Fireside Chat Ep 3: The Effects of Toxic Leadership on Psychological Safety W/ Martijn Sjoorda

Watch the interview here:

 

 

Stephan: 

Hi, my name is Stephan Wiedner and I’m the CEO of Noomi.com. And today’s recording is part of a series that we’re doing on toxic leadership. Now, of course, the goal for your organization or any organization is not simply to eliminate toxic leadership but to build an environment where individuals within that organization can really thrive and grow and achieve incredible results. And today’s guest Martijn Sjoorda. Welcome, Martijn thanks for joining me here today. 

Martijn: 

Thank you. 

Stephan: 

Why I have you on today’s recording is because we’re going to be talking about psychological safety and how that affects toxic leadership or how toxic leadership rather affects psychological safety. We’re going to talk about what psychological safety is and your perfect expert in this topic, because you’ve been working with many teams across the globe, and you are also a partner of the Fearless Organization that is Amy C. Edmondson’s organization, and you’ll probably touch on her and her work in a moment if you’re not familiar with that name. And so again, welcome Martijn. I am so glad to have you here today. 

Martijn: 

Thank you. It’s lovely to be here because I am very excited about this topic and I have long been a  student of toxic leadership. And indeed, as you said, Stefan, it’s a real factor in low or high psychological safety. If you have simply put toxic leaders around, then almost by default, psychological safety will be lower. And second psychological safety is really a key driver for building high-performance cultures and environments in organizations. And you briefly referenced Amy Edmondson, and indeed I’m the co-founder with her of an organization called the Fearless Organization, and what we try to do is a measure of psychological safety in organizations and in institutions, but also bringing tools and best practices to workplaces. 

Stephan: 

Well with that. Can you explain what is psychological safety, especially for those who haven’t heard about it or haven’t read her book? 

Martijn: 

So Amy Edmondson has been doing about 25 years of research into teaming and a large part of a  successful teaming is defined by the level of psychological safety. And psychological safety in the official definition is; a belief that you will not be punished so humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions,  concerns, or mistakes. That’s the official that Amy gives. And that is I think something that you can really make operational because if you would go back in your mind in a situation where you didn’t feel psychologically safe, you would know that you would hold back on ideas. You really hold off on asking a  question and you’d probably definitely not raise your concerns or come forward, with any mistakes that you might’ve made. 

Stephan: 

And it’s also true that what you just described this desire or ability to speak up is directly linked to high performance.

Martijn: 

Absolutely. So there was a project that Google did, which is extensively, still very much high-performance organization. And over the course of five years, they ran a research project called Project  Aristotle. Very easy to find with lots of great reference materials to do your own work around this. But what’s really cool about that is they have about 12,000 individual data points, about 180 teams. And they were really struggling to find a common ground in research as to what would make and correlate with high-performance teams. And then suddenly they’ve stumbled upon Amy’s research around psychological safety and that’s where it then really clicked for them. And as a result of that, they started defining it and they found that psychological safety along with four other factors was the gateway to building high-performance teams, but indeed also a high-performance culture and that this notion of psychological safety actually also weighed over for over 40% over the other factors. And that simply if you didn’t have psychological safety, you couldn’t sustainably be high performing. 

Stephan: 

Mm-hmm (affirmative) So now let’s talk about toxic leadership and psychological safety. So how does a  toxic leader disrupt psychological safety? 

Martijn: 

So the foundation of psychological safety is that as we said, people feel free to come up with ideas,  questions, concerns, or mistakes. And let me impersonate the toxic leader for a couple of seconds, if I  may. And let’s say we are in our one on one weekly, and I would come forward to you and said… I would say things like, “Stefan, your performance is not up to scratch. You’re not delivering on the goals that we’ve set together. And therefore I had taken a real issue with where we are at right now in our business relationships. So you need to shape up your performance because it’s really, really getting  under my skin right now.” All right, if you just sense how that comes across. 

Stephan: 

Well, I don’t even know what to say. I’m kind of speechless, to be honest, 

Martijn: 

But there’s precisely the point. From a neuroscientific perspective. What happens if I use that type of language and you know that I’m in a position of power, what actually happens is that you go to the lower sort of reptile part of your brain and your fight, flight, or freeze response is triggered. And unfortunately, that part of your brain has sort of a three-second advantage of the higher part of your brain, your executive function. And you just shut down, put very simply fear makes you dumb over… that is toxic and display toxic behaviors is that they shut people down. And because they shut people down, they will not get the benefit. So, instilling the fear of some deity, to use proper language, into people is actually a really, really useless leadership strategy over time because people will burn out, the attrition rates in your organization will be higher and that’s really bad for the climate in your organization and not conducive to generating high performance. 

