Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast Reverb, a conversation designed to help leaders go even further faster by digging deeper into this month's episode.

I'm your host, Susie Gray. Last week, Andy was joined by Charles Duhigg for a conversation about the surprising role psychological safety plays in the workplace.

Andy, I think it was really interesting.

You guys kept making the point of this is not theoretical. This is practical.

Well, and I made the point that years ago when I first heard about psychological safety,

I'm like, what is that? Yeah. And then when it got defined for me, I'm like, oh yeah,

I've worked in places where there's not psychological safety.

It's a real thing. It's not fun. Yes. I know. You sit in a meeting and you know you need to say something, but you think so long and hard about how you're going to say it because you don't feel safe. And you don't think about it as safety. You think about I don't want to look dumb. I don't want to look bad. I don't want people to roll their eyes. But that's safety. Definitely.

And then now as a as a boss, You think about I don't want to look dumb, I don't want to look bad, I don't want people to roll their eyes, but that's safety.

Definitely.

And then now as a boss or, you know, having direct reports, the last thing I want is somebody sitting in a meeting with me and they want to say something or point something out or push back on something and they're thinking, oh no, what's going to happen?

And again, they don't think in terms of safety, but they're, you know, subconsciously wondering, is it safe to say that?

Am I okay to say this?

Yeah, well, people laugh.

Will people push back?

And the point I made at the beginning of our conversation last week, because we've talked

about this on the podcast, is our intuition is usually indefensible, but I don't

want people to not share their intuition in a meeting because they're like, oh, if I say that,

they're going to ask me why or they're going to ask me how. And again, where there's psychological

safety, people feel free to share thoughts without needing to defend them. And we want everything on the table.

So it's not an HR issue. This is personal. And again, once I understood what it was, I can remember sitting in meetings, maybe like you could as well, wondering, is it okay to say that? Is this the way to say it?

When I was in graduate school, we had a professor

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