In the last 26 years, Ed Molitor has developed his leadership skills in athletics and business. From working as an NCAA Basketball coach at Texas A&M to becoming the Vice President of a national recruiting firm, Ed has taught countless athletes, coaches, and business leaders how to THINK, ACT, and EXECUTE at an elite level. As a result, Ed has a unique set of skills to deliver leaders across the country a purposeful, positive, energetic, and refreshing experience to unlock their true potential.
In 2016, Ed launched his company, The Molitor Group, to reach and add value to a larger sphere of ambitious individuals and help them achieve their goals every day. Through The Molitor Group, Ed has guided all leaders to achieve success. From entrepreneurs and executives to teams and companies, The Molitor Group empowers individuals and groups to achieve at the next level. Through Leadership Performance training, coaching, and speaking, Ed’s goal is to supply people and organizations with the necessary tools to move forward from where they are now to where they want to be.
Success in business and athletics is determined by consistently performing at a high level. When they wake up, leaders and coaches operate under extremely high pressure to perform, produce, and keep everyone depending on them happy. Every day, they have to figure out a way to be the voice and face that everyone on their team needs to see and hear.
For some folks, it is a hard reality. This could be because they lack the skill set, confidence, or experience to meet the standard. When we feel that pressure, we can’t project that onto our team members. As leaders, we have to find a way every day to translate the expectations and strategies into process and execution.
One of the core ways to do this is to focus on value and psychological safety. Psychological safety is being able to show and employ oneself without fear of negative consequences for one’s image, status, or career. It knows the team is safe from interpersonal risk-taking, and members feel accepted and respected. They can challenge the status quo without fear, producing a team-driven toward innovation.
Psychological safety starts with building the right mindset and behaviors. The key is to establish a positive climate where teammates value one another’s contributions, care about each others’ wellbeing, and input how the team carries out the work. As a team leader, you can catalyze by empowering other leaders in your organization and fellow teammates by reinforcing the behaviors expected by the rest of the team.
As coaches, we have to remember that there are eyes on us at all times, and people who look up to us will see how we respond in certain situations, especially in conflict. They need to know they can trust us in times of adversary, and we’re not going to turn our backs on our values the moment a situation turns heated. When you can create psychological safety, they know that they can trust you, even in moments of adversary, and you’ll have their back.
The best recruiters are the people you have right now. Psychological safety drives trust and trust drives everything else, including energizing your recruiting and extending your retainer. If people are happy, feel valued, and are doing work with value, they’ll stay with you longer than anyone else.
Psychological safety isn’t the same as being soft. We model the leadership and values of our leaders, so your team is going to work smarter, harder, and as a more cohesive unit because they feel safe. Not to mention, they’re going to have a lot more fun. When you stay committed to psychological safety, even in times of adversary or growth, it becomes a way of life.
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To the Athletics of Business, a podcast about how the traits and behaviors of elite athletes and remarkable business leaders frequently intersect. The real stories and hard lessons to help you level up your leadership and performance. Now, your host, Ed Molitor.
Welcome back to another episode of the Athletics of Business podcast. I am your host and CEO of the Molotor Group, Ed Molotor. And today we're going to have a conversation. Well, not so much a conversation because it's just us, it's a solo cast, and we're going to dive into psychological safety and I'm going to get there in a second. But I want to talk about where this came from, give you a little bit of context as to why we're talking about this today. One of the hard realities of life for some folks is that your success is determined in business, in athletics, by your level, to consistently produce and perform at a high level. At a high level for you. This is the time of year when this podcast is being recorded that you're starting to see the writing on the wall.
For some college coaches, for some MBA coaches, but specifically for the college coaches, they operate every single day, from the time they wake up till the time they go to bed, at extremely high level of pressure. Pressure to perform, to produce, to recruit, to keep the boosters happy, the administrators happy, the players happy, the players handlers happy, the player's parents happy, the players, high school coaches, AAU coaches happy to keep their families happy. On and on and on. And at the end of the day, they have to figure out a way to show up every day and be the voice, the face that their team needs to see and the voice that their team needs to hear. And it's no different than a leader in the business world and in corporate world.
