0:00:07.1 Junior: Psychological safety is the collective emotional intelligence of a group. This is something that we've been saying for several years now.

0:00:19.4 Tim: Yeah, we have.

0:00:27.6 Junior: As soon as we started saying it, it clicked with people, and it's one of the most cited aha moments that we've had in as long as I can remember. So, today, we wanna explain that sentence, make it relevant for you in the context of personal and professional development at the individual level, and then more broadly to an organization. Why is this concept important? So, I wanna start off with a question for you, Tim, which is, is this heresy, this idea of EQ and emotion, or EQ and psychological safety? What's going on?

0:01:03.7 Tim: Right. So, there's an intuitive quality to this, to say that psychological safety is the collective emotional intelligence of a group. So let's just say we have a team of, I don't know, 10 people, and this person has high EQ, and this person has high EQ, and everybody has high EQ, all 10. Okay? What does that result in? Think about the way they're interacting. Think about what happens if they're delivering those inputs. Right? All 10 are contributing high emotional intelligence. What is the output? What is the culture? What are the norms of? What are the terms of engagement for that team? It's going to be inevitably high psychological safety. So that's intuitive for people. But as we say this, the light goes on. It's kind of an epiphany for people like, "Ah, yeah, that's right. That makes sense."

0:02:04.6 Junior: We think it makes a lot of sense. I don't know if Big EQ is going to think it makes a lot of sense or Big Psych Safety, but we're going to make the case today. And one of the things that organizations often get wrong is measurement and sequencing. That's one of the areas that we're gonna talk about today is how do you measure these two things? How do you approach them in concert? What's their relationship? From a training perspective, if you're an L&D, how do you sequence your training and your measurement? Which one goes first? Do you do them together? Do you do them separately? One one year, the other another year? So, we're gonna dive deeply into that. We wanna start off with some definitions to prove the point. So, let's walk through the logic of PS being collective EQ. So, let's go to the slides and start looking at some definitions over here. Emotional intelligence, the ability to interact effectively with other people. This is something that we've talked a lot about. We've done an entire series on emotional intelligence. We've talked about psychological safety a lot. Oh, that's not showing up as well, is it? I'm gonna use this marker, and I'm gonna use green.

0:03:08.6 Junior: Psychological safety, a culture of rewarded vulnerability. So, practically speaking, what's the difference? EQ is an individual metric. So, when we start talking about assessment, that's important. We don't measure EQ at the level of the group. We measure it at the level of the individual.

0:03:25.7 Tim: That's right, Junior. So, from a research perspective, it's a construct where the unit of analysis is the individual. It's an individual thing. So, if you go back, emotional intelligence really came onto the scene in 1990 with that original paper by Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer. It's an individual construct from a research standpoint. Now, we're going to see that's very different when we go to psychological safety. So, do you want to tee that one up?

0:03:57.4 Junior: Yeah. So, psychological safety, conversely, is a group metric. So, how do we measure both of these? As we said before, on the EQ side, self-assessment or multi-rater with a single target. Right. So, we could evaluate your emotional intelligence either by you responding on behalf of yourself.

0:04:16.6 Tim: Right.

0:04:17.1 Junior: Or by me and the production team here responding on your behalf. Right. In a 360.

0:04:22.1 Tim: Either way.

0:04:22.7 Junior: Many people are familiar with both of those.

0:04:24.7 Tim: Yeah.

0:04:25.3 Junior: Interestingly, I've had a lot of conversations with organizations about EQ, and many times they will ask, "Well, can't we just do EQ but do a group report? Can't we just do aggregate all of the data?" And it's a fair question, but very quickly, you become subject to the laws of averages. And all you get is just a big standard distribution that's representative of an average population. And it starts to look like that across even, three, four, five people. You don't need large numbers to get that bell curve. So on the other side, psychological safety, how do we measure it? Well, we're measuring the group, so it's exclusively multi-rater in that we're targeting the group itself. So, you're responding on behalf of the team? I'm responding on behalf of the team and so on. And we measure at the level of the intact team.

