Productivity, Anxiety and Standards

Lessons from the Psychological Safety Book Club

Aug 11, 2023

Today’s Crafting Tech Teams issue is all about psychological safety in tech teams. How it can impact your goals and visions. Why it impacts the team’s productivity and lessons and use cases from my coaching experience and career.

You will learn the following:

Psychological Safety x Standards matrix. A combined view of your teams’ overall productivity potential.
Checking your Team’s Productivity Enablers. Learn the map. Then map your teams.
Create a vision for ideal conditions. There are many paths to productivity with pros and cons. Let’s explore them and choose your course.
Lesson—Accidental Anxiety. I tried and observed all combinations. Stories from the wild.

Psychological Safety x Standards matrix

The weekly calls are bearing fruit!

It’s easy to miss and I’m glad we started reading The Fearless Organization in the book club.

Chapter 1 of the book helped me build two key concepts that I’ll share with you today:

Psychological Safety and Standards matrix
Discounting the Future

The matrix (pictured above) highlights the strategic idea that psychological safety and quality standards are orthogonal concepts. It’s easy to think of the a**hole hero developer analogy and teamwork using the above context.

A manager may naïvely think that the desired hemisphere is the right side: high standards. But in reality, most engineers want to work on the top side: high psychological safety. The ideal overlap is the top right.

Throughout my career I’ve traversed all quadrants, have gained insights and learning experience in all quadrants and have coached teams and individuals who were embodying transitions from one to another. More on that later.

The second idea is more tactical: discounting the future refers to overvaluing the need for stability and order right now and undervaluing the long-term health of the organisation and processes.

I recall conversations from my past with teams, managers and clients that capture this essence. They went something like this:

“Don’t overcomplicate things! Just do it.”
“We don’t have time. This needs to go out today!”
“Tests will slow us down, we’re already late!“
“It’s just a small fix! Stop drawing on the white board.“

Checking your Team’s Productivity Enablers

In tech we can express these concepts with our own metrics that are proven performance enablers: DORA and SPACE metrics. The matrix overlaps perfectly. Let’s take a look:

This concept goes all the way back to the main research and use case also mentioned in the book, conveniently from our—tech—industry: Google’s Project Aristotle under the re:Work initiative.

The research isn’t conclusive on all aspects and sadly measuring objective and subjective indicators on a team-level is incredibly chaotic—impossible even. But the conclusive bits are interesting (from the SPACE paper):

Myth: Productivity is all about developer activity
Myth: Productivity is only about individual performance
Productivity and satisfaction are correlated
Performance is the outcome of a system or process. It is often best evaluated as outcomes instead of output.
There is an inverse correlation between reporting incidents (incident management) and psychological safety.

Teams lacking in PS, under-report mistakes and problems. Issues get swept under the rug. In contrast, high PS teams report more accurately and have less bugs and more quality. However, comparing the low and high PS teams, the reports will show the low PS team making fewer mistakes. The skew is caused by reporting error and can make it seem as if the less safe, perhaps even more junior team is performing better. More on this in tomorrow’s Crafting Tech Teams issue!

Create a vision for ideal conditions

Now let’s look at how you can navigate these quadrants. Here’s a simple framework:

Identify where you are.
Pick one of the possible routes ^{_{I illustrated common ones below}}
Measure your most impactful outliers (scarce resources, risk, stress areas)
Combine the measurements and align with company values and outcomes
Set an intention to make time to act on your finding
Go back to 1—Repeat

Scenario 1: The Team is too Comfortable

Slow pace, confusion regarding business outcomes, limited customer impact and low revenue and profit are the hallmark signs of a team that is too comfortable. I have seen this go either of three ways:

Avoid disrupting the comfortable status quo: a slow decline into apathy.
Bite the bullet and disrupt too much: aggressive pressure, hustle mentality.
🎖 Set Higher Goals that invite the team outside the comfort zone: success guaranteed if they consent to this challenge willingly.

Scenario 2: The Team has an existential crisis

This is the apathy zone. Everybody checks in, checks out. The team is the perfect book-example Cost Centre. Cost cutting is always under discussion, as are unpaid overtime and frequent crunch modes.

