As we (rightly) strengthen regulatory and governance frameworks to ensure safety and quality of care, we also need leaders who are agile, adaptable, forward-thinking and deeply committed to helping people not just stay safe, but truly thrive.

In my work with leaders I can see that that’s a big ask.

The tension between compliance and innovation, risk management and human-centred care, short-term pressures and long-term reform is becoming increasingly difficult for one CEO, Executive or Board Chair to hold alone.

Perhaps this speaks to the growing importance of diversity in leadership teams. Not just diversity of background, but diversity of thinking, experience and perspective. And equally, the importance of creating leadership cultures with enough trust and psychological safety for those perspectives to genuinely be heard.

I’ve spent much of my career in and around disability services organisations, and I’m now heavily immersed in the aged care sector – both professionally as a coach, and personally through the people I love.

I want the leaders of these organisations to keep me and my loved ones safe and well. But I also want them to keep learning, adapting and improving so service recipients experience dignity, choice and genuinely high-quality outcomes.

Understanding the tension is an important first step in managing it.
And perhaps one of the greatest risks for the sector right now is expecting leaders to carry that complexity without enough support themselves.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

On this particular day, I was struck by the clear and pristine beauty of Middleton Beach, while just across the peninsula, much of our South Australian coast is struggling under a toxic algal bloom.
It got me thinking about the different workplace cultures I encounter through my coaching work. Some are clear, positive, and energising, with a healthy, forward rhythm like the Middleton’s waves. Others feel murky, stagnant, and even unsafe, much like parts of our Gulf at the moment.

So, what can you do if you’re a leader trying to make a positive impact within a toxic workplace?

1. Reset expectations around behaviour and accountability:
   Be clear about what good looks like. Involve your people in defining the standards and hold everyone, including leaders, accountable.
2. Model the behaviours you want to see:
   Demonstrate respect, openness, and integrity. Have the courage to call out toxic behaviours, even when they appear in your peers or those above you.
3. Ramp up your self-care:
   Toxic environments can take a toll. Prioritise exercise, rest, and positive social connections outside of work. Without strong self-care, it’s easy to become part of the problem.
4. Focus on what you can influence:
   Change what you can, accept what you can’t, and stay clear about the difference. Influence grows from clarity, not frustration.
5. Know when to move on:
   If the culture has reached a point of no return, look outward. Find your own “patch of coast” – the environment that allows you to thrive and lead in alignment with your values. Sometimes, it’s just across the peninsula.

Even in toxic waters, renewal is possible. But it starts with courageous leadership and a clear commitment to creating safer, healthier currents.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

An effective leader

• Understands the capacity and potential of their reports, and supports them to challenge themselves to grow and learn without feeling like they’ve been thrown in the deep end without a life jacket.
• Understands and promotes the value of a strong feedback culture, providing clear, kind and actionable feedback without shaming, blaming or humiliating people for mistakes
• Is clear about expectations, and holds people to account for agreed deliverables and behaviours, whilst providing the required coaching and support to enable people to meet those agreements.
• Can express feelings and emotions to aid understanding and trust in a style, tone and setting that is not intimidating or provocative
• Seeks support from their Manager, People and Culture team or external coach to navigate what can be very nuanced and sensitive scenarios.

What other examples can you think of? I’d love to hear about your experiences?

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

Change projects are essentially about people. A successful change depends on getting people on board. But this takes us into the murky area of psychosocial risk. Should we stop initiating change because of the risk? Absolutely not. Whether you’re a leader or a senior technical expert, a core part of your role is to find new ways to create value for your organisation. If you stagnate, you don’t survive.
To keep people psychologically safe during change, I believe we need to support them in two distinct domains which I’ve named Change Agility and Change Stability.

1. Change Agility
This involves building the capacity to adapt and engage. It includes three key activities:
a) Context – Help people understand why the change is needed, framed within the organisation’s strategy.
b) Conversations – Create opportunities for one-on-one or small-group discussions. People don’t resist change because they’re change-resistant—they resist when they can’t make sense of the change within their personal frame of reference. Encourage questions and dialogue to help people align their mindset with the proposed change.
c) Contribution – Give people the opportunity to contribute. They might help design solutions to the challenge driving the change or shape how the change strategy is implemented. Involvement builds ownership.

