The Shortlist Episode 62: Psychological Safety in AEC Marketing

The importance of psychological safety, particularly in high-pressure industries like architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC), is having a moment—and for good reason! This episode of The Shortlist delves into how stress, especially secondary stress from pressure and insecurity, can negatively affect communication and team dynamics.

Middle of Sixers Wendy, Allison, and Becky share their own experiences and emphasize that psychological safety—defined as a workplace environment based on respect, trust, and open communication—is essential for fostering creativity, collaboration, and overall well-being. In short, when people feel safe, they perform better, which in turn leads to better outcomes for businesses, whether it's the bottom line or the quality of work produced.

CPSM CEU Credits: 0.5 | Domain: 6

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to The Shortlist.

We're exploring all things AEC marketing to help your firm win The Shortlist.

I'm Wendy Simmons, and today we're talking with Allison Tivnon and Becky Ellison to discuss psychological safety.

Hey, Allison.

Hey, Becky.

Hey, Wendy.

Hey, Becky.

Hey.

This is a very special topic.

I'm glad we're digging into this more than we've just lightly touched in on other episodes.

But before we get into it, let's start with our little warm up here.

I'm very curious.

What are some of your highlights from this week?

It's been a big week, so there's plenty to share, I'm sure.

Allison, you want to start?

Highlights?

This has been an action-packed week.

It's the fourth to last interview training.

I've gone out on the road for of 2024.

Very excited to put the travel behind me, but also just reflecting on all of the people that I've gotten to interact with this year talking about presentation skills and helping them feel more comfortable in talking about themselves and their firms.

I also got to help out two of my clients that I'm working with right now really do that tough, sometimes tough, hard work of identifying new mission, vision, value statements and teeing themselves up for how they're going to carry that forward into the following year.

And I just got to attend an event last night with some of my coworkers to celebrate women in Oregon as part of the Women of Vision Awards ceremony and kind of pinching myself that I got to be counted amongst their ranks this year.

So floating on a cloud, ending out the week.

It's been quite a month of intense work for you.

In particular, I know the whole team is working hard, but being in person, helping with training, getting very personal with teams about how they can do better and make progress and improve, and having a lot of heart in that work, and then working on those mission, vision, values.

It takes a lot out of you.

You know, it's hard to have that back to back, and we're just in that season when that is the demand right now.

Although, the demand is also very much on proposals.

And I know Becky, you've been in proposal land for a long time.

Kyle's not on the mic today.

He's had back to back to back to back proposals.

So it just feels like it is back to school and hunkering down to get all of that kind of meaty work done.

Becky, what are your highlights from this week?

You know, honestly, I've been working with Grace, our social media lead on a project that we're doing about AI nightmares.

And we were rounding up some hilarious, like AI-assisted Photoshop fails that we were just laughing ourselves unconscious, just people with animal faces and scary creatures showing up in photos.

And there's nothing funny about AI coming to take all our jobs.

But it just like, I don't know, like we've seen some real hilarious results from experimenting with that.

And that was just a nice break in the deadlines, break in the pressure, just a fun, real fun time.

A little levity on constant deadlines and trying to rebrand companies and write their brand story and just do your best, best work ever.

Oh, we also need to laugh.

We need to see some dog faces.

Turning Kyle into a baby or like, you know, you have been creating a picture of you with a family of dogs sitting next to you.

You'll see.

That makes it all worth it.

And this episode is probably coming out in the New Year.

So it's all old and go back into our feed and see what we were laughing about as a team.

At that event, Allison was mentioning last night, which was so lovely.

It was it was so inspiring to see all of these.

I think there were 47 women honored.

Everyone had an amazing story.

Allison made me cry.

Allison makes everyone cry when she goes on stage.

It's just so genuine and wonderful.

But the thing I was going to say is, two people came up to me at that event and said, man, I just love your social media.

I'm so jealous of your creativity and what you all put out there.

And I have to remind them like, well, don't forget, don't forget.

This is what we are really focused on, and we've got a pretty big team to do that.

But I like that they're seeing that creativity and we're bringing some levity to their days too.

And it's appreciated.

It's not just all sales and pushing, pushing, pushing.

So anyways, lots of good stuff.

Those are all lovely highlights.

Thanks for sharing.

