At some point we have to reach the conclusion that most of the time products fail because they are of lower quality compared to their competitors.
The only way I can see psychological safety effecting the eventual outcome of Google+ is someone who, being psychologically safe, would have said right at the beginning, "this is stupid, don't even try it".
Products that could have succeeded instead failed because of a lack of PsySafety on the team.
Nobody's suggesting this is a panacea that'll make your unviable idea suddenly viable, the article is about how options for working that could lead to success get cut off when PsySafety isn't present on the team.
Or said “you do realize this isn’t good, right?” at any point later on. A really smart exec could have noticed a preponderance of negative internal feedback (or solicited feedback if none was forthcoming) and fought to change course. That would have worked out a lot better for the company.
You seem to contradict yourself by diminishing the impact of psychological safety at the same time that you give an excellent example of how it might have helped a project.
This topic could be controversial, but maybe we can hack out some tools for it.
Previously, this would just have been part of team alignment. In a business culture that eshews black-and- white thinking, the zero-sum state of "safety," should be replaced with something more dynamic, like risk, because then it is something manageable you can reasonably engage with. Accepting the principle of psychological safety implies that it's not just a (unfalsifiable) fire alarm lever to pull. If anyone told me they felt "unsafe," it would be difficult not to make every effort to avoid them, and I think any lawyer would say the same. US law has this concept of "fighting words," which this concept is not directly, but appealing to safety is absolutely a legal and political threat, and it is not normal professional discourse. Since I am not a psychologist, I am not equipped to deal with psychological safety, and this is an HR issue.
Imo, we should really look at reframing "psychological safety," as something more manageable like, "burnout risk," "initiative risk," "working trust," or something else less formal.
This comment highlights both the need for what the article is advocating for AND why the waters here will always be treacherous; there will always be a push and pull.
To be effective, a team needs to be able to communicate freely, and each individual needs to be able to speak freely. But there’s a lot of power dynamics at play, not just in the team, but external to the team.
This is also why minorities are especially cursed in work environments: it’s not just that some folks might actually have prejudices against you based on your identity, it’s also that some folks might have prejudices against you based on your identity, and so you watch what you say and/or try not to be too assertive or contentious and/or wonder if some poorly worded comment was intended as a slur or not...and the smart manager is also cursed, because they may feel that they too need to be careful not to be too assertive or contentious, lest they draw attention from HR or a lawsuit.
Successful teams require mutual respect and brave communication. “Psychological safety” is a term that feels correct to me in the abstract, but very wrong as an applied concept for the workplace.
I think “cultivating mutual respect and open communication” is probably a better framing.
If someone extended their trust to you to tell you that they felt unsafe, your immediate reaction is to betray that trust and run away? They ask you for help and you punish them for it?
> Since I am not a psychologist, I am not equipped to deal with psychological safety, and this is an HR issue.
And yet, the way you choose to communicate and interact with others contributes to how safe they feel. You aren't formally educated in psychology, but it's still your informal responsibility as a member of society, to generally not cause psychological harm to those around you. Including when at work. If you don't take that responsibility, then you become the HR issue.
> zero-sum state of "safety," should be replaced with something more dynamic, like risk
How is risk any less zero-sum than safety? If you're going to claim the only states are safe/not-safe, why doesn't risky/not-risky work the same way?
> we should really look at reframing "psychological safety," as something more manageable
I think you're putting the phrase on too high a pedestal. To paraphrase the article, psychological safety is feeling that asking for help or admitting failure will not be punished. That's it.
I just can’t help but think of this movement as a kind of gaslighting. Your reports are either engaged because the work is interesting or the product is meaningful, or they are not. Attempts to sugar coat will fail just like how construction workers making a bridge to nowhere out of Popsicle sticks will inevitably start asking reasonable questions. Maybe my experience at some relatively cutthroat teams at Amazon color my opinion, since I have been in an environment where this kind of PS “happy-argumentation” was actually rewarded instead of just talked about.
In an optimistic mindset, “psychological safety” boils down to feeling secure in one’s job and in control of one’s project. When people feel secure, they free up cycles to creative, sleep better, enjoy each other’s company more, etc. when they feel in control they have the energy to constructively argue.
But when rubber hits the road most engineers do not have one of either security or control. At a startup they may have some limited product control but there is no safety. In a large company they may have more security but no actual control of the product. Either way, to promote PS and get a more engaged team, a manager has to downplay the reality of the situation. This leads to management allowing complicated pet projects, rewrites, and feedback meetings that go nowhere all for the sake of appeasing egos. Engineers tend not to be overly people-savvy but we catch on eventually.
I think it’s no better than the “we’re all a family” rhetoric. Just another way of trying to eke out more work for nothing in return. My last employer signed all employees up for an app called “happify” where we would get daily challenges to pop bubbles with stressful words on them or write praises to our coworkers. That strategy was so bald-faced that I had to kind of admire it.
So why are checked-out engineers bad? They are worse than bad, they are counter-productive. They push shit code because who cares? They don’t question obviously bad designs because they know there’s no point. They quit or move on leaving the team in churn-hell. But these are symptoms not of psychology but of reality. Spinozas Ethics is a lovely look into how psychology and reality are just two sides of the same coin, and you can’t fix one without fixing the other. As stated above, the solution is engaging work, but most work is not engaging. So let’s just be more realistic, ok?
I don't think "psychological safety" boils down to feeling secure in one's job in the way you suggest, it's more specific than that.
Being able to be your "true" self is the observation, not "be happy". If your true self is a neurotic mess, "psychological safety" on a team would give you the space to do that without feeling judged or that negative consequences would arise (informal or formal) by acting that way.
You can improve "checked-out" engineers feelings by creating a way for them to express their concerns without worry that they'll be punished for it.
Those toxic teams I'm sure you've been part of, where everyone felt shitty and nobody felt connected to the work? They didn't have to be that way by leveraging "psychological safety", even if "reality" was immutable (also, it's not immutable but we can get to that).
I completely agree with you and every point. I will also admit that I was being intentionally pessimistic but to get a point across. It’s funny you mention my cutthroat teams as a negative, because those are the teams that made me realize what it actually means to be committed to a goal. The teams that made me come to this conclusion were subsequent “bullshit” teams in places where will-to-power was punished instead of cultivated.
My main point in writing the diatribe above was to deter the type of pleasant but dull middle manager who thinks that all they have to do to solve their teams’ problems is psychologize them. I’ve actually noticed this as a larger cultural trend: people blaming their own minds or the minds of others for what is an actual real problem in the world. If I can help clear the wool from a few low-level programmers eyes to help them see that they aren’t so different from an accountant or the fry cook at their favorite bar (and that this is not a bad thing!) I feel like my job is done.
Yeah, it bothers the hell out of me when management forgets that we're actually tied to providing real value. The whole point of all this is that you get more value from the team when you do these things -- making people feel "safe" is a productivity hack, not the end goal. If people feel warm and fuzzy, but then don't move the project over the finish line, it's re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
The trick is to find people like you, get you engaged and feeling like you can actually fix the shit that's stopping you from being productive, while also getting you to give space for people to fuck up now and then, because people fucking up and feeling okay with that sometimes leads to really great insight when instead of fucking up they do something great.
Basically, "safety" is letting people feel not-terrible for taking a risk and having it blow up in their face. That should be allowed on a team, and Google's research seems to show that teams who allow people to fuck up without making them feel bad about it tend to make better shit than teams who punish people for fucking up.
...to a point. If all you do is fuck up, that also violates the safety, on the manager's side because then they're not feeling safe letting people take risks.
I think you have it backwards; psychological safety is something that executive leadership has to build into the culture of the company.
What it comes down to is a culture where decision making is transparent, questioning the status quo is encouraged and no one person holds the power to make / break a product. At the team level you’re always going to have good managers and bad managers, but with the right culture the bad managers blast radius will be diminished. A good manager can’t do a whole lot to overcome a shitty culture.
> You can improve "checked-out" engineers feelings by creating a way for them to express their concerns without worry that they'll be punished for it.
This is a utopia though. Every manager has their own manager right up to the company board. If you have to let people go, then how can you say you are not going to fire the guy who is the most checked out? If the person cannot deliver you cannot guarantee they won't lose their job.
It boils down to you really can't trust yourself to not be biased to those who are more open but more negative.
Simple, you cannot guarantee "they won't be punished".
> Every manager has their own manager right up to the company board. If you have to let people go, then how can you say you are not going to fire the guy who is the most checked out? If the person cannot deliver you cannot guarantee they won't lose their job.
Most checked out is not the same thing as can't deliver. In a well-functioning organisation one would hope that managers would assess people on how much they were actually delivering rather than how involved they sounded, and would have support from the structure above them in that.
Thanks for the clear and concise way of summarizing my thoughts of the last few months.
I am in a situation where I actually have near absolute safety and nearly no control over the projects. It was even worse in 2020 regarding control after being thrown into a toxic project by a CEO who always touts the motto "no a**holes".
Well when pitching for the biggest budget in the history of the org reality is what counts. Not nice mottos.
So I agree. Everytime I hear this bs about being a team/family/safe place I just think: STFU and pay me. I do my work. Nothing more, nothing less.
Psychological safety isn't about making you happy, I'm actually a bit surprised why so many people here think it is. It's about producing positive outcomes in the form of successful projects. You're still going to have toxic projects, this isn't a magic dust you sprinkle on a project to make it suddenly successful, it's a technique you use to make unbearable work bearable and give the people who don't feel comfortable speaking up the space to do so.
The observation is if everyone feels comfortable disagreeing with one another, the project is more likely to succeed. That's it.
This is a productivity tool to make marginal projects more likely to tip favorably, and to keep good engineers around even when they're on bad projects, and hopefully make some bad projects less bad by giving everyone room to suggest improvements.
People keep saying this but I don’t understand the difference. Engineers only want to have constructive arguments with each other if they feel committed to the project and happy about their place in the organization. If people feel that their job is on the line or that argumentation will not lead to any constructive output, then they will not engage in such an activity. Can you explain the difference between being happy and engaging in behaviors which a happy person engages in?
Maybe it would be helpful to use the term other than “safety”? Is there a synonym for a psychological safety that would get cross what you’re thinking about better?
I think the part you're missing is that projects don't just materialize as "committable" or "comfortable", people have to make them that way, and the more people who feel like they can step into that position, the better it is for the project, just from a pure numbers perspective.
