Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
They go on to say this psychological safety is also the absence of negative consequences. And I take issue with that, because I actually disagree with that aspect of it. Because if you try to build in a workplace environment that has psychological safety,and you try to root out negative consequence, then all you're doing is effectively building a lounge where everybody's happy, everybody's comfortable, and there's no real risk.

Jeff Ma  
Hello and welcome to love as a business strategy, a podcast that brings humanity to the workplace. We're here to talk about business but we want to tackle topics that most business leaders shy away from. We believe that humanity and love should be at the center of every successful business. I am your host, as always, Jeff MA and I'm here to have conversations and hear stories with real people about real businesses, real life. And my guest today is Dr Jonathan Thorpe. Jonathan currently serves as the chief learning officer of Quantum Connections, which is a globally recognized leader teaching safe conversations to develop an advanced relational competency based on the neuro and quantum social sciences, fully committed to the lessons he shares on human connectivity, influence and leadership. Jonathan has impacted adult learning across significant time spent in military service, corporate leadership and graduate education. His career service began with 25 years dedicated to the United States Navy as a naval aviator and flight instructor, and this is complimented by his corporate career as vice president of organizational and talent development at JP Morgan Chase. Prior to this, Jonathan served as a VP at JP Morgan in first command financial services. He's also taught military and civilian leaders in strategy, communication, culture and decision making as a graduate school professor at the US Naval War College and the American College of financial services. So with that, I'd love to welcome Dr Jonathan Thor to the show. How are you? Jonathan, great. Thank you. Jeff, wow. So a lot, a lot of stuff I love, I love, I love the bios for all the guests, but yours in particular is just full of, I'm assuming, stories as well over these many, many years of so much teaching and learning.

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
Yeah, for sure, I think if you're paying attention, the stories are always there. And I've certainly learned a great deal and made plenty mistakes, and, you know, paid attention enough to hang on to some of those lessons learned along the way. 

Jeff Ma  
Well, we only have 30 minutes, so I'm going to try to get to the good ones. But let me start with a question I always ask, which is, what is your passion and how did you find it?

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
Great question, my passion is people. My passion is helping people get along better, work better together, and enjoy life a lot more. I think when you're doing those kind of things, you drive home every day thinking, Man, I did the world a good turn. So I think that's the answer. Your question is, it's certainly people

Jeff Ma  
love it. How did you find that passion? How did you arrive at that? 

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
I think I bumped into a lot of broken people along the way, and what surprised me was so many of the things that break people, I think are within their control to fix. And I think once you took a closer look at that and helped a handful of people discover, man, I have the tools to do everything I need to help myself out of the hole that becomes a source of inspiration, and it keeps me going, and, uh, hope to find the next one.

Jeff Ma  
I think, having such extensive experience in both kind of the the military and the course, like, you know, like that sector of of life, and also have worked so extensively in the corporate world, I'm really curious right out the gate of like, your take in general, on on kind of culture as it pertains to the workplace, but also what you learned and gained from from the military space. And I'll give, I know it's, it's I'll give context to why I'm asking the questions, because I think when it comes to the Navy, the military, the army, all these people that I've spoken to, you get the sense that there's something special and important that happens in those environments when it comes to how humans relate, how we how we react, relate to each other, and culture in general, in those spaces. And yet, I think it's not understood by most, because, you know, a lot of people think Navy or Army, and they think strict, very top down, regimented, kind of like the antithesis of what they would want in a workplace. And I was hoping maybe you could start. This is like, maybe off topic, but wanted to hear from you, like having seen your experience in that. What is your take on, I guess, culture as it pertains to those two worlds,

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
I can give you one guy's perspective, right? And in 25 years, there's a lot I came to appreciate about the Navy and certainly the camaraderie that you feel with your brothers and sisters in arms that you know, you're, you know, locked elbow to elbow in a common mission. I think that's really empowering and strengthening. I think very clear, cut core values helped define that culture. We knew what was expected. As you mentioned, there's a fair amount of regimentation, rigor, and you come to expect it, and that becomes comfortable. I think that probably the most distinct thing I experienced in the Navy was the fact that\ you're living in a land of limited resources, and that drives a tremendous amount of sacrifice, whether that's the time away from your family or the risk of your own welfare or the people that work for you or you support, and I think those kind of unique things made the Navy so special to me. And they're the same kinds of things I try to promote and carry over and transfer into civilian cultures. Some civilian cultures have all of those things, but the ones that don't, you try to at least offer them to consider adding those things in. That

