Psychological Safety and Decoding DEI with Sona Sherrat

In this episode, we talk DEI and psychological safety. Bill Banham's guest is Sona Sherratt, a faculty member at Ashridge (Hult International Business School) where she designs, teaches, and is an academic client director for customized education programs.

Sona has worked with FTSE 500 clients such as Worldline, Amcor, Swarovski, Beazley, Heineken, Avis, and SAB Miller.

Questions for Sona include:

• How did you become interested in the topics of psychological safety and inclusivity?
• What is the difference between diversity and inclusion? Why should organizations be pursuing DEIB?
• What area within this field did you pursue your research in? What is the scope/methodology of your research?
• What are some examples of unwritten organizational rules?
• Were there any findings that surprised/interested you more than others?
• Given what you have discovered through your research, what advice would you give to organizations?

More About Sona

Before joining Ashridge, Sona worked as Head of HR for Astra Zeneca UK and for Nortel Networks covering Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific regions.
Sona designs and delivers senior leadership programs for clients around the world. Her interests are focused on the development of executive leadership and organizational culture, particularly focusing on underpinning high performance with psychological safety, inclusive leadership, and learning agility.


We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast, and Iceni Media Inc.   

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. I'm your host today, bill Bannum. In this episode, we're going to talk about DEI, psychological Safety and Inclusivity. My guest this time is Sona Sherrat, a faculty member over at Asbridge, where she designs, teaches and is an academic client director for customized education programs. Sona has worked with FTSE 500 clients such as Worldline. Hey, sona, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the show today.

Speaker 3: 0:55

Thank you very much for having me, Bill.

Speaker 2: 0:57

So, beyond my reintroduction, sona, why didn't you start by taking a minute or two and telling our listeners all about yourself and what you get up to?

Speaker 3: 1:05

Let me go all the way back and say that I was born in India and I was nine when we moved. My family moved to the States, so much of my formative years then were spent in the United States, and we can come back to that as to I think that was quite important in the work that I am doing now. So I grew up in the United States, in and around New York, new Jersey and Philadelphia. I did my undergraduate and graduate degrees there before I met and married my British husband and moved to the UK, so I've been here for a very long time. I was in pharmaceuticals before I joined Asbridge 20 years ago. I'm a psychologist and, as you rightly pointed out in the introduction, a lot of my work is with organizations that are global and, in particular, that are interested in developing their senior leader population, middle and senior leader population in terms of leadership, in terms of emotional intelligence, in terms of motivating others and teamwork.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Thanks for tuning in to the HR chat podcast. If you're enjoying this episode, we'd really appreciate it if you could subscribe and leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice. And now back to the conversation.

Speaker 2: 2:40

Wonderful. Thank you very much. Let's jump straight into the main content of today's conversation and, as I mentioned in the intro, we are talking all things DEI, psychological safety and inclusivity today, listeners, in your opinion, so now, what is the difference between diversity and inclusion? And, as part of the answer, perhaps you can suggest what? Why should organizations be pursuing DEI be?

Speaker 3: 3:04

initiatives. Okay, so maybe if we just step back and that acronym DEI be so. It stands for diversity and E is for equality. Or some people say equity, I say equality, I is inclusion and B is a sense of belonging. And so for me, this idea of diversity is the first step into this picture.

Speaker 3: 3:36

Because without diversity and genuine diversity and by that I mean visible diversity and visible, you know you can pretty quickly tell that I'm a woman. If you see me, you can tell I'm a person of color, perhaps. So there are some things that you can see straight away. And then there's lots of invisible diversity. That could be my religion, it could be my sexual orientation, it could be even my style, my behavioral characteristics, whether I have any issues in terms of my mental health. There's, there's lots of ways in which we are different.

Speaker 3: 4:22

So diversity is this idea that there's, there's lots of power that comes from differences, differences in lived experiences, differences in ideas that people can bring through those lived experiences. But for me that is only the first step, because inclusivity goes so much further and the idea of inclusivity is about valuing those differences. And more and more as I get involved in this area, I realize that organizations really have only formative, that they're formatively taking those those early baby steps in this space, where they are exploring ways of bringing diversity of thought in to their organizations, but not taking that next step to think okay, and then, when people do put themselves forward and really try to offer their different points of views, their diversity is that valued, because people won't share their uniqueness until they feel valued. So, going back to that really important question you asked Bill about, why should organizations even care?

Speaker 3: 5:55

So, apart from the ethical, the moral reasons, there is so much data to show that organizations, if they harness that diversity, if they are great at making people feel valued for those differences, the impact is enormous. The positive outcomes for the organization can be huge. The thing that I often say to clients, though, is that when people are bringing people into, bringing diversity into their organizations, what initially happens is that that the conversations become become more muted rather than more exciting and more rich, because people will wait to see how different ideas are received, and it's only when they see that there is genuine curiosity, a welcoming of different ideas, that's when they will cautiously come out of their shells and start to offer their their views, and that's where genuine innovation happens, and that's what we're looking for in our current VUCA world volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

Speaker 4: 7:32

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the HR Chat Show. Iea training provides professional development to a changing workforce with changing needs, and we're proud to support this episode of the HR Chat podcast. Iea offers lots of courses, webinars and on-demand training to meet our students where they are and help them reach their goals. We're proud of our contribution to better risk analysis and high operating standards in the industry. Learn more at IEAtrainingorg. And now back to the conversation.

Speaker 2: 8:04

One thing that you're keen to chat about today was unwritten organizational rules, so now I wonder if you can share some examples of those with us now, as part of also talking to us a bit more about the scope and the methodology of your research.

