One of the key factors in how we get-on in life is our ability to manage our mindset. Like training our bodies for an event, we can also train our minds to deal differently with life and work events. Without this training, we give up personal power and simply react to events around us.

In our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world (VUCA for short), we are often struck with a myriad of ‘triggers’ that can cause us to react. We can become defensive, aggressive, withdraw or become silent. Our ability to manage our mindset in the micro-moment between the trigger and our reaction ensures our own mind-care, as well as the collective mind-care of our workmates.

Often our emotions have automatic behaviours (both micro and macro) associated with them. When someone annoys us, we can roll our eyes, ignore them, pretend to be doing something else, or try to move on; all at a subconscious level. We display many automated behaviours; both helpful and unhelpful.

Hugely complex in it’s creation, the inner core of our brain creates our emotional reactions. Also known as the reptilian brain, its primitive responsive behaviour is designed to keep us safe. 

Whereas the outer cortex of our brain is our “thinking” brain. Massively clever and complex, the boundaries of its potential are yet to be fully explored. 

Unfortunately, the outer cortex of our brain is sometimes not activated during certain events, causing us to react, rather than respond. Putting it in colloquial terms; we can ‘flip our lid’.

When struck with a challenging situation that causes us to go into fear, we may come out fighting, belittle someone else, try to engage others into our behaviour, or retreat into silence and sulkiness. Our reptilian brain takes over. Fear is often a root-cause of this behaviour.

Being able to calm our mind when in this situation is not only vital for our personal mindcare, but also for the collective. This requires us to learn to manage our own mindset during these moments, as well as that of strategies in our collective mindset.

Humans are social beings, driven by a need to belong and feel valued. Psychological safety is the term used to describe the safety that we feel when we are together (Kahn, 1990 [ 1 ]). When in a group of people, we will screen others to evaluate if they will be rejected, ridiculed, mistreated, ignored or be insignificant. This drive to be social is often even more pronounced with people in powerful positions. Our evaluation may cause us to withdraw or move towards someone. 

The thing is, however, this behaviour can be detrimental on a personal and collective level. It can hinder growth and diversity. It can cause us to move towards the more dominant person, or to back-away and become silent. This hinders our ability to share ideas, it also engenders a lack of commitment and accountability. At a collective level, it hinders shared responsibility.   

A lack of psychological safety hinders personal and collective potential.  

• It causes group-think, where we agree to the loudest or most powerful voice.
• It stifles creativity, replacing it with the status quo.
• It causes distrust.
• We avoid critical conversations, in return for keeping the peace at all costs.
• It masks the problems, sending behaviours ‘underground’.
• It causes anger, depression and people to “check-out”.

A lack of psychological safety can disintegrate organisational culture. The following table shows the relationship between Organisational Culture and People Mode. Where is your organisation or leadership situated?