Hang:

And you'd multiply that with everyone else having the same sort of issues, and then what happens is little things trigger people, right? People make comments. Maybe they make a joke in a meeting. But again, they didn't have the rapport established before the meeting or after the meeting, and then the joke comes off kind of not so great. Or they'll make a comment like they're not satisfied with something and they're just exasperated, and we really try to get people to be authentic in that sense. But then what happens is when you make a comment that you meant one way and you're exasperated, someone takes it out as a slight, and it becomes what's considered a microaggression, right? So I'm giving you a very complex scenario there that I've experienced quite a bit here, and I think a lot of people... Tracy just nodded her head because she knows. But I don't want to say everything, but Tracy, your thoughts.

Tracy Bannon:

No. I think you bring up probably the heart of this, is that a term like psychological safety is a term just like we say Cloud and DevOps and agile. We say all these words and there's so much complexity, so many dimensions against it. You brought up this, and I thought it was really interesting and it got my brain going, about the scope of our ability to be authentic, right? You're super authentic with your family, you're super authentic with a certain group of friends. You become more authentic, but you have to be kind of intentional about it with your work teams.

Duong Hang:

Exactly.

Tracy Bannon:

But then, what I heard you say is, and I realize that I've experienced this, there are kind of scopes of authenticity or scopes of psychological safety. In your team that's the closest to you, with the people who are my work spouses, those people who are day in and day out that we're talking with all the time, we're texting, et cetera, there's a different degree of that feeling of being able to be authentic and having psychological safety than to the next level, whether it's a level up or a level of newness, peer level newness or a level of more junior people. So that adds to it.

Tracy Bannon:

As a leader, I've got to be cognizant of my ability to both positively and negatively impact other people. I know that by virtue of sending an email to newer in career individuals, if I happen to send that at six or seven o'clock at night because I happen to be free at six or seven o'clock at night, got my feet up, I'm sipping my Merlot, and I'm getting ready for whatever, the reaction that they have is immediately that, "Someone senior has sent something to me. I need to look at this right away." There's pressure associated with it. And that's just a micro example, a tiny example of something where I need to be more deliberate in not sending emails to folks off hours, that cognitive overload, in thinking about how they might take a joke. And my jokes are different from my posse, the work spouse, what we joke about is a little bit different because I know where their minds are. So jeepers creepers, scopes of autonomy for teams and scopes of psychological safety and leadership, and gosh, no wonder this is so crunchy.

Carolyn Ford:

So I'm hearing different aspects of psychological safety. So first, how we interact with each other and how we feel safe with one another, and knowing that Tracy sends a midnight email, I don't need to respond and she'll be fine if I don't respond until tomorrow's work hours. So there's that part of it.

Carolyn Ford:

But there's also the part about if you see something wrong in the process, in the development, in the product, that back in the day only C-suite got to pull that cord and say, "Stop the production line. There's a problem." And I think that psychological safety is not just the personal interactions and how we interact with one another, but the ability to raise your hand and say, "This is wrong. The space shuttle is going to blow up. We need to back up."

Tracy Bannon:

There's truth to that. So Carolyn, I'm going to pull the thread on that.

Duong Hang:

Sure.

Tracy Bannon:

So you apply the same kind of approach to it in order for people to feel, and this is a feeling, in order for them to trust that there's not going to be a reprisal, they need to see that. So they need to feel it with their peers, but they need to see that behavior, they need to understand with their leadership what's going to happen as well.And so, if you're leading by example and you're allowing yourself like Duong was just very vulnerable, and if his team hears this, there's so much authenticity to that and there's so much leadership just in being exposed that way, they begin to realize that they can raise their hand. If I say, "I disagree with that." I'm a leader and I disagree with that. If I turn around to them and ask them for their thoughts on this and give them the opportunity, open opportunity, there's a lot of cultivating that has to happen. I've got to tell you. Everybody doesn't immediately say, "Yep, I see something wrong. I feel comfortable in raising my hand about it." No. It depends on the humans, right.

Carolyn Ford:

So you've got to have that... Okay, but my question to follow up to Duong is, I was raised by a military father, so I understand chain of command very well. Even though my dad encouraged me to speak out, and I'm definitely my father's daughter, different episode. So what I want to know is, how do you reconcile the, "Hey, I'm a lowly private, but I see something wrong here," with chain of command? Or have you been able to?

