This is the fifth in a series of blog posts, culminating with a toolkit for fact-checkers on mental health and well-being. Learn more about the program here.

By Emma Thomasson, Training Manager of the program Mental Health Leadership for Fact-Checkers.

Journalists and fact-checkers often describe themselves as adrenaline junkies. They love the thrill of breaking news and the sense that the work they do matters. But that means that they often struggle to differentiate between what is urgent and what is important. In many newsrooms, the urgency of responding to external events — be it an election, a coup or a natural disaster — means there never seems to be time to think about important, but non-urgent matters, like the wellbeing of the team. For managers, that can mean it is hard to prioritise making strategic plans, or checking in with their staff, or making sure their own needs for guidance and career development are being met.

That is one of the main takeaways of the participants in the Mental Health Leadership for Fact-Checkers Program, a 6-month program of training and coaching for leaders of fact-checking organizations run by The Self-Investigation. Participants noted that the program was particularly valuable because it forced those leaders to block time in their calendars to think, learn and share experiences with peers in a similar position.

1. Stop working as if everything is an emergency

As the program drew to a close, several participants pledged to keep up the habit of reserving slots in their calendar to break the lure of working in a “crazy busy” way described by emergency room doctor Daria Long in her TED talk.

Long recommends applying the ER principles of triage to prioritise everyday challenges.

• Red – immediately life-threatening
• Yellow – serious, but not immediately life-threatening
• Green – minor
• Black – the worst scenarios, when nothing can be done

Instead of reacting to everything as if it is a category red emergency, as we often do in the newsroom, we need to work out when things are not that serious and find ways to delegate them, or make time for them when the real reds issues have been dealt with. We also need to beware of spending too much time worrying about some things in the black category, when it may be better to admit that is a waste of effort and move on.

Another way of deciding what to prioritise is to focus first on those tasks that are both urgent and important, an idea said to have been practised by former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Tasks that are important but not urgent can be scheduled for later, those that are urgent but less important can be delegated and those that are not urgent or important can be deleted.

Jency Jacob, managing editor of BOOM Live in India, says he has an informal rule that he does not want to have meetings during lunch hour. That gives him time to eat lunch at a fixed time and also flexibility to relax post-lunch before the next meetings are scheduled. 

Lorena Martinez, Head of Editorial Operations in Europe at Logically Facts says: “I usually have a packed agenda and often find myself multitasking. To prioritize important tasks, I block off dedicated time in my calendar each week to ensure I have uninterrupted focus time.”

Others pledged to implement a rule that they have a 15-minute buffer between meetings. That might mean that one hour meetings are kept to 45 minutes.

2. Make time to connect

When faced with a deluge of news, teams struggle to make time to connect on a human level, particularly if some people are working remotely. That makes misunderstandings and conflict more likely. Many of the participants in the program highlighted the value of sharing experiences with other fact-checking organizations from across the globe during the program and pledged to make more time for building relationships in their teams.

Blanka Zöldi, Editor-in-Chief at Lakmusz in Hungary, says every second Monday her team works a short day and holds a team meeting in a cafe for about an hour and a half where people can share any topic on their minds. 

“It’s a good opportunity to zoom out from the rush of the daily work,” she noted, “and to reflect on “bigger” professional questions such as the most efficient tools, formats for fact-checking, to reflect on current events and, if needed, to talk about our priorities and strategies as a team. But, most importantly, it’s an opportunity to be together regularly, to listen to each other, and to create a safe space to ask questions, to talk about any worries or fears, and also to share what interests and motivates each of us.” 

Alessandra Monnerat, Assistant Editor of Brazil’s Estadão Verifica, has organised a monthly online “buddy” coffee. She pairs up people in her team for a 15-minute informal meeting: “The feedback I received was very positive; some of them noted they discovered new things about their peers they would never find out by simply working together in a virtual environment. I think activities like these are important to build confidence and teamwork.”

3. Make a plan for accountability

The fact that the program combined workshops with one-on-one coaching helped to hold leaders accountable for their plans to support their own and their team’s mental health. 

However, now that the program is ending, we asked participants to come up with a plan to help them set and reach short-, medium- and long-term goals for themselves and their teams. We asked them to answer these questions to develop a personal action plan.

• WHAT actions (behaviors, practices, policies)
• HOW you will do it and be held accountable (tools, resources, metrics)
• WHO can help support you in your commitment (team, audience, community)

Katarina Subasic, editor in AFP’s fact-checking team for Europe, says she plans to set reminders in her calendar so she sticks to her plan.

Other participants have pledged to ask peers, colleagues or friends and family to check in on them to make sure they are sticking to their plans.

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts, culminating later this year with a guide for fact-checkers on mental health and well-being. Learn more about the program here.

By Emma Thomasson, Training Manager of the program Mental Health Leadership for Fact-Checkers.

What is psychological safety?

The job of fact-checking is all about establishing more certainty about what is true, engaging critical thinking and correcting false information. That doesn’t leave much room for mistakes, nor for admitting weakness or vulnerability, at least not in public.

Against that backdrop, it can be a challenge for managers of fact-checking teams to create a culture of psychological safety. This is defined as a workplace culture where it is OK for employees to admit to mistakes, ask questions, express vulnerability or suggest new ideas.