"Happy" is a hard term to define, and I don't think you need to be happy to feel "safe". Another way of describing "safety" is "the ability to make mistakes/ask for help without negative consequences". You may feel "unhappy" that you made a mistake, but you won't feel judged for it if the people around you are comfortable with you taking risks.
You can be deeply unhappy, personally and professionally, and still experience that shared comfort with risk taking on your team, and benefit from what Google's research shows, I think. Perhaps you're all comfortable with the risks because the project is going so poorly and you need to throw some hail marys out there to try and get out of the bad situation. The focus is on everyone agreeing that making mistakes is expected and acceptable, because risks also come with reward.
I actually really like that example, where you're on a doomed project, and the natural "safety" that forms with the team who all knows it's a doomed project anyway, so why not take a few shots at something wild? The space you create in that environment where, "we were going to fail anyway might as well throw some shit at the wall to see what sticks" is exactly what I mean when I say "safety". Projects that have that attitude apparently tend to be more successful. Imagine having that level of comfort with your team and also working on a successful project!
> Maybe it would be helpful to use the term other than “safety”? Is there a synonym for a psychological safety that would get cross what you’re thinking about better?
Trust. Psychological safety is (real) trust between members of the team and the people who impact the team (e.g. managers or executives or whoever). It's trusting the people around you so you feel free to be yourself, to propose off-the-wall but potentially terrible ideas without being thought less of, to be open about flaws and failures, to try to stretch yourself beyond what you think you are capable of because you trust that the people around you will support you.
It isn't having a secure job or even a happy one. I was once on a team with a shitty director and severely understaffed in a very unsexy, low-paying industry. I did not enjoy my place in the organization. But we had psychological safety on our team. In our scrum team the tech lead/manager was amazing. He protected us from above, he trusted us, he was honest about the situation, and he had a passion for building a great team and growing his people. When someone made a big mistake in prod, he taught that person how to correct the mistake as an opportunity for growth while the entire team supported them (but didn't do it for them, because we trusted that person). The job sucked and within 2 years the entire team had quit. But not a single person even thought about leaving until that team lead left and the culture of trust left with him. Psychological safety is related to happiness in that teams with it tend to also have happy employees - but it creates happiness, not the other way around.
Psychological safety is often hard to have when the job is unstable (it probably feels unstable because of a lack of trust somewhere), but a startup is a great example of where you can have both trust and an unstable job.
> Engineers only want to have constructive arguments with each other if they feel committed to the project and happy about their place in the organization
This is not true. I don't need to be happy to want constructive arguments. In fact, the more unhappy I am, the more I need that constructive argument about what is bothering me - to deal with situation that makes me unhappy.
Whether I go into it depends a lot on whether I think/feel it is safe for me to open argument or join it. If I think I will be punished for saying stuff, I don't say that stuff, because I am not dumb.
And I can also be unsafe psychologically and subjectively happy. I can have interesting tasks, fun, I won't be expressing my opinions and there will be risk unsolvable situation will arise. But until then, I will be happy.
I've had lots of junior and entry level engineers who are frankly intimidated by their team. Someone will have a decent idea but not bring it up in a group session because "Jane has a PhD and 15 years more experience than I do, their idea is probably better so I didn't bother".
You know what? Most of the time they are right. But it's still important to have a culture where everybody feels comfortable presenting their own ideas and critiquing others - not because we're going to discard the sr. staff persons architecture in favor of the interns idea very often, but because the process is good for the ideas, good for the product, and good for the team members (whatever level).
>I'm actually a bit surprised why so many people here think it is.
I would hazard a guess that most of the misunderstanding around the term is due to its ambiguity. I think it's so bad it’s counterproductive actually but that's subjective. It really feels like what they are trying to say is that everyone feels personal agency in their decisions, actions and communication, but the term evokes a concept of being free from threats or risk.
I would suggest that neither of these create high performing teams, they just tend to reduce the pathological behaviors that impede them. They still need to get past the observations of Andy Grove 'When a person is not doing [their] job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; [they are] either not capable or not motivated.' After all, someone sleeping at their desk day after day could actually be experiencing maximum psychological safety.
> Psychological safety isn't about making you happy, I'm actually a bit surprised why so many people here think it is. It's about producing positive outcomes in the form of successful projects. [...] The observation is if everyone feels comfortable disagreeing with one another, the project is more likely to succeed. That's it.
It is both.
My decision to stay or quit is a cost-benefit analysis, and feeling happy or unhappy is a part of the equation. High employee turnover usually means lower productivity, because knowledge is lost and new team members need to learn about the project from scratch.
When I first started studying software engineering/development/programming, I was bombarded with advice to question everything, push back on unnecessary features, try to get to the bottom of what was really needed and deliver that instead of what was being asked for and not to be afraid to say no. I took that advice to heart - I was a professional and in it for the long haul, trying to make a lifetime career out of this, after all. It took a long time for me to realize I was better off abandoning those platitudes and just getting my work done. Although the inspirational types are correct in arguing that the world would truly be a better place if everybody took ownership and made the bottom line their business, it's hard to make the world a better place if you get fired for being a PITA.
Yeah, I heavily bucked trends at my past 3 companies. I even got into plenty of disagreements with "principal engineers" at the end of their careers and those engineers inevitably won the arguments. However, there were enough times where, once the team realized how problematic those solutions were, they backtracked and used my solutions.
Every manager (as well as a few colleagues) has tried to get me to come back so far. A couple have recommended me to lead the tech side of their friend's (well-funded) startups long after I left.
I wouldn't ever do it again though unless it was explicitly asked for. Stressing about getting fired in the initial weeks after getting hired (or during a boss change) just isn't worth it.
The definition of “gaslighting” is a form of psychological abuse where someone is trying to make you doubt your own sanity by manipulating your perception of reality. I think this is a very powerful meme, because if you think gaslighting is occurring, anyone who argues that you aren’t being gaslit is calling you crazy and is therefore one of the gaslighters. This worldview reframes self-doubt or cognitive dissonance as being a product of a conspiracy. So in that sense it’s kind of a one-way street. Any thoughts that perhaps you aren’t being gaslit are just further evidence of how deep the gaslighting goes. Other explanations like “honest disagreement” or “lying” are more parsimonious and often a more accurate representation of reality, but just can’t compete.
Unfortunately the adaptive thing to do here is go along with it. If a friend tells me they are being gaslit, I’m certainly not going to side with the gaslighters.
I've noticed this with some other insults too - primarily used by the "woke" crowd.
My favorite example of "marxist" style insults is claiming that someone lives "rent free" in ones mind. Admittedly, I find this uniquely insulting and if anything I've got to give credit to zoomers and the other forerunners of todays "wokism" for adding more interesting insults and accusations to our linguistic zeitgeist.
Limbaugh, hardly a zoomer (but actually a closeted Marxist!), bragged about living "rent-free" in Obama's mind at least a decade ago. My memory is fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure he made the same boast about one or both of the Clintons even earlier than that.
Terms are subject of fashion. Psychological/relatinships related terminology is as much subject of buzz-words as tech.
The process is exactly the same as when on tech suddenly everyone talks about fluent api one year, then about other buzzword, just for those then slowly dying.
slightly impolite => harming a person
rejecting nonsensical PRs => missing stair
having heterodox opinions => harming the community
being friendly first but firm on another occasion => gaslighting
So the original somewhat elaborate and sinister process of actual gaslighting has lost its original meaning.
Now it means that by being friendly once but not always you have betrayed the trust and psychological safety of the woke person.
You are therefore an evil manipulator on the same level as the villain in the movie Gaslight!
Your reports are either engaged because the work is interesting or the product is meaningful
The point is that all members on a team may believe the work is meaningful and interesting, but still be unproductive due to group dynamics that penalize certain types of behavior that would constructive if they were allowed. It doesn't matter how meaningful or interesting things are if a co-worker or manager shuts you down every time you present a differing opinion on something.
> Either way, to promote PS and get a more engaged team, a manager has to downplay the reality of the situation. This leads to management allowing complicated pet projects, rewrites, and feedback meetings that go nowhere all for the sake of appeasing egos. Engineers tend not to be overly people-savvy but we catch on eventually.
Does it always have to be dishonest? "We need to implement a bog-standard CRUD app for XYZ, so it's a good opportunity to try some new technology stack / make a really polished codebase / ..." ought to be the kind of conversation that you can have.
I think it's great that you speak up. Your ideas may be incongruous with the current conversation or too black and white when there is a lot of grey beneath the surface. Work on reducing your general level of stress and people will likely be more receptive to your ideas.
Actually, I tend to be the one advocating for the grey area solutions. I think in the West we have too much emphasis on one of two opposing solutions being the complete and correct answer, when the best option is probably some amalgamation of the best parts of both ideas.
It may help to put yourself in the mindset of your group leader, and figure out how to present your feedback as assisting with their problems and priorities. I’ve heard “junior engineers bring me problems, senior engineers bring me solutions.”
I understand that. The impression I've gotten is that the managers got where they were by going with the flow. They don't care about ideas that come from below unless they align with an existing mandate from above. I mean, if you're making that kind of money, it pays not to rock the boat, even if it's beneficial, when the person above you holds all the power.
The other issue is how do I tell if it aligns with what they want? There's so much salesmanship in the leadership talks at large companies. I've brought in suggestions that clearly aligned with stuff stated in those sorts of meetings, only to have it basically ignored. With some of it I was able to find out from friends that the real goal behind the scenes was completely different.
I generally only bring up problems if there is a solution for it. Otherwise it's just complaining, which I still do but not to my boss.
I've done it often enough and had things work out well, but you do have to know your audience and pick your battles. If no amount of reasonable conversation is going to change something, even if it is very obviously wrong, you have to let it go.
What do you expect to see or hope to test for? At a previous employer I worked at where people weren't happy, I'm pretty sure half would've quit almost immediately. Admittedly I don't have data on that but I'd expect that outcome.
I think the idea is that financially secure people are more willing to speak their mind. Getting salary upfront means everyone has small scale “fuck you” money. The problem here is that most people don’t actually have a reason to care about their employer’s problems, so not speaking up is often just a strategy of least resistance.
I think lots of people would just hop around between companies, getting the free year of salary. Not too often, every 2-3 years maybe. 3 years of salary for 2 years of work.
Sometimes I feel like a lot of managers don't live in reality. Sure, psychological safety as a concept is nice to talk about, but how can an employee be totally psychologically safe in an employer-employee relationship?
