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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 pe
by Viliam1234 6y ago
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.
- cutemonster 6y agoA toxic person, but just below the "too much you're fired" amount, is maybe the worst > 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
- Viliam1234 6y ago> I wonder if he got feedback about his behavior? 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.
- cutemonster 6y agoHmm, @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
- Viliam1234 6y agoFun 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.
- darkerside 6y agoWell, yes, everything in life is probabilistic. 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.