Leadership and Psychological Safety with Gitte Klitgaard | Transcript

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So welcome everybody to another episode of Software-Architektur im Stream, this time with Gitte about leadership and psychological safety.

Gitte, do you want to say a few words about yourself first of all?

Yeah, so I am sort of a coach, agile coach, leadership coach, organizational coach, where I do anything from like more individual coaching to going in hands-on and helping people, not inside the code but helping people, often helping people in tech.

And then I speak at a bunch of conferences about stress, depression, humanities, leadership.

Yeah, and that brings me to sort of the reason or one of the points about this stream.

So you’re going to talk about the subject that we also are going to cover here at Software Architecture Gathering in November.

And we have a rebate, 15% off with the code SATV_15.

And I’m also going to be here.

So this is sort of in preparation for that conference that supports us and that we are happy to support as well.

Okay, so we are talking about psychological safety and leadership.

So first of all, the question would be, so what is psychological safety even?

So psychological safety is about not being afraid to be punished in some way, whether that is losing your reputation, losing your job, maybe losing the view you have on yourself.

So it’s very much about these things.

And that also means it’s inside your head.

And it’s very individual from person to person.

So feeling safe is about that you know you can you can come up with new ideas, you can come up with, you can have a different opinion than people in the room.

You can be who you are, how much you want to bring of yourself without there being any repercussions for it.

So it’s not enough to say, okay, everyone can say whatever they like at this place.

It’s somehow more than that, isn’t it?

Yes, it is more than that.

Because it’s it’s, it’s also about figuring out, for instance, in a team, what makes us feel safe.

Because we all come with a background, we all live before we started working.

We work in different places, we, some of us will have triggers and some will not.

Like I work a lot with courage over the years.

So it will take a while before I feel unsafe, where other people might have had other experiences.

So it’s very much about figuring out what is the thing that’s going on for us.

And also the thing about saying what you want, some people misinterpret that as literally saying whatever comes out of your head.

And you still need to show respect for people, and you still need to consider what you are saying, because you are part of creating the psychological safety for others as well.

Okay, and there is a relation to leadership.

So what is leadership in your opinion?

Do you have any definition for that?

I mean, I don’t have a clear definition.

But for me, leadership is about, first of all, leading, which means you are the one going forward.

And I think everyone leads, if nothing else, by example.

But of course, there are different kinds of leadership positions, we can have management, but we can also have like architect or being a senior.

One of the things I experienced often coming in as a consultant is that in one way, I am a leader, because I’m the expert from the outside and coming in.

So leadership is a lot of thing.

And I think good leadership is very much about leading people.

But it’s also about making sure that they can follow.

I’ve seen too many examples of bad leadership, where people think, okay, I’m a leader, I’ll go in front, you’ll be autonomous, and then the team doesn’t get any help.

You still need to, like, if you are a manager, you still need to help your team.

If you are an architect, you still need to make sure that the teams can do whatever you’re working with.

So for me, leadership is both about leading, but it’s also about taking care of people, but not just taking care of them in a, everyone feels nice, and we can sit in a corner and eat ice cream, taking care of them in a way that is healthy for them, and healthy for the working environment.

So after we did the preparation call, there was one thing that crossed my mind.

I actually did an interview here with an officer of the German army, and he said that the only organization that actually formally educates people in terms of leadership are, well, armies.

So do you think that that is true, or is that a problem that we have, like, that people in the economy, in the industry, in any industry, not just our industry, that they are not educated, and the army is the only organization that does that at scale, and like, in a formal way, educate people in concerning leadership?

I would say in a lot of cases it is.

I have met so many leaders from first-level managers to C-level leaders who never had any education in what they’re doing.

I was looking at some numbers, and I only managed to find numbers from Australia, but it said the average time from becoming a manager, for instance, to getting your first training was nine years.

So I think we don’t educate our leaders enough.

We don’t actually put them in a position where they can do what they need to do to be good leaders.

We sometimes do it with managers, because they have the formal hat.

But for instance, if we’re talking about having autonomous teams or self-directed teams or whatever variant of the word we use, they are also supposed to lead themselves, and we don’t spend a lot of time helping people learn how to lead.

And I mean, in the army, you’re kind of like, if you can’t lead yourself, you’re in deep shit if you don’t have any contact to your general or captain or whatever.

Whereas we don’t have the same sense of urgency, because we are not going to be in war or having to do things that are dangerous in that way.

I think that’s a very important point.

In our industry, it’s pretty much only about money.

I mean, only most of the time.

So therefore, we can get away with quite a few things that are not acceptable in other environments.

So Vanessa Meyer just said on LinkedIn, yes, being easy to follow.

So she likes that statement.

So that’s good.

What’s the relation between, I mean, basically, that is what your talk is about.

You’re saying that leadership and psychological safety has a relation.

So what’s the relation?

I think if you are to be a really good leader, you need to be able to create an environment where you can have psychological safety.

You might not succeed in it always.

But whether you are a manager or someone that people listen to, if you are not creating that psychological safety, then people might not tell you things like, I’ve met young developers who are afraid to talk to the senior developer because they are very senior.

And then it’s important for that senior developer to take the leadership and actually create psychological safety, help the young developers or junior developers, whatever you choose to call them, help them be in a place where they know it’s not just okay to ask for help.

It is expected that they ask for help.

It is expected that they make mistakes.

So I think leadership in whatever form it is, has a very important role to play.

Also, because no matter what we think about ourselves, we are role models.