Speaker 3: 8:22

Yeah, I'm happy to thank you. So I'm if I just step back for a second and share with you that Initially, when I started to look at what I wanted to study in depth, it had nothing to do with psychological safety and it had nothing to do with Diversity or inclusion. In fact, I had gone down a completely different route, which was about learning agility, and how do we speed up our learning in this world that is moving at a faster and faster pace. And when I started to look at learning agility, what I realized a little bit to my surprise, is that in order for us to learn really, we need to be out of our comfort zones. But that also means that we will likely make mistakes, we will fail, we will ask or we should be asking for feedback and all of those things are vulnerable making right and we tend not to allow ourselves to be put into a situation where we might feel that we are embarrassed, we are humiliated by getting something wrong. So we want to not do that, we stop ourselves from doing that, and it's only when leaders create environments In which there is psychological safety. Amy edmondson has done a lot of great work about psychological safety and really creating a space in which leaders are humble and they seek as many different opinions as they can, and they are curious in their nature. It's only when we're able to do that that we encourage people to learn at this faster and faster pace. So then I started to focus more on this idea of psychological safety and on inclusive leadership, a leader that really seeks out as diverse of a Of opinions as possible so that they are able to create innovative spaces, so that they're able to to move at a faster pace, and I started to explore these ideas of what's stopping organizations, or what is it?

Speaker 3: 10:52

When I was talking earlier about organizations are just taking their baby steps. I'm finding that a lot, of, a lot of organizations are. When they're making these baby steps, people are are seeing things that organizations may not always realize are apparent, and some of these things are unwritten rules. So we are, as as employees were, cleverer, I think. Then you know that. Then we realize and we start to recognize that there are unwritten rules in every organization. That's what creates the culture right of an organization. So some of the unwritten rules, that that I've done research with three really big global organizations and they are deliberately different organizations Because I wanted to understand what's happening, not only within different industries or different organizations, but also are there kind of meta patterns that are happening?

Speaker 3: 12:03

And so I realized that these unwritten rules are things that people are there. They're tiny things that people are picking up, so I'll give you some examples, thank you. There was a person who said to me in my organization, the first person that speaks up in a meeting, that's the person that has all the power. Someone else said we are organized often in our meeting rooms in a U shape and it's the person who sits in the middle of that U. That's the person you've got to look at, because they will have the power In another organization.

Speaker 3: 12:48

The individual said just out of sheer numbers, even though there is a growing set of promotions for women, for example in this organization, there's not enough women in senior leadership, and without the numbers of women, that means that the women don't speak truth to power. So although they are there maybe one or two women in very senior roles they tend not to speak up, and actually research shows this. So there's some really recent research that says just in a board meeting, you'll need to have a minimum of three women in order for them to feel safety in those numbers in order for them to speak up and share their perspective. So this keeps coming up, that we know more in the subtle nuances about what's happening and as to whether it's safe to speak up, as to whether there is enough of us that we've got safety around us to know that when we share something, there will be others who are quote unquote like us, who will support us.

Speaker 3: 14:14

And we know that in organizations, the leader in particular has a lot more power than they think they do in being able to create that safe space so that people do get past those initial reticence and they do start to share their uniqueness. That's what we need in order to truly move forward. Because organizations. My allegation is that it is only our ability to learn faster than our competitors. That is what's going to hold us in the best stead. We can't be like we used to 10, 20, 30 years ago, that we were creating a product, for example, faster. At this stage, it is just about our ability to learn faster. That's going to hold us in a space that we will continue to thrive and grow in our organizations.

Speaker 2: 15:22

Okay. So I guess what else, given what you have discovered through the research, what you've just shared with us a moment ago, any other advice you'd give to organizations as we look to, we're going to be concluding this interview in just a couple of minutes. That's crazy. The time has flown by Any other advice from the research that you've done?

Speaker 3: 15:41

So I guess two things that have really come up through my research. The first is that employees are looking and they are really noticing whether organizations mean what they say. So if an organization is kind of making superficial attempts at diversity and inclusion, my research is showing that people see that they can see through that. So I would say be genuine, be authentic as an organization and be clear so say look, this is we are working towards a longer term goal and this is what we aim to do this year and here's our strategy for the coming years. So I would say absolutely be as genuine and authentic as you can. It is my first advice to organizations. My second advice would be really notice what are the unwritten rules, because those unwritten rules are really pervasive. So check what's being said, either consciously or unconsciously. To employees, that almost matters more than the policies, the written policies that are being dispersed throughout the organisation. I'm noticing that people are paying more attention to what's not said than to what is being said, or equal at best. But my research is really saying that employees are noticing the un-said and working to that.

Speaker 3: 17:36

And then I would say think hard about what's really important to you as an organisation, because if you believe that innovation, that learning, is genuinely important, then we've got to get under the skin of that and understand that it is about valuing inclusivity, valuing difference of opinion, and that will mean really talking with leaders about how do we do that on a day to day basis. I think we often don't realise that we're asking the right questions, but we may not be following up with the listening, the in-depth understanding, if we're asking some questions. We've also got to move ahead and make sure that people we are showing people that we do want to listen, we do want to change, we do want to hear the difference of opinions that people are sharing with us, and that's a skill, that's a learned skill. That is absolutely we're able to do it. We've just got to focus on it and understand what we're doing to either encourage or discourage the difference of opinions.

Speaker 2: 19:02

OK, and on that note, listeners, that takes us to the end of this particular conversation. It just leaves me to say, for today, so now, thank you very much for being my guest.

Speaker 3: 19:12

Thank you for inviting me very much, Bill.

Speaker 2: 19:14

And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 19:21

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