Duong Hang:

That's an amazing question. So one of the things that we try to do here at Platform One, and again, I know that I said it's an Air Force organization. We do have military people in it and civilians and contractors, and it's in the DoD. But at the same time, this is one of the most progressive organizations that I've ever been in, in terms of as an organization. And one of the things that we try to highlight and emphasize is people, even at the lowest level, can speak up. And they're encouraged to be in a lot of the different meetings that we have, whether it's at the technical meetings or at the more senior meetings where we have much more strategic level discussions. I've seen people that, and I know when you're a junior, you know don't know a lot, so you maybe get a little shy and you don't necessarily want to say stuff.

Duong Hang:

But at the same time, I have people that have felt, and we have people that even were residences. And so, we basically have a program called our Residency Program, where we actually bring in other people, military and government civilians from other organizations to come in for about a six-month period, and they get embedded with us at work. Some of these are captains, maybe some E-5s, and some of them are lower level GS employees. And I've seen in some instances where they do speak up, they say, and they're not like, "This is wrong," but more like, "I have an opinion about this," which is kind of a starting point. It's like, "I have an opinion about this" or "I've seen" or even a good one would be like, "I don't understand how this works." And they do it in a larger audience.

Duong Hang:

And I've seen the audience, or our group, and this is I think a testament to sort of the culture we have. We don't necessarily, we don't make fun of them. We don't go, "Oh wow, you should have known that." Or we don't say, "Hey, you've got to..." kind of like, "Okay, well we'll take it offline." People are like, "Hey, let's talk about it." Now sometimes we rabbit hole, and that's one of the challenges we have is we rabbit hole quite a bit because some of those things happen. But I think on the positive side is that it's like people are willing to engage regardless of where you come from, what rank you hold, and even the experience you bring in.

Tracy Bannon:

Let me add an observation.

Duong Hang:

Sure.

Tracy Bannon:

So I was not raised in a military environment, and I am now military adjacent. I have bought into the passion of helping the DoD. It blows my mind that these amazing individuals do all the things that they do. And I've been exposed to the need for command and control, and I've been exposed to exactly what Duong is talking about. In software and in the design of software, in bringing value to the end user or to the war fighter, it isn't command and control, because we need to have that collaboration. So it's a different dichotomy, it's a different need.

Tracy Bannon:

On the battlefield when we're engaging, there's command and control. So there is a need, there's a right time for command and control, and there are times where to Duong's point, you absolutely need to be fostering this multidimensional culture, because it is by that collaboration of new and level, has a lot of energetic new ideas, where somebody else who's been doing this a little bit longer sometimes gets codified in what they've been doing for the last 2, 5, 10, 15 years. The only way to bring that innovation to the table in Duong's world is to get everybody together. If you just went with leadership dictating down in a command and control style, well you ain't going to get beautiful, delightful software that truly helps people to accomplish their mission.

Carolyn Ford:

That's such a great point. There's a time and place for both styles, right?

Duong Hang:

Mm-hmm.

Tracy Bannon:

Yeah.

Duong Hang:

So Carolyn, I'm just curious. I know it's about the rest of us, but I just wanted... Your father, what military branch was he?

Carolyn Ford:

National Guard.

Duong Hang:

National Guard. Okay. Army or anything?

Carolyn Ford:

Army, Colonel. Mm-hmm.

Duong Hang:

Okay. Okay. So I'd say one aspect of the military I think its' maybe not... I know that the whole command and control style, obviously very military perspective or flow in the military. I think there's a side of the military that people don't maybe appreciate as much, is there's a side where it's actually less command and control style.

Duong Hang:

And there's a term, especially in the Army, I've learned and it's called mission command. So there's a separation to centralized command, decentralized execution is another phrase that's used. And the idea is that, and this is really from before we had really good IT and communications between the generals in the back field and then the people doing the fighting in the front, is that because they couldn't be everywhere at once, the generals couldn't be everywhere telling people what to do, yes, they would just maybe delegate it to people to tell what to do, but obviously, they know that there's a problem of the telephone game problem, where you tell, "I need you to do it exactly this way" and then the next guy says it slightly different, and by the time it gets to the guy that executes, it's going to be completely off base.