0:05:21.5 Tim: That's right.

0:05:22.0 Junior: So, those are the functional differences concerning measurement between these two things. EQ, individual metric, psych safety, group metric.

0:05:30.5 Tim: That's right.

0:05:31.0 Junior: Anything else you want to say on that point?

0:05:32.4 Tim: No, I think that's right. And then let's talk about sequence. Right? Which comes first because this is very interesting and we need to talk about what do you start with and is there a prescribed way to go? So, I think I want to jump into that.

0:05:49.2 Junior: Well, we'll get to the answer by continuing on this definition path. So, hang with me for a few seconds because we're going to get there on the EQ side. What is EQ? It's interacting effectively with other humans. The mechanism by which we increase psychological safety is rewarding acts of vulnerability. So, we've talked about this before. What's an act of vulnerability? It could be introducing yourself, could be raising your hand and asking a question. It could be challenging the status quo, it could be admitting that you don't know something.

0:06:21.1 Tim: Could be apologizing, could be apologizing, could be showing emotion, could be, as you say, registering a different point of view, could be asking for feedback, giving feedback many different acts of vulnerability.

0:06:36.9 Junior: So, on the receiving end of that vulnerability now I get to choose how to respond. Let's say that you ask a question. I have a few options available to me. I can say, Tim, that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. Right? How many more questions am I going to get from you?

0:06:50.9 Tim: Yeah, not very many.

0:06:52.2 Junior: Precisely zero.

0:06:52.9 Tim: Yeah.

0:06:53.4 Junior: Alternatively, if I say, Hey, that's a very interesting question. Where did that question come from? Right? And then you launch into your explanation and I say, "Well, I appreciate that you asked that, that's relevant to what we're doing right here. What else do you think about this?" And we start a dialogue. We have a conversation.

0:07:09.7 Tim: And let me, let me put a finer point on that too, Junior. I think the conclusion that we've come to is that when we engage in acts of vulnerability, there's going to be a response. And we would go so far as to say that the response is going to be rewarded vulnerability or punished vulnerability. There's going to be a reward or a punishment. There's not a neutral option. There's no neutral response. If I give an opinion and you don't respond, okay, we might think at first blush, "Oh, that's a neutral response." It's not. No, because I'm going to interpret that if you don't respond to me, I'm going to interpret that as, "Oh, I've been ignored, I've been rebuffed, I've been marginalized." So, we really have come to the conclusion that when there's an act of vulnerability, that act of vulnerability will either be rewarded or punished. No neutral ground in the middle there.

0:08:16.4 Junior: Yeah, I agree with you.

0:08:17.1 Tim: Not there.

0:08:17.9 Junior: It truly is binary. If you don't think it is, please put it in the comments. I would love to hear what you think because we've tried to prove this the other way and steelman the idea that there is a neutral ground and just have not been able to do it. And so, any nuance in the response is going to be on either side of the ledger. Even a non-response is a response on the negative side.

0:08:42.3 Tim: So, that's a hypothesis. It's our theory that in human interaction there's no such thing as a neutral response. As we're interacting with each other. That's a big deal. It's very important that we understand that. Yeah.

0:08:54.5 Junior: And that will play into the way that we measure and the way that we report on some of the things that we'll talk about a little bit later.

0:09:00.8 Tim: That's right.

0:09:01.1 Junior: But the mechanism here, let's break it down even further. So, in psych safety, we're saying reward vulnerability. So, Tim asked a question. I tell him it's a good question, I rewarded the act. But here's the process that we go through. First, I have to identify the act of vulnerability. So, my perceptive capacity has to be high. I'm constantly looking around, seeing what's going go on. Then two, I'm validating. Tim, I see that you asked that question. I appreciate the question. Three, Tim, that really helps us progress in the conversation. I would encourage you to ask more questions as you have them. Right. As we do those three things, rewarded vulnerability becomes a pattern inside the team, inside the organization. That's how you increase psychological safety.

