Even if it turns out this is a puff piece supplied to the Times by Google, it's still a very well written and insightful article explaining a bit of why psychological safety is critical for teams to perform optimally. It's probably my favorite Google-related article this year, actually. I'd much prefer reading about companies trying to improve their working environments than about whatever incremental new product feature they're launching.
I remember a gig I had where one of the developers was someone who didn't seem to be technically that deep. Yet every project she worked on did better because of something nobody at the time understood. I remember having such a great feeling about working with her every day. I didn't get that from other people. I think this article explains why she was so awesome: She made people feel safe. When she talked to you, you felt like the most important person in the room.
For future reference, here's how you achieve that effect when talking to people: 1) make and keep eye contact, 2) listen more than you speak, 3) ask follow up questions, 4) if your phone buzzes, ignore it 5) if your computer dings, ignore it, 6) turn towards people when talking with them, 7) reposition yourself so your eyes are on the same level if possible, 8) don't tower over people, 9) always approach from the side, not the back or the front
Basically, give people your full attention when talking to them, and avoid primal displays of dominance or subservience. Mostly the attention part.
Sounds like you know your Dale Carnegie quite well! :)
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.
I learned the best advice for approaching women only after I became happily married:
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.
Lean back slightly if you have to stand. Also look at someone face on but stand a little sideways and back. I am 6'4" and most people don't notice it until I end up standing over them accidentally, they suddenly comment "WOW you're really tall" and it actually surprises them because I work very hard at not being intimidating. Approaching from the side is good advice and so is making sure people notice other things first.
Stand back from them. In the immortal words of The Police, "don't stand so close to me." From 3 or 4 feet away most people realize I'm tall but when I stand directly next to them there's zero ability to make eye contact.
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.
Honestly, just stand a little bit farther back. The main factor seems to be the angle at which each participant has to crane their necks in order to make eye contact.
Michael Lewis had an article a few years ago where he described this effect using Shane Battier as the example - none of his stats were spectacular, but somehow his team played better when he was on the court. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html
If it was a situation where most of the devs were men and your colleague was one of the only women, it seems likely that gender dynamics and stereotypes about women made a big difference in her getting perceived as "non-technical and comforting" (that's one of the usual stereotypes about women developers, after all).
In this case not a stereotype. I think she had tremendous raw intelligence but she was a fulltime mom with kids and was caregiving for her aging parents at the same time and a husband on the road a lot. This just didn't leave her much time to deep dive on anything. If I were in her shoes I'd probably been fired for not keeping up. So she likely had the potential of being the most technically deep person on the team but her life didn't really give her much time to develop that. In the end it didn't matter for the team as a whole: she made things better because she simply was a better and more preceptive person than most people.
Interesting. If the previous comment had used male pronouns, would it even have occurred to you to associate the described attributes with gender stereotypes?
Yes. There is a very visible pattern. Yes in 2006, but times have changed around 2011-2013 (Twitter's IPO, Mozilla CEO fired, GitHub CEO fired, conferences excluding people for sexual jokes), and if in 2016 I had on my team a woman whose role was to be talkative rather than technical, I would find it sexist.
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.
But the better team is the one where she becomes the team lead. That's not sexist. Some of the most important skills are leadership skills. And leadership skills are not about command and control. They're about understanding and leveraging (often intuitively) a million complicated things we barely understand about our ancient primate wiring. Those things make computer programming look like preschool skills.
As long as she becomes the team lead after learning the technical skills like everyone, and as long as it's not out of prejudice that males don't have people skills, yes. After 7 years trying, I've left the corporate game which was rigged in favour of women, and I've created my own company, and I vote against women rights, which is also a racist party. I really don't want to vote for the racist part, but I've worked in 3 companies, in 3 different countries, 19 women met, 18 were in management positions, including 11 promoted in my presence, not all of them skilled, and I've seen only 1 male be promoted. Feelings were hurt. Fairness is out of the window. You bet it's going to take long to repair.
Indeed - what I enjoyed and got out of this article is a fairly easy correlation to what separated good teams that I have been on from bad ones. I had classified the difference as "camaraderie" - but the idea of psychological safety is a little more useful. Camaraderie is the superficial outcome, while psychological safety is the enabler.
On the contrary. Culture fit is a pretty normative term: It says to me, we act like THIS at this company, and we're looking for more people who act like THIS. It's pretty explicitly anti-diversity, and speaks to a search for cultural homogeneity.
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.
Maybe in theory, but in practice? Either the team has a shared culture of open-mindedness, or a culturally diverse team will have opinions which are held by some and taboo for others. Either way, you need a common culture, even if it's fairly broad and flexible.
Not really, one term is the popular term the other one is a term from behavioral psychology. So they describe the same phenomenon but by different people.
Someone could fit very nicely into a given working culture despite that culture not being 'psychologically safe' by the author's definition. They are not the same concept.
I love the topic and like this particular article. Having said that, this still feels like a puff piece. The notion of psychological safety certainly matters but not always. My experience is it matters less when you have teams made up more of "thinkers" (vs "feelers"). Also matters less when the team has a clear vision and set of requirements and just needs to adapt their past expertise to minor variations in new problem. Sometimes teams are more efficient and innovative when truth wins over harmony. Depends on team's purpose, etc. Let me be clear, I prefer the more psychologically safe mode of group work. Yet it's still pretty clear to me that hinders, not helps, in plenty of cases.
> Sometimes teams are more efficient and innovative when truth wins over harmony.
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.
That's not what the article is going for, and that's the common mistake I see in teams.
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.
Good points, these replies. I think it is fair to question what truth/harmony we are talking about. The "truth vs harmony" dichotomy has become a bit loaded especially with all the folks invoking truth as a license to be jerky intellectual bullies.
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.
Where are you getting this "harmony" junk? Maybe you're right, there is a tug of war between truth vs harmony, for some definition of 'harmony'. But who's calling for something called 'harmony'?
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.
> Sometimes teams are more efficient and innovative when truth wins over harmony.
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.
> It's probably my favorite Google-related article this year
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).
As a counter point, the best team I ever worked on was at Amazon, and years later many of us are still friends. Further, AWS is cleaning Google's clock with number of features, delivering new services, and providing customer value.
I don't think this piece should be read as "come work for Google" (although you can interpret it that way). Rather, I think the researchers would want see all companies to take advantage of this research and use it to make every workplace better.
(Disclaimer: This is my opinion, not that of my employer.)