Duong Hang:

It recognizes that that's too slow, that it is not effective. And so, really what the military did back in the past was say, "Look, here's my intent. Here's what I'm trying to get after." The commander's intent is another phrase that's used. And then, what happens is based on that intent, you have people that interpret that intent, and then they basically execute that based on the intent, and they report back, right? So it's really, there's a style of delegation in the military that's not really heard a lot.

Duong Hang:

Again, you see the stories about people telling other people what to do maybe at a very tactical level, like the guy is right there in front of you telling you what to do, or maybe in the office, the general telling them what to do. But there's a huge range. It's a huge bureaucracy, right? There's a huge range of things that have to happen between the general and the backfield and the people who are the fighting. And so, they have to do this, "This is what I intent is, and I trust you, with your skills, knowledge, and training, to actually get it done however you think is the best to do it. Because you are closest to the problem. You're the one that your life is on the line. Your skin is right there. I'm the one that's a general, whatever. I'm just in the back field, but you're the one that's living it day-to-day, so I trust you to make the decision at the end of the day." So I don't think that's something that people know or think about or hear about or associate with the military as much.

Carolyn Ford:

Well, if that sentiment and that kind of leadership can be communicated and believed in, that's psychological safety, right?

Duong Hang:

Right.

Carolyn Ford:

To say, "Here's my objective and my intent, and I trust you to make it happen."

Duong Hang:

Exactly. "And I trust you to tell me when it's a bad idea, too." Right?

Carolyn Ford:

Yeah.

Duong Hang:

Yeah.

Carolyn Ford:

And I was just thinking, I'm reading an oldie but a goodie, Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull. And he is the founder of Pixar, and he about realizes that people aren't speaking up, people aren't feeling safe. And he walks into the boardroom and he realizes that there's a physical configuration in their conference room that really screams, "We don't care what any of you say. If you're not sitting in this chair or this chair, keep it zipped." And he said, "We immediately reconfigured." And I guess I'm going to throw you another curve ball. Have you ever done anything like that intentional, like realized, "Oh. The way this room is set up is not good."

Duong Hang:

Oh.

Tracy Bannon:

So I'll give an idea to jump start you, Duong.

Duong Hang:

Great. Yeah, yeah.

Tracy Bannon:

I don't lead meetings that I call, at times. I need this meeting for this reason, and as a leader I need it. I will work with somebody else and say, "I want to be a participant. I don't want to be there in... I don't want to be at the head of the table without people being able to..." So putting us all at a round table or putting us in a huddle together, evening it out, is something that I really try to do. And I try to judiciously use my mute button and listen a lot.

Duong Hang:

Yeah. Oh, my goodness. So I'm going to try to pull two threads. But the first, one more personal, well, they're both personal but one's... I have plenty of stories. So one of my roles, I'm also an Air Force Reservist, and I used to support European Command. And so, they did this really big, massive inter-theater meeting where we had all these different senior people coming in. And so, my job, because I'm just one of the guys there temporarily, was to help arrange the room, put placards, names of people or positions, right? And it's military, It's very formal. And so, I was like, "You can move the tables around, things like that." To make a long story short, I arranged, first because there was probably at least 50, 100 people, in tech, that was the number of people in that room.And so, you're trying to figure out, "Okay. There's going to be maybe the U shape." A table in the middle. Then they did an extra U outside of that. So now there's two concentric views, right? And then it's like, "Who's going to sit next to whom? Who's going to sit behind?" That whole, and then we had a guy come in and he was like, "I have a protocol background." And so, we ended up spending three hours arranging and re-arranging these placards around who was...

Duong Hang:

And to me, there's some obvious people, like the most senior person in the middle, and then you kind of put the remaining people on the side, and then you put maybe... There's some obvious ones and there's less obvious ones. And they're built on these relationships between the people themselves and the organizations they sit in. Highly complex, I would never wish that upon my worst enemies to do that again, personally.

Duong Hang:

So that's one aspect. The other aspect, another story that I'd like to share, is when, two jobs ago, I was in charge of quite a few people coming into the Navy. And one of the first things I intentionally did was, typically you have again, a rectangular, very long rectangular conference room table, right? So in the military, the head person sits at the very end, and then everyone sits on the sides. And then you have a screen, a TV.