There is often confusion over what this term means. It is sometimes thought of as a counterpoint to physical safety. So when preparing for a dangerous or potentially disturbing assignment, journalists are encouraged to think about both physical safety and psychological safety (seen as synonymous with mental wellbeing). However, the term has taken on a wider meaning in the context of team leadership due to research by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson. 

Edmondson says that team members only engage in close collaboration when they feel “psychologically safe”, knowing that “questions are appreciated, ideas are welcome, and errors and failure are discussable”.

 “People can focus on the work without being tied up in knots about what others might think of them. They know that being wrong won’t be a fatal blow to their reputation,” she said.

Edmondson made a name for herself by studying how teams and organizations deal with mistakes. During research into drug errors in hospitals, she came to the counterintuitive conclusion that better teams seem to make more mistakes, not fewer. She eventually realized that doctors and nurses in these high-performing teams don’t necessarily make more mistakes, but they report more because they don’t fear retribution for being open about problems.

Edmondson’s insights have since been applied to many other organizations and contexts, including Google, which studied thousands of teams and concluded that the top-performing groups had five dynamics in common, with psychological safety being the most important of them. 

The other key factors cited by Google are:

• Dependability: members reliably complete quality work on time
• Structure and clarity: a team has clear roles, goals, and plan
• Meaning: team members have a sense of purpose in their work
• Impact: members believe their work makes a difference.

When I was drawing this illustration of the Google conclusions at a workshop, I made a spelling mistake. Normally, I would have started afresh, but I decided it was a good way of illustrating the importance of being open about errors.

Looking at this diagram, it is clear that teams in the media industry generally have a very top-heavy pyramid. Journalists usually have a strong sense of “meaning” and “impact”. Perhaps even too much, which promotes an unhealthy obsession with work that drives us to burnout. Meanwhile, during my workshops and training sessions, newsroom leaders I have worked with admit that their teams often lack psychological safety, as well as structure and clarity.

Active listening is key for promoting psychological safety

One of the most powerful ways leaders can cultivate this culture is to practice active listening, which involves listening without judging or jumping to conclusions, and refraining from imposing your own opinions or solutions. That might sound easy but we often find it hard to resist the temptation to interrupt, while we usually jump in to fill any uncomfortable silence in a conversation. But if managers can master the technique, they often find it liberating as they no longer feel under pressure to fix the person’s problems. Often, a team member who feels truly heard will feel supported to come up with their own solution.

Here are some tips for how to practice active listening:

• Face the speaker and have eye contact.
• “Listen” to non-verbal cues too.
• Don’t interrupt.
• Listen without judging, or jumping to conclusions.
• Don’t start planning what to say next.
• Show that you’re listening
• Don’t impose your opinions or solutions.

Here are some other ways that a leader can promote a feeling of safety in a team:

• Model vulnerability – show your own humanity and humility as a leader.
• Admit your own ignorance – celebrate mistakes as learning opportunities rather than shaming people who are brave enough to say they don’t know.
• Invite participation eg: implement the rule in meetings that no one talks twice before everyone has a chance to talk once.
• Offer feedback, celebrate success – give as much praise as criticism
• Don’t avoid conflict – address problems before they spiral out of control
• Encourage feedback of your leadership – don’t react to feedback with defensiveness

What are the obstacles to psychological safety?

Promoting psychological safety often demands a big shift in organization culture. If a manager wants to encourage team members to admit to mistakes or suggest new ideas, she will need to acknowledge her own fallibility and be open to constructive criticism of her own leadership. It can be time-consuming to check in with team members to make sure that psychological safety is combined with accountability to turn ideas into action.

As Rosemary Igbeka from FactCheckHub noted, “It is important to be vulnerable: we are all human. We can make mistakes.” And Eric Litke, Senior Editor, Fact Check at USA TODAY, pointed out, “It can be tricky admitting failure. I tell junior staff: ‘Here are some things I screwed up along the way.’”

The whole idea of psychological safety is very rooted in Anglo-Saxon organizational culture where challenging authority is more acceptable than in other parts of the world. Employees from countries like Serbia, Nigeria and India that have a tradition of respect for hierarchy, might find it harder to express disagreement with their managers than colleagues from countries like Britain and the United States. Likewise, it might be easier for a manager in a flat-hierarchy start-up to admit fallibility than a boss in a large top-down traditional media house.

Here are some reflections from our participants:

Katarina Subasic, AFP digital investigations editor: “In Serbia, kids in school are not encouraged to ask questions or disagree… kids are not allowed to oppose adults – hierarchy is so strict.”

Eric Litke, Senior Editor, Fact Check at USA TODAY, said: “In the US, we have an independent mindset, which sometimes means we have an oversized concept of our place in the world that makes us very assertive.”

Karen Rebelo, deputy editor, BOOM LIVE, added: “We have a flat hierarchy. We are free to speak our mind. We say if we don’t know something.”

To be clear, psychological safety isn’t always about being nice and agreeing with everyone.

This is not about creating environments where people think it is fine to slack off, or make mistakes without consequence. But if colleagues are afraid to speak up or experiment, organizations will miss out on open exchange, learning and innovation. 

And successful teams need to be able to disagree and deal with conflict in a constructive way.

So managers need to be alert to their own conflict management style if they want to promote good teamwork and be prepared to vary their style depending on the situation. Sometimes, it pays to be more assertive, while other times a more collaborative approach can be more effective.