All right, let's start where there was as much time as we can to talk about psychological safety, very important.

Who wants to give us the overview?

Why this is important?

What we know about it?

Why we think our audience would appreciate the conversation?

I can take a stab at this.

I think a lot of the insights that have been rolling around in my head have come out of these trainings that I've been giving.

I think that there is a lot to be said for the fact that technical staff have a lot of pressure on them.

They are preparing for presentations that are causing them to feel elevated feelings of insecurity, stage fright, just this pressure to bring home the win.

And we have a focus on secondary stress as a part of these trainings in addition to exploring all the different facets of stage fright and how they can affect your ability to show up successfully during your interview prep as well as in the actual interview.

But that stress and really making space to talk about that and the effects of secondary stress when you're bringing that stress into your job and it kind of spills over onto everyone around you that can be this force multiplier for a toxicity that can build up across the team and affect everyone's ability to be really successful and happy in their jobs.

And that's kind of where my head has been is that this is a very pressure filled industry, the day to day of our jobs, whether you're in marketing or on the technical side, it comes with a pressure that we place on ourselves that can affect our ability to communicate well with each other.

And I think a lot of the issues we'll be exploring today with psychological safety do come down to affective or ineffective communication and how we're just able to play well with each other and support each other in the hard work of supporting our firms.

Stressful situations which we are living in, we're not alone, but the marketers and AEC, that's pretty well documented that we're always on a deadline, lots of pressure, jobs, whether we know it or not, are kind of on the line.

You need to win that work so your team can keep going and that sort of thing.

So there's a lot of pressure and being able to work in a place that provides, I don't know, a rough definition of psychological safety is that having respect in the workplace, maybe this goes on beyond the workplace, but we're keeping it in that category for this.

But respect and trust and open communication in the workplace allows for creativity to happen.

And when there's that lack of those elements, you know, people close up, they don't share ideas.

And in the worst case scenario, they're not alerting the team to detrimental issues that are at hand.

They could be a safety issue because they're like, if I'm going to get yelled at, be raided, talked down to, if that's going to be the experience from whoever I'm sharing my experience with, then I'm not going to say anything.

So, yeah.

Stressful environments can put people on edge, and we all want to work somewhere that we can bring our best and bring our ideas and also be wrong sometimes, but not be raked over the coals over that.

Yeah, this is a really important issue, especially in our industry, because architecture, engineering, and construction is a very old industry.

It's a very male-dominated industry.

It's an industry that has been going since the days of way, way back in the day when you didn't have a lot of worker protections, when you didn't have people having conversations about things like safety.

And I think that there's this kind of feeling that skills are divided into hard skills and soft skills, right?

And I think people see stuff like psychological safety, even today, I think, as a soft thing, as an extra thing, as if it's fluff, we don't, that's ridiculous.

Man up and do your job, right?

Is kind of the prevailing attitude, unfortunately, in this industry.

But I think if I could speak to those people who still sort of espouse that feeling, it's that workers, especially creative professionals, marketing people, anybody, even the people, everybody does a better job when they feel safe.

They produce better results.

So if all you care about is the bottom line and getting it done, then you absolutely need to tune in to this because people who are worried that they're being dismissed and laughed at, people who are worried that they're going to get in trouble for every little thing that they can't make mistakes, are not going to create the wonderful results that you want to do a better job, to create a better project, to put out a better product.

So the more that we can work on making ourselves and each other feel safe, the better job we're going to do.

So think of it in terms of, I mean, as a business case, you know, there you go.

Whether you care about people or you care about performance, you care about psychological safety.

Either way.

Yeah.

We need it.

Have either of you experienced, I mean, share what you're comfortable sharing, of course, but experienced workplace instances where you felt psychologically unsafe?

Inklings of that, or maybe hopefully not worse, but.

I think the times when I have felt, well, and I'll take a moment to define what safety feels like for me.

It's going into my job, knowing what to expect from others, and that I have a really clear understanding of what is expected of me, what the desired outcomes are of my work, what my day-to-day workflow is going to look like, and just having some consistency in how I approach each day, that I feel confident in the work that I'm doing, that I'm not missing anything.

But it's also that whiplash you can get when you work with somebody who is telling you one thing about what their needs or expectations are, that you're working together towards a goal, whether it's a proposal or an award submittal or a strategic plan.

