Annaliese McGavin, Senior People Insights Researcher at an Australian tech giant, on crafting collaborative conversations, cultivating psychological safety and providing effective feedback (#4)

Since graduating from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Science, focusing on the brain, behaviour and cognition, she’s completed honours at the University of Sydney under the area of organisation and coaching psychology, done a masters (where she was the #1 performer) at Macquarie University, looking at relationships between social cues and psychological safety and is a current PhD candidate at UNSW. Beyond her educational accolades, Annaliese has an impressive array of experience consulting in UX design, marketing, psychology and scientific research.

She now works as a Senior People Researcher, applying rigorous, evidence-based research techniques to improve engagement and wellbeing among thousands of employees and help shape their behaviour. More specifically, she applies behavioural science, including the knowledge and techniques discussed in this podcast, to improve outcomes and hone interventions for individuals, teams and organisations.

In my own experience, I’ve seen Annaliese’s caring nature and dedication to helping people smash their goals!

Top 3 quotes from the episode

"Being able to feel like you’re a part of a collaborative experience of progress and improvement and change, really does play a huge role in helping to support psychological safety"

"The most successful behaviour changes or just changes in general, are typically longer lasting, gradual and consistent changes, over time."

"Taking that time to reflect and prioritise goes so far in a busy world, whether you’re trying to learn something new or trying to get clear on what your priorities are for the day, or week, or month, (reflection) can be so valuable"

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Show Notes

The origins of Annaliese’s interest in psychology (1:26)

What psychological safety is and what it leads to (7:10)

What makes effective feedback (9:07)

The importance of positive reinforcement and embracing vulnerability (13:57)

Rapid-fire questions (21:16)

The fundamentals of high performing teams (24:52)

The value of prioritising reflection (28:47)

Embracing collaborative problem solving (33:05)

Fostering high engagement in group discussions (38:21)

The work and knowledge I’d like in 10 years (43:53)

More quotes from the episode

"People really like feeling secure, appreciated and able to be open, so any of those aspects of teamwork that can be enabled by that feeling of security, appreciation and openness, can probably be something that psychological safety will help with"

"Often, managers will think 'I’ve observed this, I know what they should have done instead and here’s what they need to do.' Sometimes you have a great insight into what went wrong and they should fix it but sometimes, there’s information that the person who did the behaviour ... had in mind"

"One of the biggest opportunities for creating psychological safety that often gets missed, is showing appreciation and positively reinforcing when people do take those behaviours that we want to see"

"It’s about not only appreciating someone’s vulnerability but being able to mirror it yourself"

"One of the key assumptions leaders or managers will make is that they have to show some grand gesture to positively reinforce a behaviour"

"Taking simple opportunities to show appreciation often mean that you can be more timely and therefore can be more impactful"

"You can have two, on the surface, totally different teams that are managed in totally different ways, that have totally different team processes and they can both be really successful"

"Too many teams continue to march forward, and they go from one project to the next, and they don’t take the time to actually pause and go, 'what worked well or didn’t work well in that last thing that we did, and how can we improve for next time'"

"Giving people the opportunity to communicate in a way that best suits them is a really powerful tool"