Here are the paths out that I have observed:

Temporary stability: Facing existential problems, it’s a good idea to radically change communication structures and start addressing the negative influence of local leaders. Outcomes are a combination of catching up on sleep, getting rest, going on vacation, updating documentation, contracts and reassessing personal and company-wide priorities.
HUSTLE: Clamp down on the team and squeeze out the final delivery before the company goes bankrupt. This option never goes well and is usually a sign of a sinking ship with a founder who won’t face reality.
Slow and Steady: Take the long route, aim to improve both PS and standards and adopt at a steady pace over a period of 6-24 months. The expense can be caused due to the limited time focus, scope (e.g. only 1 team as a pilot project at first) or lack of overall motivation to improve, requiring management overhead
Full Organisation Transformation: This is the unicorn. This is what’s on every agile, scrum and executive coach’s product page. Situations I have been involved with that did work out in the end was where a low standard, hustle-prone team was empowered to empowered to lead a high standard on a pilot project, deviating from regular company processes. A coach oversaw the gradual adoption of psychological safety. The challenge comes from making sure that the team’s pilot project is seen as an early adopter to an overall organisational commitment that has already started, instead of being a martyr team that’s pushing out the most critical project.

You will notice I didn’t attach the medal. In a way—they all have medals. The victory in itself is to move out of Apathy at all costs as it is the most dangerous, both mentally, emotionally and physically for everyone involved.

Realistically, most teams would be best served by the Temporary Stability option and make it a regular routine if they oscillate on PS.

Scenario 3: The Team hustles towards burnout

This is the bright flame. Hero, superstar team. Probably spending money fast. Likely toxic. Just one more project. With no future in sight. This is the performance-validation zone as that will discuss more tomorrow. The team requires constant praise, validation and financial incentives. In order to avoid rejection and criticism they have eliminated mistakes and learning from their process. They focus on accepting only those tasks where they feel evidence of guaranteeing good performance in order to get that praise and raise.

Transformation paths:

Drop standards, lay-offs: Money is running out. Next company, next VC, next rodeo. This is not an improvement, merely replenishing resources to repeat the same process. Until someone burns out.
Quit: Replace the toxic environment with a comfortable one. This is the most common route I witness. These two quadrants capture my biggest cohort of clients.
Reboot: The default strategy for companies that churn employees faster than their cash reserves. This often entails restructuring part of senior management and creating departments that serve as comfortable recovery stations. The ideal outcome is then mixing these groups with the rest of the company to promote diversity and new perspectives to recover the high standards while the high psychological safety takes hold.
🎖Learn More, Encourage Mistakes: This is the simple, but challenging option, and my most common coaching focus. Encourage the team to slow down and be earnest about their mistakes. Teach them how to turn their failures into learning opportunities without judgement and double-down on active communication training and active listening.

Lessons from the past

I did an exercise while reading the book. I went over my employment and consulting history and mapped every employer, team and engagement onto the matrix. Here’s what I found out about my learning curve:

I started off in a comfortable space and sought high standards immediately. I was lucky in this.
I left that comfortable company and joined a startup with high standards. But it felt off. Psychological safety was very low in that environment because local leadership was constantly in flux. Standards started dropping as a result.
I repeated this a few more times and the low-psychological safety area started dominating my employment space. This is the most common problem for engineers early in their career. Loop between apathy and anxiety.
I started working on improving my communication and leadership skills. Unknowingly, I became a local leader that provided safety for a team while also keeping standards high. I got lucky. This team later followed me around in a few companies.
We joined a fresh company and establish the upper right quadrant from day one. This was my accelerator. I could connect. I could learn. I could deliver value and be safely obsessed with customers. I learned more in a week here than I did in a year.
After that I started coaching this journey: helping teams recreate this process based on my experience and knowledge. My mission is to impact a million developers by accelerating their team’s journey into the safe, learning, high-performance zone.
It wasn’t all roses. I had to learn how to deal with coaching engagements where my involvement accidentally pushed a team or individual from the apathy zone to the anxiety zone. This was hard to navigate, and the article you are reading today is my summary of that learning journey.