10 ms·

Psychological safety vs. high standards: A misunderstood dynamic

124 points by sherilm 2y ago

schneems 2y ago
I love this. I watched The Bear (a show about an aspiring chef) and I’ve been struggling to find the words about how I related that to my own workplace ambitions. I think this post is a good start. Not to ruin anyhing: It seems the characters in the show know there’s something out there besides verbal abuse for achieving performance but struggle to find the balance between high standards and safety.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  In my experience, both what I've been through and what I see from other people, it does seem like negative reinforcement works better than positive reinforcement for getting people to actually internalize lessons I don't even mean negative reinforcement in an abusive way, although it often is. People just tend to remember when others were angry at them a lot more than when others were encouraging I guess my observation is that people tend to internalize negative interactions much more freely than they internalize positive interactions. Therefore if there is a lesson alongside the negative interaction, they remember that lesson I also think people tend to question positive interactions a lot more than they question negative interactions. Maybe I just interact with a lot of people with low self esteem though I'm not saying that negative reinforcement is good or the right way we should do things. Just observing that it seems more effective at reaching people
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    I think that stems from it's very obvious you did something wrong with negative reinforcement. Like if you cook potatoes and eggs and somebody congratulates you on the eggs does that mean the potatoes were bad? --- But also don't go berating people. Stick to "Critical Criticism" and point out the potatoes wren't cooked long enough or w/e.
  - schneems 2y ago
    > it does seem like negative reinforcement works better than positive reinforcement It 100% seems that way, but perhaps not for the reason you might think. In “thinking fast and slow” they highlight that fighter pilots seemed to do better after being criticized rather than praised. They eventually figured out that it’s due to regression to the mean rather than due to the praise/criticism. Effectively: on average you’ll perform at your baseline. If you do something worth of praise the next likely thing to happen is that you’ll perform at baseline again (so it looks like praise didn’t work). Versus if someone is critiquing a poor performance your next thing will likely be better (but still baseline). This gives the impression that criticisms works better than praise. But it’s really just regression to the mean/baseline. It’s over generalizing to say that’s the cause 100% of the time, but I bring it up because not intuitive yet makes total sense. I choose to take this and believe that in the long term praise has more upside than punishment (assuming the recipient has high standards and wants to perform well).
    - whynotminot 2y ago
      Hmm was this for very experienced pilots? For newer pilots going through training, it seems like the baseline should move progressively higher with training, and so you’d want good data to know what kind of feedback accelerates that baseline improvement. For experienced pilots who’ve sort of maxed out their inherent talent/capability, it would make sense to me that over and under performance would be somewhat random. Anecdotally, I’ve never found feedback to be a one size fits all kind of thing. Everyone responds differently and needs something a little different from you.
      - schneems 2y ago
        Really what people need is an accurate sense of their performance (where they are at), an alignment with a goal (where they want to be), and a concrete action plan on how to make up that delta (how to get better). I think instead of asking “does criticism or praise produce better outcomes on average over the duration of training” (my interpretation of your comment) I would ask “how can we ensure our assessments of student performance are accurate and how can we make sure it is translated to the most effective feedback per individual student.” If you HAD to generalize to only positive/negative feedback, my guess would be that people need both, so an ideal value would be a ratio rather than binary. Say: 2 positives to every 1 negative (for example). But as a sometimes educator it’s really hard to keep track of that ratio for each student (unless it’s written or formalized in some kind of way).
Eumenes 2y ago
[flagged]
- Optimal_Persona 2y ago
  So it sounds like the patriarchy's got this one all sewn up!
- loriverkutya 2y ago
  Margaret Thatcher begs to differ.
dijksterhuis 2y ago
i’ve been the arsehole who demands high standards and then lambasts folks when they don’t achieve it. i’ve also been the lovey dovey safe space hippie-esque person who just wants everyone to be happy and comfortable, saying yes to everyone and everything. no discomfort anywhere. yeah, both of those are absolutely rubbish for getting high quality stuff done. but yeah, this definitely tracks with my experience and nice to see i’m kind of working on moving toward the right path now, albeit after getting quite lost along the way (and being a bit of an arsehole).
- hangonhn 2y ago