Stephan: 

So Martijn, if I understand you correctly, what you’re saying then is that a toxic leader breeds fear within their staff, within their organization. People are afraid to speak up and that fear is basically making them, as you said, dumb. And I guess it’s the team and the organization that suffers right. The organization and team lose their ability to learn is that right? 

Martijn: 

That’s right. And maybe we can try a little experiment because I could perhaps illustrate this quickly on the basis of the model that is in Amy’s book, The Fearless Organization. I hope the audio works. 

Stephan: 

I can still hear you. Yeah. 

Martijn: 

So an overlay is in essence, with Amy’s model where she says here, you would find yourself in the apathy zone. Here, you would find yourself in the anxiety zone. Here, you can find yourself in the comfort zone, and here is where you actually would aspire to be. It’s the comfort zone, sorry the learning zone. What this overlays nicely with is a Moodle developed by [Kim Scott 00:10:12] where actually what  you need to learn to do as an effective leader is you need to be able to care personally, and you need to learn how to challenge directly. 

Martijn: 

If none of that has happened, you run the risk of ending up in manipulative insincerity. If there is too much for sensitivity and caring versus me, you might end up in ruinous empathy. But particularly if you have touchy leaders that tend to quite often be lots of challenging directly to you and you end up with obnoxious regression, and obnoxious regression really shuts people down and what you’re striving for to be learning to own this balance. And that’s also what you hopefully will teach your leaders. Is that a  divorce where people can be both challenged directly and also feel that’s where you create the climate for learning zone? And that is what Kim Scott defines as radical candour if that makes any sense to you. 

Stephan: 

Yeah, that made sense so you’re walking through the model by Kim Scott, the radical candour model, but then before you got into that model, you were talking about the different emotions you might feel in each of those states. So you’re going from a place of high anxiety to that obnoxious aggression quadrant,  which is characterized by a high amount of direct challenge and a low level of personal care. And that puts people in a high state of anxiety. That makes a lot of sense to me. 

Martijn: 

But also as a knock-on effect, probably what will happen because people don’t dare to come forward is that they actually, after having such a negative experience, will opt for, well, I’ll mitigate this by just be reverting to manipulative insincerity. So I will not come forward with anything, but you’ve effectively put yourself in the space that Amy defines as the apathy zone. You have both got low psychological safety as well as low motivation. 

Stephan:

So is that what you would call a yes man or something like that, like someone who’s just there to please that leader and say: “Yes, I’ll do that. Uh-huh. That’s a great idea. Wonderful idea. Let’s do that. Let’s detonate a bomb in our own production facility. Sounds great.” Got it. 

Stephan: 

So some of the clients that come to us, Martijn they’ve, they’re obviously describing situations similar to what you’ve described, whether it’s an individual and they’re causing toxicity within their organization.  And here’s the kicker. It’s often someone that’s been with the organization for a long time, years in fact.  And it makes me think that there’s something within organizations that perpetuates toxicity or allows it to happen at the minimum. So can you speak to that at all in your experience? 

Martijn: 

Yeah. I think there are two types of dynamics that come to mind. One, if you take the humanity out of it and you solely look at milestones goals and financial performance. People with what I would define as toxic personality traits are often great at getting the results, but the results are only hitting the numbers.  And we’re not looking at the goals to humans of hitting those numbers when they’re being charged on by people who clearly have got toxic traits. So that’s one aspect. Also what I’m starting to see in organizations is that quite often, people who hit the C-suite have worked years and years to get there.  And when you interact with them, they are often the nicest people to interact with. But the people who are on C minus one or C minus two, often have got more toxic traits because they’re literally doing the hard work or even the henchmen work for the people in the C-suite. 

Martijn: 

And they do that often also with the best intentions. But what you got to know based on the work of Art  Kleiner, who wrote a book called, Who Really Matters: The Core Group, which he argues that organizations don’t exist to make the world a better place or to create shareholder value, but they exist to serve the purpose of a core group of people, is that these people actually are amplifying behaviour of the top leader. So in order to be more like the leader, certain behaviours really get amplified and this often translates into toxicity as well. So somebody makes the directive COMMENT that needs to be followed up. Or sometimes somebody makes a comment that is perceived as being directive and then in order to do good people will go to extremes to deliver on what they think that particular comment of the CEO meant. 