Jeff Ma  
makes a lot of sense. I never thought of it from the from the angle of resource, I guess, because I think it does make sense that when when you see, when you hear of successful corporate teams in in that space, it's often because they're scrappy startups trying to, they're all aligned on trying to get one thing done, and you're not going to hear about toxic culture and these small, close knit, kind of, like, you know, you know, those teams. And then we get, I guess, comfortable. I guess we get, I guess it gets bigger and it gets harder to like, what happens after that?

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think a well funded team can do anything. The problem is there. There eventually runs a point where you run out of resources. There is a limit to everything. And I think when you bump into resource limitations, you have to dig down and say, how else are we going to solve this if we don't have the time, the resources or the manpower to solve it the way we should. You know, you dig deep, and then you you innovate and you solve it. And I think that's what is so special about nearly every single team I was a part of in the military and what a lot of civilian teams are now learning, you know, how to adopt.

Jeff Ma  
So let's jump over to psychological safety. Just a hard jump. Here, we've, we've talked about it before. Here, it's a widely used word nowadays, I would say much more compared to go back a few years, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't even understood by many at all. But what is your, I guess, what's your elevator pitch on psychological safety from your perspective, yeah, it's a relatively new term, I think in, you know, in business parlance, it's only been around for 25 years. I think Amy Edmondson, a business professor at Harvard Business School, coined the term back in 99 and since then, I think it's been very commonly understood to be this sense of being, you know, having the safety in an environment to be yourself, you know, to speak up, to take calculated risks, to make mistakes and to admit mistakes and to learn from mistakes. If all those things are present, conventionally speaking, most people would consider you to have psychological safety present. They go on to say this, psychological safety is also the absence of negative consequences. And I take issue with that, because I actually disagree with that aspect of it. Because if you try to build in a workplace environment that has psychological safety, and you try to root out negative consequence, then all you're doing is effectively building a lounge where everybody's happy, everybody's comfortable, and there's no real risk. And I would substitute out the absence of negative consequences to saying this environment is free from unreasonable or embarrassing or humiliating consequences, and that you now have accountability present for people to actually take ownership of the things they do. They feel comfortable to make mistakes. They feel comfortable to take risks, but if they screw up, they know they throw up their hand and they say, that's on me, but they also know that they're responsibly proportionate and expected, and won't be so unreasonable that they risk their job or their livelihood because they were told to innovate. They go and take a risk and they get fired for it. You see, that's inconsistent in my head, and that's why I like to say psychological safety are all of those traditional things like speaking up, taking risks and making mistakes, but also a very healthy amount of accountability, so that there's also.

Ownership for reasonable consequence. I think therein, to me, lies the challenge right of of psychological safety. And I think, help me, help me navigate this one piece of the equation where one psychological safety over the last, as you mentioned, 25 or so years, has been a thing. Now everyone's saying we need psychological safety, and what I've seen is as soon as people say we need to be psychologically safe, all the psychological safety is sucked out of the room, because everyone's like, Oh, we better be psychologically safe so we're not allowed to be, you know, like, it's almost like it creates this meta issue to solve, because we're talking about psychological safety. What's the right way to approach it?

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
Well, I would tell you this. I think a lot of companies chase the appeal of psychological safety. They want to havethe appearance of safety in the workplace so that people feel like they can innovate and take risks. But I think that's as far as it goes for many people, because as soon as it becomes time for real accountability, a lot of corporate environments today are not very experienced in accountability. They hang on to blame and they love attribution and fault finding is still a very real part of their ethos. And that's tough that when those things are real and and everyone on the floor knows it, because you can't escape that reality when, when something goes wrong and somebody says, I need a name because somebody's head is on the block for this, that that's not a psychologically safe environment. And so once people know that that's the reality, they don't care what the claim is that we're going to try to establish in our culture, the reality is it ain't safe, and so they don't feel safety.

Jeff Ma  
Really, really well put that makes a lot of, I think a lot of people relate to that. And so I guess the question leads to, what is the right way, I guess, to do it, because it is one of those things that feels like it's on the mouths of all of the executives, saying we need to do this, and even with often with good intent, to be honest, right? Like they often want to become leadership that is psychologically safe. They don't want people to live in fear. But what kind of what are they doing wrong? Like, what do they need to where should they start to make this actually work?