Every single day we have to find a way to be the face and voice our team needs to see and hear. And it's not always easy to do, especially when things aren't going as well as they're expected to go. Why is this a hard reality for some folks? Okay, let me talk about that for a second. It could be, honestly, a lack of skill set and a lack of commitment to developing the necessary skills. It could be a lack of self confidence, which could be a result of the lack of commitment to work towards developing a skill set. It could be something that some sort of crucible they're carrying with them. There's something that's happened to them. Sometimes they've fallen up short.
Or it could be they lack confidence because they don't have enough losses, they haven't dealt with enough adversity to have the spotlight on to shine every single day. Possibly they haven't been held to the same standards that you and your organization that your team are trying to hold them to. Now, as a leader again, you're going to experience just a ton of pressure. And I was thinking about this as I was reading a couple articles and a phone conversation I had yesterday with a friend of mine whose team is struggling at a high level. A lot of it has outside of their control. And he told me, I have to figure out today, I'll get tomorrow, I'll plan tomorrow at the end of today.
But today I have to figure out how to bring the energy, how to bring the focus, how to put people in place so they can win today. See, when we experience that external pressure, it is so key and so critical for us not to project that onto our team. Whether there's something going on away from the office, whether there's something going on internally with upper management or with others or with their peer, whatever it is, that can't be visible and it can't be sensed and it can't be picked up on by our team members while we're working with them. As leaders, we have to find the way every single day to translate the expectations and the strategies into process and execution. Now think about that. We talk about becoming a coaching leader, developing leaders. Now let me back up for a second.
We know that today's workforce, there's three things that they want. They want to know that they're valued. They want to know that the work they do is important and it has meaning. And the third thing is, and if you listen to the podcast often, you'll know the third thing, and that's they want to be coached. So becoming a coaching leader, you have to develop the ability to translate the expectations and strategies into the process and execution. And one of the best ways to do that, the core intangibles, one of the game changers, something that'll impact your people on your team long after you are working together. And it'll not only impact them directly, it'll impact others in their life, is the ability to focus on, value and execute on psychological safety. What is psychological safety? Let's lay that out there. Okay.
Psychological safety, it's being able to show and employ one's own self without fear of negative consequences of self image, status or career on a team. It's that shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking and that members feel accepted and respected. And I'll get into the soft piece later, but members feel accepted and respected. That doesn't mean that we want them to just desire to fit in. We want them to embrace the culture, embrace the vision, relentless pursuit of that singleness of purpose that we're after. Right? And they're accepted and respected because of what they offer the team. And they knowing that they're a part of something bigger themselves and that they sell, they're selfless and they serve their teammates. That's what I mean by feel accepted and respected. Think about this.
If your team members can ask for help, share suggestions informally. So in other words, it's not like, okay, it's a meeting. Here's our structure, here's our agenda. Like how I stressed agenda, but here's our agenda. Now it's your turn to talk. What do you got? No, no. They have an idea. They bring the idea forward. Okay? They're able to challenge the status quo without fear of backlash and negative social consequences. If you can do this, then your team's going to be able to innovate quickly, right? Embrace and adapt to change, unleash the benefits of diversity. And I'll tell you what else. You're going to have team members that are going to follow you into the fire. You're going to have team members that feel like they're in the trenches for their teammates, not just with their teammates.
Resilience absolutely is the byproduct of psychological safety. Think about it. Interpersonal risk taking, the ability to fail and learn and to move forward. Learning to be resilient, embrace reality, accept reality, and then figure out what you're going to do with it. But how do you do this? Well, you build the right mindset, you build the right behaviors with the team, and then you build the right climate. And I want to quote an article by McKinsey & Co. From February of 2021. And I really like this, and I want you to think about this, okay? Especially in this time of being so remote. We're still remote and we're going to be remote. It's the way things are going to be. I'm going to quote this here. Our research finds that a positive team climate in which team members value one another's contributions. Okay.
A positive team climate in which team members value one another's contributions, care about one another's wellbeing, and have input into how the team carries out its work is the most important driver of a team's psychological safety. By setting the tone for the team climate through their Own actions. Team leaders have the strongest influence on a team's psychological safety. As the coaching leader, you can serve as a catalyst by empowering other leaders in your organization, even if not by title and your specific team, to help cultivate psychological safety. Now, pay close attention here by role modeling and reinforcing the behaviors they expect from the rest of the team. Now, I'm going to add another story here, okay? And this is where this came from. And it's kind of a combination of different things.