And that’s something I think we need to be very aware about.

I actually chose the PP cup, because PP says, if you’re very strong, you have to be very nice.

So if you are a leader, you have to yield that power with responsibility.

And part of that is to create safety for the people around you.

Yeah, that’s actually a good point.

What you just said, if you’re strong, then you have to be extra nice.

And the other thing that I just…

So actually, I wrote a message on our internal Slack.

And I said that the thing that I’m most afraid of is like fail silently, like someone wouldn’t do their job, or because they’re unable to or something is missing or whatever.

And nobody…

And they are not open about it.

They don’t speak up about it.

And that’s pretty much what you’re describing.

If you don’t have psychological safety, then you end up in that situation.

So and concerning the military, so Sarah Gruneisen at LinkedIn just said, I was lucky to have years of leadership training paid by companies I worked for, and I’m not in on the military.

So there is hope there are companies that actually invest in leadership.

So that’s good.

So and therefore, we also we covered the question why you would care about psychological safety.

You said it’s not about feeling better at work, or that’s probably the question.

So if I enjoy going to work, and if I enjoy working, is that psychological safety?

Or is that even something that we should be afraid of that this happens?

No, I don’t think we should be afraid of what we should be afraid of, if it if it’s too comfortable.

If we are not, if we have this harmony, or in many companies, fake harmony, where we don’t really want this, oh, it must be nice to go to work.

And I mean, if you take down a whole system, for instance, that’s not going to feel very good.

That’s going to feel like shit, but it has to be safe, has to be safe that you learn from it that the company learns from it.

And like you said, we don’t want, we don’t want problems or bugs or whatever that is under the hood, because people are afraid to speak up.

One of the examples that Amy Edmonton, who is a researcher in psychological safety talks about, is the big Boeing planes, where they basically dropped down because there were so many bugs in them.

But people were afraid to speak up because they were fired if they were speaking up about these things.

So it’s great if you can go to work and you can feel amazing.

And, but that amazing also should be that you get challenged and that you can disagree with others and that you can make mistakes.

And the bigger the mistakes are, the more uncomfortable it’s going to be.

If you are safe enough in your group to talk about personal things, it might not be comfortable.

I was in, so my dream team, as I call it, I was being checked for cancer.

And when I told that to my, my, my boys, as I called them, which they do not like, you know, that was not comfortable, but they were there for me and I was living alone.

So they even offered to take turns in driving me to the hospital and stuff like that.

Nothing was there, luckily, but that is not comfortable.

But it, it was because we had a great team and where we felt super, super safe to talk about these things.

So I have sometimes the impression that agile coaches mix this being comfortable and psychological safety.

Do you have an explanation for that?

Is that something that is common?

I think it is very common, not just from agile coaches.

I have also had the argument that we don’t need psychological safety just so people feel nice at work.

I think it’s very easy to, to make that mistake because when we talk about feeling safe, the first thing that often comes to mind is when did I feel safe?

Oh, I felt safe when I was feeling good, when I was comfortable, when I was working on something I knew how to do, which can also be part of safety, but we are forgetting the other parts.

And the other parts is where we have innovation, for instance, where we have learning, where we have growing.

That is where we are challenged.

That is where we are doing experiments.

All of that is in the, should be in the safe zone, but it doesn’t have to be in the comfort zone.

What I do think we need to remember is to not be out of the comfort zone all the time, because that is super, super stressful.

So I see it as the comfort zone as being a place where you go back and you rest.

Like sometimes it’s just nice to not be challenged and work on something that you know how to do.

But if that happens all the time, then you are not evolving as a person.

The company is not evolving.

You’re not getting great products.

You might get a little bit of new things, but where it really matters, that is where you are ready to take that step into being uncomfortable.

So some anonymous LinkedIn user just said, thank you for the scenario you have mentioned, which is probably the one about the cancer treatment that you described.

And Alexander Turo just said, recently I came across this neat description, friction is the root of learning.

And in learning, friction is indeed not a bug, but a feature, no friction or learning.

Yeah.

And I mean, the earliest mentioning I found of psychological safety is actually from Shine and Bennett, who were looking into learning in a lab environment where they’re kind of like, there’s a difference between being anxious and having a good learning environment.

And that difference is psychological safety.

So this is from 1965.

And that’s the first mentioning I have found of psychological safety.

So were they talking about schools or what?

No, they’re talking about grownups learning in like a lab, which basically just meant a training center.

And Sarah also said, I love seeing you shine, Gitte.

You’ve really grown since our leadership landing.

Such great points about the safe versus comfort zone.

Okay.

And I would second that, obviously.

So as we are talking about this relationship between leadership and psychological safety, do you think you can establish psychological safety without buy-in or support from management or leadership?

You can, but not in the whole company.

I have seen in companies where there is a toxic management, but where there’s safety inside the team, for instance.

And sometimes when I start working with companies, that’s also where we start.

We start with creating that safety in the team.

It’s much better if there is buy-in from the leadership, if the leadership also actually knows what it is.

Because I’ve also met leaders who go like, but I told them it’s safe.

I don’t understand why they don’t feel safe.

But I’ve also met managers who are able, for instance, to fire people in a very empathetic way.

Because with the world as it is right now, you might have to fire people.

If you can’t do that as a manager, then you can’t fulfill your job sometimes.

But the way you do it, the way you can create that safety for people, that is really important.

But that being said, a lot of times you are not in a place where there’s safety.

And the bigger the group is, the harder it is to create that safety.