0:09:48.3 Tim: That's the mechanism.

0:09:49.3 Junior: So, it's a small hinge that swings a very large door. So, if anyone ever asks, how do I increase psychological safety? It's precisely that, reward vulnerability. So, one of the most interesting exercises that I think we've ever had people do is create a list of acts of vulnerability. How has that been as you've seen people do that?

0:10:07.6 Tim: It's fantastic. It's so productive. We asked them to create a master list, and they just flesh it out. They just identify, and they keep going, and they keep going, and they keep going. And then they come to the realization that, you know what? If I can't engage in acts of vulnerability, I don't know that I can really be human. Yeah. So, they go together.

0:10:29.3 Junior: Well, it is human. If you think about all of the things covered by that umbrella of vulnerability, that's precisely the human experience. Think about a day that you have had where you haven't engaged in any act of vulnerability. Probably haven't had a day like that. If you have, I'm sorry, you're locked in a basement.

0:10:48.9 Tim: Let's go back and define this, Junior. We say that human interaction is a vulnerable activity by definition. So if you're interacting with another human, you are engaging in a vulnerable activity. It's impossible for you and me to interact right now without engaging in vulnerable activity.

0:11:11.3 Junior: Yeah, it's the premise.

0:11:12.5 Tim: It's the premise.

0:11:13.0 Junior: It's a given. So here's where it becomes interesting. Let's move over to the slides again. Inside reward vulnerability, we have those three things: Identify, validate, and encourage. Now we have to ask the question, what's required of the person engaging in those three behaviors? What's required of them? Three things: Awareness, motivation, and behavior. Now, those three words may sound familiar from previous episodes that we've done. Those are the three domains of emotional intelligence. Awareness, motivation, and behavior at the level of the individual. So, you see that these things are very related. I love this slide on the left, so we have emotional intelligence. What does it require? Awareness, motivation, and behavior. As those three things enter the environment in a pattern, we have the ability to identify, validate, and encourage.

0:12:11.9 Tim: On the receiving end.

0:12:14.4 Junior: Exactly. Acts of vulnerability.

0:12:15.2 Tim: That's right.

0:12:15.9 Junior: So, you can see. Okay, can we? Here's a question: Identify, validate, and encourage acts of vulnerability without awareness, motivation, and behavior. Is that possible?

0:12:27.5 Tim: Don't think so.

0:12:28.3 Junior: We would say, no, it's not impossible, because in order to identify, you have to be aware, in order to validate, you have to be properly motivated, in order to encourage, you have to do something behaviorally, you have to act. So, I think that this is about, as simply as we can put it. The relationship between these two things, they are necessarily linked. You cannot pull those two apart.

0:12:51.3 Tim: So, there's a threshold requirement there, Junior, for those skills. And let's just go back and remind ourselves that these things have to happen real-time. If we delay, if we hesitate, it changes the dynamics completely. So, all of these things have to happen real-time. Because when a person engages in an act of vulnerability, the response comes immediately after. The response could be hesitation, it could be a delay. But that changes everything. So, the skills that we're talking about, to be able to identify, to be able to validate, to be able to encourage those acts of vulnerability, they have to happen real-time. So, what does that imply, for you and me, for all of us, we have to become sensitized to identify acts of vulnerability when they happen, and then deliberately respond. We've got to be more intentional about the way we're doing it. And these are skills that we can develop, that we can practice, and that we can improve on.

0:13:56.3 Junior: Yeah. If you look at the managers that you've had the best time with. Those that have been most influential, most effective, you've probably noticed that they have a pattern of rewarding vulnerability using those three things. It separates those who do well, those who don't.

0:14:14.8 Tim: That's right.

0:14:15.1 Junior: Not necessarily technically, but interpersonally, certainly.

0:14:18.0 Tim: That's right.