How many line engineers at Google let alone a random tech company can question a VP/director's pet project? Heck, how many middle managers can? Psychological safety should mean you should be able to call BS and be okay with others calling your BS (in a non-inflammatory way), but in reality it means stroking others' egos, especially of those in leadership.
>It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own. — Buddha, Dhammapada
Indeed, like all of Buddha's teachings, it also applies to the author of course.
I think it can exist by the employee forgetting the nature of the relationship in the heat of the moment, but the slightest sigh of frustration by the boss is going to destroy it. It is exceptionally fragile.
>employee forgetting the nature of the relationship in the heat of the moment
Curious to learn others' experiences, but I've never seen this in my career, ever. I've seen _peers_ yell at each other, but never seen an employee slip "out of character" with their superiors, at least publicly. And if it isn't happening publicly, there's no psychological safety, is there?
Most people (including myself) have been conditioned to bring their "work self" to work, not their "true self". As such, there's very little chance of "forgetting the nature of the relationship" even in heated moments.
In my own case it is getting caught up in a discussion and pressing further than my strategic self would. It is as simple as stating "this is going to break" when I would usually do a more muted and subtle "I am not sure that this will work."
I am not really one to challenge all that directly normally. But sometimes that slips.
So context here, I’m transgender — but transition was always about bringing 100% of myself to the table at all times. I similarly had my “work self” and “true self” — but keeping them separate was impossible when in that identity-less state a lot of trans people experience mid-transition.
So when I was reestablishing my personal identity in my late 20s, I just never made a separate “work self”, and it’s been a deliberate decision. I regularly talk openly with my superiors and make it known that I’m very opinionated but I’m also fallible and open to learning from my mistakes. This kind of openness and trust is absolutely essential at the executive level; the real secret is that none of us really knows what we’re doing and we’re all making it up as we go too.
Doing this a few times with the right people will help you learn when asking questions is helpful and when you should get out of the way and follow orders. A good leader has the level of humility to know they’re not always right.
In fact, this ability to “fight back” effectively is what gets you promoted above a line manager level. And in my opinion is why white men are so overrepresented in senior levels of companies: the psychological safety is there for them in the rest of their lives so they can have it at work, and it’s not there for others so it’s a lot harder to build the muscle on the job if you’re always on guard at home.
> I just never made a separate “work self”, and it’s been a deliberate decision
This is amazing self-awareness. I wish I had it earlier in my career.
>And in my opinion is why white men are so overrepresented in senior levels of companies: the psychological safety is there for them in the rest of their lives
This is interesting, but I don't entirely agree. I have seen both sides as an Indian male who has worked both in India (privilege) and SV (no privilege). It's not a matter of "fighting back" or "being open", it's just in-group mechanics at work. There is a tacit understanding among people in positions of power about who is the "in-group" that doesn't need to be expressed or acknowledged even. For example, in India, even as a junior engineer I would be invited to important meetings whereas more experienced female engineers wouldn't. If I'd simply shown up and done the bare minimum, I would have quickly risen up the ranks, IMO. I had the exact opposite experience in SV, being seen as the "out-group" of the "worker bee" class by default.
Sorry if I wasn't clear - GP's thesis was that white men are overrepresented in senior positions _because_ they can more easily "fight back" and "be open" than others. In other words, they still believe in meritocracy, it's just that white men are afforded the chance to be more meritorious.
I'm disputing that thesis based on my experience. You don't need to be vulnerable or "be open" at all - you just need to be part of the in-group. I know "Senior Director of Engineering" who had no clue what the hell was going on. They never spoke up in meetings, or did anything useful at all - it was clear to everyone they added no value whatsoever. Turns out they were just floating from startup to startup moving up in seniority in the process. Presumably, nobody bothered to question them during the interview process as it was assumed they were "competent" based on their background and past positions.
You're asking developers at the largest ad company in the world why some of the development they do relates to ads. It has nothing to do with engineers vs managers, both are and have been willing to push against user interest for the vast piles of money.
I can't tell if this is a serious question, or just some quip. Assuming it's serious...
It's not an average SWE's job to make product decisions and to steer strategic initiatives. There are people whose job it is to do specifically that.
Think just for a second what it would be like if every one of be more than 100,000 employees could bring a product plan to a halt because they had reservations.
What's in your power is to ask tough questions (people do)..
To make your opinion heard (people do). To change projects if you wish (something Google makes easier than any other company). And to take risks and make choices in the execution of your own job duties. That's psychological safety.
You may find this hard to believe, but the people working on FLoC have chosen to. They could easily find a different project if they wanted to. It may be disappointing you you that the average SWE isn't nearly as ideological as the average HN commenter, but it is what it is.
And this is engineers at Google we're talking about: usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge. In other words, very hard to replace people. How must more difficult must it be for people who could be replaced tomorrow?
> we're talking about: usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge
I thought Google just hired recent grads that play the leetcode game.
Google hires lots of different kinds of people, including new grads, graduate students, experienced engineers, people with PhD’s, and professors. Your previous experience is going to affect what kind of work you can get.
> usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge.
Maybe 2005 Google, but not anymore. A good bachelors degree or enough YoE at most companies gets you the interview, and then the interview result usually does the rest. Those are the "line engineers" that move on to other faangs or unicorns when psychological safety becomes an issue.
Typically it's the people from the hard-to-get-into colleges, or with years of company tenure, or with specialized knowledge causing the psychological safety issues.
> Typically it's the people from the hard-to-get-into colleges, or with years of company tenure, or with specialized knowledge causing the psychological safety issues.
This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
How so? It seems common-sense that people in a less secure position would be more careful of others' feelings, and so issues would likely come from those in a more secure position.
I think the managers do live in reality. They know perfectly well that this is a power tool that can be used against engineers who are more intelligent than themselves.
U.S. companies are very much fear driven. Management always keeps people in doubt and uncertainty. Violating psychological safety is another charge to hit people with.
It is the same as the "counterrevolutionary" charge in communist countries, to be used against intelligent dissidents.
> How many line engineers at Google let alone a random tech company can question a VP/director's pet project? Heck, how many middle managers can? Psychological safety should mean you should be able to call BS and be okay with others calling your BS (in a non-inflammatory way), but in reality it means stroking others' egos, especially of those in leadership.
Employees should have psychological safety to voice concerns within their domain, but that's not a license to start backseat driving upper management. It's one thing for a line engineer to raise concerns about their team's choice of frameworks for a project or the chosen architecture of the system. It's a different issue entirely if the employee is simply "calling BS" on company directives or cynically referring to initiatives as "pet projects". From a managing perspective, there is a stark difference between people who voice concerns reasonably and those who simply like to complain.
The good team members raise their concerns with an open mind, seek more information to understand why certain decisions were made, come prepared with alternative suggestions, and most importantly are willing to disagree and commit if they don't get their way.
The bad apples do things like "call BS" on initiatives without understanding the whole story, aren't interested in learning more, don't have any constructive suggestions, and tend to drag their feet or spread dissent through the ranks when they don't get their way.
Psychological safety doesn't mean employees get a free pass to be disgruntled or push back against what they're being paid to do. Questions, concerns, and alternate suggestions are welcome and should not be punished, but at the end of the day employees must be willing to commit to the chosen direction and get on board with company initiatives.
As long as in the end you can disagree and commit I’ve found that being willing to disagree in the first place is treated as a moderately positive trait by most managers.
If you won’t disagree and commit that’s a different story.
I've been what some might consider a "difficult employee" all my life. I speak up. I don't shut up. I have almost no filter (almost as in I did learn to reformulate things but I still don't shut up). If something stinks I'm not gonna pretend that it smells like roses. I can live with some stink but I'll tell you that it stinks and that I want you to start shoveling it away.
I have had some co-workers or higher ups that probably found it inconvenient and didn't like me (in fact strike the probably - I know for a fact). Yet it has so far not resulted in me being fired, demoted etc. and in fact the opposite has happened. I've been told to never shut up and that they keep me around precisely because I don't.
My luck might obviously run out at some point but so far, from my first internship where I just didn't do the stupid task they gave me and instead replaced their awful sendmail+pop3d setup with a full featured postfix and imap/pop and spam filter combo (well I showed the boss on my last day that I had built it on my computer and what it could do. He offered me a part time job as their network/sysadmin to do it for real on the server and to migrate all their users over) it has worked out. I'm not on 'brilliant jerk level'. Way not brilliant enough and just below jerk ;)
I have a colleague that’s difficult. Upfront I’ll say that I like him a lot personally.
He almost got fired recently. He didn’t, in part because a bunch of us stood up for him, but it was dicey.
The reason he almost got fired is because he’s very expensive to manage.
That dogged unwillingness to never shut up, along with more than his fair share of brilliance, is great when he’s digging into a thorny, ugly problem that most would prefer to pretend doesn’t exist.
But when there’s a meeting with $3k/hour in fully loaded cost worth of people in it and he’s going on and on about his pet issue that’s a problem. When every decision you make has to first be delivered to the team and argued in detail to this guy, that’s exhausting. To his credit he’s convincible, but still. Since projects have to be carefully evaluated for fit before being assigned to him that makes him harder to use well. Having to unruffle other employees’ feathers all the time certainly isn’t fun. And so on and so forth.
All this means he needs a very strong manager, both in a technical sense (because without that credibility no one will be able to manage him) and in a people skills sense (both for him and for the people he comes into contact with). Such managers are themselves are difficult to find and expensive to employ. To keep him around and aimed in the right direction means a disproportionate amount of one of those people’s time is going to a single employee.
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. It sounds like whatever you are doing is working for you. But maybe this provides some food for thought.
Totally understandable if you ask me. There's difficult and there's difficult. I've had someone like you mentioned before as well. Especially the pet issue part of it. Really bright guys that know what they're doing and they're awesome if you can focus them. But left unchecked ROI just isn't there. No we can't spend 80% of our time refactoring everything to match _their_ ideals.
To make another example of where I personally can't shut up: if I see someone propose a stupid rollout plan that's got a real good chance to eff things up royally, then I will say that it stinks and why. That doesn't always mean doing it in the big 3k/hour meeting like in your example. And I'm not talking about a 'pet issue'. I can obviously be overruled and that's fine. I've brought it up and have it black on white that they were warned and they made the decision anyway. Fine by me. Don't blame me afterwards. I won't do unpaid overtime later to fix your shit.
But I sure have seen way more than 3k/hour spent in meeting upon meeting after the warnings weren't heeded and it did explode in their faces.