So I would say, yes, you can, but it’s much more effective.

And you won’t be sharing, for instance, mistakes outside the team if you don’t feel safe enough to do that.

So, I mean, one thing that comes to my mind is that there are actually agencies that are specialized in doing the actual firing of people so managers don’t have to do it.

And there is a movie up in the air with George Clooney, where he actually is one of those persons.

So, you know, there is a whole story about that.

So concerning that you can have that team where people actually feel safe, even in that team, there’s usually, I mean, when we talk about team, I assume that we are talking about these scrum-like teams, like with seven people plus minus two, these kinds of teams, right?

It’s all leadership team.

It would be like a management team on different levels.

But even in such teams, you have like the person who is higher up the hierarchy.

So that person doesn’t need to buy in into psychological safety and you can still make it happen.

If you have a team, and then I would say that if the senior developer just does not buy into this, then it’s super, super easy to break it.

It is so easy to make jokes about it.

Or, you know, when people make a mistake going, oh, that was so stupid.

Or don’t they teach you anything in school today?

Or, you know, whatever.

Those things can be enough to break the safety that people start speaking up.

And I’ve seen cases of that where the team feels safe from the outside, but then you notice that when people come up with ideas, the one who’s been there the longest will just pull them down and say, we tried that.

We’ve done that.

So if that kind of leadership is not there, then it won’t be safe inside the team either.

Hopefully you will then have at least a body where you can feel safe.

But in a lot of companies, you don’t.

But what you’re saying in a way is, or that’s at least what I understand, is that everyone in a team could break psychological safety because everyone could say, well, that’s really a stupid question, whatever it is that you just mentioned.

So then you would need to have buy-in from pretty much everyone, not just management, right?

No, that’s true.

And you would need to help people understand why it’s important.

And I think that that’s part of what some of the things that I do.

Because if you look at psychological safety, it is a definition from academia.

And sometimes it can be super, super hard to relate to the daily work that you’re doing.

So inside teams, it’s very good to have that discussion about what it actually is and why is it important to us.

And I have had people who are super, super skeptical about this and why do we even need it.

And then when we start discussing it and when we start creating a little bit of safety so that the team members open up, that’s when they start realizing what a difference this can make.

I’m afraid I have to sort of add an advertisement.

So I used to watch a lot of air crash investigations.

And if you look closely at those episodes about air crash investigations, it’s sometimes that you feel like there is a captain and the first officer sitting and piloting that plane.

And then somehow you notice that one of the persons is behaving somewhat strangely, not really speaking up.

And then they show you what the other person, the most senior person has done before, which is basically, as you said, don’t they teach you anything at school and making that person feel stupid.

And it turns out that the aircraft industry did this crew resource management thing where they educate pilots and even crews to behave correctly so that everyone can speak up.

And I did an episode about that with pilots because it stuck with me because, I mean, those people like they are paid to speak up if you’re the first officer and they don’t.

And sometimes, I mean, if an airplane crashes, it’s sometimes even your life on the line.

So, you know, seeing someone that they should speak up is definitely not enough.

And that’s, I think, an example.

Yeah.

And I think it’s actually really scary how easy it is to break that.

And I mean, I was listening to a talk at some point about when the space shuttles fell down in NASA.

And one of the first things, when the first thing happened, when the first happened, people went and they deleted what was on their computers.

And the precaution that they then made was that if something happens again, the one in charge would take his gun and ask people to step away from their phones and shoot anyone, or computers and shoot anyone who went to the computers.

And you kind of go like, okay, that’s why they did it.

And that’s a little bit scary is that when people come, when we try to hide these things, because we are afraid of the consequences, we are afraid that we’re going to be fired, we’re afraid that we’re going to, you know, lose whatever.

And even in some cases, we don’t know what it is we’re afraid of.

We are not always conscious about what makes us feel safe or not.

And that’s, by the way, one of the things that I also like about aircraft investigations.

Most of the times, it’s an open, honest discussion about why that was the problem.

And it’s also, it doesn’t stop at the point where they say, okay, the pilot failed, but rather they ask why.

Is it a matter of education, of training or the situation the pilot was in?

Okay.

But I actually didn’t want to dive too deeply into that.

There is one thing that that I still want to ask about these teams that people feel safe in.

What you’re saying in a way, or I think that’s what you’re suggesting, is to build up safety in such small teams and then like scale it out in the whole of the organization.

And I have to admit that oftentimes I feel like there is a piece of or part of the organization where things like agility or psychological safety actually works, but it’s impossible to scale it out.

Would you agree or is there anything I’m missing?

Like is there something that you need to do to scale it out to all of the organization?

Is that something that feels often?

So how do you feel about that?

I think you can have an organization that is psychologically safe, but the bigger it gets also the further the distance is.

And that’s also when culture comes in.

So I’m Danish and very often the distance to the highest boss is not that big.

You can actually go talk to them.

Whereas in more hierarchical countries, you would never ever tell your high boss that you failed.

Same as if making a mistake is something that is culturally wrong, then you can’t create that safety.

But I think you can create a lot of safety.

And one of the things you can do as a leader or a high level manager is to talk about these things, talk about how it’s important to make mistakes, to make sure that you are challenged, that it is important that you are expected to ask for help.

And also talking about their own mistakes, which takes a lot of things from managers as well, because a lot of managers have been conditioned to kind of go like, okay, I’m the manager, so I cannot fail.

And the further up you go, the further it can become like, I cannot fail, I need to report to the board.

