Using Data to Foster Psychological Safety

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Feb 17, 2022

8 min read

Psychological safety is a hot topic across all industries these days, but in the fast-paced and dynamic world of software engineering, it plays an especially important role in driving innovation and high performance. Yet, what exactly is psychological safety? Why is it so important for software engineering teams in particular, and how can it be fostered?

To gain real-world insight into this complex topic, Code Climate’s SVP, Customer Organization, Karthik Chandrashekar sat down with Anjuan Simmons, Engineering Coach at Help Scout, Heidi Waterhouse, Principal Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly, and Lisa Van Gelder, VP of Engineering at Avvir.io, to discuss the importance of safety, the strategies they use to implement it, and how data helps them achieve it. Here are some highlights from their virtual roundtable.

Psychological Safety Heightens Speed and Performance

Lisa: [Psychological safety] gives engineers the ability to fully participate in a team. To give their ideas, to debate ideas, to feel free to take risks, to experiment. And if people don’t feel free to do those things, everything slows down.

Anjuan: I boil psychological safety down to two things, truth and trust. People can live their truth – the truth of their experiences, their history, even the truth of their performance.

Heidi: When I come at psychological safety, I frequently come at it from the sort of scientific side, realizing how much of a difference it makes to the performance of a team. The faster a team moves, the more psychologically safe they are, the more they feel like they can take risks, but also the more they feel like they can take risks, the faster they move.

Learning Your Team’s Lived Experiences Helps Cultivate Safety

Anjuan: I think that leaders have to establish authentic relationships with their directs. One of the easy tactical things to do is to have weekly 1:1s. If you’re a manager and have people who you are responsible for, if you’re not meeting with them weekly in a 1:1, then you’re not engaged in a psychologically safe environment, because you just don’t even know where you are.

[During 1:1s] talk about more than just status or work. Discuss their career and personal goals and see what you can do to be supportive. By having those 1:1s, you begin to get an idea of their background and their profile. You’ll probably find that a number of the people who you work with and who are your directs have gone through trauma brought on by work, especially if they are members of marginalized groups. Knowing [someone’s history] is really important to understanding what team members may not be feeling psychologically safe and steps that you can take to help with that. I’ve never found a one size fits all approach to this. You have to tailor it to the individual people who you’re working with.

Heidi: The more senior we get, the more trauma we have. To this day I have a fear reaction when I’m one-on-one with my manager and they close the door. There’s nothing wrong with closing the door to give me feedback. That is in fact the responsible thing for a manager to do. But I got fired enough at crucial times in my career that I have a fear reaction.

I think the idea of moving through the world as a trauma-informed person enables you to be considerate of the scars people are carrying around, becoming a force multiplier for your ability to be a good friend and manager, and to get the best out of the people that you’re working with.

Lisa: It’s not always obvious if your team is having issues with psychological safety. Ideally, they will tell you, but quite often, especially if you are a new leader on a team, they don’t trust you enough to let you in and tell you what’s going on. You kind of have to go into debugging teams mode, observe them, and see what happens.

Put Metrics in Context

Lisa: When you think about introducing data or metrics onto your team, I encourage you to think about what those metrics are nudging the teams to do in order to meet those metrics, because it’s really easy to accidentally introduce a metric that would harm the psychological safety of your team.

A metric I love to use instead is Cycle Time. I love it because it’s a full-team metric. [For example], if it takes an engineer two days to complete a story and seven days to deploy it, you have a better idea of where to start digging to spot areas that can be optimized.

Heidi: Metrics are useful for building safety and consideration around your team while still figuring out where your gaps and your problems are in a blameless way.

Small Changes in Syntax can Improve the Environment

Anjuan: As I mentioned before, you always want to hone in on the lived experiences of the people who come through the doors of your company, whether they’re physical or virtual. So for example, at Help Scout, we took the common scrum term “backlog grooming” and changed it to “backlog refinement” because the word “grooming” has negative connotations. That small change was a nod to the fact that we understand that some words can be triggering to some people.

To find out more about using data to help foster psychological safety on your team, request a consultation.

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Whitney Diehl

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