  +1 to this. I'm currently almost 6 years into my dream job (20+ years career). My manager maintains a culture/atmosphere where belittling people, yelling, or any sort of overly negative actions towards someone, especially in public, is not allowed. This may seem very lovey-dovey but it does also mean newer engineers or more junior ones aren't afraid to ask questions or even question existing ideas. Asshole behaviors are often used to maintain the status quo and stop people from ever questioning how things are done. In addition, she encourages frequent, timely feedback that are objective, not personal, and, above all, she is actually rather quick to fire under-performers. This is easily the most productive engineering team I have ever been on. A team can have both high standards and have high psychological safety. I think that's just good professional behavior -- there is never a good reason to get personal or publicly humiliate someone.
  - throw627004 2y ago
    How does feeling psychologically safe work when the boss is quick to fire "underperformers"? That's totally a real question because I have trouble imagining this. Is it the kind of situation where everyone involved, including the person in question, knows they're not up to the task?
    - hangonhn 2y ago
      That's exactly it. She (and other managers on our engineering team) doesn't fire arbitrarily or on a whim. That's not what I meant by quick. The management culture is to always give frequent and timely feedback so that the person knows how they are performing -- be it good or bad. By the time they are fired, it's pretty obvious to them (and likely everyone else) that they're underperforming. It should never be a surprise to that person when it happens (or when the opposite happens such as when someone is promoted) I think your question is a really good one and really gets to the nuances of having both a high performing team and psychologically safe place. It's much easier said than done and requires good, consistent management habits.
asgr 2y ago
Results speak for themselves. If Musks style is inferior, why are his companies doing so incredibly well?
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  There's a sibling comment that says the following: "i’ve been the arsehole who demands high standards and then lambasts folks when they don’t achieve it." Then goes on to say that this is a bad way to get anything done That seems obvious I think what Musk does isn't this. I think Musk has high standards, then gets rid of people who don't meet them. Then tries to find and hire people who do meet them If you can actually find people who do live up to incredibly high standards then you will very likely have a successful company
  - nonameiguess 2y ago
    Frankly, the answer to this seems mundane to me. I served in the Army and put up with hardship and abuse on a level no engineer would ever consider acceptable, and so did everyone else in my organization. Why? Because we deeply believed that what we were doing was worth it for the larger good of country, something bigger than us. It's the same reason athletes in sports that pay shit or nothing at all will do it, or parents will sacrifice, suffer incredible hardship, and sometimes die for their children. When I moved to my current house, my neighbor had been an engineer for Tesla, but he burned out and decided to renovate his current house, which had an unused barn, into a destination bnb. I talked to him a lot about his experience and why he did it in the first place. He and other Tesla engineers were true believers. They were leading a green revolution that was going to save the world. SpaceX is in a similar situation. Achieving viable large-scale space travel is a literal moonshot that nerds dream about. It's no mystery either why his antics have failed at Twitter. Nobody at Twitter believes that 140-character microblogging will save the world. They don't get to go to work feeling like firefighters or astronauts. They'll work for pay and comfort, not for mission.
- Eumenes 2y ago
  This is HR speak and from my experience, "technical" people talking about these topics tend to be overcompensating for lack of competency, or interest, in their domain. Its objectively easier to talk about this stuff all day vs coding or being knee deep in the guts of systems. My last job was big on this and many engineers with high "EQ" were rapidly promoted into middle management roles. Lets just say, the promotions were short lived because a "reduction in force" followed. This isn't an excuse to be a jerk, but the industry has over indexed on HR/psychology talk and real hardcore technologists don't give a shit. Fortunately many of these firms are super upfront about these things, like on their career page, or if you feel inclined, look at their leaders/manages on linkedin - they put this stuff on blast all over their profiles. A little research goes a long way.
photochemsyn 2y ago
There's a relative power dynamic at play here - if the head of a corporation or institution is free from consequences for making rather poor decisions (eg, Cybertruck production), then it's easy to be fearless. If you're a mid-level grunt who yolos something and it's a disaster, you risk losing your job. Overall incentives do matter, however. SpaceX appears to be led by the engineering division, not the financial derivatives division, which is a big difference. If your metric of success is engineering a large bonus for your boss by making drastic cuts to the R & D division (see Boeing), versus successfully re-engineering a rocket engine to reduce maintenance and fuel costs...? The fundamental problem in the USA economy is that shareholder conglomerates like Blackrock and their pet executives at places like Boeing do not have to face the conseqeuences of their poor decision-making since the government (which is run by the pet politicians and bureaucrats of these financial conglomerates) always steps in to provide bailouts and relief, while never demanding any serious restructuring that might hurt the financial position of said conglomerates and executives.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  > If you're a mid-level grunt who yolos something and it's a disaster, you risk losing your job. This plays into concepts like privilege as well. If you are a trust fund kid with very high financial security, or have a spouse willing to let you become unemployed who can pay the bills, or a family willing to take you back home if you run out of money, or any number of other safety nets, then you can afford to be a middle manager yoloing decisions that fail once in a while in the effort to fast track your career Having safety nets that do not rely on yourself to be successful is a huge component of Psychological Safety that lets people take risks