2. Change Stability
This focuses on giving people psychological anchors during change. It includes three key activities:
d) Familiarity – Highlight what’s staying the same: familiar processes, systems, people, or routines. These act as a tether in unfamiliar waters.
e) Alignment – Reinforce how the change supports the organisation’s purpose, and how each person’s work continues to contribute to that purpose.
f) Grounding – Anchor the change in the organisation’s values. Not only should the outcome of the change align with the values—but the process of change should also consistently reflect them.

Managing change safely means recognising and addressing psychosocial risk. By supporting both agility and stability, I believe we can create the conditions for people to not just survive change, but engage, adapt, and thrive.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

While managing these risks is a shared responsibility, managers and leaders are uniquely positioned to create meaningful change. With the right support they can become powerful agents for psychosocial safety.

Why Psychosocial Risk Matters

Unlike physical hazards, psychosocial risks are often hidden within culture, systems, or leadership behaviours, making them harder to detect until harm occurs. Yet their impacts are real: mental health conditions now account for 9% of serious workplace injury claims in Australia (WorkSafe, 2024), and burnout is rising across industries.

Common psychosocial hazards include:

• High emotional demands or workload
• Low job control or unclear roles
• Bullying, harassment, or unresolved conflict
• Lack of recognition or leadership support
• Poor organisational change practices.

Left unaddressed, these issues lead to low productivity, absenteeism, high turnover, and long-term mental health impacts—posing legal, ethical, and business risks in addition to the obvious personal costs to an injured worker.

Managers: A Frontline Defence

Managers play a critical role in shaping safe, supportive team environments. They’re responsible for setting expectations, structuring roles, resolving conflict, and ensuring people are treated fairly. But many managers, particularly if new to people leadership or in an already emotionally demanding role,  feel under-equipped to identify and manage psychological risks—especially when they’re dealing with emotionally complex situations.

Rather than seeing unwell staff as “problems,” managers can learn to recognise them, just like the canary in the coal mine, as important signals – early warnings of deeper systemic issues. When someone shows signs of distress, it’s a cue to ask: Is the workload too high? Are expectations unclear? Is the team culture healthy?

How Coaching Can Support Managers?

Coaching can help equip managers with the awareness, tools, and confidence to effectively prevent, identify and reduce psychosocial risk. Here are four possible areas you might relate to:

1. Raising Awareness
   Coaches help managers step back and identify hidden risks in their team dynamics—such as unresolved tension or unclear responsibilities—before they escalate.
2. Building Skills
   Many managers avoid emotional or interpersonal issues due to discomfort. Coaching develops their confidence and communication skills to address concerns early and effectively. One leader, for example, learned through coaching to confront a long-standing team conflict that had been eroding trust and morale.
3. Encouraging Strategic Thinking
   Rather than reacting to issues as they arise, coaching supports long-term planning. For example, during organisational change, a leader was coached to build better consultation and feedback processes that reduced stress and confusion.
4. Shaping Culture
   Coaching helps managers create psychological safety and model healthy behaviours—setting boundaries, encouraging breaks, and resisting an “always-on” culture. These visible actions show teams that wellbeing is not just encouraged but expected.

From Individual Fixes to Organisational Responsibility

Often, organisations place the burden of managing stress on individual workers—offering resilience training, fruit bowls or wellbeing apps. While helpful, these don’t address the root causes of harm.

At an organisational level, People and Culture teams can help identify where risks exist across teams, job clusters or geographical locations. This data enables smarter strategic decisions like redesigning roles, skill development for leaders, or improving support systems.

But it’s my belief that true change starts with leadership. Coaching empowers managers to take responsibility for the things they can influence—team dynamics, role clarity, communication, and culture, thereby embedding psychosocial safety from the ground up.

If we want to reduce psychological harm at work, we need to support the people who shape workplace culture every day—our leaders and managers.

