4.15 Creating Cultures of Safety and Alignment in Academia

Creating Cultures of Safety and Alignment in Academia

In this episode of The Mindful Academy, host Jennifer Askey delves into the importance of psychological safety and alignment within academic institutions. Building on her previous discussion about coaching skills for leaders, Jennifer explores how creating a culture of respect and excellence can enhance psychological safety for staff and faculty members. She emphasizes the roles of academic chairs, shared governance, and the evolving nature of higher education. Key points include strategies for fostering an environment where individuals feel safe to express themselves, the significance of departmental alignment, and the challenges of balancing independence with collaboration. Jennifer also shares insights from her consulting work and offers practical advice for academic leaders aiming to cultivate a supportive and high-achieving culture. The episode includes calls for audience engagement and previews future topics in mindful leadership and academic coaching.

00:00 Introduction to The Mindful Academy

00:36 Building on Coaching Skills: Psychological Safety and Alignment

03:16 Creating a Positive Department Culture

06:50 Navigating Generational Differences in Academia

13:12 Aligning Department Goals and Priorities

21:09 Fostering Psychological Safety through Alignment

22:30 Conclusion and Contact Information

Transcript

Hi everybody. Welcome back to this week's episode of The Mindful Academy. I am Jennifer Askey, I'm your coach, and I am here working with academics of all stripes to be more mindful leaders of their careers, of their themselves, their students, their disciplines, their institutions. And in my last episode, I talked about.

Coaching skills for leaders and if you haven't listened to that, please do. I think it's a good one today. I want to build on something I said in that last episode and talk about psychological safety and alignment. So let's get into it. Have I ever said that on this podcast? I hope not, and maybe I never will again, because.

I don't think it's me. And so psychological safety [00:01:00] is the circumstance where regardless of rank, people feel like they are safe at work, being their complete selves regardless of their job title of their time, at the institution of their race, sex, gender, creed, nation of origin. Spiritual practices, free time activities and not everybody wants you to know about what goes on outside of work.

So the safety also to be a private person, but people people feel psychologically safe when they do not have to hide parts of themselves at work and. People feel psychologically safe when they can express questions, disagreements and be treated respectfully, right? When there's no screaming, when there's no finger pointing and blaming, that comes out of [00:02:00] nowhere.

Where people can expect that if they do a good job, they will be treated well and if they mess up, they will also be treated well, even if the error needs to be amended fixed. So psychological safety is I. It is something that is increasingly becoming codified in provincial legislation around workplaces, that workplaces have an obligation to be psychologically safe.

I don't know if this has ever been adjudicated in courts but I know, psychologically unsafe work frequently winds up in front of HR or human rights complaints offices internally at institutions, and, and I'm not going to pretend I'm gonna solve that entire problem for you today, but I do wanna talk about a few things that we can do as leaders that create fertile soil for psychological safety.

And. I don't think they're [00:03:00] incredibly challenging to implement, but they might feel challenging to start if this is not part of your culture. And culture was another thing that I talked a lot about towards the end of the last episode, so I'm gonna pick that up. Alright. All right. Allow me to set the scene for you around alignment and culture and psychological safety.

In my last institutional role where I was doing learning and development at a university, I was working with chairs and a faculty. And as part of the workshop that we were doing, I had occasion to read the university handbook language that defined the role of Chair. And the role of Chair has some sort of managerial things around scheduling, making sure the classes get offered, in rooms that accommodate the students who need to take them. Chairs have a responsibility for delivering, making sure the curriculum that leads to a degree or a certificate gets offered on a regular basis. But in addition to the managerial [00:04:00] stuff, chairs at this institution, were tasked with creating an environment.

Of positivity and excellence in the department, like environment is another word for culture, right? Chairs help create the culture of their departments, and in this university's handbook that was placed squarely on their shoulders, right? Create the right kind of culture, create the culture where people can succeed academically.

Oh my goodness. What does that look like? And that's a valid question because if you're a chair and that you're like, hold on a second. There's shared governance, there's academic freedom, there's the fact that I'm not really anybody's boss, or they might not see me as their boss. How do I create culture and.

This is a question stated and unstated that I run into a lot in my work. In part because of the way academia is set up and the fact that most faculty don't see chairs as their [00:05:00] boss. The fact that a lot of chairs did not rush gleefully into chair hood but it was their turn or they took it on because they didn't want somebody else who they thought would do a worse job.

They didn't want that person to take it on. So the job of chair is a sticky one, and you may not, if that's your role, you may not feel like you signed up to be the chief culture officer of your department, but you kinda did. Sorry. Academic freedom means you can't tell people what to research.

Now, job descriptions say most of your faculty members have a research obligation. So you know, you can remind them of that. You can set, help them set their goals. You can review their goals with them. You can celebrate great achievement. You can ask what do they need in order to get unstuck. If they feel stuck, you can say, Hey, if [00:06:00] you're stuck, let's talk.

