Psychological Safety vs. High Standards: A Misunderstood Dynamic

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

"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.

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."