If you’re a manager, ask yourself:

• Do I know what psychosocial risks exist in my team?
• Can I influence the conditions causing them?
• Do I have the skills to intervene early?
• Am I creating a culture that supports wellbeing?

If any of these give you pause to reflect, coaching might be the next step.

Coaching provides a confidential, practical space for leaders to develop the awareness, skills, and strategies needed to create psychologically safe environments, supporting them to shift from reactive problem solving to leading proactively with intention.

If you’d like to explore how coaching could support you or your team, please get in touch to arrange a complimentary virtual coffee – I’d love to connect.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

Emotional intelligence is not about stifling or hiding emotions, always being positive, or needing to be more emotional.  It’s about using emotion productively –  recognising, understanding and working with emotions in ourselves and others, so we can

• Interact more effectively
• deal with disagreement constructively
• pro-actively handle stress and change
• read and navigate the dynamics of an organisational or team culture
• manage through complexity and make difficult decisions
• show up authentically
• build and maintain trust.

All of these behaviours help us to increase our performance and achieve more positive results. There is indeed strong evidence that high levels of emotional intelligence in the workplace can lead to:

• Better physical and mental health
• Improved workplace relationships
• Coping better with high demands and stress
• Increased levels of engagement and discretionary effort
• Reductions in employee turnover and absenteeism
• Prevention of psychological injury
• Increased creativity and innovation
• More effective leadership.

So how do we build emotional intelligence? A good place to start is working on our self-awareness to get better at recognising emotion, in the moment,  in ourselves and others. To build self-awareness, practice paying attention to these four things:

1. Emotion is a biological reaction, and is first triggered in the body, so we can start to notice emotion by being aware of physiological changes or body sensations – are we holding our breath, where do we feel tightness, how intense is that tightness, how far does it extend, how long does it last?
2. Next tune in to our self-talk – what are we thinking, what words and phrases are we saying to ourselves that give us a clue as to how we’re feeling?
3. Notice what we’re saying – listen to our language, the labels we are assigning, and to the tone and volume of our voice
4. Pay attention to our behaviour – both what we’re doing, and what we feel like doing.

When identifying emotions in others we don’t have the benefit of knowing directly about their body sensations or their self-talk (although we could ask them). But in addition to what they’re saying and doing, we also have the benefit of observing facial expression and body language to help us recognise and label an emotional experience. A shift in the person’s energy can also be a clue that they have experienced an emotional reaction.

Awareness in the moment alerts us to the presence of an emotion in ourselves and others. Having a comprehensive mental dictionary of emotions gives us the capacity to label that experience. We can then use that information to make a choice about how to respond more productively.

For example, when we recognise emotion in ourselves we’re able to regulate the way we express that emotion, shift our emotional state to one that is more productive and incorporate information from our feelings, together with facts and other information, into decisions.  When we recognise emotion in others, we can acknowledge the emotion with empathy, assist them where necessary to regulate how they are expressing the emotion, and use a broader range of  information to help us respond appropriately.

Emotional Intelligence skills can be learnt, by focusing on key behaviours you want to change and practising new responses over time. Like any behaviour change, it can be hard going to get started, but begin by recognising the value to you and the people around you in terms of improved performance and relationships. Then through self-awareness, feedback from others and observation of impact you will start to embed emotional intelligence for a thriving future.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

Workers who don’t trust their managers are often angry or scared or both. They’re angry about perceived injustice or bad treatment, and scared of unpredictable behaviour and being disadvantaged. And when people are scared – in a constant state of flight or flight – they respond in exactly the same way as if they were in actual physical danger. The higher functioning, thinking brain gets hijacked, and our focus of attention narrows; creativity shuts down; problem solving is diminished; and we lose our ability to look at issues strategically. Not surprisingly, our performance suffers.

As a manager, if you want high performing staff, consider these four foundations of trust:

Be honest

• Admit when you’ve made a mistake and make amends, rather than trying to cover up the mistake or blaming others
• Accept responsibility for your actions, even if they have unintended negative ramifications, rather than trying to pretend you didn’t do something
• Don’t pretend you did something when you didn’t, in order to promote your own status
• Don’t pretend you didn’t do something when you did, in order to protect your own reputation.