And occasionally throughout my career, I've had folks that have not done what they said they were going to do.

And then kind of displace that and put it on me, as though I had done something wrong.

So how did this get missed?

Why didn't this happen?

And this place where there's like accusations or blame, or just trying to push all of the ownership out of that space of feeling like you were collaborating and into a, this is all your fault kind of a space.

And I think that in marketing, a lot of times we are conditioned to feel like the buck stops with us.

And even though it's a team sport to pull a proposal together, if something goes wrong, invariably marketing, all the heads turn to marketing as though we could wave a magic wand and make that, prevent that from happening when we can't really control the behaviors of others.

So, I think it's just when you experience a backlash from somebody else who maybe didn't pull their weight on it, but they can't take ownership of that and it somehow ends up splashing back on to you.

So that's one instance where I've felt that sense of uncertainty, insecurity, bracing myself for what feels like a very unfair amount of scrutiny on my role when it should have been more of a holistic conversation to examine it across everyone who was taking part in trying to make something happen.

Are there any suggestions or steps that you would have liked to have seen, or you would recommend when someone's experiencing that?

Like, what could affirm, or what could leadership, or how could the culture change to make it so that there's more space to understand everyone's role and communicate that?

That's what we're all striving for, I think, is to find a way out of the collision that can happen in those instances.

I think part of its process documentation, making sure that your kickoff meetings are filled with a lot of exploration on roles, responsibilities, assigning things, deadlines.

And we as marketers strive to try and get that stuff nailed down early on in the process.

But there's also a people component to this, and we can't control for that.

It's very hard to manage up, and we're expected to do that a lot.

But it's very intimidating to go to someone that you might perceive as being above you, or more senior to you and telling them that they're doing something wrong, or they're not showing up in the right ways.

It is a two-way street.

But I think that as far as firms go, having those debriefs as teams can either be handled really well, where the conversation is focused on the what, the now what kind of model, instead of the you did this, you didn't do this model.

So some structural changes in that way, in terms of just how you're approaching those difficult conversations.

But then there's also difficult people.

And the supervision and the management of personalities is an area that I think we're constantly striving to get better at that.

And our understanding of how to communicate most effectively with someone is tied very specifically to their communication styles and how they receive feedback.

So a heightened level of emotional intelligence would be really great to have amongst our managers and supervisors in our firms, that when we're messaging things back to those that are in positions where they can relay feedback in a way that we might not always feel empowered to do, that we have a high level of trust that they're going to have our back and be able to successfully get those messages across so that everyone just ends up working better together in the future.

But no clear straight arrow through that question you asked.

You have to know your team well.

You have to invest in understanding them wherever you are in that circle and the dynamic of your team.

You have to take some time to understand what they're going through, what are the stressors that they're dealing with.

We look a lot at strengths and overdone strengths at Middle of Six.

So understanding when we're in pressure where they're going to and how that's going to react and not necessarily just accepting that as, oh, well, that's that person.

That's how Bob does it.

But to be able to start to have some conversations around it and not, you know, accusatory, we're all here to learn and be better together.

So yeah, not a simple way to do it.

But if we want to enjoy where we're working and what we're doing and the people we work with, we have to know each other really well and have some honest conversations.

Becky, do you have any examples of when you felt like there wasn't great psychological safety or maybe examples of when you did feel supported and you had that and what the difference might have felt like in those situations?

Of course, I have both.

I was in a situation at a previous firm where I don't want to go into too much detail, but there was a couple of people who were creating a bit of a toxic atmosphere that was not only creating an uncomfortable situation but was directly affecting my job.

So being the kind of person who tended to keep quiet, keep to myself, don't rock the boat, it took quite a bit to get me to the point where I would go to my supervisor.

I went to several people who were sort of above me in the chain of command for help, and they didn't support me in that, which was unfortunate.

And I think putting myself in their shoes, I think they thought there was nothing they could do because the people involved were very high up in the company and had a lot of free reign.

So I think that they felt like, well, you know, what can we really do about it?

But what I needed wasn't, I didn't need them to fix the situation, to make those people go away.

That wasn't the issue.

I just needed somebody to listen to me, hear me out and say, we get it, we understand, let's see what we can do to help you.

I didn't need them to solve the whole company or like even, I don't, it wasn't even about those people.