Duong Hang:

And so, I was very deliberate in terms of saying, "You know what? I'm not sitting at that very head. I'm going to sit in the middle." And the reason why I did that was... Well, I've seen examples of I know when President Obama was in charge, they would sit in the middle, and I felt like being at the very end, I don't get to be... The distance between me and everyone else, physically, the average distance was lot further. But if I'm in the middle, then the average distance between anyone is a lot shorter, right? Because I'm closer to everyone in the middle. And when I did that, the team, I think it got confused the first few times why I'm sitting there.

Tracy Bannon:

No, you're right. You're right.

Duong Hang:

And it was really interesting, and of course, when I started the job I didn't really say much either. So that freaked them out, because I was listening.

Tracy Bannon:

Right. So you're in listen mode and you're sitting really close to them.

Duong Hang:

Yeah.

Tracy Bannon:

I'd be like, "Okay, who's the creeptastic guy here? What is this thing that's going on here?" But how did it play out then? How did it play? Because you're right. That idea of me not leading my own meetings virtually is essentially the same thing.

Duong Hang:

Right.

Tracy Bannon:

I'm not sitting at the head of the table. How'd that play out for you in that role? Did they eventually warm up to it or did they kind of keep you out, a little push away?

Duong Hang:

No. I think my deputy, he was a very old school Navy officer guy. And there were times when I would sit in the front, depending on the situation, the meetings, and the people that were participating. If it was a meeting that was internal to my team only, I would typically try to sit there in the middle, right? Because they would know me better. Again, context and people knowing who you are and being authentic. And so, I think, for the most part, I was able to... I felt more connected even though I'm just sitting there, right? You feel more connected with some people, especially there were individuals, and that was in a very IT-centric, technical organization as well.

Duong Hang:

But we had a lot of supporting people in that organization that did a lot of the acquisitions, the finance piece, and cost, and they were typically women. And I'll throw that out. And one of the things that struck me was I had never been in an organization that had as many women in that organization as I was in there. But also, they were playing these roles where they're typically not in the driver's seat in an IT organization. It's not, you're supporting.

Duong Hang:

But what I would try to do, and I tried to elevate them during these meetings to say.. There's some top topic, we're debating over it, and it's really technical, but there's also some other things that go with it. And then I would ask the financial person or the cost person, "Hey, what are your thoughts?" And a lot of times, either they go along with it or sometimes they'd say, "Hey, what about this?" And it was seeking that alternative perspective, both in terms of the role they played as well as just, I hate to say it, but there were a lot of men in this typical role. And having a different perspective about the organization, the relationships, what the effects were, and also just... It was a really empowering, and at least I felt like I was trying to empower them. And I got a lot out back from that. And so, I felt like I built up a really good relationship with those other people that don't normally play primary roles in these technical organizations.

Carolyn Ford:

So you changed the configuration, your physical proximity, and you asked for feedback. You just said you're asking for feedback from people that maybe normally wouldn't be so proactive. Not that their feedback wouldn't be welcome, but you're actually reaching out to them saying, "What do you think?"

Duong Hang:

Right. Yeah. In most situations-

Tracy Bannon:

You're stepping outside your comfort zone. Oh, I'm sorry, Duong.

Duong Hang:

Yeah. Oh, no.

Tracy Bannon:

But you are. You're stepping outside your comfort zone a little bit with these folks. You might not have been interacting with them before, but you're getting more holistic. And the more that you get holistic and the more that you're bringing people along with it, actually the more dynamic that conversation gets. If you're asking the finance person, you normally wouldn't have asked them, and they start to weigh in, you do get a very different perspective and a lot more insights.

Duong Hang:

Right. Absolutely. And it's about value, right? Since we're bringing in the finance, right? The techno guys love to build solutions and they love to make things, people happy, with solutions. But the problem is, can you afford it? And it's an acquisition organization too, but we didn't heavily rely on that. And so, we have to make sure that those voices are heard and they can provide perspective.

Duong Hang:

And it's also a two-way street, because sometimes you have folks that they're not as engaged because they don't understand what's going on. And so, it's also my way to say, "Hey, let me engage you, make sure you're still following the conversation." Even if it's not at the deepest level, but at least they have the highlights, and then we can engage. And then, it also demonstrates to everyone else, especially the technical people, "Hey, I value those ideas. And so you should have the same similar conversations even offline." Because I'm expecting that holistic value proposition discussion versus just, "This is a cool toy that we're going to build for someone."

Tracy Bannon:

Yep. There's a question over in the comment section that was brought up. And the question is, and I think we can really double down on this pretty quickly, "Are there some common practices or activities that you've seen that might not be effective in your organization?"