This past weekend, as I think I mentioned before, this past high school basketball season, I volunteered assistant coach with a great friend of mine here at our local high school. And we're having a good year. We've had some ups and downs. I think we have 18, 19 wins, still have some games left, state tournament coming up, and still have a chance to do something pretty special. And psychological safety is so important with kids these days. I mean, it's always important, but there's so much focus on it right now and paying attention to how you do things, how you coach kids, how you respond in negative and adverse situations during the game, during practice, discipline situations on and off the court, and how you stay true to your values, right?
To like what you stand for and what are your standards that you expect and accept and being consistent with that, but in the same breath, being compassionate about what they have going on in their life and how the last two years have impacted and affected them and their families and their friends and the world spinning around them. And I do mean spinning. And this last Friday night, we happened to play our rival school town north of us and ended up winning by two. They missed a three at the buzzer to beat us and crowd rushed the floor like anywhere, you know, big rival games. And it got a little bit dicey after the game. And I was playing the peacemaker in a certain situation. I happened to be friends with the other coaching staff that specifically the head coach.
I've actually spoken at one of his classes at their high school about how to be a success in life in the situation. Not going into it got a little dicey. And as I was walking off the floor, a couple dads and a grandfather, I'm presuming, I guess I am. Profiling verbally attacked me. And again, I was a peacemaker. And I was walking with our coaches back to our locker room off the floor. And our biggest concern was getting the kids off the floor, our players back to the locker room, getting everybody out of there safely. And it wasn't really, it got dicey but by no stretch of the imagination was there ever a threat of violence. Well, anyways, these two men, along with three or four women just verbally unleashing on me.
Cause I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. As I'm walking off the floor, it pops my head that my son is at the game by himself. Now, seven years old, he's sitting with a great friend of mine. I know he's got him. So I don't have my 7 year old just floating around the packed gym causing trouble for people. But anyways, I'm conscious of the fact that at some point I'm going to see him as I'm walking up the floor and I have these two men verbally jumping, which it is what it is. I've had a lot more challenging situations similar to that in my life.
But anyways, we're walking off the floor and we say our piece to each other and I continue to walk and I notice that my son is now next to me, seven years old, he's now next to me. He's looking up at me and he's looking at them. And I realize that this is probably the first time in his little life that he's going to see how his father responds to a situation like this. And I've always taught him that how you treat people is a reflection of your character, not their character. And how they treat you, in fact is a reflection of their character and not your character.
And that thought was popping in my head and at the same time I had that conflict of interest where there was no person, no man going to talk to me the way this person was in front of my son. So we resolved it. I looked down at him, I asked him if he was okay, and we did talk about it later and he was fine with it. He was way more fine with it than I was fine with it. And we had a couple of laughs over it. And then I did talk to him and explain it to him, and I explained the situation to him. And I was working on some content for clients this week, one client specifically. It dawned on me that's something.
As coaching leaders in the business world, in the athletic world, we need to be very conscious of the fact there are always eyes upon us, specifically our team members. How are we going to respond to certain situations with others? Are we going to compromise our standards, what we expect and accept for certain individuals that perform at a higher level than others? Okay, are we going to let things slide? Or what is our ability? Can they trust us? In times of adversity, when our back is against the wall, are we going to abandon the things that we stand for or our authentic leadership style that we talk about? Are we going to abandon that because we get tight and we panic and we start thinking about ourselves as coaching leaders? It's just funny how that something like that pops up and it happens.
Because here's the bottom line. It all comes down to this. It all comes down to trust. And when you have that ability to create psychological safety for your team and you employ that psychological safety in certain situations and how you treat others relative to whatever their position is, their tenure with the company, the situation at hand, they're going to figure out how well they can trust you. Because don't think for a second without even saying a word to you, they're not putting themselves in that situation somewhere down the line. Like, if that were to happen to me, how will he or she lead me? Can I trust them? Do they have my back? Is it cool to go to them with something that's going to be a little bit. Feel a little bit vulnerable for me? Right.
Or can I push the envelope a little bit here and challenge the status quo in respectful way? And by the way, as a coaching leader, you absolutely want people that can do that. You want people that see things differently than you. You want people on your team that are stronger in certain areas than you are. And when you have the ability to create psychological safety during adverse times, during times of disruption, during times of change, which we're going to continue to see at a pace and with a pace and range that we've never seen before, I mean, it's just going to keep getting greater and greater, which means our ability to create this incredible foundation of psychological safety has to improve significantly along the way as well. And I just think that's so key. But here's the thing. Safe versus soft.