Act fairly

• Don’t treat some team members more favourably than others, even if you like them more or get on better with them
• Don’t change how you respond to the same issue, depending on who raises it  – if you have a good reason for behaving differently and it could appear unfair, explain your reasoning
• Don’t keep changing your mind about something  – If you have a good reason for changing a decision, make sure you explain why.

Consider everyone’s needs

• Get to know your team members – use regular one on one informal conversations to understand their motivations and fears
• You can’t please all of the people all of the time, but you should at least consider everyone’s needs, especially around the big issues that will significantly impact on them
• Communicate your understanding of staff needs and how you’ve considered them in your decisions and actions
• Keep people safe – physically and psychologically.

Show integrity

• Mean what you say
• Say what you mean
• Keep your word
• Don’t breach confidences
• Be clear about your values and act in accordance with them.

It might be tempting to be a little bit dishonest, unfair or selfish in order to solve a tricky issue, get your way or preserve your reputation. But just like your mother always knew when you were lying, your team members have highly attuned trust barometers, so you can be sure they’ll figure it out. And once trust is eroded between a manager and their staff, it’s very very difficult to restore.

Staff who trust you will accept your decisions even if they don’t agree with them, will look for ways to support you and will go the extra mile for you and the team. Staff who don’t trust you, even a little bit, will devote their energy to fighting to protect themselves rather than doing their job. They’ll withdraw discretionary effort and may even actively sabotage your decisions. Acting at all times with honesty, fairness, consideration and integrity often takes a great deal of courage, but Managers who make the effort to develop and maintain trust within their staff will reap the rewards of happy, loyal, high performing teams.

Staff and managers trying to re-establish trust within their team will benefit from personalised, confidential coaching to identify and implement positive changes. Call or email me to discuss coaching rates and availability.

Jo Saies

pbperformance.com.au

Most of us aren’t dealing with life or death situations, but once we experience what feels like the psychological death that we can easily associate with failure, we spend the rest of our lives trying to avoid it at all costs. But can failure be helpful?

As a downhill ski racer, and member of the Australian Disabled Ski Team back in the 1990s, there was a saying – if you don’t fall, you’re not trying hard enough. I fell lots! But as a professional, as a leader, as a human being trying to do my best in life, I can be terrified of failure, and it often stops me trying. The anticipated psychological harm feels so much worse than the frequent and  inevitable bruises and bumps I got racing at speed down a hill with limited vision.

Leaders need to be able to fail so they can push themselves and their organisations beyond the limits of what they know, think and do. But it’s hard, because you have to over-ride the internal safety regulator that clicks on the moment we sense the potential for even small failures, and you have to be willing and able manage the biases, judgements and expectations of others around what it means to fail.

So, if you’re not sure if a project will succeed, and there’s valuable learning in giving it a red hot go, here’s some suggestions to help make failure an OK option:

Fail Fast
Get on to it quickly – drawing it out might put off the pain, but prolonging the agony or uncertainty can be unsettling for you and the team. If something isn’t going to work it might be better to know that quickly so you can recover and move on.

Fail Small
There’s no point in risking everything – start with a pilot, a short trial, a low risk part of the business, or with a group of early adopters, and see what happens. You can better manage any risk, and if it doesn’t work out, you’ve minimised the fall-out.

Fail Soft
I used to dread training on days when the snow was packed down hard as ice – I’d hold back just that little bit more, attempting to avoid at all costs, a fall that felt like landing on concrete. Training on softer snow meant losing some of my fear, and being able to push myself to the edge of my limits. What are the conditions that make it easier for you to fail with a soft landing? For example, pick your timing – maybe don’t try something risky until market conditions are relatively stable, or wait until the new merger is bedded down.

Fail Safe
Nothing is ever really fail-safe. Human beings are not perfect, accidents happen, the world works in mysterious ways. We can’t control our environment or each other as much as we think, or as much as we’d like. So let’s get used to things not working out in the way we’d hoped or planned, and be OK with that. That means shifting how we view our own failures, and it also means as leaders, we need to make it safe for others to try and to fail, by encouraging creativity, appropriate risk-taking, and a mindset of experimentation. Reward staff for taking a risk, protect them if it doesn’t work out, and institutionalise a process to tease out and share learnings from failed projects.