So there’s actually very often a lack of safety among leaders.

So for them to go out and say, I made this mistake.

I will reflect on and figure out how I can avoid doing it some other time.

That can be a big thing.

But it also can have such an impact on an organization, seeing that your manager or for that matter, your heroes are people that make mistakes.

And I love when I see like one of the big names in our industry talking about how they made a mistake or how they still, I was going to say Google things, but not everyone uses Google anymore, but like how you don’t know everything.

And that is part of what creating safety is, is to show, hey, we are all humans.

We aren’t going to make mistakes.

And some of those mistakes might be to break safety.

But then we will have to rebuild it.

And the better safety you have, the easier it is to rebuild it.

I agree.

And there was something on Mastodon not too long ago about how people would still confuse like basic Unix commands.

I think that that’s what it was about and how they would still look at the main pages.

So that’s exactly the example that you were talking about.

So there are a few comments still.

So Zara said, I love the example.

We told you, you are safe and wonder why the teams aren’t safe.

The example of the middle leadership leading up to ensure those they need below stay safe.

Love it.

Although, yes, of course, it is best when middle leadership can feel safe too.

I think, yeah, I’m not sure whether you want to answer anything.

No, I would say, yes, they are humans and all humans should be able to feel safe at work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That’s a good one.

Then the comment, Vanessa Meyer said that friction is massively underestimated.

Alex remarked earlier on and goes on to say, I’ve come to think that the issue, the issues with poor team performance isn’t always related to a lack of psychological safety, but rather companies that reward optionality, meaning there is no incentive for teams to be decisive.

The incentive is to keep all options open and decision tentative.

So teams just don’t cover, converge on a direction.

Fake harmony is optionally preserved.

So that’s interesting, right?

It basically says you’re rewarded not to make any decisions.

Yes.

And instead keep the options, keep all options open.

Let’s not make decisions.

Let’s keep all options open.

Let’s not make a decision until we are closed.

Things like that.

And I agree.

I mean, psychological safety is only one of the things that will help you have high performance.

Things like actually making decisions and doing things is necessary to have high performance.

Something like having, like taking a pride in your work, actually, you know, telling people if you’re late before it happens.

So when Google looked into this in 2016, I think with Project Aristotle, which is one of the reasons why we’re talking about psychological safety in the industry, they were also talking about that you need to believe in what you work in.

You need to be able to see your place there.

You need to have clear roles and you need to have that accountability and that commitment so that you work on things and that you answer for it.

And I think if a company does not make decisions, I think that’s a big, big problem.

Sometimes it can be because you get punished if you make the wrong decision and then scan it.

If you cannot make a mistake, if you’re not making a wrong decision, then you will wait until you have the best decision.

So we need to also like, yes, sometimes we want to keep our options open, but sometimes not making a decision is making a decision and it can cost a lot of resources and time and money.

One thing that comes to my mind or one, let’s say, skill that I think you need to have is like courage, like to actually make a decision.

So you would agree that this is also like one of the things that you need?

I think it’s hard to not have courage working if you want to do really good work.

And I mean, it was one of the original values of extreme programming as well.

And I think courage is very related to psychological safety.

It is not exactly the same, but if you come in and you start talking about your mistakes in your team, that takes courage.

And if you have that courage, it’s easier for you to do.

If you feel safe, it’s also easier to have courage.

So they kind of help each other up.

But yeah, I think you need to, you need to have this.

I once did a talk called, are you brave enough to be agile?

Because a lot of the things you do, if you follow the agile principles from the manifesto is you have to be brave, like maximizing the amount of things not done.

You have to be brave enough to say, hey, the best solution here is actually not software.

The best solution here is that we change this process because we don’t want to do stuff that is not necessary.

So I think that courage is a big part of both high performing teams and it helps safety move along, I think.

Yeah.

And I was just remembered by Vanessa’s comment because I feel like if you, if you chill, one reason why you still want to keep your options open might be because you don’t have the courage to actually say, okay, I’m going to make this decision.

It means that we are not going to use these options and that’s it.

And I think it’s even, I mean, it’s totally understandable why you would behave in that way.

It’s just that it’s not really the best way to do it in some cases.

No, and you risk that you don’t really get to make the right decisions.

And then at some point there’s only one left.

And is that actually the decision that you would have made if you made it early on?

So Alexander said, Rich, Shirley Dunn made a very good, very much underestimated point in the talk related to his marvelous book, Joy, Inc.

And he said, we need to suck the fear out of the room.

And from there you start.

I can say, yeah, I mean, Rich runs a very interesting company and I hope to go see it at some point.

And he’s very true is that we do need to pull fear out of the room.

It doesn’t mean that you, I mean, being brave does not mean that you’re not afraid, but it means that you do what is necessary, even if you are afraid, I think.

And I think it’s super important to acknowledge that people will still have fears.

So how can we help them do the best they can with those fears?

So how is the company interesting?

Menlo Inc. in the US.

They run things like they have promiscuous pairing.

So you have to change pairs all the time.

Some of the things they have is like they have anthropologists as some of their product owners, because you have to know about humanities and how people actually work and how they evolve.

So they’re doing a lot of super interesting things.

And Rich wrote these two books that are really, really good as well.

Which leads me to a question.

I mean, you just mentioned Google and how Google is important for this discussion.

I mean, obviously, Google or Alphabet is one of the most successful companies that we have on this planet in terms of valuation, at least.