I mean, I'm sure they didn't care about me.

It was, I just needed to feel like I was safe and being heard and like I just, I didn't get that.

And that was what really bothered me.

So that I think the lesson there is maybe like, you don't, if you're in a position where someone's coming to you for help, you don't necessarily need to be able to solve the whole situation.

Just do whatever you can to like listen to that person and give them a little bit of support and just try to help them out as best you can.

Yeah, maybe even ask them like, what do you need from me?

How can I help to understand?

Because maybe they just need you to be a sounding board and to be heard, and that can be enough, or maybe they need more.

But yeah, everyone, well, not everyone.

Lots of people want to be a problem solver.

This comes up a lot in like marriages or whatever.

And a lot of times you need to say them to your spouse, but you don't need them to fix it.

You just need them to hear you and understand.

What types of, I don't know, techniques have you used to help protect your mental well-being when you aren't heard or you didn't get the response you needed?

Sometimes we just have to protect ourselves.

Any suggestions?

Well, I left in my situation, but-

That's the downside that can happen for sure.

Yeah.

No, but I mean, I think it takes a lot to go to somebody for help that, I mean, I guess maybe for some people, it's very easy.

But for me, it was very hard and it took a very long time to feel like I could do that.

So I think being able to kind of to find anybody, even if you're not ready to go to a supervisor or whatever yet, if you can find anybody that you can talk to and just kind of like develop a little bit of a rapport with somebody who's a safe person and just kind of say, hey, like I need to talk this out.

You know, I think if you hold it in and you just sort of stew over it, that's never going to be good.

And it's not going to fix your problem, you know?

So yeah, I think talk it out.

I think remember, try to remind yourself, like this is just a job, you know?

Like, I mean, yes, you can care very much about it.

You can be invested in doing a good job and being proud of your work product and all that.

But at the end of the day, I mean, like it's an exchange.

It's, you know, it's a transaction.

So I mean, you're not married to that job.

You don't have to stay there.

You know, it's just like it's not it's not your real life.

I guess if you can try to find your way to remind yourself of that.

Yeah, I I was very, very lucky.

In the first firm that I landed at, I had a manager there who took me on a bus ride.

I went down to Oakland, where their headquarters was.

And I can't remember where we were going, but we ended up on a bus.

And so we're in this very informal atmosphere.

And she just started to talk real with me about the expectations that she wanted to level set at the beginning of my tenure at the firm, which was also my first in the industry.

And she said, Look, we work between the hours of eight and five.

I expect you to not send or reply to emails after five o'clock at night.

She's like, That doesn't mean you can't compose them.

Just do not hit send on them after five, because I don't want to set the precedent for the rest of the team, that there's an expectation that they're going to be responsive when they should be out enjoying their lives.

This was in 2008.

It's felt kind of revolutionary at the time.

We are finally at a place where this term work-life balance actually has meaning within our industry.

But I really appreciated her saying that and kind of setting a tone of almost this protectiveness over her marketing resources and staff.

But she also said, Give me your best eight.

Which added this layer of flexibility.

I was a new mom.

I had a little baby at home.

And that stress of trying to be responsive and be on the clock at exactly the times that everyone else was, it was something that it was just harder to stretch into that.

And she said, Look, if you have something that's going to take you out of the office, and you would rather work at night, that's fine.

If you need to get something done over the weekend, and it's not going to affect the deadline, that's fine.

And she's like, Just give me your best day, and then go and enjoy your life.

So those were two very supportive, philosophical ways of looking at the job that, again, in 2008, were a little quirky.

So then transition to my second job in the industry.

And on day one of onboarding, literally, one of the first things I heard was marketing does not say no.

And I think that there's probably a lot of listeners who in one form or another have heard that statement.

Literally, yes.

We don't say no.

Yeah.

And there is something intrinsically unsafe about that kind of a statement, especially to a woman, that you do not have the option of saying no is something that we have got to eradicate from our industry.

And I will get out on the bully pulpit and preach that, because that leaves absolutely no room for that partnership that you talked about, Becky, that always puts you into this almost indentured servitude mode.

And we are supposed to be experts in our field.

We have so many things that we have to juggle day in and day out, many of which not all of our technical staff are even aware that we're doing, which gets us something I hope we touch on is the the danger of assumptions.