> Really bright guys that know what they're doing and they're awesome if you can focus them ... [They sometimes want to] spend 80% of our time refactoring everything
Actually being unable to focus oneself reasonably well without the help of a manager sounds almost a bit dumb to me
I'm surprised you're writing "really bright"
> if I see someone propose a stupid rollout plan that's got a real good chance to eff things up royally,
To me, you seem to be the opposite to those "really bright" people, in that you're helping others, sometimes the whole company?, focus on the right things, and avoid doing dangerous things.
Those others, need help with focusing. Whilst you help people focus correctly?
Most people are not equally bright in all departments :)
Yes, they're bright guys, I stand by that and they do awesome work of what they do. When left unchecked, they just focus exclusively on what they love and think makes the most sense. This may not always fully align with the overall company goals customer wise. And obviously you're getting only _my_ viewpoint of this, not theirs.
They do remind me of myself more than 15 years ago, telling my dad about Linux From Scratch and Gentoo and how that's the only way to be. He was obviously right when he said that no, they don't have the time for that at their place of work and I declared him insane (in my head) because obviously, that was _the only_ way :) It definitely made me learn a lot of stuff, so for myself at the time it was the right thing.
> in that you're helping others, sometimes the whole company?
I try I guess. Sometimes it's really hard, because they don't want to be helped and/or actively seek to introduce policies that are detrimental to the company overall (not talking about the "bright guys" above in this case, e.g. the rollout plan I mentioned was the business people, not us tech guys). And again, my viewpoint only that you are getting here.
Additionally I've been in situations where management turns a blind eye to an obvious sociopath, and sociopathic people are a real phenomenon which prey on people's vulnerability. I tried just be vulnerable, it back fires. Since experiencing that, I've found myself keeping a distance, I tell my truth but I don't share vulnerability since it sucks when it's used against me. I'm in a stronger position not sharing.
There are always consequences for over sharing, the obvious answer is don't overshare.
> how can an employee be totally psychologically safe in an employer-employee relationship?
How can any human feel totally psychologically safe in a world with climate change, cancer, random attacks of violence, earthquakes, etc?
The answer is that you're thinking in black and white terms about a concept that is a continuum. Even in employee-employer relationships, with a good manager it is entirely possible to have a reasonable level of psychological safety, just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car.
>just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car
Then again, it's reasonably straightforward to measure physical injury and come to some agreement about acceptable risk. Psychological injury is far more subjective.
First: I did not say that subjective means arbitrary. Second: The problem with this is, there still must some agreement on what constitutes an acceptable answer when you "ask them". This brings us back to the subjectivity of psychological injury.
That's interesting, in that there's a risk that, if they feel really unsafe, they'll want to pretend that all is fine
And if the group is small, even if you try to make the answers anonymous, maybe you still would be able to figure out who wrote what, and they'll realize this, and write mostly nice sounding things
Anyway, asking and talking about it seems like a good idea. Maybe also asking them to read the article being discussed here :-)
>psychologically safe in a world with climate change, cancer, random attacks of violence, earthquakes, etc?
Obviously, "total" in this context means in the workplace. Also, psychological safety essentially means "ability to express yourself and make mistakes without the fear of negative consequences" - it has nothing to do with shielding yourself from cancer, climate change etc. Ironically, the Buddha, who was quoted in the OP grew up with "total psychological safety" as you defined it, and you know where that led him.
> just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car
Again, this is not a comparable analogy at all. If you're unable to in no uncertain terms say "this project is going to hurt users" out of fear of getting fired/looking like not a team player, that is not even a "reasonable level" of psychological safety.
> If you're unable to in no uncertain terms say "this project is going to hurt users" out of fear of getting fired/looking like not a team player, that is not even a "reasonable level" of psychological safety.
We're talking about software engineers in big tech companies, right? They're extremely well paid and would have no problem finding a new job.
Except for the ones on visas, interns, and recent grads. Anyone who doesn't want to or can't cram for four hours of consecutive leetcode is also going to struggle.
I have told my managers many many times "I think this feature/change is bad for users" without fear of negative repercussions. If the entire existence of the project itself is user-harmful, then you have bigger problems than psychological safety.
Fair enough, good for you. I'm not sure if you're a Googler, but nevertheless, my point was that this luxury isn't afforded to the vast majority of people in tech. I highly doubt it's even afforded to the majority of Google engineers either (based on my acquaintances), but that is beside the point. Somehow whenever you mention Google in any context, a bunch of people come forward to defend Google culture -- so, my mistake that I sort of pulled Google into it.
I think psychological safety comes from similar expectations of the employer/employee relationship. You don’t have to agree on the specifics, as long as you agree on the methods.
> How can any human feel totally psychologically safe in a world with climate change, cancer, random attacks of violence, earthquakes, etc?
Speaking my mind does not increase the speed of climate change, the chance that I might get cancer, or the probability of earthquake. Therefore, it is easy not to think about those things while discussing work.
Anyone with the wealth to not care about the outcome, even if it means getting dismissed. There's more wealthy individual contributors in tech than we might think. It's certainly not everybody, but there are some who could speak their mind, without fearing losing their income and risking their mortgage or rent payment.
This isn't the same amount of wealth for everyone, which is interesting. Some of my friends get more psychological security from having no debt and a few grand in their savings account than others who are worth six or seven figures.
At my current job I'm getting marked down for not demonstrating leadership. "Leadership", in this context, means supporting and implementing whatever latest buzzword the VP heard at the country club that we are not staffed for and will be a disaster.
I get that. I've told my boss it's a bad idea. I told my boss' boss it's a bad idea. But the management is all incentivized to do this horrible thing because it pads their resume and likely gives them more headcount. They don't argue with me on the merits, I get vague platitudes about how we're bleeding edge, this is where the market is headed, etc. Their incentives are not aligned with quality output.
There is a thing, called the matrix organization, which has many problems. One of its strengths, though, is that you have a "boss" who is responsible for your career advancement but is not responsible for assigning and grading your work and is not concerned with your opinion about leadership so much.
You work on technical tasks for other people, who make sure your work is ok, and your supervisor makes sure you are OK.
That person is your advocate in all things that fall in the tense employee-employer tug-of-war. Inside the "group", there is psychological safety. On "tasks" there is often less of it, but you always have your group.
I think this often papers over the tension instead of resolving it. The best way to resolve the tension that comes from doing a poor job is to do a better job. The second best way is to find a better job (within or outside the team/organization). I realize that sounds heartless, but I believe the first is usually possible (assuming competent hiring) because most people want to do good work. If you disconnect the career manager from the work being done by the employee, you make it harder for good managers too effectively redirect their employees, which results in worse outcomes.
And the same structure prevents accountability, promotes political infighting and causes a misalignment of objectives all around. I hated every single minute of working inside such organizations.
The elephant in the room is that there has to be a level of tension, of slight mutual discomfort, of a bilateral transaction present in employer-employee relationship. It needs to be very dull and implied but it has to be there to make sure incentives are aligned and objectives are consistently met.
Tenured public service and unions show what might happen when this inconvenient element is missing.
>Sometimes I feel like a lot of managers don't live in reality. Sure, psychological safety as a concept is nice to talk about, but how can an employee be totally psychologically safe in an employer-employee relationship?
That talk is not actually meant to matter, it's just cant...
> “Hey. Do you have a minute? I think I have a psychological safety topic.” I was stressed. Without a single frontend developer in our engineering team we were starting to slow down. I had finished the performance profile and sent it to my teammate two days ago.
It's weird, there are so many of these pieces and they all sound the same. Is there a template that everyone uses who wants to get into personal brand building? "Start with a direct quote. Then set the context with some sentences. Now throw in a snippet from some study you've read. And use funny images!"
Plus a healthy dose of making up or adjusting stories to fit whatever they're writing about. Self-help and pop-business books do the same thing, a lot. It's a similar style. I think people who are really good at the "tell me about a time when X" questions in interviews do some of the same (likely leaning more to adjusting than completely making them up, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm wrong about that and well-told, rehearsed fiction gets you the best results there)
Maybe from a developer perspective, the grail is a confident salary and a kind team. Shipping well fosters, but does not guarantee, both. From a management perspective, "pyschological safety" is not about self actualization but performance.
Management is foremost about solving the problem you are accountable for. In development, that will likely mean that success is when the team ships something useful to the business.
In an unsafe environment, members of the team are afraid to act and speak. The working relationship devolves to "tell me exactly what you want done". Teams can ship like this but managers need to overperform and it sucks for everyone.
In a safe environment, manager and team have a shared understanding of what the goals are, and we work flexibly to acheive them. if something doesn't work, learn from it and try something else. Collectively, we still have to deliver. For sure, we can all be safe and still fail. Safety needs to improve the odds.
The manager question is "how do we best ship?" What dynamic best predicts team success for a given goal? The bet is that a safe team will perform better at solving the typically squishy problems that stand between you and shipping well.
My belief is that safe teams perform better by allowing more people to engage constructively and critically on any one problem (more traction), by learning efficiently (low latency), and by demonstrating work incrementally and frequently (more cycles). This is failing fast, failing better, and converging well.
One additional point of "safety" is the question of "how do you want live?" As manager or team, what do you want work to be like? People flee harsh teams. How do you succeed then?
Everyone should tread carefully when someone in authority is telling them it's okay to speak freely.
I worked at a company where vulnerability and mindfulness were championed above all else.
It went exactly the same way as Mao's [Hundred Flowers Campaign][1].
So much so that I am convinced it's something deeply ingrained into human nature.
Feedback was welcomed, and psychological safety was guaranteed.
Initially people were rewarded for being vulnerable and opening up with feedback in public and anonymously. It ended up as a witch hunt with the CEO trying to guess whose anonymous feedback was whose and admonishing people's anonymous feedback in public meetings, and then several employees being fired after the CEO went around spreading rumors about the employees and building a consensus that things weren't going well because of these employees - things that everyone else could see were clearly false.
It was incredible to watch, and when it happens it creates the ultimate chilling effect, and rapid loyalty to the leader on the witch hunt, but closes everyone off, and makes everyone parse their words and basically never say what they feel needs to be said. You don't push back or tell them they are wrong or what they are doing is inappropriate, because you see how vicious they are to dissenters. It was an amazing psychological journey to go on though, and I learned a lot about human nature, and a first-hand understanding of how some events of history probably played out psychologically amongst a population.
People who obsess over, and push mindfulness and vulnerability and such are usually those that are over-thinkers and with psychological problems that led them there in the first place.
The problem is that the people in power don't realize that they actually can't handle to hear a lot of the honesty they are asking of people.