By no stretch of imagination, when we talk about psychological safety, are we talking about taking it easy on people. Okay. And I always go back to Gray Popovich, right? Hug them and hold them. Hug them and let them know you love them and you care about them and you want them to be successful. But hold them accountable to the standards that you set. And do not compromise what it is you are trying to accomplish. Do not compromise the type of people that you are going to bring into your culture. And not just as a keeper of the culture. You don't want your culture to remain stagnant, because actually, then it'll be going in reverse. You're either Expanding or contracting. You want to bring people in that are going to drive the growth of your culture, strengthen your culture, bring more energy to your culture.
You know, here's a funny thing. We've. We're in this huge struggle right now, right? This great resignation, which it's another conversation, another time. But here's what psychological safety, here's what being authentic as a leader, right? Operating with honesty, integrity and vulnerability. Here's what that does for you when it comes to this situation. We have the great resignation. Who are your best recruiters? Is it that search firm that you hired? No. Your best recruiters are the people you have right now. They're your best external recruiters and they're your best internal recruiters. And what does that mean? What does that mean? Psychological safety drives trust. Your trust, like I said, drives everything. It drives performance, it energizes recruiting and it increases your retainment. It does.
If people are happy and people feel valued and they know that they're doing meaningful work and it's significant and they know they've got a person that's in the trenches for them, not just with them as a coach, they'll stay possibly for less money than going somewhere else. So what are we doing? Sometimes we need to make the complicated simple, right? The complex simple. We spend all this time and energy talking about what can you do today to increase the psychological safety of your team? Where are the gaps? You know, this is something we work with our clients, with our victory defined program. And again, we take that word victory and it's values, intangibles, creativity, team objectives, rules of the game and you. And we layer it against the five fundamentals of coaching which preparation, communication, execution, reflection and adaption.
And we help them find the gaps of what's missing and what can we do better and what can we double down on? What is it we do really good that our people love about us as leaders that make them feel safe? See, when you have psychological safety and you're not being soft, your people are going to work harder, they're going to work smarter, more efficient, they're going to be more cohesive, they're working together, they're going to be more innovative, they're going to be more creative, and you know what? They're going to have a lot more fun. And again, they're going to follow you into the fire. They're going to model and emulate the behavior that you display and the leadership style that you display and honor, respect and promote the standards that you establish.
So I think there's a lot more to psychological safety than just making sure everybody is okay. Because sometimes when we want to make sure that everybody is okay, we're playing not to lose. I want to make sure that everybody's doing great. I want to make sure everyone's fired up as my we're all going to have bad days. We all have flaws. We all have shortcomings. But dang it, we're going to go to work every single day and we're going to squeeze that sponge dry. We're going to bring as much energy as we can possibly, bring as much positivity as we can. And I'm not talking about being cheesy. You know what I'm talking about, right?
We're going to reframe novel solutions and figure out what they really mean to us and how we can go about attacking that and growing through adversity and doubling down on what we're really good at and becoming great at. And then when we're great at it, to work at becoming elite at it. That's what psychological safety empowers you and your team members to do. I hope this was helpful for you, and I love talking about it, and I love having a conversation. And really, I look forward to engaging with podcast guests here because, you know, with the lineup that we have coming up, this will be a topic of conversation. It's so significant. It is so important.
And the thing is, when you keep it front of mind and when you stay committed to psychological safety, even through times of challenges and times of adversity, times of growth, times of and times when you're trying to sustain that success, you're getting a little bit comfortable with the way you're doing things. But psychological safety, when you keep that front of mind, eventually it just becomes a way of life. And it is absolutely what you and your culture are known for. Again, you'll attract the top talent, you'll retain the top talent, and you'll have a lot of fun growing as an organization and as a team along the way. Thank you so much again for listening to the Athletics of Business podcast. I appreciate all the emails and all the comments over the last few years with this podcast.
And one of the things I'm finding more out is questions on our programs and our services. So please feel free. Whether it's our coaching programs, our development programs, or the keynote speaking, you can reach out to me directly at edhemolitor Group. It is T H E Molotor Group M O L I T O R group dot com and just shoot me any questions that you have any comments in any of our programs that you might be interested in, you can find out our programs@the molotorgroup.com thanks and really dial into psychological safety and it's going to pay huge dividends for you and your team.
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