That can get in the way of of effectively communicating and working with each other.

But just just having that kind of a tone coming into a job where you are constantly being pressured and in some ways forced to make something happen when you might not have the tools, time, resources or ability to make it happen is constantly putting into a space where you are kind of set up to fail.

And and you can't really thrive when you have that kind of a downward pressure being placed on you all the time.

So those were just some of my early experiences in it.

But I am so happy that one of the things coming out of the pandemic and and even terms like quiet quitting and in this idea of that people will quietly mentally disengage from their jobs and just not care anymore because they don't have an outlet to push back and find ways to articulate what their limits are or be given space to buy their managers or supervisors to say, are you getting the support you need to do your job?

Are you overloaded?

Let's take a look at your responsibilities.

Let's refresh our understanding of your role here.

All of those are good ways to kind of start to circumnavigate some of those old habits in this very old industry, as you mentioned earlier, Becky, to break away and into something new.

We can change.

The industry can change, leadership can change.

We don't need to be pigeonholed and do it the way it's always been done.

That's a red flag too.

Maybe we need to work harder and try to change things.

That's all very insightful.

I've definitely heard from many marketers when I say, hey, you can say no.

That's what a go-no-go is for, to say no, it's in the first word.

I couldn't believe when you told us that.

When I first came here, you would say sometimes we'd say no to things and like, do you have space for this?

And should we?

I don't know if we necessarily wanted.

I was so shocked.

I thought like it was a prank.

Like I couldn't believe that we were turning this down.

Yeah, I remember being in-house and that feeling.

Luckily, we didn't have the culture of marketing can't say no from the top.

I think internally for the marketers, we felt like we never wanted marketing to be the reason why we couldn't.

And that's a slight nuance there, a little bit different, put a lot of pressure on us.

And that's where I see now in the seat that I sit in where marketing teams can be saddened and frustrated that they can't do other things besides proposals and interview coaching and a few other like must do can't say no type activities.

This is why websites don't get updated.

This is why they can't get that darn holiday video card that they've been concepting for a few years or any of the cool ideas.

Those get put on the back burner when a team doesn't have the ability to describe why something should be a no.

You can't do everything, we've talked about this a lot in other podcasts about how to gather the data and make a case, make a plan and have an advocate and all of those other tools so that you can say no.

But it's important because a piece of psychological safety, if you don't have it, is that creativity diminishes.

You are not willing to take risks.

They are not willing to say a creative idea and put it out there like, I'm going to go out on limb.

This is kind of a crazy idea.

There's not time for any of that.

It is just tactical.

It is just get it done.

And probably to the point where we feel like, this isn't even my best work.

And you pile on other dynamics and you're like, I'm out.

And that is, it's like this formula for burnout and people leaving the industry.

I'm like, let's try something else.

It does seem like, you know, the silver lining of the pandemic is probably that we got to look at this differently and thought about mental health differently.

And we should keep that all top of mind, because it's not, it's not done.

We didn't fix everything yet.

Get closer.

What about mental toughness is a term that is often used when people feel like some individuals or maybe generationally, some folks are not as tough and they're over sensitive in the workplace.

I don't know, have you experienced that or do you have any thoughts on that term?

Do you know how tough you have to be to fight for your psychological safety in the workplace, I would say to those people?

Sorry, I'm popping off.

Allison, what do you think?

This is a term that we're hearing a lot, and I think it's an offshoot of generational frustration that we're experiencing.

This is also something that has come up in those presentation trainings that are usually all day affairs where you get people into a room to fully examine how to get better at communicating and connecting with people in person after you've connected with them on paper, as I say in the training.

But one of the things that we spent a lot of time talking about is communication basics, communication 101.

And this term referred to as noise by communication professionals, which is definitely physical noise, things that can distract you from being able to keep your attention front and center on the person in which you're communicating with.

But there's a lot of other types of noise at play, and there's psychological noise, there's physiological noise, and there's semantical noise, in addition to the physical, loud HVAC, someone talking outside of your office kind of stuff.

And as it relates to psychological noise, and this isn't just me spouting off, I did a lot of research on this too, is generational noise.

The fact that different generations have different vernacular.

I see this in my 15-year-old son.