So I guess my point would be that, psychological safety is important for eliciting true feedback, but even if you are the one in power and offering it, you cannot trust yourself that you will be able to handle it.
Everyone should just be more chill and easy-going instead of trying to drive formulaic new-age initiatives.
> Awesome! Not awesome that we have this problem, but awesome that you brought it up. That‘s how we build psychological safety and that’s how we build a successful company!
This gives me chills haha. So robotic and corporate. I just wish people would chill!
This is so bang on. The real mystery is why this shit propagates and becomes such a “necessary” thing that companies engage with. I suppose it’s another mechanism that business use to get rubes to buy in and exchange labour for below market rates
I think psychological safety is a real thing, but it's limited. You can't really have it deeply with a team larger than 8, and you can't have much of any on a team of over 50.
I can imagine feeling psychologically safe in a larger group, it's just statistically unlikely.
The way psychological safety works is that sometimes one new person is all that it takes to destroy the safety. Every time you add a team member, you roll a die. The chances of continuous good outcome decrease exponentially with the team size.
Even this is not completely unavoidable. Sometimes the existing team is strong enough to resist the new person, if the new person turns out to be incompatible with their previous relationship. And sometimes the new person leaves, and the peace is restored. But this is rare.
Specifically, I have seen a situation where a new junior developer with somewhat toxic personality was treating every existing team member like an idiot. This did not ruin the psychological safety of the remaining members, because being attacked all at the same time made it obvious they were all on the same side and no one took the attacks seriously. (It would have been worse if the new member instead focused his attacks only on one or two of them.) And because it was a junior developer, his opinions had no real impact, so people around him felt uncomfortable, but not actually threatened. Finally, it was the new guy who decided he had better options than to work with idiots, and in a month or two he moved to another project. The atmosphere within the team quickly returned to the original state.
A much worse situation was in a different company, where the new member was maybe only 1/5 as toxic, but he was a senior developer recommended by the management as an expert, and stayed there for a year before moving as an expert to another company. The original peace was never restored, and at the next problem, people started quitting.
People who consider themselves smarter than everyone else usually don't pay much attention to feedback from those supposedly less smart. We tried to explain where he was wrong, but he thought we were just making excuses.
Hmm, @darkerside & William, this indicates that each team sometimes need their own private place to talk, where the others in the company cannot hear
Can total transparency in a large organization, damage psychological safety
I wonder about the Linux mailing list, the whole world can read. I wonder if some good ideas never get posted, because there're too many people reading.
Hmm, if there was a way to post ideas semi anonymously, and take credit for them, only if they turned out to be well accepted
Fun fact: the place for the team to talk is sometimes called "retrospective", it is officially a part of Scrum, and it is the part of Scrum that almost every company leaves out.
> People who obsess over, and push mindfulness and vulnerability and such are usually those that are over-thinkers and with psychological problems that led them there in the first place.
A maxim worthy of framing on wall.
> The problem is that the people in power don't realize that they actually can't handle to hear a lot of the honesty they are asking of people.
Early on in my career it was nearly impossible to have psychological safety because I was constantly worried I'd be risking my physical safety if I did anything that could put my job at risk.
I attribute a lot of this to weak social safety nets and at-will employment in the US. I constantly feared that I would be fired for some statement, personality clash, or mistake (or for no reason at all, which is entirely legal)... so I kept my head down and was lightly abused (frequent overtime without pay, tolerating verbal abuse, etc).
I was living paycheck to paycheck and without a job I'd rapidly lose housing and healthcare. It took me nearly a decade to attain financial security while racking up psychological damage.
> weak social safety nets and at-will employment in the US
Between the lines, I'm reading that a good social welfare system, eg health care and unemployment money, would be good for the companies -- easier to reach higher psychological safety, then, more good ideas and healthy critique, better decisions
> Psychological safety describes a belief that neither the formal nor informal consequences of interpersonal risks, like asking for help or admitting a failure, will be punitive. In psychologically safe environments, people believe that if they make a mistake or ask for help, others will not react badly. Instead, candor is both allowed and expected.
People feel "psychologically safe" because they have confidence. They have confidence because they have a track record of getting things right. They might be wrong now but they have enough credit to risk being wrong. Successful teams have people who speak up because those people are confident (likely due to a history of success).
In any case, in the event that you speak up and are wrong, there's no way you can be insulated from "formal nor informal consequences of interpersonal risks". If someone says something that I know to be wrong, it makes me think less of them. Will I be rude to them? No, but if it keeps happening I'll pay less attention. Kind people will give you plenty of chances but only stupid people will give you infinite chances.
The perspective here, where we should aim for "psychological safety" is minimizing one kind of fail case (people not speaking up because they're afraid) and maximizing another (people speaking up and being wrong). It isn't obvious that you should make that trade-off.
Regardless of reality, perception of reality is more important for this. The boss can think the worker is wrong, and can react with a
> That's stupid, it won't work due to X, we're going with Y
or a
> Thanks for the feedback, but this time we're choosing Y due to X.
One is going to leave the worker happier than the other and feeling safer despite the boss thinking the worker is wrong. Unless you can measure the counter-factual (often not) you will only guess as to which was better.
The latter is really just a more polite version of the former. I think the trust inspiring response would be,
What are your concerns with solution A such that you think solution Y is better? Help me understand so I can explain what you're missing. Or, so I can see what I'm missing.
People usually view psychological safety from the manager- report lens, but that's actually the easy part. Some training and good intentions on both sides will usually get you most of the way there.
Often the biggest challenge is team dynamics. An introvert on a team might feel his psychological safety reduced by what he perceives as relentless criticism my an extraverted teammate. However, said extrovert might view psychological safety as being free to express his opinions as he sees them.
I've had to manage for PS at several organizations. It doesn't mean that everyone is free to say/do whatever they want whenever they want. It's team-oriented.
It takes a lot of work to establish if you don't have it. It's incredibly easy to lose if you abuse it in any way. But it's an awesome way to work.
Any notion of "psychological safety" is an absurd impossibility in most tech companies since:
- your boss can fire you at any time without cause or notice
- your project can be canceled on a whim
Since these properties are generally foundational and immutable (and usually codified in corporate governance as well as employment law, at least in the US) "psychological safety" cannot exist in any such organization for any rank and file employee (executives may be protected somewhat by contracts and golden parachutes). The only thing that can exist is a hierarchy of fear and power, and that is exactly what we see.
But what if your project was at least guaranteed a fighting chance to succeed? Say 1 month before facing the verdict? Anyone betting (either for or against) the project would have more evidence on which to make their decisions. Anyone working on the project would have an opportunity to either make it work or drop it as necessary. Any customers would not have to deal with bugs or feature churn before the bet was verified.
Would that not be more "safe" for everyone involved? That's but one tangible, measurable way we can increase psychological safety in organizations. Your claim of immutability seems to lack basis.
How are hierarchy of power and phycological safety related? Obviously, speaking up != your opinion is always upheld. The point made is that a culture that encourages speaking up makes for a better functioning team. It doesn’t change the reality of employer-employee relationship or the power balance.
> “The good teams […] don’t make more mistakes; they report more.” — Amy C. Edmondson
This is rediscovering what has been going on (or at least held as the ideal) in the military for quite some time.
It's a two way street of accepting a contrary opinion on one side, and continuing to work as a team when that contrary opinion is rejected. I know it's popular among some to view the military as brainwashed morons, but it is a conscious decision to execute orders that one disagrees with. Otto von Bismarck Quote: “A bad plan that is well executed will yield much better results than a good plan that is poorly executed.”
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadThe only way I can see psychological safety effecting the eventual outcome of Google+ is someone who, being psychologically safe, would have said right at the beginning, "this is stupid, don't even try it".
Nobody's suggesting this is a panacea that'll make your unviable idea suddenly viable, the article is about how options for working that could lead to success get cut off when PsySafety isn't present on the team.
Previously, this would just have been part of team alignment. In a business culture that eshews black-and- white thinking, the zero-sum state of "safety," should be replaced with something more dynamic, like risk, because then it is something manageable you can reasonably engage with. Accepting the principle of psychological safety implies that it's not just a (unfalsifiable) fire alarm lever to pull. If anyone told me they felt "unsafe," it would be difficult not to make every effort to avoid them, and I think any lawyer would say the same. US law has this concept of "fighting words," which this concept is not directly, but appealing to safety is absolutely a legal and political threat, and it is not normal professional discourse. Since I am not a psychologist, I am not equipped to deal with psychological safety, and this is an HR issue.
Imo, we should really look at reframing "psychological safety," as something more manageable like, "burnout risk," "initiative risk," "working trust," or something else less formal.
To be effective, a team needs to be able to communicate freely, and each individual needs to be able to speak freely. But there’s a lot of power dynamics at play, not just in the team, but external to the team.
This is also why minorities are especially cursed in work environments: it’s not just that some folks might actually have prejudices against you based on your identity, it’s also that some folks might have prejudices against you based on your identity, and so you watch what you say and/or try not to be too assertive or contentious and/or wonder if some poorly worded comment was intended as a slur or not...and the smart manager is also cursed, because they may feel that they too need to be careful not to be too assertive or contentious, lest they draw attention from HR or a lawsuit.
Successful teams require mutual respect and brave communication. “Psychological safety” is a term that feels correct to me in the abstract, but very wrong as an applied concept for the workplace.
I think “cultivating mutual respect and open communication” is probably a better framing.
If you are avoiding someone, you feel unsafe. That is what it is, no reason to avoid that word.
> Since I am not a psychologist, I am not equipped to deal with psychological safety, and this is an HR issue.
And yet, the way you choose to communicate and interact with others contributes to how safe they feel. You aren't formally educated in psychology, but it's still your informal responsibility as a member of society, to generally not cause psychological harm to those around you. Including when at work. If you don't take that responsibility, then you become the HR issue.
> zero-sum state of "safety," should be replaced with something more dynamic, like risk
How is risk any less zero-sum than safety? If you're going to claim the only states are safe/not-safe, why doesn't risky/not-risky work the same way?
> we should really look at reframing "psychological safety," as something more manageable
I think you're putting the phrase on too high a pedestal. To paraphrase the article, psychological safety is feeling that asking for help or admitting failure will not be punished. That's it.
> burnout risk," "initiative risk," "working trust," something else less formal.
Those all seem more formal to me, though I think "working trust" is at least in the same ballpark.
In an optimistic mindset, “psychological safety” boils down to feeling secure in one’s job and in control of one’s project. When people feel secure, they free up cycles to creative, sleep better, enjoy each other’s company more, etc. when they feel in control they have the energy to constructively argue.
