Great article today on the importance of psychological safety on teams: Engineering a Culture of Psychological Safety, via Martin Fowler:
Teams without psychological safety underperform. Here are the danger signs and routes to improve.
From the article:
When discussing failures, people need to feel safe to share all relevant information, with the understanding that they will be judged not on how they fail, but how their handling of failures improved the team, their product and the organization as a whole. Teams with operational responsibilities need to come together and discuss outages and process failures. It’s essential to approach these as fun learning opportunities, not root-cause obsessed witch-hunts.
My ex-boss Casey used to say, “It’s my policy that you made the right decision. It’s more important to make decisions than be perfect. We may make another decision based on new information, but you will never be blamed for making a decision.” That really helped me feel safe. And it’s become my policy now too.