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
My experience is most people presume. They just think, if I ask for psychological safety, I will get it and that most people would know what to do. And that's where most companies fall short. They make the what and they ask for psychological safety, but they don't know themselves how to build it and how to deliver it. And so there are a number of tools, actual habits and behaviors and processes you can adopt to promote actual psychological safety, things like a culture of affirmations, about affirming everybody's unique value. There's a way to do that, and there's a way to teach that, things like a zero negativity climate. And how do we pursue a place where we try to minimize as much negativity as possible? Now the criticism of that approach. As people say, Well, this is the business world. There are some realities, and sometimes we have to talk tough, and we have to coach and counsel and have a one on one with somebody, where the answer is not always pleasant, but you can do that in a negative, free way, believe it or not. We also coach, or you can coach how to become more aware on the work floor and actually try to suspend judgment just for a second to allow things like curiosity and empathy in. And finally, one of the most concrete skills you can do is actually to practice a two way dialog as a matter of routine. Now you think, well, we want to improve our way of communication, sure, but if you think about it and take a closer look, most people are still monologuing at one another, even in a conversation with two people. And while one person is talking, the other person is formulating their response, they're processing their rebuttal, they're processing their defense, and they're not really fully exhausting the other person's perspective first, and it is the the the prototypical race to be understood before you're done trying to understand the other person. And we get that wrong all the time. And so those are a couple things I would say globally you want to do, install a culture of affirmations, promote zero negativity, build awareness, and finally, establish structured dialogs. That sounds kind of fairly macro and strategic, maybe on a tactical basis. Here's what I'd say, people can actually do a handful of things right now, and the first one, I would say, is make psychological safety an explicit strategy.

You tell your teams that you are becoming more psychologically safe aware, and that this is an interest that you have to promote on the floor. So make it explicit. The next thing I would say is make sure that you expressly ensure everybody speaks up and in meetings go around the table and make sure everybody chimes in. It's not enough to sit silently and nod your head and remain silent because the company is paying you to have an opinion and make the expectation that I'm going to actually build input from all of you, the next thing I would do is actually make sure people normalize failure and actuall\y promote the existence of failure as proof that we are still trying to innovate, and that every failure is still something gained, something learned, if we're paying attention. And the last thing I would do is actually, by your example, promote a better measure of dialog, and when someone finishes talking, you can mirror that back, or you can reflect back what you thought you heard. Now, we're all humans. We all make mistakes. So there's a good chance, if Jeff, you were to share a message with me and I tried to read it back to you, I would probably get most of it, but probably not all of it. And that would give you by mirroring back or reflecting back to you, would give you a chance to say, well, the part you got, Jonathan was this, the part you missed was this. And I could say, good, I've got it now. And before leaving you, I would say, is there any more? Is there any more you want to add? And that's a real culture shock, because if I stop the conversation long enough to say, I'm not done listening, that's a real shift from the norm that most people exhibit in a conversation. So if I stop and I say, give you one more chance and I say, anything else to add, your first reaction might be, this is a little weird. I'm not used to being asked to continue, but here's somebody that's trying to invest time in interest and curiosity into me, and it's kind of cool. So I think by doing all those things, you're starting to plug in a little bit more psychological safety to the workflow. And those are usually always good things.

Jeff Ma  
Wow, absolutely. And yeah, I use it a couple of times, but it stood out over and over. Is the concept of curiosity and empathy littered throughout that that process, which I agree, is something I think, that has gone missing in the average workplace nowadays, we show up. We have something to do. We want to get it done, get to the point, and there's this element of efficiency over effectiveness that has kind of pervasively spread in the workplace. I'm curious about the concept of trust, relational trust, or trust between peers. I know you didn't explicitly state that, but a lot of things that you you speak about naturally build trust. Can you speak a little bit about the conflict, the element of trust, and out as it pertains to the psychological safety.