0:14:18.5 Junior: And over a long enough time horizon, those who do well interpersonally end up doing well technically, even if it's indirect contribution. Okay, let's talk about the problem that organizations have with EQ and psych safety. They experience symptoms with a deficiency in human interaction. What does this mean? This means that they're seeing things in their organization that they think are interpersonal problems, which they probably are, that they don't like. So, what are some of those? Could be silence. Could be non-performance, could be disengagement, could be low morale. Could be a whole host of things. What are things that you see that are symptoms that people come to you and they say, "Hey, we're experiencing this, and we have a hunch that there's a problem?"

0:15:06.8 Tim: Well, as you said, Junior, silence. So, that's one of the first patterns that we see, is that people will become quiet. They're withdrawing, they're disengaging, they're retreating, they're recoiling. And so then they start to self-censor. They start to change what they say and what they do. And overall, it's less interaction. We're seeing less interaction, less engagement. So, the just the overall quantity of vulnerable behavior goes way down. That's the first thing that we see. And then sometimes we'll see patterns where they try to mask over it, cover it, armor it with being nice. As we like to say, kind of a superficial collegiality that comes into play. So, we'll often see those kinds of patterns. Right?

0:16:06.7 Junior: Niceness is a killer.

0:16:08.5 Tim: It's a killer. And it's usually an indication that you have a deeper problem related to emotional intelligence and psychological safety in the way that people are interacting. It's not going well.

0:16:17.5 Junior: And the reason that it's so problematic is that we rarely see people that come to our door and say, "Hey, our team's too nice," right? They don't show up and say that.

0:16:26.3 Tim: It's a symptom.

0:16:27.9 Junior: Even though it's a symptom, they don't recognize it as a symptom of an underlying problem. They think, "Oh, what a wonderful place. We're all so nice." That collegiality can be hiding. It can be masking something lurking underneath. It's not a good thing to have.

0:16:41.7 Tim: But what they often will say is, "We are not able to have a rigorous, hard-hitting discussion. We're not creating this idea of meritocracy where we can really debate issues on their merits in the room." And so people are finding that they can't do that in the room. And so they come out and they engage in their sidebar conversations and have the real meeting.

0:17:10.5 Junior: And often they don't even describe it that way. They'll say something even farther down the line, which is, "We don't innovate. We're not innovating."

0:17:16.7 Tim: Okay. Yeah.

0:17:17.9 Junior: And then we'll say, "Well, are you having dissent? What happens when there's dissent?" They'll say, "No, we're not." Well, okay, there's a problem. So what do they do? They attempt to reduce the symptoms, often with very ineffective intervention. So they'll say, "Okay, we're not having the type of innovation we'd like to have. So we're gonna declare this a state of psychological safety." Right? How many times have we seen this?

0:17:45.8 Tim: We're gonna legislate it.

0:17:46.3 Junior: Send a memo. Right? Let's get the comms team together. We're gonna draft a nice email.

0:17:52.9 Tim: This is a speak-up culture. And it begins now.

0:17:55.2 Junior: Yeah. Today.

0:17:56.2 Tim: It's gonna be fun.

0:17:57.6 Junior: And what happens? Nothing happens. Makes it worse. Right now we're disingenuous on top of the false niceness, not good. And three, they don't take a synergistic approach. So, even if they do identify, "Okay, this is an EQ thing. We think there's some psych safety stuff going on. We take an ad-hoc approach. We're going to band-aid the thing. We're going to throw out some training. We'll make it asynchronous, too, and we'll make it opt-in, and everyone can just go through it at their leisure, and we will have solved the problem."

0:18:33.0 Tim: Yeah.

0:18:33.5 Junior: It doesn't work.

0:18:34.4 Tim: No.

0:18:35.0 Junior: Often what we'll see, too, in concert with this conversation, is their engagement data. So they'll bring their engagement data, and there usually will be one or two items, depending on the instrument you're using. Sometimes none but one or two that has something to do with psychological safety. Usually, what will happen is they will point to the disengagement, right? The overall.

0:18:57.4 Tim: But the disengagement is still symptomatic.

0:19:00.0 Junior: Precisely. That's why they're coming and having the conversations.