But when rubber hits the road most engineers do not have one of either security or control. At a startup they may have some limited product control but there is no safety. In a large company they may have more security but no actual control of the product. Either way, to promote PS and get a more engaged team, a manager has to downplay the reality of the situation. This leads to management allowing complicated pet projects, rewrites, and feedback meetings that go nowhere all for the sake of appeasing egos. Engineers tend not to be overly people-savvy but we catch on eventually.
I think it’s no better than the “we’re all a family” rhetoric. Just another way of trying to eke out more work for nothing in return. My last employer signed all employees up for an app called “happify” where we would get daily challenges to pop bubbles with stressful words on them or write praises to our coworkers. That strategy was so bald-faced that I had to kind of admire it.
So why are checked-out engineers bad? They are worse than bad, they are counter-productive. They push shit code because who cares? They don’t question obviously bad designs because they know there’s no point. They quit or move on leaving the team in churn-hell. But these are symptoms not of psychology but of reality. Spinozas Ethics is a lovely look into how psychology and reality are just two sides of the same coin, and you can’t fix one without fixing the other. As stated above, the solution is engaging work, but most work is not engaging. So let’s just be more realistic, ok?
"But when rubber hits the road most engineers do not have one of either security or control."
Well said
Being able to be your "true" self is the observation, not "be happy". If your true self is a neurotic mess, "psychological safety" on a team would give you the space to do that without feeling judged or that negative consequences would arise (informal or formal) by acting that way.
You can improve "checked-out" engineers feelings by creating a way for them to express their concerns without worry that they'll be punished for it.
Those toxic teams I'm sure you've been part of, where everyone felt shitty and nobody felt connected to the work? They didn't have to be that way by leveraging "psychological safety", even if "reality" was immutable (also, it's not immutable but we can get to that).
My main point in writing the diatribe above was to deter the type of pleasant but dull middle manager who thinks that all they have to do to solve their teams’ problems is psychologize them. I’ve actually noticed this as a larger cultural trend: people blaming their own minds or the minds of others for what is an actual real problem in the world. If I can help clear the wool from a few low-level programmers eyes to help them see that they aren’t so different from an accountant or the fry cook at their favorite bar (and that this is not a bad thing!) I feel like my job is done.
The trick is to find people like you, get you engaged and feeling like you can actually fix the shit that's stopping you from being productive, while also getting you to give space for people to fuck up now and then, because people fucking up and feeling okay with that sometimes leads to really great insight when instead of fucking up they do something great.
Basically, "safety" is letting people feel not-terrible for taking a risk and having it blow up in their face. That should be allowed on a team, and Google's research seems to show that teams who allow people to fuck up without making them feel bad about it tend to make better shit than teams who punish people for fucking up.
...to a point. If all you do is fuck up, that also violates the safety, on the manager's side because then they're not feeling safe letting people take risks.
What it comes down to is a culture where decision making is transparent, questioning the status quo is encouraged and no one person holds the power to make / break a product. At the team level you’re always going to have good managers and bad managers, but with the right culture the bad managers blast radius will be diminished. A good manager can’t do a whole lot to overcome a shitty culture.
This is a utopia though. Every manager has their own manager right up to the company board. If you have to let people go, then how can you say you are not going to fire the guy who is the most checked out? If the person cannot deliver you cannot guarantee they won't lose their job.
It boils down to you really can't trust yourself to not be biased to those who are more open but more negative.
Simple, you cannot guarantee "they won't be punished".
Most checked out is not the same thing as can't deliver. In a well-functioning organisation one would hope that managers would assess people on how much they were actually delivering rather than how involved they sounded, and would have support from the structure above them in that.
I am in a situation where I actually have near absolute safety and nearly no control over the projects. It was even worse in 2020 regarding control after being thrown into a toxic project by a CEO who always touts the motto "no a**holes".
Well when pitching for the biggest budget in the history of the org reality is what counts. Not nice mottos.
So I agree. Everytime I hear this bs about being a team/family/safe place I just think: STFU and pay me. I do my work. Nothing more, nothing less.
The observation is if everyone feels comfortable disagreeing with one another, the project is more likely to succeed. That's it.
This is a productivity tool to make marginal projects more likely to tip favorably, and to keep good engineers around even when they're on bad projects, and hopefully make some bad projects less bad by giving everyone room to suggest improvements.
Maybe it would be helpful to use the term other than “safety”? Is there a synonym for a psychological safety that would get cross what you’re thinking about better?
"Happy" is a hard term to define, and I don't think you need to be happy to feel "safe". Another way of describing "safety" is "the ability to make mistakes/ask for help without negative consequences". You may feel "unhappy" that you made a mistake, but you won't feel judged for it if the people around you are comfortable with you taking risks.
You can be deeply unhappy, personally and professionally, and still experience that shared comfort with risk taking on your team, and benefit from what Google's research shows, I think. Perhaps you're all comfortable with the risks because the project is going so poorly and you need to throw some hail marys out there to try and get out of the bad situation. The focus is on everyone agreeing that making mistakes is expected and acceptable, because risks also come with reward.
I actually really like that example, where you're on a doomed project, and the natural "safety" that forms with the team who all knows it's a doomed project anyway, so why not take a few shots at something wild? The space you create in that environment where, "we were going to fail anyway might as well throw some shit at the wall to see what sticks" is exactly what I mean when I say "safety". Projects that have that attitude apparently tend to be more successful. Imagine having that level of comfort with your team and also working on a successful project!
Trust. Psychological safety is (real) trust between members of the team and the people who impact the team (e.g. managers or executives or whoever). It's trusting the people around you so you feel free to be yourself, to propose off-the-wall but potentially terrible ideas without being thought less of, to be open about flaws and failures, to try to stretch yourself beyond what you think you are capable of because you trust that the people around you will support you.
It isn't having a secure job or even a happy one. I was once on a team with a shitty director and severely understaffed in a very unsexy, low-paying industry. I did not enjoy my place in the organization. But we had psychological safety on our team. In our scrum team the tech lead/manager was amazing. He protected us from above, he trusted us, he was honest about the situation, and he had a passion for building a great team and growing his people. When someone made a big mistake in prod, he taught that person how to correct the mistake as an opportunity for growth while the entire team supported them (but didn't do it for them, because we trusted that person). The job sucked and within 2 years the entire team had quit. But not a single person even thought about leaving until that team lead left and the culture of trust left with him. Psychological safety is related to happiness in that teams with it tend to also have happy employees - but it creates happiness, not the other way around.
Psychological safety is often hard to have when the job is unstable (it probably feels unstable because of a lack of trust somewhere), but a startup is a great example of where you can have both trust and an unstable job.
This is not true. I don't need to be happy to want constructive arguments. In fact, the more unhappy I am, the more I need that constructive argument about what is bothering me - to deal with situation that makes me unhappy.
Whether I go into it depends a lot on whether I think/feel it is safe for me to open argument or join it. If I think I will be punished for saying stuff, I don't say that stuff, because I am not dumb.
And I can also be unsafe psychologically and subjectively happy. I can have interesting tasks, fun, I won't be expressing my opinions and there will be risk unsolvable situation will arise. But until then, I will be happy.
You know what? Most of the time they are right. But it's still important to have a culture where everybody feels comfortable presenting their own ideas and critiquing others - not because we're going to discard the sr. staff persons architecture in favor of the interns idea very often, but because the process is good for the ideas, good for the product, and good for the team members (whatever level).
I would hazard a guess that most of the misunderstanding around the term is due to its ambiguity. I think it's so bad it’s counterproductive actually but that's subjective. It really feels like what they are trying to say is that everyone feels personal agency in their decisions, actions and communication, but the term evokes a concept of being free from threats or risk.
I would suggest that neither of these create high performing teams, they just tend to reduce the pathological behaviors that impede them. They still need to get past the observations of Andy Grove 'When a person is not doing [their] job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; [they are] either not capable or not motivated.' After all, someone sleeping at their desk day after day could actually be experiencing maximum psychological safety.
It is both.
My decision to stay or quit is a cost-benefit analysis, and feeling happy or unhappy is a part of the equation. High employee turnover usually means lower productivity, because knowledge is lost and new team members need to learn about the project from scratch.
Every manager (as well as a few colleagues) has tried to get me to come back so far. A couple have recommended me to lead the tech side of their friend's (well-funded) startups long after I left.
I wouldn't ever do it again though unless it was explicitly asked for. Stressing about getting fired in the initial weeks after getting hired (or during a boss change) just isn't worth it.
Unfortunately the adaptive thing to do here is go along with it. If a friend tells me they are being gaslit, I’m certainly not going to side with the gaslighters.
My favorite example of "marxist" style insults is claiming that someone lives "rent free" in ones mind. Admittedly, I find this uniquely insulting and if anything I've got to give credit to zoomers and the other forerunners of todays "wokism" for adding more interesting insults and accusations to our linguistic zeitgeist.
The process is exactly the same as when on tech suddenly everyone talks about fluent api one year, then about other buzzword, just for those then slowly dying.
Now it means that by being friendly once but not always you have betrayed the trust and psychological safety of the woke person.
You are therefore an evil manipulator on the same level as the villain in the movie Gaslight!
The point is that all members on a team may believe the work is meaningful and interesting, but still be unproductive due to group dynamics that penalize certain types of behavior that would constructive if they were allowed. It doesn't matter how meaningful or interesting things are if a co-worker or manager shuts you down every time you present a differing opinion on something.
Does it always have to be dishonest? "We need to implement a bog-standard CRUD app for XYZ, so it's a good opportunity to try some new technology stack / make a really polished codebase / ..." ought to be the kind of conversation that you can have.
I'm still trying to learn to keep my mouth shut. Speaking up is detrimental unless it conforms to the existing group (really leader) sentiment.
Actually, I tend to be the one advocating for the grey area solutions. I think in the West we have too much emphasis on one of two opposing solutions being the complete and correct answer, when the best option is probably some amalgamation of the best parts of both ideas.
The other issue is how do I tell if it aligns with what they want? There's so much salesmanship in the leadership talks at large companies. I've brought in suggestions that clearly aligned with stuff stated in those sorts of meetings, only to have it basically ignored. With some of it I was able to find out from friends that the real goal behind the scenes was completely different.
I generally only bring up problems if there is a solution for it. Otherwise it's just complaining, which I still do but not to my boss.