I can help. And I can help maybe by. Employing some of the coaching skills I talked about last time, where I can listen and be your sounding board while you figure some stuff out, and I'll do that in a safe way, right? So you, there are things you can do as a chair that definitely create culture. And one thing that I wanna offer, like in light of.

Shared governance, academic freedom, and the relatively flat hierarchy of a college or a faculty where people don't really see the chair or the dean as their boss in a traditional sort of command and control sort of way. One thing I wanna offer is the insight I am gaining. And I'd sensed this through.

My one-on-one work with clients and now I have thousands of data points that are confirming this in my consulting work with Modern [00:07:00] Think where I do analysis of survey results on employee satisfaction and specifically analysis of comments to open-ended questions about what makes this university a great place to work and what would make it an even better place to work.

One of the things that I'm noticing is that a certain generation of academic, my age the boomer, gen Z, maybe elder millennial, Sadie Lou dog go away. Older academics. Might be pretty content with being, with seeing themselves as independent contractors offering their services for hire to an institution they might be content with.

I'm not on a team. I have professional colleagues, but we don't need to be on the same page. We don't need to be rowing in the same direction or singing from the same hymnal. [00:08:00] We are all independent contractors doing our own thing independently, and it is the university's job to make a coherence out of that serves students.

But I'm just an independent contractor. That independent contractor mentality is less common and less welcome in newer faculty. And this doesn't mean that newer faculty need their hands held and aren't. As tough and independent as we were back in the day, it reflects, I believe, the changing nature of institutions, right?

Everybody in higher ed staff and faculty alike has fewer support people to help them do administrative tasks. There is demographic pressure on every institution around enrollments and maximizing tuition dollars, and Right. The pressures societally and [00:09:00] institutionally have changed, and the nature of being a professor is changing with it.

And I think there's a lot of discomfort around this change. And I think if you're in the United States, that change might be being forced on you in ways that are antithetical to the spirit of higher education. But even here in Canada, the job is changing and. Collaboration is even more essential and important.

And collaboration even earlier on in your career is essential and important. Networking, public facing scholarship, like all of these things look different in 2025 than they did in 2005. Radically different. And so chairs are navigating generational differences. And one thing to think about is like how many people in your department are really happy being independent contractors and you know that How many you do you think are happy [00:10:00] being independent contractors, but might be okay rowing in the same direction with the rest of the department.

Or having conversations about who are we as a department, right? How many people could get on board with the notion of we and how many people might be really eager for the notion of we. At a retreat a couple months ago, I asked the question, what does, what do you think this department should be known for?

And. Some people were very eager to have that conversation and some people saw it as an intro into, oh, you're gonna tell me what I need to teach in research. And and I don't think it means, I'm gonna tell you what you need to teach and research, but I think when it comes to psychological safety and culture, if people know, okay, we're in a department, we're in a faculty college, whatever, and.

We [00:11:00] have X number of people and the discipline is exponentially larger than those people we already know. We're only offering a slice of what is available in that discipline. We're offering these perspectives from these people in these classes. We're offering this spin on the curriculum and maybe your department has arguments about which spin on the curriculum.

You should be offering, but we're already creating an environment where there is a we, like we are distinct. The Department of Basket weaving at University X is a distinct entity from the Department of Basket weaving at university Y. And so if we go in with this notion that we're already unique. Then having conversations maybe one-on-one first, and building towards group conversations around who are you?

Who are you colleague as an academic, what part of the discipline? What part [00:12:00] of this institution light you up? Where are you steering your career? And if you have that sense from your department members, can you as chair or Dean wherever, at whatever level this is happening, can you start to put together a picture of who are we as a department?

Maybe you wanna bring in a facilitator to do this with the group, but if. The structure of the department, the curriculum course offerings, course rotations, student engagement opportunities for faculty to be engaged in the university. If those haven't undergone an examination and a refresh in the last five years, it's probably time.

Especially if they haven't undergone an examination or refresh in the last five years, because COVID was five years ago and holy cats right now we have distant more distance [00:13:00] opportunities potentially, or we did for a while and they've been taken away. But was that use right? What have we learned in the last five years?

So coming up with. I'm not gonna say a strategic plan for the department, but coming up with a sense of priorities for a department to say, okay, given the 80 gazillion things we could be known for when it comes to teaching, research and service, and given the people in the room and their predilections and preferences, what do we know we're gonna do really well?

What do we want to emphasize? What do we want to celebrate? What do we want to direct people's attention to? Those people being stakeholders outside of the institution and inside of the institution. And when I illustrate this, I frequently draw like an arrow or a pyramid, right? With this is who we are at our best and what we're known for, and the [00:14:00] mark we're making at the pointy end of the pyramid or the arrow.

And then talking about alignment in terms of priorities and goals and tasks that feed into that success. And inevitably I will say this is a bit utopian because not every task supports a goal that supports a priority that directly feeds into. This unit at its absolute finest. Some things are purely administrative.