0:19:02.9 Tim: Deeper issues, right? And they're not finishing the root cause analysis which would say, if our psychological safety is low, that is always traceable to the poor emotional intelligence of individuals in the way that they're interacting. Yeah.

0:19:21.2 Junior: Yeah. It's also symptomatic of a blunt instrument, but that's a topic for another day.

0:19:24.4 Tim: True.

0:19:25.8 Junior: They're showing up, they're saying, "Hey, we're seeing this data, we're seeing this data, and there's something about it that we don't like, but we're not entirely sure what it means. We think that we have some people problems. Can you help us?" And of course, we say, "Yes, of course we can." So, we want to get into what individuals, teams and organizations can do to solve this problem. We've been talking about this institutionally, and we'll end up there. But not everyone listening to this episode is able to pull the levers of the organization at will and say, "Well, we're going to steer the entire ship this way." Sometimes it comes down to what can you do in your role today, by yourself, to make a difference? And sometimes that's at the level of the individual contributor. Sometimes you're the leader of a team, could be a small team, could be a functional area, who knows? So what we're saying is the population is diverse, there is a lot going on. So what can we do to offer something practical to every person? So let's go at the individual level and start here. What can we do? Take responsibility to improve your EQ. This is what each of us needs to do. No one is exempt from this invitation. How do we do this? We measure. We do deliberate practice, and we measure again.

0:20:43.0 Tim: Measure again.

0:20:43.7 Junior: This measurement piece is something that we're going to talk about over and over and over. If we don't have measurement, even at the level of the individual, it's going to be really difficult for us to leverage our time and energy doing the right activities, and it's going to be very difficult to track progress.

0:21:01.6 Tim: And let's not forget, Junior, we need to go back and clarify the distinction between emotional intelligence and personality, which is something that we have to come back to, personality. So, just think of, for example, think of the Big Five personality traits, right? That's the most authoritative model of personality in the world. Right? So, we have openness, we have conscientiousness, we have extroversion, we have agreeableness, and we have neuroticism. Those are the Big Five. Those measure, taken together, they measure the overall temperament disposition of a person. And what we know from research is that those traits remain relatively stable and fixed over time. That's important to understand. Psychological or emotional intelligence, on the other hand, is a learnable skill. It's not a fixed trait, it's a learnable skill. So, if we're having these issues and we need to get better, and they're reflected in poor psychological safety, we work backwards to emotional intelligence. And we know that if we look at emotional intelligence on an individual level, we can identify areas where we're not doing so well, and we can practice, and we can get better. That's good news. That's why we're focusing on it.

0:22:38.2 Junior: The deliberate practice idea is something that we lean into a lot, and you'll see it across every level. So, what do we do for psychological safety at the level of the individual? We just talked about EQ. We've got to measure. We've got to change behaviorally, and we've got to measure again, psych safety. We use what we call the live model, which incorporates what we talked about at the beginning. Look, identify, validate, and encourage. We're looking for acts of vulnerability. We identify them. Once we hone in, we validate the behavior of the person, then we encourage it. So, if there's one thing that you could take away from this conversation, for me, this is it. And I know it's tangential to the topic itself, but this is crazy valuable.

0:23:24.9 Tim: Because this is a practical tool.

0:23:26.5 Junior: This is a practical tool for anybody inside the workplace, outside the workplace, regardless of industry, regardless of culture. I don't care who you are, where you are.

0:23:37.5 Tim: It's agnostic to your demographics. It doesn't care who you are.

0:23:40.7 Junior: It doesn't. If you look at the way that people respond to you, which is the evidence you generate when you do this, you will see that it is favorable every time. Who's going to get mad at you for identifying, validating and encouraging their question, their act of vulnerability?

0:23:56.9 Tim: Yeah. Who's going to withdraw or self-censor?

0:24:00.7 Junior: Nobody.

0:24:01.7 Tim: Or grow quiet, just become silent.

0:24:05.2 Junior: Yeah. Very few people. On the other hand, if you punish that act of vulnerability, they're going to do precisely what you said.