1. Hire someone.
2. Pay them at top of scale
3. Give them 1 years salary upfront, cannot be claimed back. (Effectively one year rolling tenure)
4. Repeat for all employees
5. Loudly and clearly state the problems facing the business.
6. Stand back
I think the idea is that financially secure people are more willing to speak their mind. Getting salary upfront means everyone has small scale “fuck you” money. The problem here is that most people don’t actually have a reason to care about their employer’s problems, so not speaking up is often just a strategy of least resistance.
I was a part of that once. It was a complete trainwreck. Never again.
How many line engineers at Google let alone a random tech company can question a VP/director's pet project? Heck, how many middle managers can? Psychological safety should mean you should be able to call BS and be okay with others calling your BS (in a non-inflammatory way), but in reality it means stroking others' egos, especially of those in leadership.
>It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own. — Buddha, Dhammapada
Indeed, like all of Buddha's teachings, it also applies to the author of course.
Curious to learn others' experiences, but I've never seen this in my career, ever. I've seen _peers_ yell at each other, but never seen an employee slip "out of character" with their superiors, at least publicly. And if it isn't happening publicly, there's no psychological safety, is there?
Most people (including myself) have been conditioned to bring their "work self" to work, not their "true self". As such, there's very little chance of "forgetting the nature of the relationship" even in heated moments.
I am not really one to challenge all that directly normally. But sometimes that slips.
So when I was reestablishing my personal identity in my late 20s, I just never made a separate “work self”, and it’s been a deliberate decision. I regularly talk openly with my superiors and make it known that I’m very opinionated but I’m also fallible and open to learning from my mistakes. This kind of openness and trust is absolutely essential at the executive level; the real secret is that none of us really knows what we’re doing and we’re all making it up as we go too.
Doing this a few times with the right people will help you learn when asking questions is helpful and when you should get out of the way and follow orders. A good leader has the level of humility to know they’re not always right.
In fact, this ability to “fight back” effectively is what gets you promoted above a line manager level. And in my opinion is why white men are so overrepresented in senior levels of companies: the psychological safety is there for them in the rest of their lives so they can have it at work, and it’s not there for others so it’s a lot harder to build the muscle on the job if you’re always on guard at home.
This is amazing self-awareness. I wish I had it earlier in my career.
>And in my opinion is why white men are so overrepresented in senior levels of companies: the psychological safety is there for them in the rest of their lives
This is interesting, but I don't entirely agree. I have seen both sides as an Indian male who has worked both in India (privilege) and SV (no privilege). It's not a matter of "fighting back" or "being open", it's just in-group mechanics at work. There is a tacit understanding among people in positions of power about who is the "in-group" that doesn't need to be expressed or acknowledged even. For example, in India, even as a junior engineer I would be invited to important meetings whereas more experienced female engineers wouldn't. If I'd simply shown up and done the bare minimum, I would have quickly risen up the ranks, IMO. I had the exact opposite experience in SV, being seen as the "out-group" of the "worker bee" class by default.
I'm disputing that thesis based on my experience. You don't need to be vulnerable or "be open" at all - you just need to be part of the in-group. I know "Senior Director of Engineering" who had no clue what the hell was going on. They never spoke up in meetings, or did anything useful at all - it was clear to everyone they added no value whatsoever. Turns out they were just floating from startup to startup moving up in seniority in the process. Presumably, nobody bothered to question them during the interview process as it was assumed they were "competent" based on their background and past positions.
It was actually kind of interesting, since I thought as you did before that.
All of them, as long as it's done internally and not jerk-like. Doesn't sound like you know much about Google culture.
Really? Why are y'all working on FLoC then? :-)
It's not an average SWE's job to make product decisions and to steer strategic initiatives. There are people whose job it is to do specifically that.
Think just for a second what it would be like if every one of be more than 100,000 employees could bring a product plan to a halt because they had reservations.
What's in your power is to ask tough questions (people do).. To make your opinion heard (people do). To change projects if you wish (something Google makes easier than any other company). And to take risks and make choices in the execution of your own job duties. That's psychological safety.
You may find this hard to believe, but the people working on FLoC have chosen to. They could easily find a different project if they wanted to. It may be disappointing you you that the average SWE isn't nearly as ideological as the average HN commenter, but it is what it is.
And this is engineers at Google we're talking about: usually people with advanced degrees from hard-to-get-into colleges and years of experience along with very specialized knowledge. In other words, very hard to replace people. How must more difficult must it be for people who could be replaced tomorrow?
I thought Google just hired recent grads that play the leetcode game.
Maybe 2005 Google, but not anymore. A good bachelors degree or enough YoE at most companies gets you the interview, and then the interview result usually does the rest. Those are the "line engineers" that move on to other faangs or unicorns when psychological safety becomes an issue.
Typically it's the people from the hard-to-get-into colleges, or with years of company tenure, or with specialized knowledge causing the psychological safety issues.
This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
U.S. companies are very much fear driven. Management always keeps people in doubt and uncertainty. Violating psychological safety is another charge to hit people with.
It is the same as the "counterrevolutionary" charge in communist countries, to be used against intelligent dissidents.
Employees should have psychological safety to voice concerns within their domain, but that's not a license to start backseat driving upper management. It's one thing for a line engineer to raise concerns about their team's choice of frameworks for a project or the chosen architecture of the system. It's a different issue entirely if the employee is simply "calling BS" on company directives or cynically referring to initiatives as "pet projects". From a managing perspective, there is a stark difference between people who voice concerns reasonably and those who simply like to complain.
The good team members raise their concerns with an open mind, seek more information to understand why certain decisions were made, come prepared with alternative suggestions, and most importantly are willing to disagree and commit if they don't get their way.
The bad apples do things like "call BS" on initiatives without understanding the whole story, aren't interested in learning more, don't have any constructive suggestions, and tend to drag their feet or spread dissent through the ranks when they don't get their way.
Psychological safety doesn't mean employees get a free pass to be disgruntled or push back against what they're being paid to do. Questions, concerns, and alternate suggestions are welcome and should not be punished, but at the end of the day employees must be willing to commit to the chosen direction and get on board with company initiatives.
If you won’t disagree and commit that’s a different story.
I have had some co-workers or higher ups that probably found it inconvenient and didn't like me (in fact strike the probably - I know for a fact). Yet it has so far not resulted in me being fired, demoted etc. and in fact the opposite has happened. I've been told to never shut up and that they keep me around precisely because I don't.
My luck might obviously run out at some point but so far, from my first internship where I just didn't do the stupid task they gave me and instead replaced their awful sendmail+pop3d setup with a full featured postfix and imap/pop and spam filter combo (well I showed the boss on my last day that I had built it on my computer and what it could do. He offered me a part time job as their network/sysadmin to do it for real on the server and to migrate all their users over) it has worked out. I'm not on 'brilliant jerk level'. Way not brilliant enough and just below jerk ;)
He almost got fired recently. He didn’t, in part because a bunch of us stood up for him, but it was dicey.
The reason he almost got fired is because he’s very expensive to manage.
That dogged unwillingness to never shut up, along with more than his fair share of brilliance, is great when he’s digging into a thorny, ugly problem that most would prefer to pretend doesn’t exist.
But when there’s a meeting with $3k/hour in fully loaded cost worth of people in it and he’s going on and on about his pet issue that’s a problem. When every decision you make has to first be delivered to the team and argued in detail to this guy, that’s exhausting. To his credit he’s convincible, but still. Since projects have to be carefully evaluated for fit before being assigned to him that makes him harder to use well. Having to unruffle other employees’ feathers all the time certainly isn’t fun. And so on and so forth.
All this means he needs a very strong manager, both in a technical sense (because without that credibility no one will be able to manage him) and in a people skills sense (both for him and for the people he comes into contact with). Such managers are themselves are difficult to find and expensive to employ. To keep him around and aimed in the right direction means a disproportionate amount of one of those people’s time is going to a single employee.
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. It sounds like whatever you are doing is working for you. But maybe this provides some food for thought.
To make another example of where I personally can't shut up: if I see someone propose a stupid rollout plan that's got a real good chance to eff things up royally, then I will say that it stinks and why. That doesn't always mean doing it in the big 3k/hour meeting like in your example. And I'm not talking about a 'pet issue'. I can obviously be overruled and that's fine. I've brought it up and have it black on white that they were warned and they made the decision anyway. Fine by me. Don't blame me afterwards. I won't do unpaid overtime later to fix your shit.
But I sure have seen way more than 3k/hour spent in meeting upon meeting after the warnings weren't heeded and it did explode in their faces.
Actually being unable to focus oneself reasonably well without the help of a manager sounds almost a bit dumb to me
I'm surprised you're writing "really bright"
> if I see someone propose a stupid rollout plan that's got a real good chance to eff things up royally,
To me, you seem to be the opposite to those "really bright" people, in that you're helping others, sometimes the whole company?, focus on the right things, and avoid doing dangerous things.
Those others, need help with focusing. Whilst you help people focus correctly?
Most people are not equally bright in all departments :)
Yes, they're bright guys, I stand by that and they do awesome work of what they do. When left unchecked, they just focus exclusively on what they love and think makes the most sense. This may not always fully align with the overall company goals customer wise. And obviously you're getting only _my_ viewpoint of this, not theirs.
They do remind me of myself more than 15 years ago, telling my dad about Linux From Scratch and Gentoo and how that's the only way to be. He was obviously right when he said that no, they don't have the time for that at their place of work and I declared him insane (in my head) because obviously, that was _the only_ way :) It definitely made me learn a lot of stuff, so for myself at the time it was the right thing.
> in that you're helping others, sometimes the whole company?
I try I guess. Sometimes it's really hard, because they don't want to be helped and/or actively seek to introduce policies that are detrimental to the company overall (not talking about the "bright guys" above in this case, e.g. the rollout plan I mentioned was the business people, not us tech guys). And again, my viewpoint only that you are getting here.
There are always consequences for over sharing, the obvious answer is don't overshare.
How can any human feel totally psychologically safe in a world with climate change, cancer, random attacks of violence, earthquakes, etc?
The answer is that you're thinking in black and white terms about a concept that is a continuum. Even in employee-employer relationships, with a good manager it is entirely possible to have a reasonable level of psychological safety, just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car.
Then again, it's reasonably straightforward to measure physical injury and come to some agreement about acceptable risk. Psychological injury is far more subjective.
