I'd love to see an article on how to create psychological safety in the first place where non exists or where the opposite is true.
From there all sorts of good habits can take root but without that things like feedback week can become bitterly political events.
I suspect creating psychological safety boils down to things like the rewards and incentive system, org structure and transparency of decision making but I'd love to hear if anyone has first hand experience
My current team is repeatedly cited as one of the most fun and open teams in the org by many (both from inside and sidelines), and I can suggest some things that seem to work:
1. Psychological safety and honesty is subtle and contagious - if one person opens up and always makes a point in identifying their own mistakes (perhaps going out of the way at times) others feel empowered to do so as well. This ideally needs to be done by the senior most members of the team to start.
2. Make it a point to never (even subtly) blame individuals in even the slightest of public settings for any mistakes. Use 1-1s to do that and encourage the same throughout the team
3. Safety is contagious but the opposite is true as well - bad influences in the form of PMs out of sync with team culture should be avoided as quickly as possible.
4. Everyone should always feel like the team has their back in any external surface (either their managers, the customer success team, the product management team, etc) - any slight or suggestion that an individual might not have done something optimally should be backed by honest support from the remainder of the team. Not lying or defending bad actions but just assuring that the team will work together to rectify any problem.
5. Make it a point to publicly acknowledge any good contribution by any team member.
6. In any public channel even within the team, all engineers are treated as if they are equally senior.
7. Display and inspire a sense of responsibility towards the product, not because you owe it to your company, but you owe it to the customers, to your teammates, and other teams in the org that will have to make up for any mistakes we do. Again not by working overtime (not more than once or twice of course).
8. Fully acknowledge that no one should work "too hard" (read: more than 9-5 on most days). If one engineer does because they have no life, make sure everyone knows that's not anyone else's problem (and make sure that this extra-work engineer doesn't cause trouble via bad code or unrealistic expectations).
9. Be brutally honest to each other in 1-1s, and try to use the same techniques as above to do so.
10. Never hold back feedback from each other that you feel obligated to give in peer reviews eventually anyway. Give it to them (privately) as soon as possible.
Psychological safety is 10% job security and 90% how comfortable you feel with the people you work with. Simple to understand, hard to make happen - you need to hire well.
>you need to hire well
This! It is odd to write but the more time I spend in the industry the more I find myself thinking back to that statement, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks."
The five dysfunctions of a team have been the hardest things to change in my opinion once habits form that prevent them.
I ponder at times if this is truly why "hyper growth" startups tend to hire on average much younger candidates and our industry says that ageism is rampant.
I just passed on a recent candidate who was a perfect technical fit for an open position on my team (far better than the candidates I’m now considering). He did, however, come across as extremely arrogant and abrasive.
I can work with a junior team member growing into a role but I can’t jeopardize the entire team dynamic based on one person’s inability to work well with others, regardless of how proficient they might be.
> I suspect creating psychological safety boils down to things like the rewards and incentive system, org structure and transparency of decision making but I'd love to hear if anyone has first-hand experience
I've never been in management but I am someone who modifies my interactions with people very easily and is very conscious of what harm could come to me based on my various actions. I am also good at spotting squirming people.
Consider what you would do if you personally owned the company, i.e. you can't be fired and everyone must get along with you. What issues would you report? What opinions would you challenge? What ideas would you propose? How uncertain would you be willing to be in a discussion? Would you cut corners on the code to make sure that everything in the sprint gets finished by the end of the two weeks?
Compare that list to what you actually do. For example, most people challenge very rarely but I can confirm from the Slack conversations which parallel the meeting that many want to do that (myself included). I've been in plenty of meetings where most agree that something is pointless or even harmful and we leave the meeting to go implement it. Why? The person speaking is the manager. Our concern is only expressed in chatting on the Slack in private during the meeting. That is why UnderCover Boss is so good at finding issues management knows nothing about.
The difference is the psychological safety deficit. Ask yourself what exactly causes that difference. Why specifically do you challenge far less than you would like to? That is what you must fix.
The problem is that the people who know this information are often lacking in the power to yield change and extracting feedback on this in an environment with low psychological safety faces the same problems as extracting any other feedback (which is why you wanted to solve the problem in the first place).
I would not believe that it could be done without replacing >50% of team members and having them trust from the start.
I suspect that an incentive system that is heavily biased towards collective success would make a big difference.
The more we are vested in each other's success the more we are likely to want to bring out the best in each other and from there we might begin to get psychological safety and other goodness
> I posit that an incentive system that is heavily biased towards collective success would make a big difference.
There needs to be enough individual benefit (or the team must be small enough) that individual efforts can move the needle. But yes I agree. One of the biggest challenges for companies is that the average employee has no reason to care whether their project succeeds.
Changing the culture of an organisation is really difficult. Ideally you'd need support from senior leaders as well as front line staff. Without both of those it's going to be next to impossible.
I like these (although some of them use lots of business jargon).
If you like video you can try this by Professor Amy Edmundson from Harvard (it's a bit clunky because it's an online conference): https://youtu.be/rhVXwdzdPcc?t=880
You're right that there's a lot of content about the benefits of psychological safety, and how nice it is to have it, but not nearly enough about how to create it if you're stuck in an org that's reluctant.
Sometimes it just takes "a terrible outbreak of tuberculosis selectively killing off the biggest, nastiest and most despotic males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously truculent primate."
From there all sorts of good habits can take root but without that things like feedback week can become bitterly political events.
I suspect creating psychological safety boils down to things like the rewards and incentive system, org structure and transparency of decision making but I'd love to hear if anyone has first hand experience