0:24:12.5 Tim: That's right.

0:24:13.4 Junior: So that's what we can do. At the level of the individual, what can we do as leaders? Let's say that we have some direct reports. Measure, model, monitor.

0:24:23.2 Tim: I really like this, by the way.

0:24:24.6 Junior: Me too, Jillian did it.

0:24:27.1 Tim: Because... I know Jillian did a great job on this. The premise is that if you are a leader, team, any organizational unit, whatever it is, whatever the social collective is, whatever the organizational unit, you're responsible for the cultural conditions. That's your job. You are the steward of the climate, the atmosphere. That container is yours. You are the primary cultural architect, and you can't abdicate or delegate that responsibility. That's yours. So, I love the way that this is broken down. Measure, model, and then monitor. And then. So, we see that in a linear sequence, but now think of it in a cycle. Go back, do it again and again. This is your job.

0:25:15.5 Junior: Yep. This is constantly happening. Those are some bad arrows, but you get the point. Right?

0:25:21.7 Tim: Yeah.

0:25:22.3 Junior: So, measure, model, and monitor. One thing that I want to double click on is this measure piece. Again, it is really difficult as a leader to track progress and to prescribe effective intervention without accurate measurement. It's really hard. And this is a pattern that we see across individuals, teams, and organizations, is they're often deficient on the measurement part? If you're deficient on the measurement part, you have to take a shotgun approach.

0:25:54.9 Tim: Yeah.

0:25:55.3 Junior: You don't know exactly what you need to do where, because you're not entirely sure what the problem is. You're going to have some symptoms that you've observed, but even then, maybe it's filtered. It's going to be anecdotal. It's qualitative. And so, you and I were having an interesting conversation earlier. Let's say that you're an L&D, and you're incredibly good at your job, and you're very perceptive, and you're right on the money with your prescription of intervention, this is exactly the training we need to do.

0:26:28.3 Tim: Meaning where you are today, challenges you have.

0:26:31.9 Junior: Yep. I understand the situation.

0:26:35.2 Tim: You understand?

0:26:36.1 Junior: Yeah. How do you show progress to the executive team? Really hard. It's going to be virtually impossible. It will be subjective and anecdotal, and you don't want your performance riding on anything subjective and anecdotal.

0:26:53.8 Tim: Right.

0:26:54.3 Junior: You want to be able to say, where possible, "Hey, this is where we were objectively, this is what we did. Now, this is where we are objectively. Point A, point B. There's distance in between attributable to the stuff we did." That's what we want.

0:27:11.7 Tim: So we need a quantitative benchmark.

0:27:15.1 Junior: Yeah.

0:27:15.9 Tim: We need a reliable measure. And it comes down to, Junior, we've got to have a psychometric scale.

0:27:24.0 Junior: Yeah, you do.

0:27:24.9 Tim: We just don't know how else we can do it because otherwise you're so deficient, and you could be badly mistaken as well with the anecdotal data that you're getting. Yeah. So, we've come to the inevitable conclusion that you have to have this.

0:27:40.1 Junior: And if you're in L&D and you want budget, that's your playbook.

0:27:44.4 Tim: That's right.

0:27:45.5 Junior: Okay. Organizations leverage intervention strategies with data. This is what we're talking about. So, let's say we're at the level of the institution. What are we going to do as it relates to these two categories? Multi-rater EQ assessment, org wide PS assessment at the level of the intact team. The reason we don't have self-assessment in measure here is if we're talking about actionable organizational aggregate data if we don't have multi-rater, it's going to be very difficult if it's all self-respondent. Next, program your intervention. Targeted training. The training can take many forms, many functions, and it varies by organization. So, we're not going to say this is exactly how you need to go and program your training. But there does need to be training.

0:28:39.4 Tim: You got it.