Excuse me. Some things aren't terribly exciting, but need to happen. So it's, this is, it's not it's a, it's an ideal structure to strive for, it's structure to keep in mind. The other thing that comes up when I talk about this structure, where we have the pointy end that things are headed towards, and then you want things to fall in line behind it, is that [00:15:00] there will be people likely who don't see themselves, their work, their teaching, their research as immediately contributing to oh, here's the thing we're known for.

Right? And this is where the worry around am I still going to be free to conduct my research the way I want to? Am I still going to be free to teach the way I want to? Within the context of our department having some strategic objectives or our department having a mission am I still going to have the freedom that is my due?

And this is again, opportunities for conversations, right? One-on-one with people to say, okay, what are you doing? Great. What about this lights you on fire? Where do you see your work contributing to our shared success and how can I celebrate that work in a way that makes you feel seen? And is there room to make what maybe appears to be like, oh, this is a little bit often left field to make it appear [00:16:00] aligned with.

Priorities. So just having conversations with people around, I see your work. I believe it contributes to our success in these ways. What do you see from where you sit about your work and how it contributes to our shared success? These conversations around departmental alignment are critical. They're critical for creating the foundations for psychological safety and creating a culture of respect and achievement that everybody ends up welcoming.

So if you have never had conversations about this is what the department does super well, this is what we're known for, this is how we show up for each other, this is how we collaborate together, this is how we support our students. These are the opportunities the students have to participate in departmental life.

These are the opportunities that faculty and staff in the department have to participate in [00:17:00] university life and disciplinary life, right? If you have never had those conversations, then what happens is if you have people, staff, and faculty who do not fully understand how their work contributes to the success of the department or the success of the university.

This is surprisingly frequent,

and this is something that I am noticing in all of the survey work I'm doing where people pipe up and say, I don't know what part of my work really matters here. I don't know if it's my teaching that's the most important. I don't know if it's my research that's the most important. I don't know if it's getting grants or collaborating or is that, community outreach.

I don't know. 'cause we don't talk about it. So if you have put your hand up for chair [00:18:00] and or been voluntold. Or find yourself in this role and haven't given it a ton of thought. These are the sorts of opportunities you have to collaborate with your colleagues to create culture. That was a lot of alliteration in one sentence, wasn't it?

But people want to know what part of their work is valuable to others. I find in my one-on-one coaching. That almost universally people say academics, scholars say, it would be great if internal motivation alone did it for me, but I really like external validation and sometimes that comes in the form of, Hey, you got the publication, you got the grant.

But teaching awards, there are only a small number of those for an institution. Awards and [00:19:00] recognition. Universities tend to not knock that out of the park anyway. And so at the unit level, how are people finding out about the type of work that they do that is most valued or that is seen and valued by the chair, by the dean, and by the rest of the institution?

By their colleagues. And when you have this kind of awareness and alignment okay, we're all doing our things and maybe we think of ourselves as independent contractors, but we know that together we create an entity that serves the institution and the students and the discipline. How do we wanna show up for each other?

Collaborate and serve and teach and celebrate our successes side by side. Because you can't carry a discipline on your back, right? You have colleagues to do this. So in this environment where there are conversations about, here's where. Here's where we're headed [00:20:00] right now, like in the next five years, here are our opportunities.

Here are some of our aspirations. Here are the things that are going well. And here's some things that we're gonna focus on growing, shifting. Being prepared for, right? So that as people, complete projects bring in students, graduate students, they know, oh, this is serving something that I have had input into, that I have seen and signed off on at least emotionally.

And we're rowing at least in the same flotilla, right? Even if we're not in the same boat, our boats are at least in the same flotilla, heading the same direction. Then when people run into issues, disagreements, mistakes, whatever, this shared notion of this is how we showed up, show up for ourselves, this is how we collaborate and [00:21:00] work together and celebrate together, and serve together then we can have the difficult conversation with a bit more ease.

So then we have the foundations for psychological safety because psych psychological safety is I can ask a question or provide input and it will be taken respectfully. We debate. Issues and discuss them in order to come up with the best answer. And my voice is heard in that process. Like all those things those are just psychological safety 1 0 1, right?

I'm not discriminated against because of my age, race, sex, gender, sexual preference, nation of origin. And when I open my mouth, I am heard. Creating the conditions for that requires a lot of listening, which brings us to last, the last [00:22:00] episode where I talked about global listening and active listening as one of the coaching skills that academic leaders can really benefit from.

So alignment conversations, alignment strategy at the department as one tool for. Creating psychological safety and a culture of respect and excellence is what I wanted to share with you today, and I hope that came across well. And if you have any questions or comments or insights please let me know.

jennifer@jenniferaskyou.com. If you saw this podcast on Instagram. You can respond to it there. I'm on Instagram most days. I'm on LinkedIn most days. So find me, let me know what you're thinking, what you have questions about, and I will be back with some more interviews and some more insights into mindful leadership and coaching skills [00:23:00] for academics soon enough.

Have a great rest of your day. Thank you for lending me your ears, and I'll be back soon. Bye.