Why is psychological safety important to software engineering teams?
What does psychological safety mean and why does it matter to software engineering teams.
Before answering this question, you need to know what psychological safety is. Amy Edmondson, in her book The Fearless Organisation, describes it:
The belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking
The best way to understand this is to break down the three key areas.
Interpersonal risk
Interpersonal relates to relationships or communication between people; therefore, interpersonal risks are issues that could affect relationships or communication. Risks could be thought of as others perceiving you to be:
Ignorant - when you share, you don't know something
Incompetent - when you make a mistake as you don't know how to do something
Negative - when you highlight mistakes, issues or potential problems
Disruptive - when you make suggestions that are different to others or generally ask questions that no one else is
What is the most effective way to counteract these risks? By staying silent and limiting what you do say to just the bare minimum. The problem is that taking risks is one of the best ways to learn from each other. By not taking risks, we slow or even limit the innovation opportunities for ourselves and others.
Work environment
The work environment can vary from situation to situation, but it is typically the group of people you find yourself working with to accomplish some goal. For software teams, this is usually the team in which you work with day to day. However, other working groups could also exist, such as your peers across the department or the leadership team you are a part of.
Belief
Belief relates to the individual within a work environment and is what they think about taking interpersonal risks.
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What does a psychologically safe environment look like?
Based on the above definition, a psychologically safe work environment would allow individuals to speak up and take interpersonal risks by asking questions, saying they don't know something, pointing out problems, admitting to making mistakes or making alternative suggestions without other people thinking less of them for it. In fact, speaking up in this way is actively encouraged and rewarded.
A point to note is that psychologically safe environments don't mean that there can never be any conflict. Conflict is almost a characteristic of psychologically safe environments. In an environment like this, individuals can have different views but, importantly, can work through them productively without resorting to a deadlock.
Complexity in the work environment
A lot of software engineering teams' work can be considered complex. Complexity arises from many factors, such as uncertainty about what needs to be done, how best to do it, and whether the outcome is even obtainable. In addition, no one can understand all the intricacies involved with the work because most systems are larger than anyone can fully understand.
Complexity is one of the key reasons why we work in multidisciplinary teams. This way, all the different disciplines can collaborate and determine what needs to be done. However, working in multidisciplinary teams requires a high degree of interdependence between team members in order to carry out the work effectively. For this reason, successful teams require effective collaboration to determine what needs to be done, how to do it, and how to determine if it has been successful.
Complexity and interdependence are some of the core reasons why software engineering teams adopt agile delivery methods. It encourages teams to break down their work, make their assumptions about the complexity visible and deliver little and often so they can iterate towards success.
Effective collaboration for group learning
Effective collaboration between team members isn't simply each person completing their part of the work and then handing this off to the next person, like a production line.
For production line style of work to be effective, all that is needed is cooperation between team members and coordination to fit all the pieces together*.
The problem with the production line framing for software engineering work is that it misses the interdependence between team members due to the complexity of the work environment.
With effective collaboration, individuals can learn from each other much more effectively. They can speak up and take interpersonal risks without second guessing whether their teammates will think less of them for it.
* Learn more about cooperation, coordination and effective collaboration using the scales of collaboration.
Why is psychological safety important to software engineering teams?
Due to the complexity of the work, creating software systems requires people to share information. One of the best ways to ensure that information flows freely is for the people involved to feel it is safe for them to take interpersonal risks. While this does not guarantee success, teams that do are more likely to identify issues, come up with solutions, and implement them much quicker than teams that don't.
Psychological safety is a characteristic of high-performing teams. It is a prerequisite for effective collaboration, which is fundamental within software teams.
Learn more about psychological safety
A 3-part interview series I did with InfoQ on the work I've done on psychological safety
Part 2: Creating psychological safety using a top-down and bottom-up approach
Part 3: What I've learned from trying to measure psychological safety
A blog post with InfoQ on how we built testability with psychological safety. Takeaways are:
Testability enables teams to confidently make changes to their systems via tests that indicate if the system's behaviour has been altered.
Successfully implementing testability needs developers and testers to collaborate effectively.
Effective collaboration doesn't just happen; it needs to be nurtured by team leaders by encouraging experimentation and reflection on what is and isn't working.
The key to effective collaboration is psychological safety, which allows team members to take interpersonal risks without fear of judgment or reprimand.
Implementing an experimental approach to working allows team members to try things and fail in a risk-free environment.
My QCon 2023 talk on how Staff+ engineers can foster psychological safety
I'll be doing a deep dive on this talk soon. Let me know if you're interested, and I'll pull it up in my schedule for posting.
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