Psychological safety vs. high standards: A misunderstood dynamic | Hacker News Reader

Psychological safety vs. high standards: A misunderstood dynamic

leadingsapiens.com

124 pointssherilm58 comments

> 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.

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.

You could just speak up to their manager?

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.

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.

It's kind of the same discipline needed when pair programming and not ending up in a teacher/student dynamic. Words and actions need to delibrate and weighed, and the intent needs to be that the code base is above all else's ego

It's hard and scary to give critical feedback at first. You also don't want to damage relationships, especially when you're counting on peer feedback to eventually substantiate your own promotion.

All that said, if you put in the effort to learn and practice giving well-formed, critical feedback, I can almost guarantee the person on the receiving end will deeply appreciate it. Even if it's hard for them to hear, they'll know how it was hard for you to give, too, and most likely they will be grateful to you for it.

Next time, take that risk, and you will be glad you did.

Toxic positivity

As a musician I know a thing or two about group dynamics, especially given the fact that there is no objective best way to do music.

You are correct in that baseless positivity and silence can kill discourse, especially since this typically results in one member involuntarily abusing that freedom of criticism, e.g. by forcing things on others, doing the bare minimum etc. This can make others slowly build up resentment or them working against that person on purpose.

The problem is now, that the polar opposite (brutal honesty) will most of the time result in a similar disfunctional team, as negative feedback without trust will lead to a discourse where thebmain topic is no longer important (e.g. the music), but has become a battleground people use to carry out personal grievances. This can be often puzzling to nerds, since the criticism was just about the topic! Ehy does it suddenly become political when what I said seemed to me just to be the truth? The reason is of course that the best criticism goes to waste if you spell it out in a way and within a context within it cannot be taken to heart.

Let me give you an example: You are playing in a band and there is a new inexperienced singer who always sings out of tune in a specific spot. Now the singer is someone you chose to sing for you and you're still happy with them, if they just could not do that damn thing. Now the worst thing you could do is chew them out in front of everyone, even worse when there are outside people. This is because they are not secure in their position within the group (and to be real for a moment: some people will never be).

The better option is to show them trust and give them a way to improve, e.g. by talking to them 1:1, first explaining how you constantly made the same mistake yourself when you had less experience (or a similar anecdote that makes them understand that you are not stomping on them just because) and then you explain where you feel they could be better (note how this sounds less confrontational than "explain why they are wrong") and then even give them a practical waybout (e.g. a contact for singing lessons etc).

You are telling them the same thing, but without them having to "keep their face" in front of the group.

Later, when trust is there you can tell them that this part was shit, just like you would with your bestie, but not before

Just today I was practicing how to tell my boss that one of the company's biggest problems is that failure and incompetence have no consequences. Great on recognising good work; atrocious at seeing bad.

I'm not asking for us to fire people; I'd like to see the consequence that people are guided and helped to be better at their jobs, and the company stops making the same errors over and over.

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.

> 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

Incredibly true and important and ignored by almost everyone, especially the CEOs who've already "made it."

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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).

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.

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).

I would agree with you if there was a way to ensure feedback isn't interpreted as a personal attack or a shortcoming.

So, this assumes you can separate feedback from motivation too. Authentic praise (as opposed to generic praise) is more effective in the long run because it reinforces motivation and allows time, experience, and in ideal situations, achievable high standards to take care of negative feedback.

The thing I don't get about regression-to-the-mean is whether there is an implication that your baseline is fixed.

That is, can a fighter pilot move up from being a level 4 in a dogfight to a level 7 with training, or will they forever be a level 4 because it's their baseline? Did Michael Jordan have the same ability as a basketball player after 2 seasons as he did after 8?

Saying “great job” after MJ sinks a shot won’t make him awful and saying “try harder” after he misses won’t make him amazing.

Baseline moves with sustained practice and accurate, actionable feedback.