And you just mentioned the company that is Menlo that is also quite interesting.

So if this is very important for the success of companies, I would believe, maybe I’m wrong, that most of the companies don’t really care about these aspects or they are even pretty bad in these aspects.

So why is this lesson not learned broadly?

I think it’s because as humans, we like easy solutions.

We like to get a recipe.

And then maybe at some point, if we’re good at something, we want to do it more freely.

But so many times when I talk to companies, for instance, especially in the early days, when I was still a little bit involved in transformations, it’s like, why do you want to be agile?

Well, we want to be agile.

And they wanted a recipe.

They wanted like, OK, we live up to these measurements.

We do these things.

And I think that’s one of the reasons why Scrum has become so popular and also GIF’s ability to sell it to management.

It is very, very simple.

There are simple rules if you follow this recipe.

And I mean, the first time I saw it, I thought that was amazing.

But it’s just not enough.

And I think a lot of what we do in companies is it’s not enough.

We are putting teams together, but we’re not helping them learn how to communicate or collaborate because these are human skills and they are human.

So they must know.

We don’t build those things around.

We don’t build the safety because these things are hard.

It is super hard to learn how to collaborate.

It’s so much easier if you can say, OK, we have seven teams and they meet every Friday for Scrum of Scrums.

And then the problem is that that recipe does not help us.

It rarely helps us.

It’s rarely enough, at least.

But I think it is because we like easy solutions.

It sells a lot better than saying, OK, I can come and introduce this process than saying I can come in and help with the teams and and then we see how far we can get and how long it will take for us.

I can do a valuation as we go along, but I can’t tell you if we can reach this or when we can reach this.

So here’s another remark again by Vanessa.

So she says, I also think we are talking about the wrong thing, especially in the Nordics.

Fake harmony is the default here.

You have to engineer dissent.

Productive conflict has to be purposely designed for.

So, OK, so you agree?

Oh, yeah, I think I think one of the reasons that people talk about comfort is that that’s what we think.

But you very easily have that fake harmony.

And I think especially in the Nordics and especially in Sweden, where I am now, there is a lot of this that we want harmony, which means that we don’t bring up conflict.

And I’m not talking about, you know, fighting and yelling at each other.

I’m talking about conflict like, I think we should use a different library when we code this.

It can even be things like that.

And I think that that is also part of the safety is that we dare to have those conflicts.

And if you look at the book, Five Disfunctions of a Team, which you can say it might not be totally correct, but one of the things is avoidance of conflict.

That we don’t have these conflicts because we don’t want to disagree.

An example I had in a team I was working as was one of the male developers said, does this mean we cannot tell jokes anymore?

As in, if I tell a joke, you know, the woman on the team might be offended or feel hurt.

And I said, no, because if we say that you can’t tell jokes, then we don’t have safety for you.

But what it does mean is that if you tell a joke that hurts the female developer, she will feel safe enough to speak up.

And it will be safe enough for you to make a mistake if you own up to it.

Because if it becomes, I will shame you for doing this, then there’s no safety for that person.

So, I mean, because we just talked about the Nordic countries, I’m wondering, and obviously I’m from Germany, so I’m wondering, do you think there is a difference?

Do you have any idea whether there’s a difference between the Nordic countries, Scandinavia, Sweden and Germany in this regard?

So, or the German speaking region in general?

I think there is.

I think when you come into all the companies in Germany, I think it can be super hard because there is this, to some extent, rigid hierarchy.

I mean, it’s the only company, the only companies I worked in that had a proper corner office with a secretary and a coffee machine and where their parking spot was outside the building and not on the parking lot.

So because of that hierarchical thing, there can actually be quite a big difference.

And I’ve even had discussions with high-level managers where they were with their people saying, but I could be a coach, it’s not that hard.

And I had to tell him, do you want the truth?

Which of course he says, yes.

And I said, no, you can’t.

You ask people about something, but you don’t listen to what they say.

And that is the first thing you need to learn as a coach.

And from the look in other people’s faces, nobody ever told him anything like that before.

Nobody dared tell him anything like that before.

And I must admit, I had a few times where I thought, should I say this?

But then I’m like, if they can’t handle the truth said in a polite way, then this is not a place for me.

Yeah.

And I mean, that’s actually what consultants are paid for in my opinion in general.

Just a remark here, because I want to point that out.

So you’re actually talking about a specific type of companies.

So it might not be about the country, but rather that specific type of company and that culture that they have, like the traditional ones that have this strict hierarchy might be the same in other countries as well, I guess.

I just wanted to point that out.

But I also find that even in very hierarchical companies in Germany, it is possible to create safety inside teams.

But it’s harder to create for the whole organization.

Yeah, I would totally agree.

So there is an anonymous LinkedIn user and they ask, I think, an interesting question.

How would you relate trust to psychological safety?

I think trust is a big part of it.

Trust doesn’t mean that you think that people will always do exactly what they say they will, but it also means that, you know, they will own up to it if they make mistakes.

So I think if you don’t trust people around you, you will never feel safe.

And you need to, I think that’s part of when you build safety, that is part what you need to work on is that trust.

And I heard this term, which someone said was a Spanish proverb, but I never actually verified that.

But like trust comes in on foot, but leaves on horse.

It’s very easy to break trust.

So if you make mistakes, if you yell at people and you don’t own up to it afterwards, for instance, then you’ll break that trust and you will not be able to have safety.

One thing is that you yell at people, we’re all humans and we all make mistakes.