So learn to fail by failing fast, failing small, failing soft, and failing safe. But learn from what you did and didn’t do, from what happened and didn’t happen, from what went well and not so well, and recognise that this is the only way we make progress, as individuals, as leaders and as organisations. It turns out that failure is, after all, an option.

PB Performance

Looking under the bonnet can be a bit like developing greater self-awareness – the process of uncovering more of yourself and learning how you show up with others. And just like with the car, we can actively avoid taking a look inside ourselves for fear of what we might uncover, but in doing so, we run the risk of some disastrous personal and professional consequences.

What are we afraid of?
We avoid looking under the bonnet of our car because we can’t afford the cost of the work that might be needed, because it’s inconvenient having the car off the road while it’s serviced, or because we’re afraid the mechanic might uncover more than we bargained for. These concerns are equally relevant when we consider looking inside ourselves. There might be a financial cost of raising our self-awareness if we’re using a coach or attending a leadership development program; we might worry about what we might uncover; we might lose some efficiency or effectiveness while we’re doing the hard work of examining and shifting our ingrained patterns of thinking or behaviour; or we might worry about whether the expected benefits of the work will be worth the investment of time, money and effort.  And at the end of the day, what we don’t know can’t hurt us, right?

What are the risks if we don’t?
Is blissful ignorance the way to go? If we don’t take a look under the bonnet of the car from time to time, we won’t notice when parts are getting worn, and we’ll miss opportunities for fine tuning the engine that might give us better vehicle performance. And when we never take the time to look inside ourselves, we can miss the warning signs that things are deteriorating. We might miss the fact that we’re becoming reactive, negative, disengaged, inefficient or burnt-out. And we miss the opportunity to fine tune our own internal operating systems which inherently affect the way we show up with others, the way we perform and the way we lead. Self-awareness is the foundation for any shift in mindset or behaviour and is recognised as an essential component of effective and authentic leadership.

How do we do it?
Building self-awareness is like exercise – you need to make a commitment to the process, make time for it, and practice. Build habits of self-reflection, find opportunities to get feedback, and stay curious about your own behaviour, what’s driving it, and its impact on others.

• Listen to your internal narrative – this has such a strong influence on our external behaviour
• Notice your reactive behaviours – are there certain scenarios that tip you into being aggressive, controlling, arrogant, passive, distant, critical, complicit.or other habitual ways of operating that limit leadership effectiveness
• Recognise situations that trigger an over-reaction in you – one that in hindsight, or from another’s perspective, is completely disproportionate to the circumstance
• After a meeting or a significant interaction, think about what you said and did, how you intended it to be received, and how it might have been perceived differently
• Find ways to ask for feedback – don’t wait for the annual performance appraisal to find out how others experience you. Start with people you trust, whether they be superiors, peers, reports or people in other life domains – ask them to share how they see your strengths, and where they notice a behaviour that they perceive might be limiting your effectiveness
• Take a formal 360 assessment (using a reputable tool and process) to learn about how others experience you, and how this might differ to your own self-perception, then work with a coach to unpack what this might mean for you
• Journal your self-reflection, look for patterns, trends, insights and opportunities
• Stay curious – try to suspend your judgement about what you notice through self-reflection and replace with curiosity and permission to grown and learn.

When we make the effort to service our car, we’re ensuring we get optimum performance of our vehicle over time. When leaders make the effort to shine a light on the underlying thinking patterns that drive their behaviour, they gain access to an untapped reservoir of new choices, possibilities and potential for more authentic, sustainable and effective leadership.

PB Performance

Recently I’ve noticed I also have my own internal safety manager who monitors my choices, decisions and actions to prevent me from coming to harm. And I’ve also come to realise how much this safety manager gets in the way of me achieving my goals. He’s the voice in my head that says watch out, be careful, danger ahead, go back, not now, not me, are you sure???  I’ve given him a name and a persona to help me take back control!