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
Again, in my experience, I think trust is a result of a series of things leading up to that end result. And so once two people are in a dialog, you're you're forming the basis for a real connection. And once connection starts to happen through a mechanism, like a dialog, then you start to see things start to appear like candor and honesty and support, mutual support, also appreciation. And when those things start to stack, I think people are starting to build an expectation that I am safe in this space. And I think once the expectation of safety is repeated, that's what actually establishes the basis for trust. And So trust is easy to want, and we're near immediate and when we expect to see it, but the reality that has to happen over time, and what I've witnessed most is a series of connections allows the construction of trust. It doesn't just happen or appear,

Jeff Ma  
makes sense Absolutely,in that, in that time we're talking about, I guess it's understood that all things human take time to develop and grow. You know, there's, there's so many situations, I think that listeners and people in the world alike are just going through right now that already have history, that already have an element of broken trust or lack of psychological safety,and these things often are not easily forgotten, or at least not easily shaken. Do you have any perspective or approach on how to hit the reset button for these folks, how to try to move quicker through kind of forgiveness, if you will?

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
One of the ways we coach organizations and individuals alike is. To adopt what we call an awareness model, and that's to suggest that everybody, all of us, you and certainly me, we all have histories, and we all have current needs, many of which get met and some of which go unmet, emotional needs, relational needs, but we also have, in a sense, tied to those emotional needs. We have past challenges now, depending on how far back you dial back, they go all the way back to the time we're born, and most of those, we carry forward for the rest of our lives. And in this awareness model, we coach people to recognize that we all have past challenges and we all have unmet needs. And in a two way dialog, you can actually start to solicit some curiosity and some interest in the other person, and on a level that they're comfortable with, they begin to feel comfortable by sharing some of that with you, sometimes all of that with you, but more often than not, that kind of builds iteratively, and they start to share more and more and more when people are faced with these traumatic past challenges or these current unmet needs, the body responds in one of two ways. It's either going to maximize the energy as a defense or it's going to minimize the energy as a defense. And some people act out in these maximizing mechanisms. And if you're the observer that the behavior looks funny to you, sometimes unexplainable. And equally, the people that minimize the energy related to this, they retreat, they exhibit behaviors that also are unexplainable and a mystery to people. And I think what we try to coach is to remind people that we all suffer from these histories of past challenges and that they probably have valid reasons to that person. And I think once that person becomes willing to share, sometimes, sometimes they don't ever share as is the right. But once they become mindful of that everybody has this list of challenges and unmet needs, we become a little bit more tolerant. We start to recognize, hey, if I've got challenges and needs like this, chances are they do also, and that's when I can maybe suspend my judgment of their funny behavior long enough to say maybe I should try to demonstrate some empathy and not try to judge or guess what they're going through. But ask this sounds like this is a real rough spot to be in. I'd love to learn more if you're willing to share and reach out and demonstrate. I'd like to see the world through your eyes, if you let me, and not through my eyes. And this is a tangent, but this is where sympathy goes wrong on the way to empathy. A lot of people try to demonstrate the right kind of response, and they say something like, oh my gosh, you just lost a parent. I lost my mom six months ago, and I know exactly how you feel, to which everybody responds, No, you don't. You don't have a clue how I feel. How could you? So I think we try to coach an awareness of past challenges and needs, and try to promote a sense of empathy to experience the world through the other person's eyes, so they can remain curious to their experience. And I think that's when we start to become a little bit more grace filled, and we can start to forgive, certainly our own behavior, but also the behavior of other people. That's a that's a long answer to your short question, but maybe I got halfway there. 

Jeff Ma  
Oh, I love this. And curiosity and empathy are words that constantly come up in all the work I do in the conversations, and it's such a key thing. And I didn't know you coming in the show like before, like how you would approach answers to these questions, but the fact that you keep going back to curiosity and empathy is just so powerful for me, because it's just, it's missing so off, like we just, we just have, like you said, one way conversations, we have debates, and we don't have dialogs. And it's just like, so much could change for us if we started in this space, like not just in psychological safety, but just in culture, in general, relationships and everything.

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
And we certainly need it right this, this particular country has never been more polarized, and I think we need to do something right now to stem that tide and to learn more about other people, to accept a wider range of differences and get beyond those differences so we can connect and stay connected. You know, we have a fundamental need to work together as human beings, and right now that we're doing a lot, that's flying in the face of that, and I think it's time to change that.