Stephan

Mm-hmm (affirmative) So that’s not really a case of the C-suite individuals modelling a certain behaviour and the C minus one or C minus two in adopting that behaviour or is it a learned thing as in, okay, so I saw how you got to where you are now. So I’m going to do the things that you’re doing to get to where you are now, is that okay? 

Martijn: 

No, of course, you’re going to get the consultant’s answer. It depends. Because what we say in our profession is that context is really key. Whereas the CFO might say context a caches game, but I think understanding context is more of a feminine trait and it’s very context-specific. So it may be that there is just a culture where over-aggressive behaviour is associated with achieving sales success. I mean, you only have to look at the Glen Gary, Glen Ross movie, which is a beautiful depiction of that type of macho culture. And then it’s just ingrained in the whole organization, but it may also be that you know, and that’s quite often, I think that’s where it’s probably relevant for newbies who work with helping toxic leaders transform themselves. It’s often that people have gotten to where they go in the organization by displaying a certain type of behaviour. 

Martijn: 

And as a result of them hitting their numbers and their performance goals, in essence, people have really sort of, what can we say in Dutch, someone who’s been holding a hand over their heads to mean that they’ve been supported by, would you almost call people who are complicit with them because they’re happy with them getting the results and they tolerate expert if deleted behaviour because they’re happy with the results that that certain individual has been getting. And then it comes to a certain point where there is so much attrition in Mike’s department, that it actually comes on the radar. 

Stephan: 

So you mentioned our work and predominantly the work that we’re doing is to deliver coaching for toxic leaders. And we’ve been able to see some tremendously positive results because ultimately what we’ve discovered is that many toxic leaders, even though they breed toxicity within the organization don’t necessarily intend to do so, they don’t necessarily have malicious intent. And so when they, when you can shine a light on the impact that they’re having on the individuals around them, and you can show them another way of operating, then they can embrace that. And driving from their competitive nature,  they can, they can make some behaviour change that sticks. And in your work, you’re often working with senior leadership teams and inevitably some of those teams are going to have some toxic leaders. So how do you as a consultant or a team coach, whatever title you want to give yourself, how do you work with those types of individuals? I’m sure you have some crazy worst stories. 

Martijn: 

Yeah, I think what we do is we often some form of a measure to be able to present data. And that may be getting really frank 360 feedback from peers, subordinates. And in some cases, the layer of both and then we use that data not to put somebody in court so to say, but to really creates a space where there’s also for someone who’s been identified as a toxic leader, the psychological safety to not go into a defence response but to really take in the feedback that we have gathered. 

Martijn: 

And one of the things that we are starting to use increasingly is actually our instruments that we’ve developed to measure psychological safety because low tech, low psychological safety is a clear indicator that there may be toxic behaviour around. But what’s interesting because people who are identified as people with toxic traits often are very competitive and very numbers-oriented. They actually, as a result of the fact that a number… For example, their department on psychological safety is low to critically low will actually come into their response, that they normally have numbers that you’re like, this is really bad. I need to do something about this. 

Stephan: 

Mm-hmm (affirmative). 

Martijn:

Also, objectifying the impact of the behaviour, and then in parallel, there is lots of personal work to do because what we got to remember is that people who hurt other people have often been hurt in a  traumatic way somewhere in the course of their life. So you also have to have compassion and to be able to hold the space and executive coach to really unpack what may be, even in the childhood of a toxic leader, went wrong. And right here she is like, has become as she has become. 

Stephan:

So all of this that you’re describing is all done. One-on-one then you’re working with the leader only,  you’re collecting 360 feedback on behalf of that leader. You then debriefing it with them. You’re also presenting psychological safety metrics that you may have collected. Is that, is that correct? 

Martijn: 

That is the first step. Because quite often people are quite unaware of the impact their behaviour has.  Had a brilliant exchange where two of my colleagues who are now facilitators introduced themselves around the question, why is psychological safety important to you? And one of my colleagues said, well,  I used to have a boss who was like this and very toxic. And that’s why I know what the impact is. And I’ve found ways to work through that. And then one of my older male colleague said, well, I was like that boss. 

