The pattern is "If a junior woman can't code, let's promote her as team lead; If a junior man can't code, let's teach him to code" - and this is wrong because both sides have everything to lose with this behavior.
Basically, give people your full attention when talking to them, and avoid primal displays of dominance or subservience. Mostly the attention part.
Could you elaborate on this? How do you resolve significant differences in height?
Another important bit is that if someone is sitting down, you should sit down next to them. If they're at their desk and there's no chair, squat or kneel.
Leave escape room.
Whether it's a bar or a cubicle, a woman will (in general, according to my wife and other female friends) be aware of being pinned in. For those not thinking of it, it's perfectly natural to stand at the end of a bench seat or in a cubicle opening to talk, but this gives them no "escape" from the situation and increases tension. Simply standing to the side of that escape path makes the situation less tense.
On the generally-male side of things, (drawing purely from my own experiences) I definitely notice when tall people are close to me, but if they stand a little further back I don't really notice their height.
E.g. NBA players who huddle around their coach
Also, don't sit straight across from them, police interrogation style. It's intimidating, especially in situation like an interview. Sit at the orthogonal side of the table.
Never the less, one of the terms is from psychology, one of the terms is from pop culture and may not overlap completely
Psychological safety is less normative: It's about being in a space where it's safe to voice an opinion, and feel that you're heard and valued for your contributions. It's a term that can apply in a very culturally diverse team.
Because being open-minded is their enforced conformity.
And if the leader of the team doesn't respect a member, he won't listen to the member, no matter how long the member gets to talk.
If you have to pick, your team sucks.
I suspect a confusing of "harmony" as a situation in which people don't speak up out of not wanting to hurt someone else's feelings with "harmony" where everyone is comfortable speaking their mind as they know their comments won't be taken as an attack or unnecessary criticism.
The second definition of "harmony" is actual harmony. The first is anything but.
I'll just quote what the Rust team said about their code of conduct, because it's spot-on: "The Rust community doesn't subscribe to the notion that there's a dichotomy between intellectual discourse and kindness."
That's pretty much it. If your team considers those two mutually exclusive, you're headed for trouble. It might not be today or tomorrow, but you will pay for it long-term.
edit: or if it does hurt their feelings, that they'll be able to express that safely, and you'll all be able to resolve the conflict.
A thick skin is necessary, but the point of psychological safety is that it must be normal and expected for someone to make mistakes and to be wrong. It happens inevitably. How teams handle it is the important part. The most successful teams I've experienced are those where someone can say "yeah, I messed up, I'll fix it" and the team sees this as a necessary part of a team's long term function.
That means nobody on the team says "I told you so," and that team members can disagree intensely without making it personal or emotional.
The big problem with "without making it personal or emotional" is that the people most guilty of making disagreements personal or emotionally charged are also least likely (in my experience) to recognize that they're instigating. These people are toxic without realizing it themselves.
I definitely don't mean that. More like, there are always tradeoffs. There is cost/benefit in being truthy just as there is cost/benefit in being harmonious. Each has it's own type and you get to choose which make more sense for the situation, team, etc.
I don't think you can "have it all" so much as you can choose to set the tradeoff point somewhere in the middle rather than at the extremes. For example, in the Rust code of conduct example, it sounds like they have decided they want a nice mix. This will cost them though. Maybe the cost is as small sending $some_multiplier_above_1 the amount of emails between the team because things are worded more indirectly to not offend and therefore more disambiguation has to take place. If their team instead committed to be as direct as possible, the could spend less time on follow up emails but now they'd probably turn of or drive away some good folks from the team who decided they didn't like all the directness and send of urgency.
Personally, I like a nice mix. I think it is just worth being clear with myself it is a mix and not two independent things where you can have an infinite supply of each.
I believe you may be misunderstanding something about the idea of psychological safety. I can't think of any definition of "harmony" that has anything to do with psychological safety.
It's Feb. :D
> I'd much prefer reading about companies trying to improve their working environments than about whatever incremental new product feature they're launching.
Google has set the right precedent for the tech-industry, and I am grateful for them having done that. 'Cause other big tech-cos like Amazon sure don't give a damn about employee well-being (not just warehouse workers, but engineers too).
(Disclaimer: This is my opinion, not that of my employer.)