Psychological Safety Provides Transparency and Productivity
Many leaders mistake it to be the other way around
Transparency and openness may be on your list of values but that hasn’t helped your team to speak up when things get though.
Hesitation and playing it safe might seem harmful at first, but it quickly creates a psychologically unsafe environment. Environment beats will every time, all the time.
In today’s Crafting Tech Teams issue you’ll learn the following:
Signals of absence of psychological safety. You and your team members have easy to spot patterns and habits if you know what to look for. A certain delay in communication, defensive posturing when a task goes late or straight-up silence in important meetings.
Behavior and processes that make things worse. As the leader you hold a lot of power in discussions, both verbally and non-. Ignoring or reacting to them may make matters unintentionally worse, slowly creating a habit where the culture adopts the lack of psychological safety as intentional. Less experienced engineers often mistaking it for a productivity incentive.
Useful tools to structure safety. Be deliberate with your behavior when you know the team is dealing with a difficult situation or conversation. In a manner of speaking, your obligation to them as their leader is to promote growth while also protecting their honor.
Forming habits to make sure they stick. Cultural change is only going to produce lasting results if they continue while you’re not in the room. Facilitating is one thing, but forming habits makes them part of the environment, lessening the drain on your team members’ willpower and cognitive load.
Signals of absence of psychological safety
Many mistake psychological safety for being agreeable all the time. Would you be surprised if I told you it was the opposite? Safety is a strong predictor of developer productivity. That productivity is the consequence of the team having transparent oversight on where the problems are. Combine that with being candid when things go wrong and addressing issues already without attributing needless blame.
Obviously, the first signal that are discussing is the lack of earnesty after discovering a problem and when things don’t go according to plan. Look back on your meetings now: this week, maybe 2 weeks
spot the silences when asked a benign question
a delivery was delayed and no one reported on it
observe in your mind’s eye any conversations where team members were fidgeting or awkward about speaking up
especially be mindful of situations where the conversation was calculated, rather than being spontaneous
be mindful of conversations that produce excuses rather than simply stating matters.
notice tendencies where stopping work is avoided when bad news emerges, the team opting to distract themselves with being busy
Defensiveness within in the team is a signal of a memory where a prior incident was harshly dealt with in their perspective. Negative behavioral patterns have ten times the impact compared to positive ones. That is why one slight or unfair treatment can quickly derail week’s worth of cultural transformation work.
Behavior and processes that make things worse
As the leader or manager, your words and actions hold significant power in discussions. Ignoring or reacting negatively to team members' concerns may unintentionally exacerbate the lack of psychological safety. This negative feedback loop leads to a culture where openness is discouraged.
Less experienced team members may mistakenly perceive this as an incentive for productivity, fearing the consequences of speaking up.
I started my career working with teams on the Balkans. I often observed situations where “sucking it up and dealing with it silently” was the productive path and speaking up about it got your in the line of fire.
The phrase “Don’t shoot the messenger” comes to my mind for these kinds of situations.
Encourage a culture where mistakes are viewed as learning opportunities. Emphasise the importance of addressing challenges together as a team, without placing blame on individuals.
“Mistakes are used as a learning path—not for blame—to determine how the process needs to be improved.“
I once had to deal with a situation where a junior engineer, a new member to our team dropped an important table in the production database. There was no significant loss, we had backups and a clear plan. But that wasn’t clear to them.
After the first “Uh oh!” the junior engineer started shaking, they were in shock. It’s easy to throw your hands up and blame this person. But a high performing team always brings this back to the objective at hand: A process to prevent this from happening is a more effective measure that keeps the team sane and happy.
Useful tools to structure safety
Heads-up for the CTT community: I’m starting a book club on Monday to read and review the book “The Fearless Organization” by Amy Edmondson. Inspired in part to delve deeper into this topic in combination with technology teams and our creating more value within our industry.
The book recommends an on-going 3-step framework to nurturing a culture of psychological safety. This isn’t an impossible, large-scale benefit. It came to my attention because applies very well to any scale of sub-organization within a company: a pair, a squad, a team an entire department, etc.
Step 1: Setting the Stage. Frame the work by setting clear expectations about failure, uncertainty, and interdependence. There should be no uncommunicated surprises about what can go wrong (ie. a pre-mortem) and what should happen when it does (ie. a contingency plan). It’s important to have a frame set for anything you may find yourself being upset about if it surprised you or the team.
Step 2: Inviting Participation. Practice and model the behavior you want to see in others. Speak last, listen actively, especially if you hold a lot of authority. Come from a place of humility and “I don’t know, can you tell me more?” rather than engaging in coerced buy-in to overconfident assumptions or angst.
Step 3: Responding Productively. Express appreciation for the team members’ contribution. Acknowledge their ideas and efforts, even if you disagree with them. It's essential to destigmatize failure by focusing on learning and improvement rather than blaming or punishing mistakes. Additionally, clear violations should be addressed and sanctioned to maintain a culture of trust and respect.
Ideas should fail. Most features you implement drive no immediate business value. Most features will fail. Ideas should be allowed to fail so we learn. Let ideas fail, so the business doesn’t.
Last month one of the teams I was coaching had a tough deadline with a month-long DevSecOps task that took the entire team by surprise. They managed to do it.
After conducting a retrospective they highlighted that the determining factor that allowed them to overcome what seemed to be an unreasonable deadline: constantly having absolute certainty on the cost of not meeting the deadline. Not blame. Not “You’ll be fired”. Just a number and clear understanding of how much it costs the business to not be ready.
“Cheating and covering up are natural by-products of a top-down culture that does not accept ‘no’ or ‘it can't be done’ for an answer.”—Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization
Forming habits to make sure they stick
It may take up to 2 months to form a habit. While the outcome is not apparent immediately, it is important to diminish reward structures that reinforce the old, negative habits.
A key outlier in teams that are low in psychological safety is not an absence of successes—they struggle to celebrate them.
To form the habit for the team, follow this structure:
Small steps, consistent over perfect: start with a small, achievable action that you can consistently do every day as a team. If you have daily standup—ensure the habit is known and visible. This can be as simple as encouraging everyone to speak up on problems, ie: “What’s the most difficult news that you have to share?”
Create a Trigger and Reward System: Help your team signal when the habit is starting to detract to old ways. Have a clear trigger system for when things derail and take a moment to accept it as “okay”, but return to the path with patience. Repeated straying from the path is likely a signal that some underlying issue wasn’t addressed by the new process.
Track Your Progress and Stay Accountable: In tech teams psychological safety is a major contributor to communication frequency, productivity and knowledge sharing. The negative aspects of those are: deadly silence, late delivery and incorrectly implemented or misunderstood requirements. Observe which of these align most with your business’ goals and track them as you are on this journey. It will help the team detach from their personal struggles and focus on the team’s overall, objective health.