But if you don’t own up to it, then you’ve broken the trust and you’ve broken the safety.

And then what will happen is that people will just be quiet.

Okay, so what would your advice be if you or if I yelled at people?

If I was in the room with you and you yelled at people, depending on what you yelled, I would either take you outside or I would tell you how inappropriate it was in the room.

I have done both.

I have gone to the extent where I told someone that if they were in my company, I would have fired them in a very calm voice.

And then he said, Well, you always say that we don’t have to react on all feedback.

And I said, No, you don’t have to react on all feedback.

But that does have consequences.

And behaving in the way you do is not appropriate.

Appropriate.

I was rather, I mean, those are good points.

I was rather looking for, like, is there any way to repair that?

Is there any advice how you can, if you have such a situation where, as you said, trust is broken, how you can try to, well, fix it?

The thing I would do is address it properly.

I think a lot of times when we do something like that, we are so embarrassed about it.

Or we are, depending on, you know, a good person would be embarrassed about yelling at their colleagues.

And we don’t want to bring that up.

Because it is embarrassing.

And it’s very annoying.

But I mean, it does happen.

I’ve been in projects where, you know, we worked until we almost dropped down in the evening.

And then when you do that, you have such loose nerve ending that it’s easy to react very strongly.

So what I would do and what I have done is I have talked to the person or the people afterwards.

And said, sometimes I’ve said, I am very sorry for yelling at you.

I still meant what I said.

But I should not have yelled at you.

I have also said, I’m sorry, I lost my temper.

That was not appropriate.

And I did not intend to make you feel that way.

But I know that that was the consequence.

One thing that I see sometimes is that people make what I call an on apology.

Like, I’m sorry that you feel that way.

If you say something like that, you’re not taking responsibility for what you did.

You have to take that responsibility and say, I messed up.

To start to create that safety again.

And then if you had a really good safe environment, then I mean, there will be a bit of hurdles, but you will rebuild that.

If you had just built the safety, it will be super hard to rebuild it.

I think it’s important what you just mentioned about the on apology, because in a way, if you say, I feel sorry that you feel that way, you’re actually blaming that other person and not taking responsibility.

And I’m not sure whether that’s obvious.

In a way, it’s obvious.

It should be obvious because that’s actually what that sentence say.

But I guess often it’s not.

So I think here is an interesting point that Mian Rashid made.

I hope I pronounced your name correctly.

So giving people the power of taking decisions makes you a leader.

Leaders are not meant to take decisions alone.

Sometimes people mix leadership with decision-taking power only.

Would you agree?

Partly.

Okay.

I think that you can be a leader where you make all the decisions.

I think part of being a manager is that you are responsible for some things and sometimes you have to be the one that makes the decision.

You might also have some insight that other people don’t.

But if you can, then delegating those decisions so that people can make decisions where the work happens.

It’s much more helpful.

It makes a lot better products.

It makes a lot better teams if you can actually make decisions where it is made.

You need to be very explicit about which kind of decisions can be made in which area.

But even if you are the one who makes the decision, then I think you should listen to people.

It does not mean that you always do what people say, but you have to take people into consideration.

You have to listen to it because they know stuff that you don’t.

So when you make these decisions, especially when you make big, important decisions, listen to people.

But also you don’t have to have everyone agree on it.

That can take forever to figure out, or you might even have a weaker solution.

And part of, for instance, owning a company is that you are the one who decides the strategic decisions.

You make the strategic choices.

You can get a lot of help for that, but you are ultimately the one with the decision power.

I have to admit that to me the word alone is very important here.

So there is the sentence that Mian said, which is leaders are not meant to take decisions alone.

And that’s quite different from leaders are not meant to take decisions.

And that’s pretty much, I guess, the point in that regard.

So in your abstract of your talk, you say that psychological safety is important for high-performance teams.

And I think we discussed that quite a lot, how this is important and why this is important.

But let’s assume that there is a team that provides psychological safety.

Will that always become a high-performance team or a high-performing team?

Not necessarily.

It is a prerequisite, I think, to have really high-performing teams.

You can have some high-performing teams for a bit if you use management by fear.

Management by fear is effective to some extent and for a short while.

But you can also have psychological safety where you don’t have any expectations of performance.

And that’s where it’s just comfortable.

I’ve seen this mistake with some agile leaders who are kind of like, I don’t want to tell people what to do.

So they don’t set expectations.

They don’t follow up.

So you can have safety.

And then, of course, you can have your own performance ideas.

I mean, a lot of the people I know in tech and especially from the older generation, where we didn’t have computers everywhere, would go into tech because this was cool, because that’s what they wanted to work with.

So sometimes you drive your own performance as well as the one.

Because performance is not just a manager telling you now you have to perform.

It can also be yourself and have high expectations to yourself.

But if you don’t have high expectations, the company doesn’t have high expectations, then it’s just a nice place to be.

And very often that safety will be the same as comfort.

So there is a question by Alexander at YouTube.

And the question is, how would you keep psychological safety during a reorganization, given the goal of it is not to reduce stuff?

First of all, I would, as the top leadership, acknowledge that this is going to be hard for people, that it’s going to take time.

And I would involve people on different levels to give input.

I would make very clear, for instance, let’s say that you say, OK, I’m going to decide which people goes in which area.

You can decide the teams.

So make it very explicit.

What are the decisions that are going to be made from the top?

And also keep talking about this, that we will be making mistakes.

We will need to change things.

So talking about this as learning, talking about this, this is something we have.

