41–50 of 68 posts
"Psychological safety" sounds awfully creepy.
This is a good idea.
Unfortunately, using therapist jargon in other contexts sounds very strange, shibolethy and throws people off.
I think this article confuses an absence of "heated arguments" with a lack of constructive, critical discussions. I've found that in mature teams with high trust, people don't have heated arguments precisely because they are not afraid that their voices will be ignored. There is no need to become heated because you trust that the other people on the team will hear you out and consider your viewpoint. >code that nobod…
This dynamic flourishes when the stakes and/or uncertainty are low enough.
High stakes and high uncertainty means everyone’s pushing their intuition and their reasoning as far as they can. They’re at their limit of what can be communicated efficiently. This results in an uneven distribution of communication bandwidth across the edges in the team network. Accountability induces leadership and competing views are ascendant and in decline.
I think it’s reasonable to wonder that, if the temperature never rises about room temperature, the team might not be fully challenging itself.
I ran a pretty high-functioning team of experienced C++ image processing pipeline programmers, for 25 years. We were part of a much larger, international (and interdisciplinary) team. We worked for one of the most renowned imaging companies in the world. Some of the folks we dealt with, were the top people in their field, and not everyone was especially good at getting along with others. Everyone thought they had The…
"Psychological safety" sounds awfully creepy.
It's Therapy Speak for "pitching ideas and asking questions is encouraged, you will not be reamed or looked down on if some of those are bad." This is a good idea. Unfortunately, using therapist jargon in other contexts sounds very strange, shibolethy and throws people off.
If so, what would you say in its place? It’s hard to write an article about a concept if you have to say "pitching ideas and asking questions is encouraged, you will not be reamed or looked down on if some of those are bad" every paragraph.
The irony of tech people complaining about jargon.
That is - I've been on lots of low functioning teams riven with conflict. Prima donna developers who publicly call managers/teammates stupid in meetings. Managers giving negative feedback in public instead of in private. Stubborn veteran team members telling newer team members to get a new job if they don't like how things are done.
One pattern I've seen in lower functioning teams with lots of conflict is some members being very well spoken, typically more classically trained like a philosophy background, probably a past debate club type kid. "Strong opinions, loosely held" type behavior where bad ideas were passionately argued by the more eloquent & aggressive team member until everyone else was exhausted and just let it run.
The kind of guys that would steamroll the rest of the team as a bunch of idiots for not agreeing with him, but flip to a charismatic "ah good point" when incontrovertible proof of their idea not being correct was presented. The problem is you can't provide incontrovertible proof in real time in most cases, and lots of managers confuse their passion/certitude for correctness.
So high functioning teams can have heated arguments & difficult people, but heated arguments do not in themselves lead to high functioning teams.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I genuinely don't know how to respond to that. The idea of connecting anger to the relevancy of one's work seems so strange to me.
Ok, lets go with this, because empathy is hard, and it seems that most here have not experienced working on complex projects. I've personally experienced this. We have a project to develop a new engine, its teklaover budget, very late, and requires a ton more work and excuses are running thin. My team is running barebones with 60-70 hour weeks trying to get the ratings done, the test team is waiting on us for the rat…
Edit: I noticed this comment was rather controversial and reread the article. The author is actually saying most people misunderstand psychological safety to be an environment where people don’t disagree. Their understanding of psychological safety however is correct. Not sure why the framing flipped my understanding in the first read. This article completely misunderstand psychological safety even after including th…
How do people cope in teams where some or even most members are vocal but actually always completely wrong and you’re the only one seeing it?
Sometimes a project gets funded by someone who wants the team to look and act a certain way and actual productivity doesn't even factor in. You're not 'right' if you've fundamentally misunderstood what you're doing there in the first place. Either take their money and play along or leave. That's the call you can make.
I think this article confuses an absence of "heated arguments" with a lack of constructive, critical discussions. I've found that in mature teams with high trust, people don't have heated arguments precisely because they are not afraid that their voices will be ignored. There is no need to become heated because you trust that the other people on the team will hear you out and consider your viewpoint. >code that nobod…
> …in mature teams with high trust, people don’t have heated arguments… This dynamic flourishes when the stakes and/or uncertainty are low enough. High stakes and high uncertainty means everyone’s pushing their intuition and their reasoning as far as they can. They’re at their limit of what can be communicated efficiently. This results in an uneven distribution of communication bandwidth across the edges in the team…
I suspect this only seems reasonable if you've never experienced a healthy work environment. I probably would have agreed with you when I was in my twenties, working at a startup with another bunch of twenty-year-old guys and a CEO who was in over his head. It wasn't unusual for the whole company to yell at each other in a meeting room. The stakes seemed high then, but they seem ridiculous in hindsight, as does my own behavior.
Thirty years later, the stakes are much higher, and the temperate is much lower. This is precisely because we can't afford this behavior, and we can't afford to deal with people who can't control themselves and behave professionally in high-pressure situations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this article confuses an absence of "heated arguments" with a lack of constructive, critical discussions. Doesn't the article refute exactly this point of view? In " The hidden cost of “nice” teams " section: " Those teams weren’t actually harmonious—they were conflict-avoidant. The disagreements still existed; they just went underground. "
>Those teams weren’t actually harmonious—they were conflict-avoidant. In my experience, this is not true because, in high-trust teams, there is "harmonious conflict." People offer criticism without getting heated. Getting heated often results from a strong opinion combined with a lack of faith that other people are genuinely considering your opinion. People who get heated feel they have to be forceful to convince oth…
But with less jest - I think we have a very good discussion culture in the team at work. No one on the team is scared to disagree, or to point out that this doesn't seem to go towards a positive direction. It's just not a heated discussion.
At times during these planning sessions, we just sit in silent thought and maybe doodling something in Excalidraw or on paper for a few minutes until someone is like "I need more input on X", or "So I have a rough plan I think?" or "I think there is an issue with that idea", even if it's not clear why - if 2 or 3 people are vaguely not fine with something, it's probably a bad idea. And we've also started to learn each others tells if we're not happy.