From working with my clients, I know the internal safety manager might give out warnings like

• ‘better not take on that new client in case you don’t really know what you’re doing’
• ‘don’t tell the interview panel about that important project you successfully managed….they might end up hiring you and you could let them down’
• ‘careful setting those KPIs for your team too high…what if you don’t achieve them?’
• ‘best if you don’t tell your colleague she let you down in that stakeholder meeting…you might look like a trouble-maker for raising it’

Our safety manager serves an important purpose, keeping a look out for perceived threats and imminent dangers. Not only physical dangers, but psychological risks such as rejection, exclusion, exposure, failure, criticism, shame, embarrassment, and humiliation amongst others. His ultimate purpose is self-preservation.

But there can also be high costs of playing it safe, including:

• Dissatisfaction – we may not pursue a dream, a passion or a goal because of the risk of harm, so we stay unhappy in the status quo
• Mediocrity – we might limit our horizons, settling for what’s known and certain in case discovery is uncomfortable
• Paralysis – we end up doing nothing because the risk of taking action seems too great
• Perfectionism or excessive planning – obsessively over compensating to avoid or minimise risk
• Failure – we can unwittingly sabotage our own chances of success because of a fear of failing or a fear of not being worthy of our success.

Safety managers can seem very authoritative and can be profoundly influential in the way we perceive and engage with the world. They may have been with us for a really long time, probably serving a legitimate purpose at one point, but chances are they’ve outstayed their welcome!! We don’t want to eliminate them completely (otherwise we’d all be jumping out of planes without parachutes to establish our capacity for flight). But to lead a satisfying, successful and meaningful life, we may need to do some work on keeping our safety manager in check.

If you think you’re under the excessive influence of your own personal safety manager, plan to get better acquainted. For the next 24 hours see if you can notice even small examples of:

• When does he show up?
• What are the triggers?
• Does he have a voice – what kinds of things does he say?
• Does he conjure up uncomfortable sensations – where and how do you experience these?

Once you’ve noticed the presence of your safety manager, spend some time digging a little deeper:

• What is the potential harm you’re being warned about?
• How does this influence your behaviour – what do you do more of or less of to prevent or minimise the risk?
• What is the cost of doing this?

For example, my safety manager shows up every time I go to write these articles! Right now, he’s saying ‘if you write an article about safety managers people will think the article is lame…they’ll criticise you and you might lose your credibility’. And how do I respond to minimise the risk of this perceived harm? ‘I’d better choose another topic that’s more interesting, more relevant and more valuable to everyone who reads my articles…oh wait, that might not be good enough either…(repeat by 10, feel frustrated and overwhelmed then postpone until another day!).

At this point it’s pretty easy for me to acknowledge that my thinking, influenced by the habitual warnings from my safety manager, is keeping me safe by avoiding the possibility of criticism and judgement. But I can also recognise the cost – in this case, paralysis, procrastination and an inability to complete something I know is important. So now I can weigh up the costs and benefits, and make a mindful choice about whether to heed my safety manager’s warnings about the selection of article topic.

Be prepared for the difficult sensations that might arise when you choose to ignore warnings from your safety manager. Noticing and allowing feelings of uncertainty, anxiety or even fear is an important element of keeping your safety manager in check. Yes, there’s a cost to rejecting safety warnings – it might be butterflies, cold sweats, sleepless nights, feelings of vulnerability or self-doubt. But playing it safe can come at a bigger cost:

• it’s hard to be the effective and influential leader that you’d like to be;
• it’s hard to stay positive, productive and high performing in the face of challenge and uncertainty;
• it’s hard to be truly authentic in the way you show up with others;
• and it’s harder to achieve the personal and professional goals and successes that you’re truly capable of.

Ultimately, it’s harder to be your personal best.

Pay attention to the safety messages, but challenge their validity and choose to proceed with the actions that are aligned with your values, goals and purpose. You might be surprised at how this opens up opportunities for success and satisfaction you didn’t think possible.

Got a Question?
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Not sure what to do?

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PB Performance