  - hilux 2y ago
    Incredibly true and important and ignored by almost everyone, especially the CEOs who've already "made it."
  - calderwoodra 2y ago
    Agree completely. But if you're a middle manager, aren't there countless jobs available for you out in the world? Just being a middle manager is a safety net in-and-of-itself, so might as well take risks regardless of whether you have the above or not.
giantg2 2y ago
I think I'd like to be in the apathy position right now. The anxiety quadrant is brutal. But I also don't see my company creating psychological safety in any position.
tahagx 2y ago
"Amy Edmondson of Harvard, the leading researcher in psychological safety, defines it as the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It encourages intelligent risk-taking by reducing interpersonal anxiety." This hasn't been the reality in the "woke" SV companies at all. On any political or social issue, the only allowed perspective was the party line. On technical issues, you had to walk on eggshells or better not criticize at all to avoid backlash. The actual company hierarchy was always clear and just camouflaged by warm and fuzzy rhetoric. What causes psychological damage here is the constant uncertainty between the empty words and what is actually happening. What also causes psychological damage is being forced to report to DEI grifters without any technical or social competence. Some people prefer Musk's (Musk is used as an example in the article) style precisely because the hierarchy is clear and there are no fake pretenses.
- hilux 2y ago
  So true. I'm not the first to observe "I'd rather work for an honest and direct 'asshole' than for a woke liberal." It's even worse at universities, btw.
jp57 2y ago
Only as an adult pushing into middle age was I able to recognize just how good my parents, especially my Dad, were at holding us (the kids) to high standards while maintaining psychological safety. He was a college professor and expected us all to excel at school, and yet there was never any sense that he would withhold his love if we failed. No yelling or getting angry. Maybe some disappointment, but accompanied by a plan to help us get back on track. My mom (also an academic) was sometimes more stern, but I never had any doubt that she loved me. My older siblings modeled their behavior on my parents, and thus I had four supportive older people in my life. It's clear to me now that this environment shaped my priors on psychological safety, such that my default is to feel psychologically safe and it takes quite a lot to shake me from that position. But that's the thing: psychological safety is not only a property of a particular situation, it is also colored by each individual's priors, so that one person might struggle in a situation where another feels perfectly safe. It's interesting to consider what are the obligations of a boss or other authority figure to support adults with very low priors for psychological safety in a workplace or some similar adult space? The current trends seem to be to say that everyone must be supported no matter what, but supporting outliers rarely comes without costs. It doesn't make sense for a whole group to become risk averse to avoid triggering one person who comes in with a default "unsafe" prior.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  >It doesn't make sense for a whole group to become risk averse to avoid triggering one person who comes in with a default "unsafe" prior. Sometimes people just need therapy, which is not something management is equipped to provide.
fs_software 2y ago
> Amy Edmondson of Harvard, the leading researcher in psychological safety, defines it as the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It encourages intelligent risk-taking by reducing interpersonal anxiety. I've found that many tech workplaces seem to favor _always_ being complimentary over "psychological safety" per the definition above. For example, there have been too many situations to count where folks don't feel safe enough to speak up if another coworker produces sub-par work. Toxic positivity seems to destroy psychological safety.
- solarmist 2y ago
  Unconditional positivity destroys moral, but I think the effect on psychological safety is more nuanced. Your example is certainly a lack of psychological safety, but only you can speak to the causes of that. A common reason would be a lack of accountability, which led to unconditional positivity as a veneer over the lack of constructive feedback.
- greesil 2y ago
  You could just speak up to their manager?
- aethros 2y ago
  I think this becomes a balance of peers. The psychological safety of one, may not necessarily be the psychological safety of another. Does the individual who wishes to speak up berate the underperforming co-worker for underperforming? How can we get the new co-worker to start performing adequately? They are a member of the team, and unless there's some business motivation to fire or reassign them, they will remain a member of the team. I think the solution is to invest velocity to bring the co-worker up to the teams overall performance level. That being said I do not condone being tolerant of intolerable performance, but I think that teams that consistently show grace and respect to each other will often yield the best results.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    I suppose offering constructive criticism rather than beratement (is that even a word?) does require some minimum level or maturity. As does acknowledging the difference from the receiving end.