The new words that are popping up in Gen Z and Gen Alpha, some of the terms are almost intentionally hard to decipher and understand because it's a way of creating ownership in your own generation and creating an otherness.

And we see some really mean kind of new terminology coming out, like Karen's or Chad's or OK Boomer.

You hear these terms, snowflakes, that are meant to degrade and denigrate other people.

And boy, do I feel sorry for my friends named Karen right now in this day and age.

I'm so glad Karen came along.

Karen saved me.

It used to be Becky, yep.

But I do think that swirled up into that mix is also the fact that our newer generations, Gen Z and Gen Alpha especially, are coming of age in a time where communication itself is changing, our attention spans are changing, the ways in which we're absorbing information is changing.

And there is a difference in how to give constructive feedback to someone who, say, is 60 years into their lifespan and someone who is 20 years into their lifespan.

And there's a lot of different things that happen within our own particular life, both from a global perspective of major events that can affect us in very huge ways.

Like for me, I was 21 years old when 9-11 happened.

And I think all of us, it's like my father talking about the day Kennedy was assassinated.

Like there's bookmarks in our life of trauma that can stay with us.

And I think about my son and the ways in which he has grown up in this very uncertain world.

Having been a kid in fifth grade, when the shutdown happened, and being isolated from all of his peers.

I think about kids that are now growing up and into adults and starting to join the workforce that had a societal imposed isolation period where there's still a lot of trauma associated with emerging generations that I think we still haven't quite cracked the nut on in the work environment of having elevated senses of sensitivity to how to help them continue to grow.

And so what that mental toughness is, I would turn it around and say it's also mental toughness on the part of say an elder or someone who's more senior in the firm of getting better at understanding how to effectively relay information and feedback to another individual.

And just one last little point about that idea of noise and the idea of, you know, this under psychological you also have things like daydreaming and the fact that people have other things teasing on the edges of their brain.

They might be worried about their finances.

They might be planning a vacation.

They might have something happening in their home that is having them distracted from work.

If it's on, say, the semantic side of things, there might be jargon or slang that someone else might not actually know what it means yet.

Understanding that all of these things can play a disruptive role in someone's ability to truly understand what you're saying, to me, is the embodiment of emotional intelligence and trying to get to a place where you can formulate what you want to say in a message that you want to relay to another individual is really taking into consideration all those potential types of noise that might be in between you and that other person and find ways to navigate around them so that you are truly and most meaningfully relaying the message that you want to send and that they are receiving it and understanding it and appreciating it in the ways that you intended for them to.

And it's very nuanced.

It's hard.

It's a journey we're all on together.

But so when I think of mental toughness, I don't think of it in terms of, well, just buck up, you know, take this for what it's worth and don't take it too personally.

I don't want to think of it that way.

I'd rather think of it as all of us just getting more insight into the fact that there's a whole lot in that space between us and another person that can affect and manipulate what we're trying to say in ways that we don't even know is happening.

And to just have a heightened level of awareness that a person that is on the receiving end of what we're saying is having to battle through all sorts of different communication noise to get to the meaning of the message that we're giving to them.

Pretty academic, sorry.

It takes a lot of effort.

It's not going to happen without that attention and some self-awareness.

And I fully admit, there are many times when I think I'm on one side of an issue, and then I need to reflect and realize, what did that person actually say to me?

I need to hear them better so that I can understand, based on my values and my decision-making, how I want to adjust, right?

And where, hopefully, we have space, and we're not just jam-packed with so many work things and being spread so thin that we don't have space to pause and think and not just react, not just have the emotional response that's not thinking and considering the other person's experience, feelings, or just properly hearing what they're actually saying.

And on that note, too, is timing of when you're going to say something to someone and trying to distance it a little bit from the emotion, because that emotion trumps everything.

And if you're going to go to someone right after a really difficult proposal has just gone out the door to list off all the things that they could have done better, that is not the right time.

They are not going to be in a headspace to analytically examine everything that you have just given to them to consider and do it in a pragmatic way.

So I think there's also something to be said for choosing your moment for when you want to relay something to somebody else.

We'll probably have to put on the podcast list the generational differences and conversation styles and that seems like a wonderful topic.

I am halfway through the book, Counter Mentor Leadership, which is all about generational differences and it's fascinating.

So, you know, keep that on the list.