0:28:39.7 Junior: And it needs to be intentional. It needs to be based on whatever the outcome was of the measurement. And then we have to monitor and maintain. It's something that needs to be incorporated behaviorally into the leadership of the organization. It needs to be incentivized. People need to see that there are others being promoted because of performance in these areas, others being let go because of nonperformance in these areas. It needs to be really clear to people that, "Oh, this is how we do better. This is how we go farther here in this organization."

0:29:15.3 Tim: They need to see evidence of that.

0:29:16.7 Junior: They do. And the evidence of nonperformance that needs to be plentiful, that, "Hey, this type of behavior, the punishing vulnerability, that's not acceptable here." Right? If they don't see that and it becomes normalized and accepted, and in some instances, revered, like he gets performance, she gets performance regardless of how it happens, that's not.

0:29:42.4 Tim: Okay, well, Junior, let's also point out that when we say training, we're also incorporating action planning into that. That's part of it. It's embedded in that so that you're coming out of that, it's not just about raising awareness and understanding and appreciation. You're coming out of that with a behavioral plan. That you're going to apply, you're going to implement for a period of time in a very systematic way. So that becomes part of the intervention, and then we measure again after that. So, I just wanted to highlight that.

0:30:22.6 Junior: I appreciate it. We want to spend a couple of minutes on deliberate practice. You'll notice that deliberate practice is at the core of what we have prescribed in these areas for the individual, the team, and the organization. Why? What's deliberate practice? It's feedback-guided, systems-oriented, attention focused, future-minded, and refinement seeking, it is constantly going in a loop. Normal practice, what do we care about? Oh, we just do the thing a whole bunch of times, right. And hope for the best.

0:30:54.3 Tim: Right.

0:30:54.8 Junior: That's not what we do with deliberate practice. The action planning piece is part and parcel. In every single training we do, you will see action planning. There is no intervention we do where actual planning is absent. Right?

0:31:08.3 Tim: It's always part of it, yeah.

0:31:10.4 Junior: So the characteristics of deliberate practice, I think, are interesting because often we talk about this concept as it relates to the individual. But what about deliberate practice as it relates to the organization or a group of people? I think that we don't spend enough time there. So what could we do? That's feedback guided, systems oriented, attention focused, future-minded, and refinement seeking. These things measure, improve. Measure, improve. Measure, improve. Do those things across time and you'll end in a much better situation than where you started.

0:31:43.4 Tim: I would add one thing to it, Junior, that we found as we're working with teams all over, and that is that when you, you take your action plan, that becomes your deliverable from training. But when you implement, you're doing it in a synchronous way with your team. You're all working together. Now, you may be working on different things because your action plan is individualized, but you're in lockstep. You're on a schedule together. You reinforce each other, you encourage each other, you hold each other accountable. There's peer-based accountability. You're in sync. Very important part of this. You're not just off doing your own thing by yourself. Yeah.

0:32:25.6 Junior: So how do we measure? We use two instruments, EQ index, PS index. As we said, it's important that you use a validated instrument. So we're going to deploy this to get data at the level of the individual. We're going to send this out to the organization, get institutional data based on the results of those. We're going to do our programming.

0:32:43.8 Tim: That's right.

0:32:44.3 Junior: So let's talk about the sequence idea. I know it took us a second to get here, but psychological safety, EQ, let's say that we've recognized the relationship. Well, which one gets priority? Is there a priority? Is there some idea of sequence here? We would say "Yes, but it depends," which is an answer we often use. So if you. Well, let's talk about some of the differences. I suppose psychological safety is a much easier metric to deploy for broad organizations and big numbers. Way easier, much more actionable, and it gives us a baseline. So your knee-jerk reaction might be based on the logic that we've laid out. Well, if EQ is at the individual level and it's the basic unit.

0:33:36.1 Tim: Yeah. And the primary enabler for psychological safety, then wouldn't you logically go back and start with EQ?

0:33:48.2 Junior: Fair, but no. Often we would say in order for that to be most effective, we need to figure out where we are institutionally as it relates to the outcome. So we want psychological safety. How are we doing in psychological safety today? Now, a few reasons for this. As I said, logistically, it's easier to do, it's less expensive, it's less complicated. So logistically, there are some advantages. Conceptually, if we're looking for the outcome, we want to measure the outcome first because we want to see what happens as we tweak the intervention well.