Xcelerate 2y ago
I think by adulthood, most personality traits are relatively set and unchangeable (there’s always exceptions). If someone is a hard worker, apathetic worker, self-driven, praise-driven, exhibits or causes learned helplessness, etc. — you’re certainly not going to change these traits as a manager. The goal of a small company that aims to do well then is to hire the right people from the very start. Unfortunately, as a company’s success grows, the “wrong people” are going to want into it. Keeping these people out is a much more challenging problem than finding a decent group of people to start a company with, because the wrong people are motivated in all the wrong ways to destroy what already exists (or extract what value they can from it) rather than to create something great which does not yet exist, arguably a much riskier and more complicated endeavor.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  There is the possibility of making punishments much harsher, to adjust for the reduced probability of catching wrongdoing. But the benefits will likely also have to be increased, to still make it an attractive place to work for those with the desired personality traits.
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
    "Just make the punishments harsher to make up for reduced probability of catching wrongdoing." is and always has been an absolutely terrible strategy and the epitome of stupid-evil. The Qin Dynasty tried that and wound up lasting for only fifteen years. They had rebellions twice caused because the alternative was death anyway, including one which had them supplanted.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Notably the Mongol empire, much much bigger than the Qin, and in some ways even harsher, lasted for over a century in a relatively stable fashion. So historical examples don’t provide much unambiguous evidence.
- charlie0 2y ago
mattxxx 2y ago
A+ article. This was excellently worded, and provides a cogent breakdown of both how people misinterpret these topics and why people need some education on their differentiation. As someone who has been a high-performing IC, a low-performing IC, and a manager, I think so much about performance comes down to whether the organization understands that many things come down to bets. So some amount of failure has to happen, if you're going to be making truly useful things.
motohagiography 2y ago
the opposite of psychological safety isn't being challenged or being chirped at or risking insult, it's the manipulative environments with a zero sum attrition games where everyone tries to align while the narratives shift. can't fix it. the way to avoid this is to be good enough at what you do so that you can afford to leave when the org turns negative-sum. in kindergarten there were the kids who built forts and the kids who played musical chairs. if you were a creative builder, the conformity, deception, and attrition games were a demented hellscape. These games produce the conflict-averse neurotic west coast passive aggression culture whose failure mode is the constant threat of not a confrontation, but of inconsolable histrionics and mob formation. the dynamic is that someone with authority tells a lie (commitments, roadmaps, features, etc) and then everyone tries to get in behind it. the ones who can't sustain the dissonance don't get group protection, so they get blamed and scapegoated for the failure everyone else was trying to avoid taking responsibility for and cast out. it's called "being managed out," and the rules around PIPs mean managers are forced to gaslight and torture people to get rid of them. Sometimes they're legit negative people who need to go, but without a culture where you can set adult boundaries, you're going to show up one day and wonder if your co-workers have been replaced with impostors, where really you've just missed a cue, failed to read a room, been cut out, and everyones just "being nice."
- mometsi 2y ago
  I'm not sure how to read this correctly, was the kindergarten comment a one-sentence aside, or do you mean you remember kindergarten as a demented hellscape?
  - hackable_sand 2y ago
    It is archetypical behavior. It's reflective.
m463 2y ago
nobody talks about discomfort. Is there a place for discomfort or not? I'm pretty sure urgency and discomfort is part of overcoming things like decision paralysis and other types of procrastination / slowness. Discomfort might be part of compromise, which is needed to get people to work together or collaborate effectively.
o11c 2y ago
I've never heard the term "psychological safety", but I've heard the concept by other (better) names for ages. E.g. "open to productive disagreement" and "anti-yes-men", and many others terms that are vaguer but cover communication in general. Actually conforming to these has often been a struggle in most organizations, and picking a worse name won't help. Laying them out side by side, it seems to me that this is in active conflict with "safe spaces", both in theory (no discomfort) and especially what I often see in practice (no disagreement allowed). To be useful, a safe space needs to be narrowly-scoped.
- jdlshore 2y ago
  The term “psychological safety” has been around since the 1950s. It’s well defined and understood by people who study these things. There’s nothing wrong with the term.

124 points by sherilm 2y ago

I love this. I watched The Bear (a show about an aspiring chef) and I’ve been struggling to find the words about how I related that to my own workplace ambitions. I think this post is a good start. Not to ruin anyhing: It seems the characters in the show know there’s something out there besides verbal abuse for achieving performance but struggle to find the balance between high standards and safety.

bluefirebrand 2y ago
In my experience, both what I've been through and what I see from other people, it does seem like negative reinforcement works better than positive reinforcement for getting people to actually internalize lessons I don't even mean negative reinforcement in an abusive way, although it often is. People just tend to remember when others were angry at them a lot more than when others were encouraging I guess my observation is that people tend to internalize negative interactions much more freely than they internalize positive interactions. Therefore if there is a lesson alongside the negative interaction, they remember that lesson I also think people tend to question positive interactions a lot more than they question negative interactions. Maybe I just interact with a lot of people with low self esteem though I'm not saying that negative reinforcement is good or the right way we should do things. Just observing that it seems more effective at reaching people
- lesuorac 2y ago
  I think that stems from it's very obvious you did something wrong with negative reinforcement. Like if you cook potatoes and eggs and somebody congratulates you on the eggs does that mean the potatoes were bad? --- But also don't go berating people. Stick to "Critical Criticism" and point out the potatoes wren't cooked long enough or w/e.
- schneems 2y ago
  > it does seem like negative reinforcement works better than positive reinforcement It 100% seems that way, but perhaps not for the reason you might think. In “thinking fast and slow” they highlight that fighter pilots seemed to do better after being criticized rather than praised. They eventually figured out that it’s due to regression to the mean rather than due to the praise/criticism. Effectively: on average you’ll perform at your baseline. If you do something worth of praise the next likely thing to happen is that you’ll perform at baseline again (so it looks like praise didn’t work). Versus if someone is critiquing a poor performance your next thing will likely be better (but still baseline). This gives the impression that criticisms works better than praise. But it’s really just regression to the mean/baseline. It’s over generalizing to say that’s the cause 100% of the time, but I bring it up because not intuitive yet makes total sense. I choose to take this and believe that in the long term praise has more upside than punishment (assuming the recipient has high standards and wants to perform well).
  - whynotminot 2y ago
    Hmm was this for very experienced pilots? For newer pilots going through training, it seems like the baseline should move progressively higher with training, and so you’d want good data to know what kind of feedback accelerates that baseline improvement. For experienced pilots who’ve sort of maxed out their inherent talent/capability, it would make sense to me that over and under performance would be somewhat random. Anecdotally, I’ve never found feedback to be a one size fits all kind of thing. Everyone responds differently and needs something a little different from you.
    - schneems 2y ago
      Really what people need is an accurate sense of their performance (where they are at), an alignment with a goal (where they want to be), and a concrete action plan on how to make up that delta (how to get better). I think instead of asking “does criticism or praise produce better outcomes on average over the duration of training” (my interpretation of your comment) I would ask “how can we ensure our assessments of student performance are accurate and how can we make sure it is translated to the most effective feedback per individual student.” If you HAD to generalize to only positive/negative feedback, my guess would be that people need both, so an ideal value would be a ratio rather than binary. Say: 2 positives to every 1 negative (for example). But as a sometimes educator it’s really hard to keep track of that ratio for each student (unless it’s written or formalized in some kind of way).

Eumenes 2y ago

[flagged]

Optimal_Persona 2y ago
So it sounds like the patriarchy's got this one all sewn up!
loriverkutya 2y ago
Margaret Thatcher begs to differ.

dijksterhuis 2y ago

i’ve been the arsehole who demands high standards and then lambasts folks when they don’t achieve it. i’ve also been the lovey dovey safe space hippie-esque person who just wants everyone to be happy and comfortable, saying yes to everyone and everything. no discomfort anywhere. yeah, both of those are absolutely rubbish for getting high quality stuff done. but yeah, this definitely tracks with my experience and nice to see i’m kind of working on moving toward the right path now, albeit after getting quite lost along the way (and being a bit of an arsehole).

hangonhn 2y ago
+1 to this. I'm currently almost 6 years into my dream job (20+ years career). My manager maintains a culture/atmosphere where belittling people, yelling, or any sort of overly negative actions towards someone, especially in public, is not allowed. This may seem very lovey-dovey but it does also mean newer engineers or more junior ones aren't afraid to ask questions or even question existing ideas. Asshole behaviors are often used to maintain the status quo and stop people from ever questioning how things are done. In addition, she encourages frequent, timely feedback that are objective, not personal, and, above all, she is actually rather quick to fire under-performers. This is easily the most productive engineering team I have ever been on. A team can have both high standards and have high psychological safety. I think that's just good professional behavior -- there is never a good reason to get personal or publicly humiliate someone.
- throw627004 2y ago
  How does feeling psychologically safe work when the boss is quick to fire "underperformers"? That's totally a real question because I have trouble imagining this. Is it the kind of situation where everyone involved, including the person in question, knows they're not up to the task?
  - hangonhn 2y ago
    That's exactly it. She (and other managers on our engineering team) doesn't fire arbitrarily or on a whim. That's not what I meant by quick. The management culture is to always give frequent and timely feedback so that the person knows how they are performing -- be it good or bad. By the time they are fired, it's pretty obvious to them (and likely everyone else) that they're underperforming. It should never be a surprise to that person when it happens (or when the opposite happens such as when someone is promoted) I think your question is a really good one and really gets to the nuances of having both a high performing team and psychologically safe place. It's much easier said than done and requires good, consistent management habits.

asgr 2y ago

Results speak for themselves. If Musks style is inferior, why are his companies doing so incredibly well?

bluefirebrand 2y ago
There's a sibling comment that says the following: "i’ve been the arsehole who demands high standards and then lambasts folks when they don’t achieve it." Then goes on to say that this is a bad way to get anything done That seems obvious I think what Musk does isn't this. I think Musk has high standards, then gets rid of people who don't meet them. Then tries to find and hire people who do meet them If you can actually find people who do live up to incredibly high standards then you will very likely have a successful company
- nonameiguess 2y ago
  Frankly, the answer to this seems mundane to me. I served in the Army and put up with hardship and abuse on a level no engineer would ever consider acceptable, and so did everyone else in my organization. Why? Because we deeply believed that what we were doing was worth it for the larger good of country, something bigger than us. It's the same reason athletes in sports that pay shit or nothing at all will do it, or parents will sacrifice, suffer incredible hardship, and sometimes die for their children. When I moved to my current house, my neighbor had been an engineer for Tesla, but he burned out and decided to renovate his current house, which had an unused barn, into a destination bnb. I talked to him a lot about his experience and why he did it in the first place. He and other Tesla engineers were true believers. They were leading a green revolution that was going to save the world. SpaceX is in a similar situation. Achieving viable large-scale space travel is a literal moonshot that nerds dream about. It's no mystery either why his antics have failed at Twitter. Nobody at Twitter believes that 140-character microblogging will save the world. They don't get to go to work feeling like firefighters or astronauts. They'll work for pay and comfort, not for mission.
Eumenes 2y ago
This is HR speak and from my experience, "technical" people talking about these topics tend to be overcompensating for lack of competency, or interest, in their domain. Its objectively easier to talk about this stuff all day vs coding or being knee deep in the guts of systems. My last job was big on this and many engineers with high "EQ" were rapidly promoted into middle management roles. Lets just say, the promotions were short lived because a "reduction in force" followed. This isn't an excuse to be a jerk, but the industry has over indexed on HR/psychology talk and real hardcore technologists don't give a shit. Fortunately many of these firms are super upfront about these things, like on their career page, or if you feel inclined, look at their leaders/manages on linkedin - they put this stuff on blast all over their profiles. A little research goes a long way.

photochemsyn 2y ago

There's a relative power dynamic at play here - if the head of a corporation or institution is free from consequences for making rather poor decisions (eg, Cybertruck production), then it's easy to be fearless. If you're a mid-level grunt who yolos something and it's a disaster, you risk losing your job. Overall incentives do matter, however. SpaceX appears to be led by the engineering division, not the financial derivatives division, which is a big difference. If your metric of success is engineering a large bonus for your boss by making drastic cuts to the R & D division (see Boeing), versus successfully re-engineering a rocket engine to reduce maintenance and fuel costs...? The fundamental problem in the USA economy is that shareholder conglomerates like Blackrock and their pet executives at places like Boeing do not have to face the conseqeuences of their poor decision-making since the government (which is run by the pet politicians and bureaucrats of these financial conglomerates) always steps in to provide bailouts and relief, while never demanding any serious restructuring that might hurt the financial position of said conglomerates and executives.

bluefirebrand 2y ago
> If you're a mid-level grunt who yolos something and it's a disaster, you risk losing your job. This plays into concepts like privilege as well. If you are a trust fund kid with very high financial security, or have a spouse willing to let you become unemployed who can pay the bills, or a family willing to take you back home if you run out of money, or any number of other safety nets, then you can afford to be a middle manager yoloing decisions that fail once in a while in the effort to fast track your career Having safety nets that do not rely on yourself to be successful is a huge component of Psychological Safety that lets people take risks
- hilux 2y ago
  Incredibly true and important and ignored by almost everyone, especially the CEOs who've already "made it."
- calderwoodra 2y ago
  Agree completely. But if you're a middle manager, aren't there countless jobs available for you out in the world? Just being a middle manager is a safety net in-and-of-itself, so might as well take risks regardless of whether you have the above or not.

giantg2 2y ago

I think I'd like to be in the apathy position right now. The anxiety quadrant is brutal. But I also don't see my company creating psychological safety in any position.

tahagx 2y ago

"Amy Edmondson of Harvard, the leading researcher in psychological safety, defines it as the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It encourages intelligent risk-taking by reducing interpersonal anxiety." This hasn't been the reality in the "woke" SV companies at all. On any political or social issue, the only allowed perspective was the party line. On technical issues, you had to walk on eggshells or better not criticize at all to avoid backlash. The actual company hierarchy was always clear and just camouflaged by warm and fuzzy rhetoric. What causes psychological damage here is the constant uncertainty between the empty words and what is actually happening. What also causes psychological damage is being forced to report to DEI grifters without any technical or social competence. Some people prefer Musk's (Musk is used as an example in the article) style precisely because the hierarchy is clear and there are no fake pretenses.

hilux 2y ago
So true. I'm not the first to observe "I'd rather work for an honest and direct 'asshole' than for a woke liberal." It's even worse at universities, btw.

jp57 2y ago

Only as an adult pushing into middle age was I able to recognize just how good my parents, especially my Dad, were at holding us (the kids) to high standards while maintaining psychological safety. He was a college professor and expected us all to excel at school, and yet there was never any sense that he would withhold his love if we failed. No yelling or getting angry. Maybe some disappointment, but accompanied by a plan to help us get back on track. My mom (also an academic) was sometimes more stern, but I never had any doubt that she loved me. My older siblings modeled their behavior on my parents, and thus I had four supportive older people in my life. It's clear to me now that this environment shaped my priors on psychological safety, such that my default is to feel psychologically safe and it takes quite a lot to shake me from that position. But that's the thing: psychological safety is not only a property of a particular situation, it is also colored by each individual's priors, so that one person might struggle in a situation where another feels perfectly safe. It's interesting to consider what are the obligations of a boss or other authority figure to support adults with very low priors for psychological safety in a workplace or some similar adult space? The current trends seem to be to say that everyone must be supported no matter what, but supporting outliers rarely comes without costs. It doesn't make sense for a whole group to become risk averse to avoid triggering one person who comes in with a default "unsafe" prior.

throwway120385 2y ago
>It doesn't make sense for a whole group to become risk averse to avoid triggering one person who comes in with a default "unsafe" prior. Sometimes people just need therapy, which is not something management is equipped to provide.

fs_software 2y ago

> Amy Edmondson of Harvard, the leading researcher in psychological safety, defines it as the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It encourages intelligent risk-taking by reducing interpersonal anxiety. I've found that many tech workplaces seem to favor _always_ being complimentary over "psychological safety" per the definition above. For example, there have been too many situations to count where folks don't feel safe enough to speak up if another coworker produces sub-par work. Toxic positivity seems to destroy psychological safety.

solarmist 2y ago
Unconditional positivity destroys moral, but I think the effect on psychological safety is more nuanced. Your example is certainly a lack of psychological safety, but only you can speak to the causes of that. A common reason would be a lack of accountability, which led to unconditional positivity as a veneer over the lack of constructive feedback.
greesil 2y ago
You could just speak up to their manager?
aethros 2y ago
I think this becomes a balance of peers. The psychological safety of one, may not necessarily be the psychological safety of another. Does the individual who wishes to speak up berate the underperforming co-worker for underperforming? How can we get the new co-worker to start performing adequately? They are a member of the team, and unless there's some business motivation to fire or reassign them, they will remain a member of the team. I think the solution is to invest velocity to bring the co-worker up to the teams overall performance level. That being said I do not condone being tolerant of intolerable performance, but I think that teams that consistently show grace and respect to each other will often yield the best results.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  I suppose offering constructive criticism rather than beratement (is that even a word?) does require some minimum level or maturity. As does acknowledging the difference from the receiving end.

Xcelerate 2y ago

I think by adulthood, most personality traits are relatively set and unchangeable (there’s always exceptions). If someone is a hard worker, apathetic worker, self-driven, praise-driven, exhibits or causes learned helplessness, etc. — you’re certainly not going to change these traits as a manager. The goal of a small company that aims to do well then is to hire the right people from the very start. Unfortunately, as a company’s success grows, the “wrong people” are going to want into it. Keeping these people out is a much more challenging problem than finding a decent group of people to start a company with, because the wrong people are motivated in all the wrong ways to destroy what already exists (or extract what value they can from it) rather than to create something great which does not yet exist, arguably a much riskier and more complicated endeavor.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
There is the possibility of making punishments much harsher, to adjust for the reduced probability of catching wrongdoing. But the benefits will likely also have to be increased, to still make it an attractive place to work for those with the desired personality traits.
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  "Just make the punishments harsher to make up for reduced probability of catching wrongdoing." is and always has been an absolutely terrible strategy and the epitome of stupid-evil. The Qin Dynasty tried that and wound up lasting for only fifteen years. They had rebellions twice caused because the alternative was death anyway, including one which had them supplanted.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Notably the Mongol empire, much much bigger than the Qin, and in some ways even harsher, lasted for over a century in a relatively stable fashion. So historical examples don’t provide much unambiguous evidence.
charlie0 2y ago

mattxxx 2y ago

A+ article. This was excellently worded, and provides a cogent breakdown of both how people misinterpret these topics and why people need some education on their differentiation. As someone who has been a high-performing IC, a low-performing IC, and a manager, I think so much about performance comes down to whether the organization understands that many things come down to bets. So some amount of failure has to happen, if you're going to be making truly useful things.

motohagiography 2y ago

the opposite of psychological safety isn't being challenged or being chirped at or risking insult, it's the manipulative environments with a zero sum attrition games where everyone tries to align while the narratives shift. can't fix it. the way to avoid this is to be good enough at what you do so that you can afford to leave when the org turns negative-sum. in kindergarten there were the kids who built forts and the kids who played musical chairs. if you were a creative builder, the conformity, deception, and attrition games were a demented hellscape. These games produce the conflict-averse neurotic west coast passive aggression culture whose failure mode is the constant threat of not a confrontation, but of inconsolable histrionics and mob formation. the dynamic is that someone with authority tells a lie (commitments, roadmaps, features, etc) and then everyone tries to get in behind it. the ones who can't sustain the dissonance don't get group protection, so they get blamed and scapegoated for the failure everyone else was trying to avoid taking responsibility for and cast out. it's called "being managed out," and the rules around PIPs mean managers are forced to gaslight and torture people to get rid of them. Sometimes they're legit negative people who need to go, but without a culture where you can set adult boundaries, you're going to show up one day and wonder if your co-workers have been replaced with impostors, where really you've just missed a cue, failed to read a room, been cut out, and everyones just "being nice."

mometsi 2y ago
I'm not sure how to read this correctly, was the kindergarten comment a one-sentence aside, or do you mean you remember kindergarten as a demented hellscape?
- hackable_sand 2y ago
  It is archetypical behavior. It's reflective.

m463 2y ago

nobody talks about discomfort. Is there a place for discomfort or not? I'm pretty sure urgency and discomfort is part of overcoming things like decision paralysis and other types of procrastination / slowness. Discomfort might be part of compromise, which is needed to get people to work together or collaborate effectively.

o11c 2y ago

I've never heard the term "psychological safety", but I've heard the concept by other (better) names for ages. E.g. "open to productive disagreement" and "anti-yes-men", and many others terms that are vaguer but cover communication in general. Actually conforming to these has often been a struggle in most organizations, and picking a worse name won't help. Laying them out side by side, it seems to me that this is in active conflict with "safe spaces", both in theory (no discomfort) and especially what I often see in practice (no disagreement allowed). To be useful, a safe space needs to be narrowly-scoped.

jdlshore 2y ago
The term “psychological safety” has been around since the 1950s. It’s well defined and understood by people who study these things. There’s nothing wrong with the term.