But for today's conversation, and sort of wrap it up today, I'm just curious if either of you want to share a few of your own personal suggestions or things you've experienced that we can do to help each other all feel safe and safer in the workplace.

One thing is to lead by example, whether you are very high up in your company or not, I think people are hardwired to want to emulate the people around them, the people they look up to, the people in authority.

So it's one thing to say we're going to be, we're going to focus on psychological safety and then not do it.

And quite another thing to live that in your daily interaction.

So if you make that effort to show people this is what that means, and this is how it looks, it's going to bleed through.

And others are going to see that and do the same thing.

I think another hot tip is if you are struggling, if you are feeling unsafe, if there's anything going on, honestly, it's better to open up and talk about it and tell somebody than to just let people wonder.

Because especially if you are going through something in your life outside of work, you got to tell somebody, you got to find a supervisor you trust and just say, hey, I want you to know this is what I'm dealing with, and here's how I'm, what we can do together to make sure that things keep on trucking.

Because you don't want them to come up with their own idea as to what's going on with you.

And if you can present your supervisor, your coworkers with like a, hey, here's the deal, but here's how we're going to make sure that it's not going to derail anything.

That creates a sense of safety for everybody, including you.

I'm just running through my hot tips here.

Miserable people do miserable work, right?

So again, back to the bottom line, if you want to produce good results and do a good job and for people to succeed, we got to make sure that they feel safe.

That's just the most basic need that people have.

And there's a lot of ways to do that.

There's a lot of things to explore.

It's a whole new world, but just remember, safe people produce better work.

And then something that I have to remind myself of a lot is that something that's very easy for you might be very difficult for someone else.

Like as Allison was talking about, like public speaking, for example, for a lot of people, that's like their number one fear.

That's the most common number one fear, I think, in the world.

Above death, people would rather die than speak in front of a group.

For me, that's not a problem.

I have zero stage fright.

I will get up and talk in front of anybody.

It's not an issue.

But I have to constantly remind myself that other people may not feel that way.

So for me, bonding with other people and what I think is making them feel safe might be acting very nonchalant about something like that.

Meanwhile, that other person might be terrified, and I don't know that.

So I have to remind myself, okay, just because I have no problem speaking in front of people or coming up with ideas in a brainstorm doesn't mean that this other person isn't.

You know what I mean?

So if I'm in a brainstorm and coming up with ideas with a group, I got to remember that just because I'm very confident throwing things out, the other person may not be.

So I have to try to make space for that other person and say, hey, what do you got?

You got any ideas?

And to just actively try to work to make them feel safe at something that for me already feels very safe.

Oh, good.

And to add to that list, I think assumptions are very, very dangerous in our world.

You know what happens when we assume.

I think that one of the inherent challenges of being an AEC marketer is that for each individual and with whom we work with in our firms, we typically work with individuals in different ways.

So we might work with folks in business development to really think about research and going out and finding those events to go to and helping people be prepared for them.

And it's a whole body of work to focus on business development.

If you're talking about proposals, that is much more hands-on, concrete work with tasks involved in it that take up quite a lot of time on your calendar.

But then there's all of the other facets that we are constantly working on in the background that a lot of our technical staff have no idea we might be working on.

And daylighting those can be very effective.

When I was in the office, I got permission to order this huge oversized whiteboard that was almost as tall as I was.

And I hung it portrait style, vertical on the wall.

And I took black electrical tape and I created a calendar grid that captured two months.

And then I had all these different dry erase marker colors.

And I went through and I assigned everything from internal meetings to award submittals, copy editing, QAQC, proposals, priming proposals, subbing proposals, because they're very different animals, business development, event planning, social media.

And then I also had one that was always in purple for some reason for personal.

So PTO and other big things, birthdays, anniversaries, other notable milestones, like a wedding or a baby or moving into a new house or whatever it might be.

And we would meet at the beginning of every week as a team and we would fill up that two month span of time with every single thing that was either on the books or in process.

And then when people would walk into my office to say, hey, I just let a client know that we can turn around a proposal in the next two days.

Instead of the me saying no, I would just grandly sweep my hand over to this beautifully laid out whiteboard and let the whiteboard say no.

So we don't have capacity for this, as you can see.

