65 Skills Challenges

Psychological safety means feeling able to speak up, ask questions, or suggest ideas without fear of embarrassment or punishment. It’s what enables teams to do their best work - whether sharing concerns before they escalate, proposing new ideas, or learning from mistakes.

Rooted in principles of wellbeing and equality, psychological safety helps organisations meet both ethical and legal commitments to inclusive workplaces. By fostering trust, openness and respect, we create environments where everyone feels safe to contribute as themselves.

As a manager, you must communicate clearly and fairly about what you expect of your people. If you perceive a performance gap between your expectations and what you observe, you need to discuss it with the individual concerned. How you prepare for and conduct that performance conversation matters.

Have you ever hidden your true feelings, or not revealed your whole self at work? Do you keep quiet about your concerns or refrain from giving your opinion when talking with your manager and/or any of your colleagues? Why is that? Respectful, honest conversations at work contribute to a culture of trust and they are key to high-performing teams.

Written correspondence with customers says a lot about you and your organisation. Clear, unambiguous messages written in a friendly tone of voice present you as reliable, approachable and knowledgeable. Flowery, lengthy sentences utilising long words can confuse, don’t communicate your message clearly, and appear unnecessarily verbose. Short words in clear sentences work well. (Compare those two last sentences, for example.) Always proofread your work and ask yourself if you can simplify your sentences to make them clearer.

To give yourself the best chance of getting your manager’s full attention, it’s important to empathise with them and consider what they need and when they need it. Choose your time carefully, prepare thoroughly and don’t interrupt them when they are focused on something else. Try to relate what you want to say to their own priorities.

Commercial awareness is essential at every level of an organisation. It’s about understanding how a business operates, what drives success and how individual roles contribute to broader goals. When people develop commercial awareness, they make informed decisions, spot opportunities and help drive growth. Strong commercial understanding can enhance innovation, efficiency and overall business performance.

Collaboration occurs when a small group of people with different skills and knowledge come together to solve a mutual problem or exploit a shared opportunity. To work successfully, each person involved needs to have a genuine vested interest in the eventual outcome. And that outcome is unknown at the start of the process. The cross-examination and critique of ideas through open dialogue is a valuable part of the process; constructive disagreement optimises results.

Receiving feedback which identifies an area where you have fallen short of expectations isn’t always easy to take. If you don’t agree with what’s being said, a common and instinctive reaction is to defend rather than to enquire. But enquiry is helpful – asking questions helps you fully understand the impact of your behaviour and actions. It’s also useful because if the feedback provider cannot answer your questions, it’s possible that their feedback isn’t as accurate or objective as it should be. Keeping calm and asking questions highlights opportunities for improvement in both yourself and potentially the feedback provider too.

As a manager, you influence how your people are feeling. You have the power to increase, or alleviate, the stresses they experience in their everyday work. The build-up of frequent, repetitive micro stresses often leads to exhaustion and frustration, and it damages morale and productivity too. Asking people to switch tasks and regularly interrupting them when they are already busy on something else is known as ‘boss bombing’. It saps energy and confuses people about their priorities.

Do you think of yourself as an introvert or an extrovert?

People who lean towards more introverted behaviour can easily be overlooked in the workplace. But introverts make excellent team players, offering complementary qualities to their extroverted peers. Their capacity for focus and attention to detail is invaluable and because they’re not big talkers, they’re often excellent listeners and work very well one-on-one. A positive and inclusive culture means valuing the contributions from your more introverted colleagues as well as the extroverted ones.

Being accountable means taking ownership of your actions and behaviour. It means being open to learning from mistakes and focusing on resolving problems rather than blaming someone else for what’s happened. Even when you’re not directly responsible, you can still be accountable if the issue occurred on your watch. By not shying away from this and feeling confident to speak up and take ownership of outcomes, you demonstrate leadership, integrity and accountability.

Presenteeism (working while unwell or disengaged) and burnout (physical and emotional exhaustion) feed off each other in today’s always-on work culture, with remote working and constant connectivity often making both worse. The consequences can be serious for organisations, leading to lower productivity and higher turnover. For individuals, the negative impact on wellbeing and relationships is a problem. The solution begins by recognising warning signs early and establishing healthier work boundaries.