Martijn: 

And then a subordinate had the courage to call me out and say, basically to me, you are destroying my life. And that was my wake up call from the universe on forever grateful to her because that set me on the path to doing more personal work, to understand what I saw as go-getting was often by other people experienced as pedantic, aggressive and putting them down. But what we do to answer your question with people, once we’ve had the awareness part of accomplished is really look at okay, how does it show up in a team? And then also contract with a team to see how by just shifting the interaction a little bit, and also intervening at the moment in team meetings to see how they could also deal with,  for example, the difference is to shift that by doing direct interventions. 

Stephan: 

So when you’re working with teams, I’m sure there are times when you stepped into the room and it becomes fairly apparent to you that there is toxicity there. I think we can all relate to when let’s say in your family, there’s been a fight. And then you walk into the room, you walk into the household, you can feel the tension between the individuals. And I suspect that some senior leadership teams are that way. And I’m sure you’ve walked into some rooms like that. How do you handle that? How do you facilitate dialogue in that kind of environment? 

Martijn: 

Pause for one moment? Can you hit the recording on both? That’s a great question. I think what’s interesting is you, you mentioned family and when you walk into the family setting, you have immediately got a sense of what’s going on. But indeed, when you walk into the boardroom, sometimes you don’t stop being human. So my counsel is always people also to really look more for what’s happening non-verbally, and I’ve become really attuned to that over the course of my work for decades now with senior teams. 

Martijn:

But what’s, we often try to do is driven by the idea that you mentioned the word dialogue. And a lot of my background is around working with dialogue, as per David Bone, Bill Isaacs and Peter Garrett’s notion of that, is that people tend to go into the boardroom and be very focused on delivering on their agenda. So by default, we’re starting to see from the data, boards are a little less psychologically safe because they’re clearly the board of an organization, but quite often they’re not really a team because they have their columns in the organization in which they work. 

Martijn: 

So what’s quite often quite transformative when we start working with boards is that we really look at,  Hey, where’s the human connection and how’d you make that human connection. So we spend quite some time, you’re getting people to introduce themselves, but also saying a few words more about their personal background. And you’d be surprised how many people know very little about each other, even if they’ve been on the board with each other for quite some time, and then to really investigate, where do you need to meaningfully come together as a team or as a sub-team in the board. And where is it actually not so useful to go through this ritual of sitting in a board room with 12 people following a  highly structured agenda? And by just also looking at what the rhythm is, and what’s a good mechanism for reflecting and just also hanging out with each other and just starting to do work on projects with each other tends to really shift the game already. 

Stephan: 

Mm-hmm (affirmative) I mean, I could view that as being kind of like a, what are you saying? We got to hold hands and sing kumbaya here. You know, like be all buddy, buddy. I think a lot of people would argue there was no real room for that. Or there was no place for that. What’s the benefit. 

Martijn: 

That’s in a language that boards understand, which tends to be more powerful and results-oriented.  Sometimes you need to slow down to go faster. So it’s always fascinating to me that people think that the loss of being human stopped, the further stopped being important. The further you go up to the rooms, the latter in the organization, the more you get to a higher place in an organization, the more being human and actually having empathy and also just human interest in your direct colleagues, but also in your subordinates becomes important. Because people make a connection to you on the basis of the fact that they trust you and they feel safe. 

Martijn: 

And as a result of making that investment and also showing up genuinely, that’s where the real transformation happens. I mean, if you look at a woman like Angela Ahrendts and what she accomplished with her colleague, Christopher Bailey in revamping Burberry’s, which was solely based on finding a way to be in touch with her teams around the world and the same thing at  Apple, which is entirely based on making a real human connection, because if you feel connected to your colleagues, to your organization and the purpose and mission of your organization, and you feel safe, guess what, then you are able to look at the Apple genius thing because she is responsible for the retail business. 

Martijn: 

You may have had an experience in a real Apple store from an Apple genius. The way they connect with you is part of the social fabric. And that’s why you have a great customer experience because it’s real.

Stephan: 

Well, you did mention Apple. And of course, perhaps one of the most legendary leaders in Silicon Valley is Steve jobs. And I mean, the results he produced are undebatable, but I think there’s a bit of a  legendary story of him being the ultimate hard-ass if you will, how do you make sense of him? Was he,  was he a toxic leader or was he a brilliant leader or was he both? 

Martijn: 

I guess he was probably both because I don’t have firsthand experience of him, but I have been a  student of him for as long as I can remember. And I’ve read all the significant biographies about him as well as interact with people who’ve had personal dealings with him. But what I find very interesting is that he was extremely challenging and he could be extremely rude, but he was extremely challenging and rude, mostly on things that weren’t working according to him. And he would of course throw the most terrible insults to his people. But if you look at the people he continued to work with productively,  they all say even on camera that they loved him very much. So somehow there was a productive dynamic between these people and either they were able to tolerate lots of abuse, but there was probably also a super high-performance culture. 