0:34:28.8 Tim: We want to see where we're at.

0:34:30.1 Junior: Yeah.

0:34:30.5 Tim: So, we begin with the lag measure. It's the lag measure and we don't.

0:34:34.5 Junior: And we don't want to bias our audience either. And that's something that we've learned with organizations over time, is if you just hit people out of left field with the PS instrument, you'll get a better data set than if you prime them by saying, "Hey, now, we really care about psychological safety and emotional intelligence and all of these things that we're going to be doing now," that can bias your data.

0:34:54.5 Tim: Good one.

0:34:54.9 Junior: Now, certainly cat's going to be out of the bag at some point, but we want just hey, today, out of left field, how do people feel today? Then we can figure out what to do next. So let's go back to the very beginning. What is emotional intelligence? It's awareness, motivation, and behavior as those three things relate to you and to other people. So you'll see in the EQ index model, six domains, right? Self-awareness, social awareness, motive, self-regard, social regard.

0:35:30.3 Tim: Which is the source of your motivation.

0:35:32.1 Junior: And then the management competencies. Right? Those six domains enable us to do this, which is so important. This is the end all be all, it's where we want to end up. Identify, validate, and encourage. But if we don't develop the awareness, if we don't have the right motivation from a true sense of regard for other people, if we don't have behaviorally, the skills necessary, we will never get there.

0:35:58.1 Tim: That's right.

0:35:58.8 Junior: And so if you're in your organization right now, thinking about psychological safety, you have to have the conversation about EQ. You have to. Because how are you going to be able to achieve your psych safety goals without the requisite inputs?

0:36:12.7 Tim: That's right.

0:36:13.2 Junior: You're not going to be able to.

0:36:14.3 Tim: That's the lead measure and that's how everyone should think of it. Emotional intelligence is your lead measure. Psychological safety is your lag measure.

0:36:22.0 Junior: I love that.

0:36:22.6 Tim: And the enabling relationship between the two is, that's how you build the psychological safety. There's no other way to get there.

0:36:32.0 Junior: Last little tidbit on that. One of the things that you may see is when you measure psychological safety organizationally by team, and you see what we call red zones, environments of punished vulnerability, often it's going to be an EQ problem of the leader.

0:36:51.4 Tim: True.

0:36:52.0 Junior: That allows you to be very specific with your intervention. It informs a lot of behavior. So if you can say, "Okay, institutionally, this is where we're at. Psych safety is low over here. We probably have a leadership issue over there and its roots. Probably an EQ," that's powerful.

0:37:11.0 Tim: It is.

0:37:12.1 Junior: What else would you say as we wrap up today's conversation?

0:37:16.1 Tim: Well, I would say that this becomes, this relationship between emotional intelligence and psychological safety is the anatomy of culture in an organization. And this becomes the foundation for all development efforts. So take a look at your, all of you organizations out there. Take a look at your curriculum. Your leadership development curriculum, your talent management curriculum. Everything is built on top of a foundation that is emotional intelligence and psychological safety. That's your cultural foundation right there. So regardless of whatever else you're doing, if that foundation is not there, you don't pass go.

0:38:00.5 Junior: I love that. Couldn't say it better myself. So with that, we'll just go ahead and end. Tim, thank Thanksgiving you for your time today. Appreciate the conversation. I think we covered some good ground, and in some subsequent episodes, we're going to get into the actual instruments that we mentioned, EQ index, and PS index. So those will be forthcoming for anybody watching. Thank you for spending your time with us today. We realized that you could spend it elsewhere. You could be doing other things. So thank you for giving us some of that time, some of that attention today. Please let us know in the comments what you liked, what you didn't like, what we would like to see in future episodes. And please subscribe if you haven't already. We will see you next time on The Leader Factor. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.

0:38:55.0 Tim: There's a lot there. That's a lot.

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