And if the group is small, even if you try to make the answers anonymous, maybe you still would be able to figure out who wrote what, and they'll realize this, and write mostly nice sounding things
Anyway, asking and talking about it seems like a good idea. Maybe also asking them to read the article being discussed here :-)
Obviously, "total" in this context means in the workplace. Also, psychological safety essentially means "ability to express yourself and make mistakes without the fear of negative consequences" - it has nothing to do with shielding yourself from cancer, climate change etc. Ironically, the Buddha, who was quoted in the OP grew up with "total psychological safety" as you defined it, and you know where that led him.
> just like it's possible to have a reasonable level of physical safety while driving a car
Again, this is not a comparable analogy at all. If you're unable to in no uncertain terms say "this project is going to hurt users" out of fear of getting fired/looking like not a team player, that is not even a "reasonable level" of psychological safety.
We're talking about software engineers in big tech companies, right? They're extremely well paid and would have no problem finding a new job.
Speaking my mind does not increase the speed of climate change, the chance that I might get cancer, or the probability of earthquake. Therefore, it is easy not to think about those things while discussing work.
That's the kind of psychological safety I have.
You work on technical tasks for other people, who make sure your work is ok, and your supervisor makes sure you are OK.
That person is your advocate in all things that fall in the tense employee-employer tug-of-war. Inside the "group", there is psychological safety. On "tasks" there is often less of it, but you always have your group.
Or at least it should be that way.
The elephant in the room is that there has to be a level of tension, of slight mutual discomfort, of a bilateral transaction present in employer-employee relationship. It needs to be very dull and implied but it has to be there to make sure incentives are aligned and objectives are consistently met.
Tenured public service and unions show what might happen when this inconvenient element is missing.
That talk is not actually meant to matter, it's just cant...
It's weird, there are so many of these pieces and they all sound the same. Is there a template that everyone uses who wants to get into personal brand building? "Start with a direct quote. Then set the context with some sentences. Now throw in a snippet from some study you've read. And use funny images!"
Management is foremost about solving the problem you are accountable for. In development, that will likely mean that success is when the team ships something useful to the business.
In an unsafe environment, members of the team are afraid to act and speak. The working relationship devolves to "tell me exactly what you want done". Teams can ship like this but managers need to overperform and it sucks for everyone.
In a safe environment, manager and team have a shared understanding of what the goals are, and we work flexibly to acheive them. if something doesn't work, learn from it and try something else. Collectively, we still have to deliver. For sure, we can all be safe and still fail. Safety needs to improve the odds.
The manager question is "how do we best ship?" What dynamic best predicts team success for a given goal? The bet is that a safe team will perform better at solving the typically squishy problems that stand between you and shipping well.
My belief is that safe teams perform better by allowing more people to engage constructively and critically on any one problem (more traction), by learning efficiently (low latency), and by demonstrating work incrementally and frequently (more cycles). This is failing fast, failing better, and converging well.
One additional point of "safety" is the question of "how do you want live?" As manager or team, what do you want work to be like? People flee harsh teams. How do you succeed then?
I worked at a company where vulnerability and mindfulness were championed above all else.
It went exactly the same way as Mao's [Hundred Flowers Campaign][1].
So much so that I am convinced it's something deeply ingrained into human nature.
Feedback was welcomed, and psychological safety was guaranteed.
Initially people were rewarded for being vulnerable and opening up with feedback in public and anonymously. It ended up as a witch hunt with the CEO trying to guess whose anonymous feedback was whose and admonishing people's anonymous feedback in public meetings, and then several employees being fired after the CEO went around spreading rumors about the employees and building a consensus that things weren't going well because of these employees - things that everyone else could see were clearly false.
It was incredible to watch, and when it happens it creates the ultimate chilling effect, and rapid loyalty to the leader on the witch hunt, but closes everyone off, and makes everyone parse their words and basically never say what they feel needs to be said. You don't push back or tell them they are wrong or what they are doing is inappropriate, because you see how vicious they are to dissenters. It was an amazing psychological journey to go on though, and I learned a lot about human nature, and a first-hand understanding of how some events of history probably played out psychologically amongst a population.
People who obsess over, and push mindfulness and vulnerability and such are usually those that are over-thinkers and with psychological problems that led them there in the first place.
The problem is that the people in power don't realize that they actually can't handle to hear a lot of the honesty they are asking of people.
So I guess my point would be that, psychological safety is important for eliciting true feedback, but even if you are the one in power and offering it, you cannot trust yourself that you will be able to handle it.
Everyone should just be more chill and easy-going instead of trying to drive formulaic new-age initiatives.
> Awesome! Not awesome that we have this problem, but awesome that you brought it up. That‘s how we build psychological safety and that’s how we build a successful company!
This gives me chills haha. So robotic and corporate. I just wish people would chill!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
The way psychological safety works is that sometimes one new person is all that it takes to destroy the safety. Every time you add a team member, you roll a die. The chances of continuous good outcome decrease exponentially with the team size.
Even this is not completely unavoidable. Sometimes the existing team is strong enough to resist the new person, if the new person turns out to be incompatible with their previous relationship. And sometimes the new person leaves, and the peace is restored. But this is rare.
Specifically, I have seen a situation where a new junior developer with somewhat toxic personality was treating every existing team member like an idiot. This did not ruin the psychological safety of the remaining members, because being attacked all at the same time made it obvious they were all on the same side and no one took the attacks seriously. (It would have been worse if the new member instead focused his attacks only on one or two of them.) And because it was a junior developer, his opinions had no real impact, so people around him felt uncomfortable, but not actually threatened. Finally, it was the new guy who decided he had better options than to work with idiots, and in a month or two he moved to another project. The atmosphere within the team quickly returned to the original state.
A much worse situation was in a different company, where the new member was maybe only 1/5 as toxic, but he was a senior developer recommended by the management as an expert, and stayed there for a year before moving as an expert to another company. The original peace was never restored, and at the next problem, people started quitting.
> The way psychological safety works is that sometimes one new person is all that it takes to destroy the safety
I suppose that's a reason CEO handover is considered risky -- rolling a die with the whole company?
> different company, where the new member was maybe only 1/5 as toxic, but he was a senior developer recommended by ...
I wonder if he got feedback about his behavior? I guess that maybe it wouldn't have had much effect but maybe
People who consider themselves smarter than everyone else usually don't pay much attention to feedback from those supposedly less smart. We tried to explain where he was wrong, but he thought we were just making excuses.
Can total transparency in a large organization, damage psychological safety
I wonder about the Linux mailing list, the whole world can read. I wonder if some good ideas never get posted, because there're too many people reading.
Hmm, if there was a way to post ideas semi anonymously, and take credit for them, only if they turned out to be well accepted
We (some of us) use shorthand (most of the time) because if we didn't, communication would be more difficult (in most cases).
I agree with most of the rest of your comment.
A maxim worthy of framing on wall.
> The problem is that the people in power don't realize that they actually can't handle to hear a lot of the honesty they are asking of people.
This too!
Whose idea was that? It's odd if the initiative was from the crazy CEO
> Everyone should just be more chill and easy-going instead of
Imagine the managers said "be more chill and easy-going". I wouldn't know what they had in mind.
The things in the article, though, included some precise and actionable steps. Which I'll make use of, where I work.
But with such a CEO, maybe the company was a bit doomed in any case
I attribute a lot of this to weak social safety nets and at-will employment in the US. I constantly feared that I would be fired for some statement, personality clash, or mistake (or for no reason at all, which is entirely legal)... so I kept my head down and was lightly abused (frequent overtime without pay, tolerating verbal abuse, etc).
I was living paycheck to paycheck and without a job I'd rapidly lose housing and healthcare. It took me nearly a decade to attain financial security while racking up psychological damage.
Between the lines, I'm reading that a good social welfare system, eg health care and unemployment money, would be good for the companies -- easier to reach higher psychological safety, then, more good ideas and healthy critique, better decisions
People feel "psychologically safe" because they have confidence. They have confidence because they have a track record of getting things right. They might be wrong now but they have enough credit to risk being wrong. Successful teams have people who speak up because those people are confident (likely due to a history of success).
In any case, in the event that you speak up and are wrong, there's no way you can be insulated from "formal nor informal consequences of interpersonal risks". If someone says something that I know to be wrong, it makes me think less of them. Will I be rude to them? No, but if it keeps happening I'll pay less attention. Kind people will give you plenty of chances but only stupid people will give you infinite chances.
The perspective here, where we should aim for "psychological safety" is minimizing one kind of fail case (people not speaking up because they're afraid) and maximizing another (people speaking up and being wrong). It isn't obvious that you should make that trade-off.
> That's stupid, it won't work due to X, we're going with Y
or a
> Thanks for the feedback, but this time we're choosing Y due to X.
One is going to leave the worker happier than the other and feeling safer despite the boss thinking the worker is wrong. Unless you can measure the counter-factual (often not) you will only guess as to which was better.
What are your concerns with solution A such that you think solution Y is better? Help me understand so I can explain what you're missing. Or, so I can see what I'm missing.
Being humble is often about taking the initiative to express mistakes, errors or things you did not know or thought you knew.
Often the biggest challenge is team dynamics. An introvert on a team might feel his psychological safety reduced by what he perceives as relentless criticism my an extraverted teammate. However, said extrovert might view psychological safety as being free to express his opinions as he sees them.
I've had to manage for PS at several organizations. It doesn't mean that everyone is free to say/do whatever they want whenever they want. It's team-oriented.
It takes a lot of work to establish if you don't have it. It's incredibly easy to lose if you abuse it in any way. But it's an awesome way to work.
- your boss can fire you at any time without cause or notice
- your project can be canceled on a whim
Since these properties are generally foundational and immutable (and usually codified in corporate governance as well as employment law, at least in the US) "psychological safety" cannot exist in any such organization for any rank and file employee (executives may be protected somewhat by contracts and golden parachutes). The only thing that can exist is a hierarchy of fear and power, and that is exactly what we see.
Would that not be more "safe" for everyone involved? That's but one tangible, measurable way we can increase psychological safety in organizations. Your claim of immutability seems to lack basis.
This is rediscovering what has been going on (or at least held as the ideal) in the military for quite some time.
It's a two way street of accepting a contrary opinion on one side, and continuing to work as a team when that contrary opinion is rejected. I know it's popular among some to view the military as brainwashed morons, but it is a conscious decision to execute orders that one disagrees with. Otto von Bismarck Quote: “A bad plan that is well executed will yield much better results than a good plan that is poorly executed.”
Lawful Neutral (Apple)
Lawful Evil (Google)
Chaotic Evil (Facebook, Twitter)