Martijn: 

Because I’ve come across people who really work in what, in soccer terms, you would call the premier league. And what I do notice that they are extremely good at taking feedback, even if it comes sometimes in extreme forms because they also really work on building relationships. And also I think the times are changing. So I think there’s much more awareness and also research on the impact of these behaviours. So I think there’s a whole generation of people who are now coming into the workforce who simply will not take toxic behaviour from leaders and they will call them out on it, or they will actually demand that HR takes action. 

Stephan: 

Right. I think you’re probably right on that one. We’ve certainly seen it with the Black Lives Movement.  There have been individuals that, borderline racist or making derogatory comments and that obviously can not persist within organizations and people are speaking up. People are feeling empowered enough to say that this is not good enough. I want to report to this leader. So I think that’s a positive change when you agree. 

Martijn: 

I think that’s a real positive. In the end, compassion is important, but there are things that are simply unacceptable. And I think the climate in that sense globally is just shifting towards, there are things that are simply not acceptable with no exceptions. So, Mike who in the past decade was hitting the great results was making crass, sexual comments, sexually-oriented comments to women, and probably also derogatory remarks to people of colour were tolerated it because he was getting the results and where we are at thankfully now is that I think we’re trying to figure out what fundamental decency means. That’s a  great, great guidepost. What is the fundamental decency? If you think about fundamental decency, you know that it’s not okay to make derogatory comments about anybody on the basis of race, of sexual orientation or sex and so on. 

Martijn:

And just to look back on Amy’s book, she has three things that she defines that leaders can do. It’s framing the work, it’s inviting participation, and it’s responding productively. For one thing of responding,  productive, an element of responding productively is that you sanction clear violations as a leader,  because if you want to structurally drive out toxicity out of your organization, you also need to note, as  we say, in Dutch, measure with two measures, if you say you do not tolerate racism, and there isn’t a  clear incident of somebody making a racist comment, then it’s simple that it’s, that is a clear violation  and that needs to be met with sanctions 

Stephan: 

And probably immediately right away. So for individuals who are in an organization that is seeking help for a toxic leader, or maybe a number of toxic leaders, any final thoughts or bits of wisdom that you want to impart on them in their role to eliminate toxicity, their organization. 

Martijn: 

I think what’s important is that you have to be aware of what your position is in an organization because we’ve seen lots of examples where people have been identified as whistleblowers and then have been ousted from the organization. So I think the number one thing is who can you really trust?  And is there someone in a position of power that you might take this up with and you can make a clear  contract about the implications that raising this in a formal way has, and to be really clear about what  your rights are, particularly in a North American setting or in an Anglo-Saxon setting, and to also really  make sure that you limit the damage when you… Because it’s a very, very courageous move and it’s very hard. So you need to be very clear of what procedures your organization has for reporting this and what  the consequences may or may not be for you 

Stephan: 

Sure. And that’s appropriate to anybody within an organization. Now, people that generally come to us,  they are HR managers, or maybe someone with, within the sort of people side of the business.  And so I guess one thing I’m hearing is that it’s easy perhaps to point the finger at the toxic leader and say, that person is the problem and let’s fix the problem, but there are contributing factors that the organization can take care of. Like you mentioned the sanctions, having clear sanctions and being able to deal with any violations really quickly and systematically. So I think that’s a very important piece that organizations need to be attuned.

Martijn: 

I think what’s really crucial is that a doc chic leader cannot exist without a support system. So if there is a toxic leader, or there are multiple toxic leaders in an organization, there is a fertile ground for toxicity,  and there are underlying factors. So it also requires the organization to really look and go inward as to how it has fostered through systems, through processes, through perhaps perverted KPIs or perverts agreement, remuneration measures, how it’s helped foster this type of toxicity in the organization.  Because as you rightly said, you can say it’s Mike, but it’s not just Mike, because Mike must’ve had a  support system for several years or perhaps even for more than a decade because otherwise, he wouldn’t have felt the complete freedom to stray away from what he knows intuitively is not fundamentally decent. 

Stephan:

Yeah. Agreed. Well, Martijn, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure. Really appreciate you taking the time here and talking about this topic that is clearly something that you’ve done a lot of workarounds.