We cannot sit down and design a perfect organization because we are humans.

And the people we have in our organization are humans.

So we can’t design the perfect organization.

We believe that this is a better organization, but it will also take getting used to.

It is expected that you might not deliver as much in the beginning as you do now, because you have to get used to your new role on your process.

So I would kind of address the difficult things about it, but also have an open door so people could come to you and talk about it.

Make it very explicit that like make it very explicit if this is a choice or not.

Because that’s one thing I’ve seen as a mistake sometimes is that managers come up with a few choices, but then people don’t pick the right one.

And if there is a right one, it’s not a choice.

So if you have already as high level management decided this is what we do, then don’t present it as a choice.

But be open as well to getting that input and be open to the fact that you could be wrong.

That there are things you don’t know.

Which sounds to me like honest communication in a way and open and honest communication.

How should I put it?

I mean, at the end of the day, this is a reorganization, right?

So it’s basically about what you’re doing on the job, which is pretty much what defines your job.

And I could believe that I was in charge of such a reorganization and I would be standing there and saying, well, you know, we are going to make mistakes.

It might sound as if I’m fooling around with the lives of the people.

So, you know, I see where you’re coming from.

But how can you be sure that this is not the impression that you’re making?

I think you would have to say something like, let’s all explain to people.

This is why we think the reorganization is a good idea.

This is why we’re doing the reorganization.

We have worked through this and we believe that this is the best version.

We also know we can’t take everything into consideration.

So we will make mistakes and we will correct this as we go along.

And that’s why we need you to keep giving us your input, for instance.

So I would not go on and say, yeah, we’re making a reorg.

And by the way, we are humans.

So we will fail, which can be very easy to do because you want to show that vulnerability.

So I think, again, I haven’t said this before.

You have to find that balance between what are the things that are, like, fixed and what are the things that are not fixed.

Sometimes people tell me that the way I do coaching is bad-ass and caring because there are some principles that I feel very strongly about.

Also, when I was a manager, and those are things that it will take a lot to budge me.

I will really need to get some really strong input.

And then there are other things where I believe that people know best.

I could come up with a suggestion.

Sometimes I would.

Sometimes I wouldn’t.

But I think that the clarity in it and the honesty in it and the respect for people, I think, is what helps create that safety.

And maybe even address that safety might be broken a bit as we are moving around, also because you need to sit with new people.

We will continue to work on this so we can get back on where we are now.

I just thought about, you know, move fast and break things.

Yes.

That actually says we are fooling around and we are breaking things.

It should rather probably say move fast and it’s okay if we break things.

And that’s sort of the line of the communication.

Not saying that we are voluntarily making mistakes.

It’s just that it’s important to be aware that there might be mistakes made.

And we want to make small mistakes and we want to make intelligent mistakes.

Yeah.

So an unintelligent mistake is something that you know will happen.

Like if you don’t test your code at all, that is not intelligent mistakes.

But even though we test our code and we think we have tested everything, code is also complex.

And there will be things that we do, and there will be overflow of an integer that will make a whole rocket fall down, for instance, because there was some old code that wasn’t deleted.

That is a sort of intelligent mistake.

You could have deleted the code.

But we want to have those mistakes that we can’t take into consideration.

And also we want to fail small.

We don’t want to do things big bang.

Yeah.

That’s also very important.

So let me see.

Prashanth Akunuri, and I’m sorry if I got that wrong, said, what is the role of bias leaders and team members might have in the context of psychological safety?

Oh, good question.

We all have bias.

The more we can become aware of our biases, the more we can act on them when they happen.

I know one of my friends, for instance, they have a bias against old people, which I’m afraid I am now entering that phase.

But you kind of have this.

I also have a friend who is now, let me see, I am 54, so she will be 84.

And if she’s sitting at the emergency row on a flight, the flight attendant will bend down, talk quietly to her, and ask her if she’s actually able to open the door and stuff like that, where, I mean, she could kick my ass any day.

She will live when I’m gone.

I am sure about that.

But she’s old.

So we have these biases.

And I think when we have these biases, it is so much easier to judge people because I’ll be like, okay, these are young developers.

They come directly from university.

My bias might be that they don’t have any practical knowledge.

And if I have that bias, I will judge them differently.

One of the ways you can go against that is to be curious about people.

So if they do something that you find is totally wrong, instead of being like, what were you thinking, going like, oh, that’s interesting, what made you come up with that?

What perspectives have you taken into consideration, for instance?

And there are other biases.

I mean, there are racial biases.

There are gender biases.

We have, I think, is there like 50 biases or something?

So I think those biases will pop up.

And the thing is to handle them when they come.

Some people say that you can change the first thought that comes in.

I don’t believe in that.

I feel like sometimes a thought will come into my head about something, and I’ll be like, okay, I know that this is a bias, and then I can choose not to react on it, or I can choose to react differently.

But that requires that you are aware of your biases and that you have developed the skill of not going directly from brain and out, but actually taking that pause, because what you think might be okay, but what you do has to be okay, especially if you’re a manager.

Yeah, I feel I’m – I would totally agree.

I feel like a bias is a way to make sense of an environment quickly, and you have to be aware that what you think first, like the bias might be wrong, and then you have to take action probably.

Yeah.

So, yeah, and it’s very natural because you have to make sense of things quickly oftentimes.

Yeah.

Is there anything else?

I’m just wondering whether there’s anything else I should be asking you.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

So what’s the most important advice that you would give to people?

I think the most important advice I would give to people is to work on this.

Bring it up.

If you can, take that first step where maybe you talk a little bit about the mistake that you did.

It can be small things.

It can be safe things, but, like, if you are able to take that first step, as managers especially, but also other leaders, I would recommend learning a little bit about psychological safety.

It doesn’t have to be like you don’t have to know everything, but at least know what it is and become aware of the effect that your actions have.

But start building trust.

Start getting to know each other.

There are a few elements that you can do, and interesting enough, they are the same when you work remotely as when you work in an office.

One of my friends, Matt, was doing some research about psychological safety in remote settings, and the things that they come up with are exactly the same things as we have.

So it’s very much about knowing that other people are humans, knowing that you as a human will fail, and it’s not like you might fail.

You will fail because we are humans, and knowing that by owning your things and by living up to your obligations, so to say, and your principles, you can still build that safety even when you fail.

But you can do a lot, and the more senior you are in whatever form that is, the more you are a role model.

And I’ve taken it upon myself to do my best to make other people feel safe because, I mean, while I’m a woman, which is not the majority in our industry, I am also white.

I come from a country where I had food every day, where we don’t have to pay for schools, where I get medical health care.

I have a lot of things that other people don’t.

I’ve had the ability to get a university degree.

So for me to be curious about other people, for me to show that I make mistakes, for instance, so the three things that Amy Atkinson says about as a leader is frame work as learning, show fallibility, and be curious.

And I think those are very important.

So be curious and be kind would be the short version of this.

So, I mean, what you said is something that I think everyone can do, like not just management but also developers and pretty much anyone.

However, if I’m in an environment where it’s really unusual to admit mistakes, you would still do that to become a role model?

Maybe.

I mean, I would.

But like I said, I also have worked with my coach for many years.

I would probably start a little bit smaller then.

Maybe I would talk about a mistake that I made outside work.

I was training my kids football team yesterday.

And I mean, the job market is not what it used to be.

But I used to tell the people, if you cannot talk about your mistakes, maybe you need to consider if this is the right place to work.

It is not as easy as it was like five years ago where you could get a job.

But the interesting part is that the more unsafe you feel, the less you believe that you can get a new job because it gets to you and you feel like it’s your fault.

So there are still two comments from LinkedIn.

So Marco Geiger said concerning the question that we just discussed, as a very first step, we do use delegation poker to transparently determine who wants to take on responsibilities in the project to be more tangible who’s in lead.

Can you explain delegation poker?

So delegation poker is a tool that was presented by Jürgen Apello in Management 2.0.

And to be honest, I haven’t used it myself.

But it is a quite concrete tool where you can go and you can figure out what about who has which responsibilities.

And I think Marco has a really good point.

It’s about who wants to take on the responsibilities in the project as well.

So it’s not about pushing responsibilities on people.

But it’s about figuring out who will take these responsibilities.

I have to admit that seems like to me that’s not – I’m not sure this is related to psychological safety.

I think that’s the question I want to ask.

I think it was related to the one where it’s about does the manager make all decisions.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

That makes sense.

And I think that as a manager and a leader, if other people make the good decisions, which they will often do because they are closer to the work, then delegation poker is a good concrete thing you can do to figure out which responsibility goes where.

So there is one question by some anonymous LinkedIn user.

Is this session recorded?

Yes, it is.

And you can actually look at the recording at LinkedIn right here where we are doing the live thing.

And also there is the webpage, which is this one.

So I mean it should be – yeah, it’s at the very top right there, software-architektur.tv.

So the recording will also be available as an audio.

And I put the URL in the chat.

And the very final question by Nils Jakobsen is, I’m working in a team where everyone works remotely 100% of the time, everyone from home and being in seven different countries, three time zones.

Is there any indicator that psychological safety is actually decreasing before people themselves realize it when not being together?

So I guess it’s twofold, right?

The question is, are there these indicators?

And then particularly in a remote environment where we don’t really have these daily meetings and we see each other every day, what are the indicators in that case?

Yeah, and I think when you are working remotely, you need to make much more of an effort.

Because if you’re in the same office, you might talk at the coffee machine.

But unless you do this deliberately, you will not – like you can have coffee meetings, for instance, getting to know each other.

There are different things you can do to build that trust.

So one of the things that you can see is about how much do people actually communicate.

Like do they have a video stream going?

Do they chat a lot?

And if that kind of is decreasing, if you don’t see people asking for help, that can be one thing.

You can also – Amy Atkinson has seven questions that she goes in and asks, which will help indicate you can make a baseline and then follow up on things.

So I would say the things that I – I think the hard part is that if there’s no psychological safety, sometimes it’s invisible, whether that is in a room or that is online.

But I look – things I look out for is like are people asking for help?

Are people offering help?

Are people talking about mistakes?

Or is everything just handy-dandy?

Or is there communication with people?

Those are things I would look out for if you don’t want to make like an official survey and ask people.

Which would also be an option, right?

I mean just talk to people.

Yeah, that’s also an option, and I’ve done it a few times.

Like talk to them one-on-one and then get an idea.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you so much for taking the time and answering all my questions and also all the questions from the audience.

Thanks for the audience for asking all those questions and joining in.

As I said, Gitte will also talk at the Software Architecture Gathering in Berlin in November 16th to 19th and Code SATV_15 for 15% rebate on the prize.

If you want to join us, I’ll also be there.

Have a great weekend.

Thanks again, and talk to you soon, I hope.

Bye.

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