Tactics for Tech Leadership Podcast

S1E21 – Psychological Whatchamacallit?

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by

Andrew Parker
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Show Notes

What is safe about psychological safety? Do you really want everyone to feel comfortable all the time? Research tells us that psychological safety is a key component of effective teams and organisations. This week Mon-Chaio and Andy dig into the whats and wherefores of psychological safety. They dive into how it is measured, how it fits together with other concepts researched, tell some stories of their own about psychological safety, and debate how it interacts with accountability.

Opening quote from “Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct”

If you have any requests, questions, or comments send them to ⁠hosts@thettlpodcast.com⁠.

References

Transcript

Andy: The burden of collaborating and learning does not lie solely with managers. Employees can help by taking specific actions that differ in important ways from conventional wisdom about an ideal employee behavior. For example, most managers would naturally value and an employee who fixes problems she encounters without bothering managers or colleagues. Organizations in which managers value the employee who speaks up, questions, existing practices, and suggest new ideas are better able to improve and learn. Because these behaviors are interpersonally risky psychological safety is needed to enable them Welcome to another episode of the TTL podcast. Today we’re gonna be talking about psychological safety. This topic has come up a few times in our prior episodes. I can’t remember exactly which one it came up first in. I think it was the one about,

Mon-Chaio: teaming, Teaming, I

Andy: It was about teaming because we were talking about Amy Edmondson’s book about teaming.

And so that psychological safety came up in that, and we said, this is a much larger topic, we’re going to do it another time. And after many weeks of waiting, now we are going to talk about psychological safety.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah. It was actually the, the title of the episode was the Organizing to Learn episode,

Andy: Ah, perfect. So the Organizing to Learn episode is where we mention psychological safety and then brushed it under the rug and say, said, let, let’s walk away from that for a little while.

Mon-Chaio: and 17 episodes later, here we are.

Andy: 17 episodes later. Now we’re gonna try to, , go over psychological safety. So I know at least one of our listeners has been looking forward to us talking about this. He asked me specifically when we were gonna do it, and when we were gonna record, and when we were going to publish. So.

Mon-Chaio: Oh, fun.

Andy: And the reason was is because we had been in a discussion about psychological safety at a client that I’m working at. We went over how it fits in to the work environment

specifically. We were in a book club talking about the book, “No Hard Feelings.” The episode just before this, my little vacation cast Mon-Chaio when you were, you were ill and on jury duty I mentioned that book. So it was for that book we were talking about psychological safety and it was a really interesting discussion and it gave us, I think, some really good fodder for this discussion.

Mon-Chaio: Hmm

Andy: So one of the things that came out of that was kind of, I think, misconceptions about what it was.

Mon-Chaio: mm-Hmm.

Andy: And so I suggest we go a little bit into what exactly is psychological safety. Because I think it’s one of those things where everyone will have, from that name an image in their head of what it is, and what I’ve found is that it, what it is, is not what most people get as the image in their head when they hear the name.

Mon-Chaio: sort of like radical candor. A lot of people think about that term and they think they know what it is. And most people, many people have not read the book or anything. And it’s not what the name sounds like.

agree.

Let’s start briefly on why psychological safety is necessary. I don’t think this is a point that we’re gonna debate. I think the research is pretty clear on this, but I think it’s good to at least put, you know, a couple minutes of foundation there that yes, it is necessary and there are benefits. And just speak to some of the research and papers and what’s known about psychological safety at this point in time.

Andy: Yeah, so I think one of the things being in the software industry, one of the things that says to us that it’s very necessary is because Google, everyone loves referring to Google and saying like, oh, Google does it, or Google says it. So that means we have to do it, but in this case, going to agree with someone that Google says it and does it, and so we should, we should really pay attention. Which is that Google had a project, I think they called it Project Aristotle. And this was an internal study of their teams to try to understand what makes some teams really effective and some teams not. And they came up with a whole bunch of different things. They, they did this research, they did literature reviews to find theories, and then they did various surveys and other things to test those theories. And what they found was that among a few other things, psychological safety was either the most or one of the most influential aspects in how effective those software development teams were. So I, I would say for me, that is very strong evidence for us and for the kind of work we do that psychological safety, I is important and is necessary.

Mon-Chaio: Agreed. I think I liked that because it’s not just that Google did it or Google does it, that’s why we’re supposed to do it. There was some pretty rigorous study around their organization as well as research that they ended up pulling in which makes it really stick in my mind as some good bit of research and good guidance.

I think the other part, as you mentioned, in terms of what we often do, going back again to that third episode around organizing to learn. One of the big things we took out of that is that psychological safety is a precursor to being in a learning mindset or being able to have an organization and a learning mindset.

So that’s another reason why it’s super important. I would say most of our listeners and most of the people that are working, that’s not right. It’s not most of the people that are working in software. That’s a very arrogant way to look at it. I, I, I would say most of the people that we’re speaking to right now in this segment of the software world are really in learning organizations. And so I do think that psychological safety is important for that. I think we can get into, there’s a lot of the world in the US and overseas that are working on very mechanistic types of software where maybe they’re not working together with other colleagues or maybe they have individual specific project contracting type work where they’re, you know, they have a boss that’s farming out work and saying, Hey, you are with this client and you just have to deliver an API for them.

And so we’re not really talking about those folks because again, getting back to organizing the learn, building a learning organization probably is not as important for those folks.

Andy: I think, I think we can disagree on that a little bit. I, I think that if they’re not trying to learn, they’re not trying to organize to learn to some degree, they’re putting themselves at a disadvantage. I think that they should still aim for this,

but they may not be interested and so they wouldn’t be listening to us because they’re probably not trying to learn anyway. So I would love them to be our listeners.

Mon-Chaio: Agree. It would be great if those folks were listeners. Hey, if you’re listening now somehow, if someone put this on your feed, listen to our episodes.

That’s my pitch to those folks. But getting back to what is it actually, I think we’ve set a little bit of foundation. It’s important. We should care about it. Andy, you had mentioned it’s not often what people think, so let’s talk a little bit more about that.

Andy: Hmm.

Mon-Chaio: Why is it not often what people think and what is it and what do people think it is?

Andy: So let, let’s get into that. Yeah. Well, I think for most people, since they’re mo most of us just don’t, we don’t read the scientific paper. We don’t go out and seek papers by by Shine and by Edmondson and by others and say, oh, let me read The definition that they’re using, what their, their theory is, and find the survey that they use to measure this.

I, I, I think most of us don’t. Instead what we do is we go by that name, psychological safety. And what seems to happen is that we take that name and we think, what does it mean to feel safe? And we think when we feel safe and we think, okay, well I am comfortable, I am in a place that I know I am, around people who I know. So you, you start taking that safe aspect of psychological safety. And I think you, you focus on that in terms of other times that you feel safe and that’s what you believe it is, that psychological safety at work, it would then be that you don’t get upset. That you feel very supported all of the time

that you aren’t concerned. And those are all aspects of it, but I think there’s kind of like this warm, fuzzy side that kind of, takes over a very clinical aspect, which is, I think, shows up in the psychological side of the, of the name many of us just kind of set to the side. and so let, let, let’s get to what is normally the definition anymore of psychological safety, which is it, it’s, it, it’s kind of clinical, it’s the willingness for interpersonal risk taking Mon-Chaio, what does that mean to you? What, what would you if, if you were told, Hey, you need to have high willingness for interpersonal risk taking on your teams. what is that?

Mon-Chaio: I think for me, that’s being able to put yourself out there, being able to take a risk to your reputation, to your comfort, to a number of different types of things.

In order to accomplish some goal,

Andy: Mm-Hmm. Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: and so it’s interesting that you talk about safety, right? Because to me, the ability to take interpersonal risk is this idea that I am comfortable not being safe. Or to put it another way, I am safe to not be safe.

Andy: I think that is an excellent way to put it. And I think a, maybe a, maybe a different. A different way of thinking about it that might be useful is safety harnesses.

So if window washers on skyscrapers are out there, they clip themselves in, they do all this stuff to be safe. That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily comfortable.

I mean, they would probably get, I, I’ve never done window washing on a giant skyscraper, but I imagine that they eventually get to a point of comfort where when they feel that harness, they feel safe. But the psychological safety, think of it more of like that harness. And you might then start wondering, okay, where is this?

What is this then? But in, in some ways, the concept from the research, it doesn’t really matter too much what it is. It’s the fact that you are safe for that interpersonal risk taking, interpersonal risk is putting yourself out there and, possibly being wrong. Is one big part of it. So for instance, going to your boss in a software company and saying, Hey, I just heard that we’re releasing this new feature tomorrow. And I think that’s a really bad idea because we haven’t done any scale testing.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: Now we have great engineers, they’re probably good, but if we haven’t scale tested it, it, what’s the rollout plan? Because this thing is gonna immediately get like a thousand requests a second.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: Now, in an unsafe organization, my expectation of doing that would be that I’d get belittled, shouted down, told that my concerns are meaningless, that I just don’t have any information. Now I. I don’t have information. That may be completely true, but in a safe organization, I would, they would be willing to hear me out and think through it and try to decide is there something that they’ve missed? And so it, they’ll, they’ll engage with the question rather than attacking the person.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm. . Let me add a different safety harness. I liked your safety harness example. I think one that I think about that’s very apt and connected to our industry is unit testing or a test suite.

Andy: Mm-Hmm.

Mon-Chaio: And the reason that I like that is because when you are making changes with a great test suite behind you, it is not that you are feeling safe making these changes.

are not certain that these changes are gonna work. In fact, oftentimes as an engineer, you are very scared about these changes as you’re making them. You’re, oh, I’m deleting these 80 lines of code and I’m moving it here, and now I’ve touched 18 files. I don’t know if this is gonna work. But why do you feel comfortable taking that risk is because you have a harness behind you in these unit tests that will catch you if you make a mistake.

And so I think about psychological safety a lot like that, which is to your point of you’re going to your boss to express a concern. You are taking a big risk there. It if you are wrong, or if your boss follows your example and you’re wrong, you stop shipping, maybe you lose $10 million of revenue.

But the fact that psychological safety exists that you feel heard and you feel like, look, there might be some consequences for that, but they’re not gonna be completely negative or detrimental. And I feel like, I don’t know what it would be. Andy, perhaps you could shed some light on it. I feel like I feel supported.

So even if my boss is saying, Hey, your bonus is cut in half ’cause you made the wrong call. I at least feel supported a part of a community, um, I think is the big part of that safety harness. Would you agree or would you disagree?

Andy: I, I think I’d agree until you said your bonus is getting cut, cut in half because you made that call. I think that that’s a, that’s, we’ll get to that a little later. How do you undermine safety?

Mon-Chaio: Right. We could talk more about that later.

Andy: So, but I, I think, I think it’s really important what we’re saying. It probably sounds a little fuzzy and that’s in a way because it is. The thing about these kinds of concepts is that what we are trying to do with them, what researchers are trying to do with them, is that they’re trying to take an idea about how human thought fits together. They’re trying to give it a name. They’re trying to decompose it into parts. They’re trying to give those parts names, and then they’re trying to come up with ways to measure if the thing is there or if it’s not, and to what extent it’s there. So the way of thinking of psychological safety is, it’s one of these many concepts, and this is the name we’ve given it. And I think it can actually be very useful to look at the questions that are asked to assess whether or not there’s psychological safety there, because it gives a, to me, it gives a much clearer picture of what is it that we’re talking about. The, the psychological safety instrument is seven questions. Each one is on a response scale of like either one to five or one to seven. One of those

things where you say strongly agree, strongly disagree, all of that, and the questions are if you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you. So that’s the thing of going to your boss and thinking that, okay, I’m, I spoke up about this. Are they now gonna cut my bonus because of that?

Mon-Chaio: Well, let’s get into that later, but

let’s go through the instruments. Yeah. Mm-Hmm.

Andy: members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues. Can you even just bring up what you think

a problem is going to be?

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: on this team sometimes reject others for being different.

It is safe to take a risk on this team. It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help. So it’s not always about like raising an issue. Sometimes it’s even just asking for help because you’re admitting some level of ignorance or some level of inability. Are you able to do that? No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts. Okay. I hope I’ve, I, I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a team where I would say no to that.

Mon-Chaio: Hmm. I’d have to give that some thought. I would say I’ve worked on some teams where people are pretty competitive,

And they have different ideas perhaps about what implementation to put forth and. I don’t know that I, I would go so far if it’s a one to five scale or one to 10 scale, I wouldn’t say, you know, they are maliciously undermining my efforts.

But I can’t say that there’s ever that, there’s never been a time where it’s one of those things that they’re like, well, you know, actually I think that it would, I would be better served if I did this.

Even if you are not better served if I do this.

Andy: But I think that gets to a really important point, which is that this isn’t a binary. You have safety or you don’t.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: There’s, there’s different levels, different degrees of safety that exist. And we’ll get to, can there be too much right after I finish the next one with the number seven, which is working with members of this team. My unique skills and talents are valued and utilized, which seems a little incongruous with the others, doesn’t it?

Mon-Chaio: does it. I’d have to give that some thought. So my individual skills are

utilized versus I can bring up issues. I can ask others for help. Tell me about why you think that seems incongruous. I’m not sure I see that.

Andy: Just on the surface it kind of is because it’s about talents and utilization of those talents, whereas the others are about asking for help and doing that kind of thing. Now, I think what you’re doing, you’re doing the right thing, which is that you’re thinking, well, well, asking for help or doing that kind of thing.

That’s how talents get utilized.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: So if no one can admit incompetence and ask for help, someone who does have that competence may feel underutilized as they watch the team around them doing the wrong thing

Mon-Chaio: Hmm.

Andy: is the way I think about it.

Mon-Chaio: Interesting. I can see that. I can see that. And so you were mentioning that you were gonna talk about is there, can there ever be too much psychological safety after the seventh question? Is this because the seventh one triggers

that sort of thinking for you.

Andy: no be, because going back to discussion that I’d had about

this, that was one of the questions that came up was, well, can there be too much? And it hearkens back to that idea of comfort rather than ability to do something. And so this person was coming from the standpoint of if you’re too comfortable, you don’t have an incentive to do anything.. And so a team that has very high psychological safety, their assertion was that they would be ineffective because they don’t kind of like have that fire under them. And so Mon-Chaio, is there a point where psychological safety, as we’ve now gone through, it could become too much and the team becomes ineffective because of it?

Mon-Chaio: So going back, the definition of psychological safety again that we’ve settled on is the ability to take interpersonal risk.

Yes. I would say with that very standard set definition of psychological safety, no, I don’t think you can have too much of it. I think you should always be in a situation where you want to. Ever be able to take more interpersonal risk for the betterment of the group, which I don’t think is in that definition, but like there has to be a goal to that risk, right?

So I would say for the betterment of the group,

Andy: and that’s the key. You just said the key. There has to be a goal to it. So I think what often happens is that as leaders, we might start thinking, I need to build psychological safety. I need to get people speaking up and I need to do this. And in doing that, we may be kind of afraid to point out that you’re, you’re not going to the goal, like this is undirected to the goal. and there you might end up starting to find behaviors where people are just bringing up nonsense. Like, Hey, let’s, let’s talk about whether or not we should change what language we implement everything in. Again, because I heard about this new language. And if, you want to foster safety, you may think, oh, I don’t, I don’t wanna shut this down because this could be a valuable thing. Except it might, it probably isn’t. Switching your, your implementation language is not a thing that needs to come up very often. It’s not connected to your goals usually, unless your goals are something about like rewriting the Mozilla browsers So it’s not goal oriented. And that, that’s the key, is the psychological safety without clear norms and goal orientation. It’s not that it’s too much psychological safety, it’s that there’s, there’s no goal, there’s nothing to disagree about.

Mon-Chaio: That’s an interesting way to put it. And it is pretty funny. I don’t think this is necessarily a psychological safety topic. This is some other sort of topic that touches on comfort in teams where perhaps start to see more like, what do I call it? A hobby or a club or something versus a business.

You know, when you’re, when you’re hanging around with your friends or, or your hobby club, you could talk about all sorts of BS, right? I mean, you’re over drinks or over coffee and you’re not goal oriented. You’re sort of exploring the space. You’re enjoying each other’s company.

Andy: you, you,

could say that goal is the enjoyment of your company.

Mon-Chaio: right. And clearly, this is not to say teams in business organizations should not put together rituals and time to enjoy each other’s company.

If you listen to our culture episodes, that is super important and most people actually don’t spend enough time doing that. Getting back to this thing. I don’t think it’s around how we think about psychological safety. I think it’s, we spend too much time in things like you were saying, that aren’t goal oriented.

Andy: And there is an a another side to this, which means that, so you’ve got the goal, you’ve got the psychological safety. It means that sometimes, possibly very often. The result of bringing up the topic will be the rest of the group saying, no, that’s not our goal.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: And, and I have, I have experience with this I had a team where, there was one member who quite often brought up topics and was like, “Hey, we need to deal with this.

We need to do this. We need, we should do this.” It was great that he brought that up. And the team, quite often, they would debate it a little bit. Sometimes they’d get a little frustrated, they’re human. And often the result, I shouldn’t say often, but sometimes the result was, “no, that’s not what we’re trying to achieve now.” So let’s put it on the backlog. Just forget about it for now. It’ll come up another time. That kind of thing. And the, the person in question one time brought up to me, he said, oh, there’s, there’s very low psychological safety. And I said, why is that? What, what, what do you mean. He said, well, I bring up these topics and they just shoot me down. And I said, but you bring up the topics. He said, yeah, but they shoot me down and that doesn’t feel good. And I was like, but, but you are bringing them up and you have the debate, right? He said, yeah, but, and so it was that, that idea that there, your opinion will always be, always change what the group is doing.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: Which once again, it’s not psychological safety. It’s an important aspect to think about. But I would say just make sure you don’t conflate that with psychological safety, that the team will always do what you bring up.

Mon-Chaio: or we’ll always hear you in the manner and timeliness that you wish this topic to be explored. Right. Getting back to it, one again, they, he was willing to take that interpersonal risk and maybe he was feeling so safe is to think that’s not even the interpersonal risk. That’s just . I call it my prerogative to be able to do this, and they need to be able to listen to me.

That’s what psychological safety is, is whenever I speak, I must be heard to the misunderstandings of what psychological safety right?

Andy: Now I think, I think there is something in there where he pro he wasn’t feeling heard,

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: Which then does start to tie into psychological safety. If that goes on long enough,

he’ll start feeling unwilling to bring this up. He’ll think that his, his unique talents are not valued.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: That kind of thing.

So there, there is an aspect of these things playing together.

Mon-Chaio: On a similar topic, I’d love to explore that first question. I’d like to explore that a little bit because I can ask the question, does psychological safety mean that I have no personal accountability?

Andy: No, I wouldn’t say so.

Mon-Chaio: Accountability to me means that when I make a mistake, I’m held accountable for it. Another way to state that is that it is held against me or there is some negative, uh, negative result of me making a mistake. At the very least, it’s logged In a book, you made a mistake, right? That’s,

Andy: it’s gone On your permanent record,

man

Mon-Chaio: right. . You, you’ll never get to Harvard. Now,

Andy: I, I, think that’s an interesting, interesting thing to talk about because we often have this idea that giving an account or, or being held accountable is a punishment. And I think it becomes a punishment when that account is held against you.

Mon-Chaio: Okay.

Andy: So if simply raising the information of this is what happened is held against you, I think that causes, that’s a problem.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: But now what can happen? And I think this is what needs to be made very clear. And we’re getting into kind of the next thing, which is how do you build psychological safety? What can happen is that you can make very clear the distinction between giving the account, raising the issue, and discussing and evaluating the actions and judgment that happened. The account should never be held against you because that’s, that’s where you start limiting that flow of information we should get. Oh. What we haven’t gotten to yet, I just realized after probably about half an hour of discussion, is what’s this model that psychological safety connects to?.

We’ve said, oh, it’s important and all of that. It’s about get, making sure that information flows around the team so that they can perform effectively and so that they can learn.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: And so if that having given an account is held against you and you start withholding accounts, what happens is that that information doesn’t flow around. People can’t learn from what happened, and they may make the exact same mistake or error or not notice that these same failure is about to occur. As much as possible create a separation between giving the account and being judged for what happened.

Mon-Chaio: I agree with that maybe in a limited way. Maybe in most of the way. I do think that you should never punish people for speaking up. Or speaking up should never have a negative influence on anything. I absolutely agree with that. Let me bring it back to the example that we touched on toward the beginning of this episode.

Let’s run through a possible scenario at some places that I’ve worked which would be very valid in, in those places. So you come and you say, Hey, by the way, I know that we’re supposed to ship this thing today. This is the thing that I’ve been working on for two months, three months.

I don’t think we could ship it today because, there’s issues in the software and I think it will crash and be a terrible user experience. And whether it’s your manager or the group might get together and look at it and be like, no, I don’t, I don’t think so. I think we’re good. I think we’re good here.

And you say, no, no, no, no. I really don’t think this is the right thing to do. And they say, well, we think we’re good, but you are the expert on this thing. I mean, you’ve been working on it for two months, so up to you, man, it’s your call.

In a lot of these types of companies. Also, they’re rewarded based on impact. And so because they made that call, delivered less impact or negative impact. The rewards or compensation or bonus or whatever is then abnormally affected.

Andy: Right. Okay.

Mon-Chaio: So does that indicate a lack of psychological safety because they took an interpersonal risk

Andy: No. All

of that, all of that is, is is playing out of psychological safety. It’s the point at which it gets to the, they made the call, the call turned out to be wrong.

Now, at that point, what I’m getting at is that that needs to be very clearly tied to something about like having, having made the wrong call shouldn’t be the thing that causes that to happen.

because

Mon-Chaio: causes the lack of bonus.

Andy: the lack of bonus

Mon-Chaio: Hmm.

Andy: pure,

just purely, that can’t be the thing because like, making the wrong call or the right call, sometimes it, it’s, it’s like quite often it’s a, it’s a crapshoot because so much about whether or not it was right or wrong ends up being out of your control. So

to me, the thing ends ends up being how did they make that call? And in the situation you gave, the thing that is, this gets to like blameworthy acts that I believe we’ve talked

about before. The thing, thing,

that happened there was that they actually, they, they went and they solicited all of this information where everyone said, we don’t see any problem here.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: So they said working on, on the, one of the scales, the working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized. This person went to them looking for their unique skills and talents said, nah, that’s all wrong. Went against it

without any compelling reason, it seems because no one else agreed with them.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm. . Or they had compelling reason, but it was, you know, 50 50 or whatever. Nobody could decide one way or the other. That happens.

Andy: And that, and if, and if it’s that, then like docking, docking their bonus, I would say is a very questionable thing. But if it’s, if

it’s like a, like no, no one agreed with you and you did it anyway like that, that then it, it’s not the fact that they brought it up, it’s not all of that. The, the thing that it is, is that they showed very poor judgment given all of the information available, everything they did up until that point. Absolutely correct. It’s

what you want to reward. Is the way I view it.

Mon-Chaio: I am curious about whether people can show great judgment but still have consequences with compensation and rewards.

Andy: , Let’s put a pin in that and everyone else remember this and hold us accountable for this. See, see if we can get the result. I. or if our judgment was bad.

Mon-Chaio: I think we’ve talked a lot about what is it, the, the, the metrics behind it. The questions that are asked.

I think now we we’re probably to the point where we’re kind of like, okay, so it’s important. The lack of it is, is problematic. We know what it is now, or at least we’ve gotten further along the path to knowing what it is.

So what can we do about that? You’re in a situation where you feel like, for whatever reason, you have low psychological safety, your answers to those questions aren’t great. What do you do about that?

Andy: That is an excellent question. I’m very glad you brought that up. Mon-Chaio.

I

Mon-Chaio: totally not rehearsed at all. Definitely not reading off of my outline about where we should be at Minute pre-edit 46 or something like that.

Andy: I Want to talk a little bit about the theory that psychological safety fits into, because it, it helps us understand what you can do about it.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: It also helps us answer the question that Mon-Chaio, as soon as he read this paper, asked me, he’s like, I really don’t know. Is this just correlational or is this causational? So it gets us to all of that. All right, so psychological safety. What, how does it fit into other things? So here’s, here’s a way of thinking about psychological safety and just research in general into these kinds of topics, is that you have, what you’re looking for is causation. Hence Mon-Chaio’s question about correlation versus causation. What you’re looking for is causation. And the way to think about causation is if, if you’re thinking like a UML diagram, some sort of flow chart or something, you

say you have a, and then there’s a little, it’s in a box and there’s an arrow pointing to B. And what you would say is, A causes B, A happens, and then B happens, or A happens more.

And so B happens more. That’s, that’s like the causational relationship. Now what we’re looking for in this, this kind of research is what are those things I said earlier? There’s like all these, these concepts that then they turn into ways of measuring it. So the concepts that they’re connecting together in these things are things like organizational performance individual behaviors team behaviors, team culture, organizational culture, leadership behaviors team performance, those kinds of things.

They’re trying to figure out how does all of this fit together. Psychological safety fits into this where they, they connect and the, the research shows a causational chain where you have to pick one that we’ll be talking about in a little bit. Leadership behaviors impacts or influences or causes psychological safety, which impacts or causes team performance and organizational performance. And in that case, what we’re dealing with is psychological safety, uh, termed mediator. So to be a mediator, there is a causal relationship. And a lot of the research shows that yes, psychological safety sits in there. It’s a mediator between leadership behaviors and team culture and between that on one side and like team performance, organizational performance on the other side. So it mediates that causation.

A way of thinking about it is it becomes an explanation for why one causes the other. The other way it gets thought of is as what’s called a moderator. It’s kind of like an amplifier. There is a causal relationship and it’s not part of that chain. But what it is, is like, it, it turns up the dial on what happens when, like leadership behaviors and team performance get into this causal relationship. So with psychological safety, the leadership behaviors get amplified to create more team performance. And so psychological safety in the research turns out it does both of these. It shows up as a mediator and it shows up as a moderator. And the reason I’m bringing this up now is because it tells us for one, psychological safety isn’t necessarily something that we’re gonna manipulate directly. It’s gonna be something else. So in

the mediator way of thinking about it, which is I think for us, a little bit easier to work with than the moderator.

So let’s talk about the

Mon-Chaio: Right, Right, Yeah.

Andy: It’s, you don’t create, you don’t just like go in and say, Hey team, I bought us 10 units of psychological safety. You’ll find them on the counter in the kitchen. Go and eat yours, and we’re, we’re all good. It’s, it’s not an independent variable that we just manipulate directly. So it’s something that is going to be there caused by other things, which then causes what we want.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: It’s those other things that we need to look at when we wanna say, Hey, let’s increase psychological safety

Mon-Chaio: makes a lot of sense to me. The next question of course that comes up is, well, what are those other things we’ve touched high level on them? Leadership behaviors, cultural organizational culture, team culture? Are there. Tactics, right? This is the name of our podcast tactics. Are there tactics that we can put out that say, look, although we can’t manipulate psychological safety directly, here are some of the things in that causal chain that we should really be working on.

Andy: There are, and thankfully going back to Google and

everything Google says is gospel.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: Google created out of their research kind of a training program for themselves, but they also I think they released it. Some of it’s leaked, some of it’s released, uh, have made it available. And so they have, for instance, and we’ll, we’ll put a link to this if I can find the link.

Again, I have the PDF, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to

find the link again. APDF describing how to foster psychological safety on your teams. This is directed towards leaders and managers about what to do. Now, some of the things I have to admit to me sound a little trite, but I’ll admit, I think they all make sense.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: And they, they, they, some of them are just really simple. Be present and focus on the conversation. That’s, that seems pretty straightforward,

Mon-Chaio: huh? What’d you say?

Andy: or maybe it’s not. I. Ask questions with the intention of learning from your teammates. Now that one sounds simple. We’ll, getting to other podcasts, we should do, that’s another one. How to ask a good question or what are good

questions? Recap what’s been said to confirm mutual understanding and alignment. Then acknowledge areas of agreement, disagreement, and be open to questions within the group. So these are all behaviors that as a leader, you can take to foster psychological safety. And I think from those three that I’ve read out so far, you can kind of see they all have a theme

of

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: elicit others talking and acknowledge what they’ve said. I.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

I like it. I think often psychological safety is put on the leader of an organization, and rightly so. Psych psychological safety is about . The conception of a group, right? Like, you can’t take interpersonal risk if you’re just taking it with yourself. I, I, I, I hope not. Maybe you can. You’re just speaking for yourself.

Oh, I don’t feel like

Andy: that, that, that is actually, that’s a really good point and something we’ve glossed over. This is such a huge topic. Why did we take, take this on, man

Mon-Chaio: I don’t know.

Andy: kind of glossed over the fact that psychological safety traditionally was a group concept.

It wasn’t really an individual thing, it was a group thing, which is why all those questions were about on this team

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: now, there is an aspect of the individual in it though, and, I don’t know. This doesn’t show up in the research Mon-Chaio. At least I haven’t found it anywhere. But to me, it is really hard to be a member of a team with a lot of psychological safety, which might sound strange, but I find it really hard

Mon-Chaio: Okay. Why is that?

Andy: because I’m always criticized. Because the whole point of it is that when someone notices that maybe I’ve done something wrong or I wasn’t thinking about something, they’ll bring it up.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm. to, again, to facilitate

Andy: Yes, yes,

Mon-Chaio: to facilitate

Andy: yes. Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: and

learning

is

Mon-Chaio: gets back into this exactly what I was about to say. Learning is difficult. Learning is taxing, and it is hard. So yes, I could see why that’s tiring and difficult.

Andy: But but I was gonna say, the thing that in my mind fits really well with this is ancient Greek philosophy, is,

is stoicism.

Mon-Chaio: Uhhuh.

Andy: Because to me, to work well in that environment takes a little bit of, of a philosophy that I am in control of my feelings and emotions and reactions. The external world does not determine what you do, that you determine what you do.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-Hmm.

Andy: so like a stoic outlook I think combines very well as an individual with psychological safety because

you can hear that thing, recognize it, feel the pain of someone pointing out that you’re, you’ve done something wrong, and

then decide to react in an appreciative learning manner.

Mon-Chaio: I like that. Let me bring it beyond Greek, ancient Greek philosophy a little bit. And back to the research. So you’re right, most of this stuff is around being team-based. Psychological safety is a very team-based concept, but less individuals think that they have no here. Andy has already mentioned, you know, try to be more stoic is definitely personal responsibility.

There’s also been some research about . There are certain individual traits that you can foster to make it more likely that you’re gonna be able to accept psychological safety and be more of a participant in psychological or in a group that has, or is trying to develop psychological safety. A big one goes back to what I was talking about earlier, this concept of autonomy, community, and compassion.

I think this one paper that I’m reading talked about them as, I think they called it basic needs, which ties into, well with a lot of the other research that says you people need these three things and to, in order to feel happy or or fulfilled at work, and so you have these three things, then it makes it very much easier to be and participate in a psychologically safe team.

So one might say, well look. These three things are the purview of the company and the manager, right? Whether or not I have autonomy, whether or not I feel community, and whether or not I, you know, feel competent or my competence is being used. That is definitely true. That is definitely true that a huge portion of that falls on leadership.

But what this paper also said is when that is low, when the basic needs are low, the biggest factor for whether you can participate in psychological safety or not is self-compassion. And self-compassion they defined as self-kindness. So being kind towards oneself when encountering pains.

Common humanity considering the personal suffering as part of the shared human experience, and mindfulness, holding painful thoughts and feelings. In mindful awareness without avoiding or exaggerating them. Kind of sounds a little bit like stoicism A little

bit,

Andy: It, it as you were reading them, I thought, well that’s, that’s, that’s stoic

Mon-Chaio: And what they, what the research paper says, or what the research says is when those basic needs are low, the folks with the highest self-compassion were the ones that we’re most able to create and participate in psychological safety. And so, while you might say it is the organization and the manager’s job, one to get me my basic needs, and two, create an environment of psychological safety.

Each individual of and themselves, regardless of their environment, can make a change and foster their own mindset to be more open to psychological safety.

Andy: Excellent. And so with, with that Mon-Chaio, I think we’ve covered just about everything. Is there anything else we’ve, we’ve missed?

Mon-Chaio: We have not by far covered everything.

Andy: Okay, let me reframe that. think we’ve covered about as much as we’re gonna be able to in a reasonable timeframe for this episode.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, absolutely. I, I think we’ve covered a lot. I think there’s been a lot of good stuff talked about. To your point, why did we decide to tackle this in, in one episode instead of maybe doing a three part series like culture? That’s the end of the year, man. We’re getting tired, right? A little bit. I’m thinking about the Turkey and the tryptophan.

Andy: Oh, man. Yeah. So, and that raises a very good point. We’ve been talking and what we’re gonna try to do is to end out the year. Because as Manon-Chaio id, there’s Turkey coming up, there’s Christmas coming up, there’s Hanukkah. Neither of us celebrate Hanukkah. There’s other stuff coming up. Dawali is happening soon.

So we’re entering the festive season and we are thinking of trying to do something a little bit lower key for us and hopefully for our listeners as well where we’re gonna try doing a little bit more of a look back on the episodes we’ve created and see if we can pull them together into a bit of a framework to help out managers. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna try to cover this in, in specific topics and call back to the various episodes we’ve done. I think because we’ve only had 20 episodes or so, we’re not gonna be able to cover everything. That would be also, if we could, that would be the end of this podcast, which I don’t think we’re at the end.

cia.

Mon-Chaio: Not close

Andy: So we’re, we’re gonna, we’re gonna do a little bit of a different format for the rest of the year, and then when we get back into the new year, we’re gonna go full on back into these like deep dives into papers and debates and telling old stories of working on software and at midnight after getting back from the bar and then shipping out new cache code that that magically worked and I never looked at again for several years.

Mon-Chaio: Right, exactly. And, and no bugs in that thing. Weirdly, I don’t, I, I don’t know what

that says. Small sample size, I think of what it says. But I think this is a great opportunity for folks. You know, our, our podcast is a lot about asking questions and reading into the research and talking through all the various sides of things of topics.

There are some folks that have talked to me and said, look, like, I don’t wanna listen for an hour about all the different parts of it. I just wanna know what your conclusions are. What are your tactics for me? What should I be doing? And I think these episodes are gonna be a little bit more focused on that.

They’re gonna be a little bit shorter. We haven’t decided whether we’re gonna continue the weekly releases or maybe move to every other week. That’s TBD,

Andy: The, the

British have

a perfect word for that. Fortnightly,

Mon-Chaio: fortnightly. And the funny thing is I use it and have for about a year or two. Because biweekly is one of my least favorite words of all time. It is one of the most confusing words of all time. So whether it’s weekly or fortnightly, we haven’t quite decided yet, but there definitely are gonna be shorter.

They’re gonna touch back on more of the specific tactics and salient points of our other episodes. So they’re kind of, like Andy said, gonna be a digest. And really what we wanna focus on is if you’re a leader of a technical organization, how do you go about building the best ones?

Andy: And if you have topics that when we pick up full episodes again in the new year, if you have topics that you want us to talk about, if you have situations that you are in that you, you want us to analyze, send it through hosts@thettlpodcast.com. HOS ts, at the TTL podcast.com. And we want to hear them.

Until next time. Be kind and stay curious

We want the psychological safety that you can ask us anything and we can answer it to the best of our ability.

Mon-Chaio: Ah, so fluffy.

Andy: Yes. But Mon-Chaio, if you get it wrong, I’m docking your bonus

Mon-Chaio: I make so much money on this podcast. Yeah, that’s, that’s terrible.

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