Jeff Ma  
Couldn't agree more. My last kind of area of questioning is around self awareness. I think speaking from maybe, let's say, a leadership perspective, because, as we know, leaders have the an outsized influence on culture and psychological safety, obviously. So what? What are some ways to help like.

Unknown Speaker  
Say I'm a listener, and I'm like, Hey, this is all great stuff. But you know, maybe in this moment, you're not recognizing that this could be about you, because, like we mentioned earlier, it's not always intentional. Oftentimes, we think we're doing a good job, where we're trying our best and but it's those we may be doing small things or even large things unintentionally that create psychological safeties, you know? Because a lot of times people think, you know, we focus a lot on intent, and we think, oh, you know, like, I want a psychological safe and it's true, you genuinely want to form a psychologically safe space. But the way in which you go about doing it, or the way you speak and the way you treat others like it's just, it is just not. It's doing the opposite, if it has an impact that you didn't intend. So how do, how do we, if we're speaking directly to that person right now, the person who has no idea that this is about them, where do they start? Where? Where do they start? Forming some awareness.

Dr, Jonathan Thorp  
Self awareness is critical for anybody, but maybe twice as much for a leader. If they're going to try to be influential and an effective steward of the welfare of the people on their team, they have to start with self awareness. I think when I have this conversation with people that we coach, we try to define self awareness in a couple of different dimensions. Most people say, oh, I need to know how I act. And it's more than that. You not just need to know the inside of you, but you also need to know the outside of you and how you interface with the rest of the world. If you take the first half the inside you, it's not just being self aware, but it's also being able to self manage and control the motivations and the fears and your personal agenda. That's the first half of self awareness is being internally aware and able to self manage. The other half of self awareness, believe it or not, involves the outside world, and a person needs to promote an awareness first of how their relationships act between other people. It's not enough to just know how you act. You could say, Well, I'm a jerk to most of the people I interact with. That's not enough. You also have to manage that, and by being self aware, you actually actively try to influence those relationships on the outside world, as well as your motivations and your agenda inside. So now you ask the question, how do you become more self aware? I think one of the best ways is to solicit honest, two way conversations from people at all levels. You've heard of the expression, you know, a 360 evaluation. I think it's well placed. I think you want to survey from the people that you report to. I think you can probably expect most of the tone of those assessments, but you also want to survey wide left and right to the people that are peers, perhaps have similar roles as you do, or similar responsibilities, and ask questions like, how good of a partner, am I? And what two or three words would you use to characterize me when I'm not in the room? And maybe my favorite aspect of this is asking south and actually soliciting one or two levels south of your current role, and asking those people, how are you perceived, and how are you helping, and how are you hurting their role and their function in the organization? And I think that's one of the ways that you can actually build self awareness. I think opening up your aperture and reading as much as you can about,

you know, non fictional accounts of people that have overcome great challenges, and what kind of circumstances did they rise through? I think that helps raise a person's awareness and gives them perspective about, you know, how you see the world and how you affect the world. That's where I'd start.

Jeff Ma  
Well, you have given 30 minutes of some of the most potent, compact, kind of amazingly powerful, well phrased psychological safety information. So I really, really appreciate and thank you for this. This, this 30 minutes that has flown by. Thank you. Dr. Jonathan, yeah, it was a lot of fun. Jeff, thank you for having me on Absolutely. And I want, I wanted to make sure, if anyone wants to check you out, learn more about you, or if you have anything to promote, let us let us know what's going on. Yeah, absolutely. Our work at Quantum connections is groundbreaking and will change the world by adding these powers of psychological safety and dialog around the world. If you have an interest, either for yourself, personally, or for perhaps your organization. Check us out on quantum connections.com, and you can contact me and you can learn more about our mission. Awesome. I'll drop a link in the show notes for the listeners on that. But again, awesome stuff. I really, really appreciate the way you framed everything and the way you think the things Can tell. I mean, it just really connects all the dots so well for me, and so I hope the listeners, I expect listeners, also had a similar experience so awesome having you on the show. Thank you so much for being here today. It was my pleasure, and I appreciate your time. Yeah, to the listeners, thank you so much as well. Hope you're still checking out love as a business strategy, not just the podcast but the book. And we hope you're appreciating all this content, and if you have any feedback, let us know. Give us some ratings on Amazon, podcast, everything. So with that, we will see you on two weeks we're signing off!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai