Psychological Safety, powered by Iterum

The mission of Iterum is to make the world of work a safer, higher performing, more inclusive and equitable place.

We do this through workshops, training, consultancy and advice. You can see some examples at https://psychsafety.co.uk/training/

We also provide a weekly newsletter with over 6,500 active readers, a vibrant online community of over 500 people, and a regular online worldwide meetup.

Founder & CEO

Red Hat

Primarily focussing on organisational dynamics, technology, and DevOps cultures and practices, I help Red Hat customers ranging from telecoms and banking to government agencies become more successful and resilient organisations. 

Engagements include:
- Cloud native technology application to network functions in one of the biggest EMEA telecoms firms.
- Streamlining and accelerating governance and compliance in a large UK bank.
- Transitioning to Platform-as-a-Product practice in a European government agency.
- Cloud native platform migration with a global energy business.

In addition, I work across Red Hat to elevate and enable teams to perform more effectively, deliver higher quality and more innovative solutions through fostering greater psychological safety and adopting new ways of working.

Transformation Lead, Open Innovation Labs 

Ydentity

Ydentity provides you with ultra-secure, ultra-scalable storage for important documents such as passports, wills, confidential business information, or anything you decide is important. With Ydentity, you can share those documents with specified individuals for a pre-determined period of time, view an audit log of access, and revoke access when you decide to.

MoreNiche Limited

Brought on to drive organisational change and technology team transformation, I lead and steer the development team, and the organisation, through adopting modern team topologies and practices, including Scrum, DevOps, Agile, and holocratic principles of servant leadership and manager-less operating models.

Through these practices, and an approach of encouraging autonomy and blameless accountability, team members co-elevate each other through cross-training, mentoring, coaching and training. 

Dramatic improvements in delivery velocity, reliability, team satisfaction and commercial performance were realised in under 6 months, and we're only just beginning.

Experian Consumer Services

Working with UK and US teams to deliver high-performance, secure, compliant and cost effective workloads in the public cloud. Particular focus on CI/CD, migration out of datacentres and maturing the cloud tech stack with progress towards containerisation and serverless technology. Constantly working to improve culture, process, technology and performance.

Head of UK Cloud Platforms

Teach First

Through working with local schools and education professionals in the Teach First Careers and Employability Leadership Programme (CELP), I help design and develop strategies for career advice and planning for young people. I focus specifically on the technology industry, and on strategies to encourage more girls to consider technology as a career.

CELP Industry Champion (Part-time voluntary role)

Responsible for the team enabling the transition from traditional architecture to IaaS and PaaS platforms (cloud), introducing DevOps culture and processes including automation, infrastructure as code, continuous delivery and continuous integration, and managing the implementation of improved monitoring, control, tighter feedback loops, compliance and security, and agile development methodologies.

About ERT - we’re a global data and technology company serving pharmaceutical companies, biotechs and CROs. Our solutions enhance trial oversight, enable site optimization, increase patient engagement, and measure the efficacy of new clinical treatments while ensuring patient safety.

Director, IT Service Delivery

UNiDAYS

•	Designed, implemented and managed the global IT operations and infrastructure, utilising DevOps and Agile principles and focusing on enabling vertical and horizontal scalability.
•	Supported the rapid growth of the business from the UK to Europe, the US, Australia and further.
•	Managed IT support, operational and development teams for UK and international operations, implementing ITSM processes and utilising lean and agile principles to support business objectives.
•	Created a DevOps infrastructure team, bridging the development and IT operations teams, in order to drive automation and rapid (continuous) delivery of high-quality services to customers, utilising IaaS, cloud services, automation and configuration management tooling.
•	This was instrumental in UNiDAYS winning the position of 9th fastest growing tech business in the UK in 2016, and Lloyds Bank Digital Business of the Year award.

Head of Tech Operations

Tria Technology

Founded in 2015, Tria specialises in big data analytics, market insights, and predictive modelling to help European arenas to sell more tickets, faster.

Non Executive Director 

National Ice Centre & Capital FM Arena, Nottingham

Redesigned and reinvigorated the IT services department and team culture, including implementation of a service desk function designed around business needs and objectives.
Implemented high-density 10,000-user arena Wi-Fi, PoS systems, public website and services, and a modernised and consolidated infrastructure.

My first job title was "Experimentalist", and after a career in ecological research and then technology, I’m now a professional psychological safety nerd. 

I created psychsafety.com out of a passion for creating safe, inclusive, high performing teams and organisations, and it's become the primary source for psychological safety resources, training, consultancy and research worldwide

Outside of work, I’m a yoga teacher, mountain biker, global health science and policy geek, and traveller. Check out my personal website tomgeraghty.co.uk for thoughts and other stuff.

Today in #psychologicalsafety we're having a look at the first ever org chart, designed by Daniel McCallum. 


In almost every sense, it's better than modern-day org charts, which are dull, blocky and usually put the leaders on top. McCallum's is beautiful, organic, reflects what the organisation actually does, and puts the leaders at the bottom, in a "fountain of power"!


Check out the full article in the link in comments:)

Tom Geraghty

Psychological safety is the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking: that is, it is safe to interact with other people in the space. 

At conferences and events, groups of people tend to form circles for conversations. This is great for the conversations, but those circles also make it very difficult for anyone else to join, since they form  a defensive wall to any outsiders. 

Speaking up is pretty hard to do if you’re physically excluded from the conversation, and excluding people is exactly what those closed circles of conversation do. 

This is where the Pac-Man rule (also known as the Open Circle Principle) comes in. 

The rule is: “When standing as a group of people, always leave room for one person to join your group.”

The Pac-Man rule provides the actual physical space for someone to join a conversation, and it also sends a strong visual signal that *you are welcome here.*

That signal that you’re welcome to join and contribute to the conversation is a strong driver of #psychologicalsafety, and we’re far more likely to get involved as a result.

https://lnkd.in/di2eHcfZ

I had a little wobble recently because we’re so busy right now with delivery work, that I thought something like “In order for our business to be successful, I need to work full time.”

But Jade Garratt shared something with me that helped me reflect that if your business lets you do the things you love, spend time with the people you love, and you enjoy it, then it’s successful. 

Forget turnover and EBITDA. They’re vanity metrics. It’s relatively easy to be more “successful” by putting in more hours, but is that actually success? 

So this is what I do on Wednesdays.

“Psychological safety” and “wellbeing” aren’t the same thing. 

They’re certainly related, but they refer to different aspects of our experience in the workplace.

It seems intuitive that feeling safe to speak up at work would positively contribute to your wellbeing. After all, if you can raise issues and advocate for yourself without fear, it makes sense that you’ll feel better, in large part because you can ask for support when you need it. And a growing body of evidence supports this.

Psychological safety can boost wellbeing in the following ways:

- A more Comfortable Work Environment: It simply feels better and reduces anxiety when we work somewhere that’s free from interpersonal fear.
- Greater access to Support: It makes it easier to speak up when we’re struggling, and allows us to access the help and resources we need.
- Improved Identification of Issues: It allows systemic and structural challenges to wellbeing to be identified and addressed.
- Avoiding Blame Culture: It steers us away from “blame and shame” cultures and practices, which can significantly increase stress and anxiety at work.
- Fostering Innovation: It lets us be more creative and problem solve, which helps us to find more fulfilment and meaning in our work.

Although they aren’t the same thing, psychological safety and wellbeing are strongly connected, even interdependent. If we can build both, and know that efforts to improve one should also improve the other, we’ll create workplaces where we’re all far more likely to thrive, both personally and professionally. 

Find out more at https://lnkd.in/eg99GBHw

I always like to have a little library set up for people to browse after I deliver a keynote talk 📕📗📘📙📚

The first few months in a new role is exactly when we need our learning capacity to be at its highest: our capacity to ask questions, raise issues, ask for help, and suggest ideas is critical at this early stage. Indeed, this permission to ask the ‘unaskable’ is one of the superpowers of being a new joiner. 

Many of us, when joining a new organisation, feel a sense of optimism and excitement, and may feel a greater sense of #psychologicalsafety due to the support and encouragement that we receive as a new joiner.

However, as a fantastic paper by Derrick Bransby, Michaela Kerrissey and Amy Edmondson shows, in nearly all cases, that early psychological safety soon tails off as we discover the “real” organisation; what Schein and Van Maanen call “reality shock”. And when psychological safety erodes quickly, so does our power to ask these insightful questions. 

This is also one of the few papers that acknowledges that person-level differences (such as beliefs, traits, experience and expertise) influence psychological safety.  The authors also propose a multilevel framework (see the chart) that integrates individual traits and group-level climate factors to explain the emergence and fluctuation of psychological safety and attempts to reconcile group vs individual perspectives in the academic literature.

Read more in this week's newsletter! 

Links to articles, newsletter and other bits in the comments :)

Who's the HiPPO?!

One of the (many) barriers to speaking up is the knowledge or perception that your voice doesn’t carry as much weight as someone else’s. 

This can be particularly common when in the presence of those who are higher up in the formal or organisational hierarchy. 

Sometimes it can feel as if there’s not much point even engaging because it will only be the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, or HiPPO, that counts.

Also known as authority bias, whatever this person says is given extra credence and importance because of their status. And this can happen even if those “lower down” have greater expertise and experience on the matter. 

This week in #psychologicalsafety we talk about how to acknowledge the HiPPO, how to recognise if it's you, and what to do about it.

https://lnkd.in/eBWFsdye

Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash

Love this sentiment. 

Seen in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Here are our top ten ways to build psychological safety in the workplace, distilled and refined from years of working with teams in a wide range of contexts from aviation to technology. 

1: Levelling power gradients

2: Establishing shared norms

3: Effective listening and giving space

4: Intelligent and compassionate communication

5: Rewarding speaking up

6: Framing work as experiments

7: Practising retrospectives and futurespectives

8: Addressing persistent problematic behaviour

9: Embracing differences

10: Accepting human error as normal

Psychological safety isn't about asking people to speak up: it's about creating the conditions in which speaking up is safe, normal and rewarded, and people can do it in the way that best suits them.

“...a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting.“


Wonko The Sane, in "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish", by Douglas Adams

“There is almost no human action or decision that cannot be made to look flawed and less sensible in the misleading light of hindsight."

Sidney Dekker

We’re currently visiting New York for some meetings and stuff. 🗽🇺🇸

Whenever we visit NYC, we stay in Brooklyn and commute into manhattan, because I struggle to maintain the intensity of Manhattan!

Here’s a lovely message from Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

“To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.”

Seen in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Quote by Hubert Humphrey, who co-authored the US Civil Rights Act of 1964.

One of the things I really love about the modern world is how, every time you park at a different car park, you get to use a whole new parking app...

Yes, we just deployed a major change on a Friday afternoon, and yes, I am going off-grid this weekend. 😳 😂

Thanks to Sarah Coiffait , Rowena Harvey, Emily Lambert and everyone who made yesterday’s Nursing, Midwifery and AHP Excellence Conference such a success! 

I was really honoured to be invited as the keynote speaker, and had a wonderful time! 

I was, yet again, in awe of the incredible work that nurses, midwives and other health professionals do day in, day out, under often very tough conditions. You’re the real VIPs.

“…a problem that stays with whoever discovers it, is a problem that remains unknown”

Lars Axelsson

Taplio

Tom Geraghty's Linkedin Analytics

Tom Geraghty

What is Tom talking about?

Tom Geraghty's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Taplio

.css-1jgreyo{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39,43,72,1) 0%, rgba(33,47,183,1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}Tom Geraghty's Linkedin Analytics

Tom Geraghty

What is Tom talking about?

Tom Geraghty's Best Posts .css-qqfgvy{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);}(last 30 days)

Want to drive more opportunities from LinkedIn?

Tom Geraghty's Linkedin Analytics

Tom Geraghty's Best Posts (last 30 days)