How does your boss make you feel?

Do you feel psychologically safe at work, able to speak up, give feedback, make suggestions, express opinions, all while being your authentic self and feeling valued and respected for it? This might sound like an urban myth to some, but it’s an everyday reality for those working with good managers.

We know that psychological safety is an essential requirement in a healthy relationship. As young children we learn how fundamental it to our survival and throughout life we seek this condition in our important relationships. Even at work, we rely on good working relationships to get things done, make progress and succeed. Since man first collaborated, the boss/employee relationship has been studied for its flaws, so you would think that we would have got it right by now, but the struggle for fair practice continues.

Role Models and Mentors

What we don’t hear enough about, are the positive, healthy working relationships that we can learn so much from and ought to emulate. We learn by example and tend to treat others as we are treated, so our relationship with our bosses is incredibly influential and impacts how we relate to colleagues, and it affects our private lives too. Identifying leadership behaviours that role model a positive mental health and wellbeing culture offers huge potential for mentoring and upskilling managers. Managing people is a serious responsibility so appropriate training, a collaborative attitude and a people-centered approach is essential for creating a healthy working culture.

The adage, ‘people will forget what you said, forget what you did, but will never forget how you made them feel’ is profoundly true. How we are treated at work provokes an emotional response which is often long-lasting. We don’t switch our emotions off when we enter the workplace, so acknowledging that people’s emotions matter in the workplace is a fundamental starting point. Our success as economic, social and psychological beings depends on how confident and capable we feel, and this can be fostered or hampered by a boss whose management style contributes to either workplace stress or to success. The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD)’s Wellbeing at Work 2022 report found that ‘management style remains the most common cause of stress at work’ (CIPD 2022), so this is something we can address.

Preventing Problems

Prevention and early intervention of psychological stress in the workplace can mitigate a whole raft of problems and risks that businesses really don’t want, and often don’t know how to deal with. The legal fees and compensation pay outs resulting from workplace mismanagement are just the most obvious cost of allowing a poor management culture. Having a positive emotional culture at work stimulates a powerful influence on financial performance, productivity, creativity, innovation and employee wellbeing and must surely be the cheapest way of improving business overall. Initiatives in workplace wellbeing provide a very high return on investment.

Many of us have experienced working with dreadful managers whose attitudes are damaging and counter-productive, but we have also experienced leaders with compassion, insight, emotional maturity, authentic engagement and a people-orientated attitude. The differences are so stark that one wonders who made these appointments, whether the recruitment process was legitimate or if some people are promoted to managerial roles purely as a result of time served.

While it is important to have clear guidelines on conduct and etiquette at work and that behavioural expectations and rules of engagement are understood and practised by everybody, it is especially important for those in authority. People need to be reassured that they have access to fair and sensible conflict resolution and that issues will be swiftly addressed. People managers need the psychological flexibility to manage in all directions if they are to balance operational demands with human capacity and create, as best they can, a harmonious and secure environment.

Managers who feel psychologically safe at work, welcome the fact that their staff can hold them to account because mistakes can be rectified without fear or embarrassment. However, if your boss doesn’t feel safe at work, it is unlikely that you will, and if you are unable to effect positive change by managing upwards, the cost to your wellbeing may not be worth the salary.

Psychologically Safe Environments

In his article Delving Deeper into ISO 45003, Peter Crush looks at the guidance set out under international occupational health and safety standards to help employers manage psychosocial risks to staff (Crush 2021). In the article, Professor Stavroula suggests that ‘the guidance is not trying to turn line managers into psychologists. It’s more about how organisations create an environment that works ‘in a more preventative way so that psychological issues don’t arise.’

Creating a psychologically safe place where people can work to their best ability relies on managers having emotional maturity, a collaborative attitude and respect for everybody’s contribution to the end goal. As Timothy Clarke, the CEO of LeadFactor explains, ‘A psychologically safe environment will allow you to feel included, safe to learn and contribute [and] challenge the status quo – all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way.’ (Clarke 2020).

According to PsychCentral (2022), an emotionally safe relationship makes you feel seen, heard and understood. So having swift recourse to conflict resolution gives people the confidence to bring up issues before a crisis develops. ‘Being able to report incidents of bullying, sexual harassment or discrimination, and knowing that swift, appropriate steps will be taken is a vital component for safe workplaces. People will only speak up if they are confident in the process and ethos, or they risk becoming targets of abuse’ (Clarke, 2020).

Dr Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School defines psychological safety as, ‘the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes’ and adds that, ‘people want to feel nurtured, listened to, appreciated and supported’ and that [they] should ‘feel able to make a mistake, own it, and learn from it.” (Thompson 2022).

Leadership and Ethos

Having professional leaders with a high degree of emotional maturity, mental agility, integrity, empathy and self-respect will go a long way towards creating the kind of environment where everyone can flourish. We all know that employees, ‘who experience compassionate leadership at work are more likely to report affective commitment to their organisation and to talk about it in positive terms’ (Poorkavoos, 2008).

While developing your healthy working environment, don’t fall for the myth that nothing will ever get done if everyone has a say. This is often the bleatings of a wannabe despot who has no idea of how to gain consensus. Balancing responsibility with the right level of autonomy is a line manager’s job and training, trusting and listening to staff is essential for promoting teamwork - so encourage your staff to turn-up, show up and speak up. However, when striving to create an emotionally healthy workplace, bear in mind that you will never perfectly achieve it. Human nature is too volatile and complex to allow harmony to reign for long. What you can do is show good intention and back this up with a healthy communication ethos that shows through in all your interactions.

The level of psychological safety at work is often a direct reflection of the attitude at the top. We see examples in the press of how a rotten executive attitude filters down, affecting all interactions with its insidious influence and manifesting at every level. Often these companies are start-ups run by young entrepreneurs with no people management skills or established organisations with technocrats at the helm. Not everyone can manage people and that’s OK, so long as expert people managers are employed to look after those valuable human assets, just as specialists are employed to look after the other areas of business.

Good people managers are of immense benefit to employees, senior teams, board members, clients, suppliers, shareholders and the organisation’s reputation as a whole. Psychological safety is good for business, so ask yourself, ‘how does my boss make me feel’? - all the way up - and down the chain of command.

Written by MHScot Team Member, Sonia Last.

Sources:

1. CIPD, 'Health and Wellbeing at Work’ report.
2. Clarke, T, ‘Is it Expensive to be Yourself? How This Golden Question Revels Psychological Safety, Forbes.
3. Crush, P. Delving Deeper into ISO 45003, IOSH Magazine.
4. Poorkavoos M, Research paper, Compassionate Leadership: What it is and why do organisations need more of it?, Roffey Park Institute, West Sussex.
5. PsychCentral, What are the benefits of an emotionally safe relationship, online blog.
6. Forbes Business Council, Expert Panel, 15 Ways To Promote Psychological Safety At Work.
7. Thompson, F. 'What is psychological safety and how does it help you to retain talent?', HR Grapevine.

Legislation and Guidance for workplace safety:

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence
Health and Safety Executive (HSE)
Health and Safety at Work Act 1974
The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999
Mental Health Act 1983
Mental Capacity Act 2005
Equality Act 2010
Human Rights Act 1998
Data Protection Act 2018