Carolyn Ford:

So that might not be effective to foster the psychological safety.

Tracy Bannon:

Right, right.

Duong Hang:

I think that psychological safety needs to be something that is recognized for not just the people. I know it's a lot of discussions about people that are doing the work, but I think we have this extend our courtesy. And I know this sounds kind of odd in my position, but to even the middle managers, right? And I'm a middle manager, right? I have people that I report to, and I have people that I take care of and make sure that they're doing what they need to do, too.

Duong Hang:

And one of the challenges with that is I've seen my bosses, they are under pressure from their bosses, who are then under pressure from their bosses to get stuff done, do all this stuff. And so, sometimes that psychological safety doesn't extend very well into their organization because the greater organization doesn't have that.

Duong Hang:

And I'm not saying that we, as leaders, shouldn't continue to fight for people, because "Hey, I don't feel safe." But I get paid very well for what I do and what I'm charged to do. And so, I know that I'm not in the position to say, "Hey, you know what? I can't do this really well. I can't, whatever." But my point is that everyone's human. And so, we say we want to make sure that we understand that even people in positions of authority or charge, they need to have the same psychological safety. And so, if you don't have that or it's not very common, then it's really hard to expect the people that work for them to have that as well, have that with them.

Tracy Bannon:

Yeah. And if we're going to distill that, it has to be on the vertical.

Duong Hang:

Yes.

Tracy Bannon:

It cannot just exist on the horizontal. And Duong, I know you. We're friends and colleagues. I know you afford that. And you're right. If it doesn't come from above you, sometimes there need to be difficult conversations where Tracy turns around and says, "Okay, I'm working with my team on this. I need you, leader, to invest in this with me." And sometimes you get it and sometimes they are under too much pressure to be able to react to it the way you would think so. So yeah, if it's not there on the vertical, it can really dilute the horizontal. It can really dilute your ability to be impactful on the horizontal.

Duong Hang:

Yeah. Well, Carolyn, what do you think? What's your answer to the question?

Carolyn Ford:

So like I said, I kind of went through the journey of my career, and thinking about when I felt psychologically safe and when I didn't. And I thought about early on in my career, I had this maybe arrogant, naive, confidence, where I felt really psychologically safe. It didn't even occur to me not to feel safe. And then, somewhere between there and here, in the middle, not so long ago, I started to realize that somehow I had lost that confidence.

Carolyn Ford:

And there's been a lot of times where I've not felt psychologically safe, but I didn't realize that at the time, right? Isn't that weird? I'm looking back and it now and I'm like, "Oh." I remember several years ago, one of the a VP in a room turned to me and said, "Carolyn, what do you think?" And I literally just froze. I was like, "Somebody help me disappear, because why is he asking my opinion? I'm just here to take orders."

Carolyn Ford:

And that's actually not my authentic self at all. I say if I feel like something's wrong. I have a career coach that I wish I would have known about career coaches my whole career. And she actually pointed out, helped me realize that I needed to ask for what I need and set boundaries. Those two things were far more scarier to me than talking about a work thing, like saying, "Oh, I don't think this will work because A, B, and C." But to say, 'Actually, I don't do 5:00 AM meetings. Is that okay?"

Tracy Bannon:

See, you bring up a whole bunch of different... Right? We're talking about a really crunchy, really diverse, really complex topic here. One of the things you brought up actually was where you are in your life journey. I think that there's a generational aspect, too to psychological safety. I see new in career, brand new, coming out of college, coming out of high school, and they are from their upbringing, so used to being the parents getting down at their level and asking them their opinion, that they automatically have a sense of psychological safety, like, "You need my opinion right now." Right?

Tracy Bannon:

And then, I think they get, as I'm observing this, I see situational awareness creep in as they're in their level for a little bit, as they're exposed to things, as they get their tail feathers sinned, because maybe that opinion at that point wasn't the right time. It was a good thought, but they needed to find a different way to express it. Then they kind of grow into that. And I think that that leads us to where we are now.

Tracy Bannon:

I feel a sense a different sense of psychological safety now than what I felt at different levels and different areas and different times in my career. So that's just observational. I do think that there is a length of career and diversity of the different types of positions that you've been in that impact how much you seize on that, how much you grasp for that authentic experience or not. Do you see that, Duong? You've got folks across the spectrum career-wise, too. Do you see any element of that?

Duong Hang:

Yeah, absolutely. I was so used to, for the longest time, being the youngest person in the room. And now I'm looking over at the people, and I spend the majority of the time with people that are younger than me, which is scary. But that being said, there is a wide variety of people and ages. And part of that too, is wherever you are in your career, especially for us three, we've a lot more experience under our belt, it's sometimes really easy to forget how hard it was when you didn't know much and the insecurities that come with that, because it was such a distant memory.And so, because now it comes so naturally, reading something and just grasping the big picture or being able to summarize something really quickly or finding what's important, or just how to interact with someone just off the cuff that you've never met before in a professional setting. Those kind of things, those skills, we take for granted. And so, I have to sometimes remind myself who I'm dealing with and where they could possibly be coming from, especially not having that experience and then having insecurities on top of that, and then try to be like, "Hey, I'm going to give you a little more patience to work through."

Duong Hang:

And so, that is a challenge. But Tracy is right, right? They do come with a set of expectations. My wife and I talk about this all the time. She's a fabulous nurse, but unfortunately in that profession, you're going to get a lot of new nurses a lot of times. So she's dealing with a lot of that, too. And so, they have that expectation of... They have a lot of expectations, I think in some ways more so than maybe people of our generation when we were growing up, about what we are owed or what we deserve. I'm not saying that it's right or wrong, right? I think psychological safety should be something that everyone is owed no matter what generation or age. But I think when we came in, I know that it wasn't something I expected, right? That I should be treated a certain way. It's like, "Hey, just treat me like..." I'm Generation X, kind of in that zone, and it was like, "Hey, just let me do my job. I'll impress you, and that's all I need to do. I don't need you to baby me in terms of-"

Tracy Bannon:

"Excited to be invited to sit at the table. I'm going to keep my mouth shut. I'm going to observe." Whereas if I were to come to the table now, and I don't mean at this age, I mean if I were to enter into my career, oh I think I would definitely be more verbal right away. I have not cautioned, but I have mentored some new and career folks to say, "Hey, we're going into this situation. Here's what I want you to observe. Here's are the kind of potential landmines." Helping them prepare politically, and then debriefing with them afterwards, and helping them step into that newness of some of the big exposures. And I'm talking about, I like to bring really junior people into really senior level meetings, to the extent we can, so they can see it and experience it a bit. I think there are a bunch of questions that are popping up. Yep. Let's see what this one is. Oh gosh, this is tough.

Carolyn Ford:

"So how can organizations market themselves as psychologically safe to candidates in the job market?"

Duong Hang:

Yeah, that's a good question. If it's a question, I'm impressed.

Tracy Bannon:

I think you put it right there. "Just join us. We're psychologically safe." Yeah.

Duong Hang:

These are actual questions. Tracy.

Tracy Bannon:

Can you actually market yourself as psychologically safe? Should you market yourself as psychologically safe? Or is it a manifestation of the culture that you have? When somebody is checking into, they go out to Fishbowl and Glass Ceiling, there are a number of different locations where... They're going to get the real story from employees.

Carolyn Ford:

Yeah.

Tracy Bannon:

So I think you kind of start from within, quite frankly. And I know that isn't a really good answer because it means you have to do some work internally. It will naturally come to the surface in your communications out to market. I just read, I was looking at a couple of different jobs. I was helping somebody who is fine tuning their resume, and I was looking at the different jobs. I could tell right away what a bit of the culture was like there, just by the way that things were worded in terms of their openness, in terms of a little bit of the jovial aspect of how things are written, even in the job invites. So I don't quite how you market it because that's not my background. But back to authenticity, if a company is being its authentic self, it's going to show, right? What do you think, Carolyn? What do you think Duong?

Duong Hang:

I'll let Carolyn go first.

Carolyn Ford:

I agree. I am in marketing, and I can't imagine saying, like you said, Tracy, market ourselves as psychologically safe. Either you are or you aren't, and it's going to come out.

Tracy Bannon:

Right.

Carolyn Ford:

And when people interview, but even the wording, some of the articles that I read about psychological safety, a lot of companies are moving away from requiring even college degrees, which ties into the psychological safety. This is really...

Tracy Bannon:

Okay. I know where you're going.

Carolyn Ford:

Okay. Help me here, because we're running out of time.

Tracy Bannon:

Certain roles do require a certain amount of education, require a certain pedigree, require certain certifications and different certificate levels. There are absolutely places for that. And we now know that not every role requires, especially in ours, we work with technology, not everybody needs to have a computer science degree. Not everybody needs that. What we need are people who have aptitude for logical thinking, and we can help them to get the experience that they want.

Tracy Bannon:

Why does that matter? If you're in an organization where everybody is expected to have education A, and you're coming in with an alternate path, you've had a different non-traditional career path, that can be difficult for you coming in as well as for the people who are there, right? There's an impedance in what the expectations are and what their knowledge set would be, not that anybody is more valuable or less valuable, but that just an impedance in the experience set. That adds on to the psychological safety. If I'm the first person to come in with a non-traditional background, when I'm talking to folks, I'm going to be a little more quiet at first to try and seek out, "What are all these brainiacs doing?" Or, "What are all these XYZs doing or all these certified whosies?" I'm going to start to compare and contrast myself. I think I would feel inhibited a little bit, quite frankly.

Carolyn Ford:

Yeah. So what I want to do, like I said, we're running out of time. It kills me that time goes by so quickly. I'd like to bring up just a list of where to start with psychological safety. And we've touched on all of this. Duong, you talked about this right from the beginning. You start with your team. A cultural change, organization wide, is daunting. And we've talked about you've really just got to start with your team. But Duong, I would like you to speak to the second point, is to model the values that you want to see such as openness and inclusion. And then, you started us off with some vulnerability and you mentioned the need for that.

Duong Hang:

Yeah. I guess to quickly to talk about number two, we as people, we affect each other. And I think we believe that, "Oh yeah, I'm my own person. I know who I am." But over time, you are the average of the people that you spend the most time with. That's a common thing. So that means that we affect other people and people affect us. And so, we want to be able to, I think, we just really make sure that if we want to make sure that we are open and inclusive and authentic, and how we want to be, then we should do that and encourage others to do so, and identify when people are either being vulnerable, and recognizing it appropriately. Or if they're not, or if they're being aggressive, microaggression to other people, then call them out, right? But also do it in a way that's professional as well. So I think those are some things that I could see then.

Tracy Bannon:

Now I'm going to add a real quick nugget on there. A book that I just recently read was called Ego Free Leadership, but I recommend if somebody's not even leading yet, because I actually believe that everybody is leading in one way or another, by the way. It really triggers you to think about the term microaggression that you used. It triggers you to think about it as a human, "Why am I reacting that way? Why don't I agree with Duong's opinion? Why am I distancing myself from it? Or why am I dismissing that? Is it because it's actually a bad idea? Or is there something else in my ego that's hidden away, the ego that people don't see, is there something there in my psyche that I'm reacting to it because it reminds me of something from my childhood or an experience that I had in college or with a prior event?"

Tracy Bannon:

As I read that and started to apply that to my own interactions with teams, I was really surprised. I don't think I'm massively biased, but at times I was like, "I think I just dismissed that because it's a better idea than mine." Right? And that's a huge thing. So I really recommend that book. It is called Ego Free Leadership, and it was written by, I'll find the writers for it, but it was actually written by a coach like you have, Carolyn, and the person who is being coached. It's kind of just honest soul bearing of these guys, pretty cool.

Carolyn Ford:

Well, in this list, it's funny, because I put together this list prior to our conversation, but based on some conversations we'd had over email, but also this book, Think Again, by Adam Grant. And he is a... I forget, a psychologist, an organizational psychologist. So there's a chapter in this book on psychological safety, and I teased these out of that chapter. But I realize these are things, Duong, that you said, and Tracy, both of you said, all through our conversation. This is where to start, this is what we have to have.

Carolyn Ford:

And then that feedback thing, back to what you've said multiple times, Duong. And he gave an example, he worked with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he asked the leaders, Melinda being one of them, to share some difficult feedback that they'd gotten. And one of her employees actually said that she got sick of Melinda Gates. She was too much like Mary effing Poppins. And so, the leaders shared some of this difficult feedback, which I thought was quite entertaining.

Duong Hang:

I don't know what that means.

Carolyn Ford:

Go ahead, Duong.

Duong Hang:

What does that mean? I thought Mary Poppins was awesome.

Tracy Bannon:

No, but I think that's what it was, like, "You're too perky. You're too happy. You're too up all the time. Stop being perfect."