And it was a little bit of a learning curve for technical staff who were just used to telling us what they needed and expecting to get it done on their timeline, which of course we always want to be accommodating.

But sometimes the reality is we can't on their specific timeline.

It went from being a little bit of a frictional conversation where the whiteboard was the tool to help them understand, to them literally walking into my office and going to the whiteboard first, before they would say anything to me and going, hmm.

And then they would point to an area that didn't have anything on it and say, would it be possible if we were to use this time here to work on this thing?

Which is such a great way to start the conversation with, is it possible?

When can we get this done?

Much more collaborative.

And now I know a lot of us are in a hybrid work format.

So having an actual physical whiteboard to point to might not always be feasible, but I have harnessed my calendar online and so have a lot of others in Middle of Six for each other's benefit.

Because even in a company of eight, we still have instances where, I don't know, Becky's got like five different things she's working on at any given moment, and I might not have clarity into that.

But just being able to toggle somebody's calendar on and see like, oh, they've got these meetings then, or even like you block time, but market is free.

So if something does come up that really needs to take precedent, you're kind of giving a signal, this is wiggle room.

But it does help people understand the flow of your day, of your week, of your month, in a way that can help make that collaboration easier.

So that's a hot tip.

And then taking it from there to that idea of the prompt feedback, the timing of when you're giving feedback, whether it's because you need to relay that you had a negative experience that is impacting your sense of well-being, psychological safety, ability to do your job, is this idea of the debrief.

And I love the what, so what, now what kind of manner of doing these, where again, to the whiteboard, if something went terribly wrong on a proposal effort or an interview prep or some other collaborative exercise where there's a lot of different forces at play that either lent to that project being successful or not, instead of it being a throw everyone under the bus, especially marketing kind of a meeting, having it be about the things instead of the people.

So what happened?

Okay, let's exhaust the list.

A deadline was missed.

A team member was added at the last minute.

Somebody left on vacation or vacation time disrupted the schedule, and don't take the names into it.

Just have it be about the thing, and then go through the exercise of, so what?

So what happened because that thing happened?

That usually the tears start to come out during this point.

Well, I had to work over the weekend.

I had to cancel this thing so that I could do this.

I ended up not being able to do this other thing that was really important because of, and then you go to the now what category.

What can we do to prevent this from happening in the future?

And then you come out with action items and actual things that you can do to address the issues.

So that is a really, really wonderful exercise.

I wish every single firm would do that kind of a process when they do their debriefs.

And last, I would say, SNPS is there for a reason.

Our roundtables are there for a reason.

The sessions, the conferences, we have an entire workforce out there across the country that can be tapped for their experiences, learn from each other, share your insights, mentor your colleagues within the industry, because the issues that you're facing in your firm are often playing out in firms all over the United States and beyond.

So there's a lot of stories, insights and tools that you can share simply by talking to each other about the struggles that we can sometimes face in doing this job.

Yeah, we're not alone.

We have resources out there.

And when you're looking internally, just at the situation in your company, you know, focusing on communication and building trust and respect is going to go a long way to creating psychological safety in your work group and maybe across the whole company.

So, you know, everyone's dealing with a different...

They're in a different spot on that spectrum.

But there's a lot of good stuff we talked about today.

Thank you both for sharing your experiences.

That's super vulnerable.

But I know that when we hear these stories and we do hear that, yes, sometimes you can say no, that's a real thing.

We're not making it up.

All of that stuff does help the other marketers out there and the other leaders who are listening to this podcast have another greater perspective outside their own firm.

So thank you so much for sharing.

I appreciate it.

And I hope to get to chat more about the generational stuff and more communication and how stress impacts how we work together.

We go on forever.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

Love talking about this.

The Shortlist is presented by Middle of Six.

Our producer is Kyle Davis, with digital marketing support by the team at Middle of Six.

If you're looking for past episodes or more info, check out our podcast page at middleofsix.com/theshortlist.

You can follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at Middle of Six.

Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

Until next time, keep on hustling, bye.

The Shortlist is a podcast that explores all things AEC marketing. Hosted by Middle of Six Principal, Wendy Simmons, each episode features members of the MOS team, where we take a deep dive on a wide range of topics related to AEC marketing including: proposal development, strategy, team building, business development, branding, digital marketing, and more. You can listen to our full archive of episodes here.