The comment is speaking. To the feedback of the instructor. If an instructor is shortsighted and only looks at the immediate next effect it will always (incorrectly) seem that criticism produces better results. If an instructor has a longer lens, they will use the best combination to quite the individual’s learning style. They should focus on setting and aligning on goals and making accurate assessments and not worrying about whether they should be more or shouty.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

It's basically impossible to keep the "wrong" people out based on personality traits. People who are lazy eventually learn to lie and BS themselves into a job. They migjt work hard for a month or two before tney revert base to their baseline. You can only gauge these traits though indirect and imperfect proxies. The best bet will always be word of mouth.

To the extent this is really a problem, it's broader than people focused on single companies seem to want to acknowledge. Globally, there are employers and employees and some balance of them such that the number of people employed in a functional economy is a huge supermajority and almost has to be for the health of the society.

Just as not every child in Lake Woebegone can be above average, this means not every company can only hire highly driven overachievers. As a company grows, its workforce grows and becomes closer and closer to the traits of the larger general population. If you ever grew large enough to be the only company in the world, your workforce would be the general population. At that point, it would be full of below average people. The only way to keep them out forever is to not grow. They're not the "wrong" people. At societal scale, to at least some employers, they're the only people who exist.

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.

>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.

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

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

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.

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.

I wrote a piece on this exact point and how much you should actually worry about EQ:

Technical and cognitive skills are clearly "threshold factors" that cannot be ignored— they get you in the game and let you keep playing it. While they might not be sufficient, they sure are a necessary condition for success in most domains.

In order to stand out on your EQ skills you have to be first competitive on your technical/cognitive skills. It will be tough to compete just on your social skillset.

EQ is probably not a differentiator at lower levels and early stages of your career. Technical chops, cognitive skills and execution will probably help you stand out more. It's only when you move on to the managerial and executive ranks that EI/EQ starts becoming a differentiator, what Goleman calls a "discriminating competency".

Even at higher levels, EQ is not a given. Where it can probably make the most impact is in avoiding pitfalls once you get there, what researchers call “leadership derailment", rather than being an active mechanism in reaching there.

More here: "Misled and Oversold on Emotional Intelligence" https://www.leadingsapiens.com/ei-vs-iq-misperceptions/

Just because a person lacks social skills does not mean social skills magically become unimportant. For all technologists like to brag about their world being black-and-white and that technical chops are the be-all and end-all, this is only true in very specific roles. For everything else, you have to deal with actual human beings, and in this case "this is the way I am, get over it" is generally a very poor strategy.

Despite & not because of?

The article discusses Twitter specifically. By practically all measures, Twitter (now X) is doing worse than before Musk acquired it. Indeed, Musk's creditors have downgraded the value of the investment multiple times. Financially, the acquisition has been a bust. It's been pure self-destruction.

Another thing about Twitter/X that most people don't realize is how little it has changed. Superficially it's changed, including a new domain name, but the actual code and operation seem to be more or less the same as before. And in fact some of the new features that shipped after the acquisition were already in the works before the acquisition. Years ago I wrote a Twitter-specific web browser extension, and aside from the change in domain name, the extension continues to work almost perfectly. In a way, it's shocking how little has changed.

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.

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.

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).

+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.

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?

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.

Sounds like a great manager. Though I'm pretty shocked to see a disclaimer that avoiding belittling or yelling at coworkers at all could be considered "lovey-dovey". I've only seen that type of behavior at one company I worked with briefly, have I just been lucky/careful?

I may be the odd one here but my career consisted of finance and software engineering. Until my current job, there was always screaming and yelling at all my previous positions that I just assumed that was the norm. It’s more likely that I’m just extraordinarily unlucky because as you’ve noted, not screaming or belittling colleagues is the norm in much of society. I think my issue was that I’ve experienced it so much that I just accepted, especially since I saw it happen at my very first job.

i fell into a managerial position once, and i was the lovey-dovey wanting everybody to be happy type. i was bad at it, but there were two major factors that lead me down that path:

1) I didn't want to be a manager and it was the path of least resistance

2) the company that was large and stable enough where getting peak-performance out of everybody wasn't necessary to keep things going smoothly

  2b) the company had so many layers of beureaucracy, that actually getting peak performance wouldn't have actually improved anything

"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.

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.

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."

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?

It is archetypical behavior.

It's reflective.

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