Carolyn Ford:

"You're too positive all the time."

Tracy Bannon:

"Stop it."

Carolyn Ford:

"Too effing positive."

Tracy Bannon:

Right. "Show us your stress. Be real. Be human." Right?

Carolyn Ford:

"Be real." Yeah. And in that same conversation that Melinda had, she did open up. And the employees responded, they're like, "Wow, she's a person." She shared that sometimes she doesn't understand everything that's being said, and that kind of blew her employees away, because they had no idea.

Duong Hang:

Right.

Carolyn Ford:

And then Duong, you actually responded. There was a longer quote that you sent me, but basically that psychological safety is a long game. It's not a check off the box kind of thing. It's something that you do as a leader, you model as a leader, and that you really should constantly be thinking about, right?

Duong Hang:

Yeah. And that's in context to that term I used earlier about complex adaptive systems, right? When you're in a large bureaucracy, you can only understand so much about the bureaucracy or the organization. Even the most senior person that's head of the company or the head CEO, he only has so much. He's human. He only has so much bandwidth and time and understanding of what's going on.

Duong Hang:

And so, I think the point of that is that we have to learn to empathize with each other in a way that, you have to extend some trust, like, "Hey." When someone comes to you with a problem or whatever, and they're someone that you don't normally interact with or whatever, you have kind of think, "Hey, maybe they know what they're talking about, and that what their concerns are are genuine." Even if in context, maybe there's other things that may be factoring in that may or may not be, whatever. But you have to kind of start thinking in a place of trust and empathy, even if you don't understand where they're coming from. And I think that's really the picture of that.

Tracy Bannon:

Empathy and be kind, empathy and be kind. And if you're not a natural empathetic person, fake it. Try and think about, "What would an empathetic person do?" Because you'll be surprised. I have a very good friend and he has told me a dozen times, "I am not an empathetic person." But he's becoming that because he's taking a pause and saying, "Well, what would an empathetic person say in this situation?" So be kind, be empathetic. That's a good start to psychological safety. We need that right now.

Duong Hang:

So he was almost sociopathic, except that he does it with empathy. So that's where he was finding out he needed that.

Tracy Bannon:

I'd really like to say that. I wouldn't say that.

Carolyn Ford:

No, he's saying it's not, or that is part of being a sociopath. Okay. So on that note, actually, I'm going to bring it around before I totally close this out.

Tracy Bannon:

Well, let me share this, Duong. That person-

Carolyn Ford:

Okay.

Tracy Bannon:

... might support you with Platform One. I'm just saying. I'm just saying.

Duong Hang:

Okay. We're hiring. We're always hiring.

Carolyn Ford:

Well, and I want to bring it back to what you said earlier, Duong, about leaders in the military, that they have an objective. They say, "Here's what I want to accomplish." And then, they trust the people around them to go do it, and do it however they need to. And that's a beautiful, utopian organization, to me.

Duong Hang:

That's wonderful.

Carolyn Ford:

So thank you very much, Duong, for taking time-

Duong Hang:

Thank you.

Carolyn Ford:

... today. And honestly, just for our audience's benefit, I don't even think we got through the first three questions on our list.

Tracy Bannon:

We did not. We did not. And that's wonderful. That's wonderful. This was an engaging... I took a lot from this. I learned things that I'm going to take out to the field today, today, and start to act on. So thank you both for just engaging in this conversation. And thanks for the audience for posting questions that really had me thinking about how we really project honesty about our psychological safety.

Carolyn Ford:

Yeah.

Duong Hang:

And Carolyn, I would love to be able to engage with your audience if they have more questions, and if there's maybe a LinkedIn or something, I'm more than happy to just even that, asynchronously chat back.

Carolyn Ford:

That's a great idea. I'm not an expert in this area.

Duong Hang:

Sure.

Carolyn Ford:

But I think somebody's listening that is.

Duong Hang:

There's help, isn't there?

Tracy Bannon:

There's a whole bunch of lurkers around the edges who are going to help us to make that happen. Yes, the tech lurkers. Okay.

Duong Hang:

Exactly.

Carolyn Ford:

All right. And listen to us on Tech Transforms, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, everybody.

Carolyn Ford:

Thanks for joining Tech Transforms, sponsored by Dynatrace. For more Tech Transforms, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.