> 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.
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.
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
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Results speak for themselves. If Musks style is inferior, why are his companies doing so incredibly well?
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.
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
Despite & not because of?
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.
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