Psychological Safety 69: Coffee’s for Closers!

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses sales teams, game theory and the Agile Prime Directive.

If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks and/or forward it to other people who may appreciate it! To view this newsletter and previous issues online, head to psychsafety.co.ukOur next meetup is likely to be September (date tbc), and we’ve got an amazing speaker lined up to talk about neurodiversity, autism and psychological safety. More details to follow!
The Psychological Safety Action Pack has had a redesign! Version 2 now looks beautiful (v1 was, frankly, a bit ugly) as well as having a tonne of useful content about building, measuring and maintaining psychological safety in organisations. There may be typos and mistakes, because it’s a new revision, so if you happen to find any, please let me know and I’ll fix them for v2.1!

And if you’re free on Tuesday 26th at 1:30pm UK time, we’re holding an Open Lean Coffee on psychological safety! Lean Coffee is a great way to have a constructive, informal, and psychologically safe discussion. You can be as involved as you want – there’s no pressure to speak up, and everyone’s voice is welcome. Register here.

This newsletter is sponsored by Conflux.

Conflux is the leading business consultancy worldwide helping organisations to navigate fast flow in software. We help organisations to adopt and sustain proven, modern practices for delivering software rapidly and safely.

Many organisations today are stuck using ways of working from a bygone age. In this article, Sophie Weston, Principal at Conflux, takes a look at why knowledge work needs a new approach in which psychological safety is a key ingredient.

Psychological safety opinion

“Coffee’s for closers!“

I’m really lucky that I get to work with loads of teams in different industries and sectors – including teams in software development, teaching, healthcare, and, recently, quite a few sales teams. And one thing I’ve observed is that sales teams often suffer from lower psychological safety than other teams. I should make it clear that this isn’t because people are behaving badly – folks in these teams, and people I know in sales roles, are lovely, caring, skilled, and committed folks. It’s not (usually) any of the team member’s fault that psychological safety is low – instead it’s the game they’re forced to play.
 

If you’ve seen the film Glengarry Glen Ross, you’ll be familiar with this representation of a stereotypical high-pressure, competitive sales team. In the film, management pit the sales people against one another, with a limited supply of “leads” that they must use to hit their near-impossible targets. Only one sales person can win, and the person with the lowest results gets fired. The supply of leads is limited, and only one person gets the reward. This results in underhand and even criminal activity, in order to “win” the game. (I’ll refrain from spoilers in case you haven’t watched it!) 

The game they’ve been given to play is a zero-sum game. I.e. not everyone can win: in order for someone to win, someone else must lose. This doesn’t have to be the way. 

Unfortunately, this approach (though maybe not quite as extreme as in the film) is all too common in the management and design of sales teams. Even in modern, progressive firms, the “highest performing” sales person receives something like a “Top Gun” award, extra bonuses, and promotions. This focus on individual success over team success results in low psychological safety; how can we be sure that someone else on the team won’t act in their own self-interest if that’s exactly the way the work has been designed? In sales, the term “eat what you kill” refers to the fact that in many teams, most of your income is derived from the sales you make – so if you make a lot of sales, you’ll earn a lot, if you don’t make many sales, you won’t earn much. The problem with this is that it’s an individual target, and we know is that teams are “greater than the sum of their parts.” – a team can achieve more together than the members can by themselves. So why don’t we incentivise sales teams with team-level rewards?

If you’ve read Amy Edmondson’s book, The Fearless Organisation or watched some of Amy’s Ted Talks, you’ll be familiar with the psychological safety & performance 2×2. We’re always striving to move teams towards the Performance (or Learning) zone, but because of the way sales teams are often designed, they can struggle to move out of the anxiety zone – because they possess high ambition and drive to achieve results, but low psychological safety. How is someone going to ask for help or admit a mistake if the team is designed in such a way that that information could be used against them so that someone else can “win” instead?

In many ways, we could argue that sales teams set up like this aren’t actually a team. In fact, they’re almost the opposite – they’re opposing “teams” (consisting of a single person) playing a competitive game. Well designed teams possess shared goals, not individual targets, and treat a sale as a team success rather than an individual win. Coffee shouldn’t just be for closers: what about the person who sets up the sale, the person who supports the close, or the person who improves the process? In a true team, everyone is responsible for shared success, and everyone deserves the coffee 🙂

What do you think? Are there ways to design a team for psychological safety and success, and ways to design for failure? 

Psychological Safety In the Workplace:

Here’s a piece (promotional) about psychological safety in the workplace with Vanessa Smith and Hannah Datz of ServiceNow. Vanessa describes a situation that I’ve seen too many times, when someone is placed in a middle-management role, between a “hard-driving visionary boss and a team that wasn’t ready for what she was proposing. Calls with her were full of drama. Calls with them were full of pushback. I couldn’t wait for my next role.” That position is almost the definition of “between a rock and a hard place” – and the source of great stress for many middle managers.

In this piece in the Compliance Podcast Network, “Safety in the middle”, inspired by Amy Edmondson’s article in MIT Sloan about Fostering Ethical Conduct Through Psychological Safety (that we covered in issue 63) the authors discuss compliance through a psychological safety lens, and point out: “the higher up in the organization you go, there may well be “an ethical blind spot. That makes the role of team managers even more important when it comes to fostering an environment conducive to both engaging in ethical behavior and talking about ethics in an open, constructive way.””

We covered this in issue 65 – the weaponisation of psychological safety, but this article by Amrit Sandhar articulates it well: “Creating a psychologically safe space isn’t a licence for people to be unkind or behave in ways that come across as rude.“

Things to do and try:

The Agile Prime Directive was created (I believe) by Norman L. Kerth  in the book, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews, in 2001. It’s inspired by the Star Trek Prime Directive, the embodiment of one of Starfleet’s most important ethical principles: noninterference with other cultures and civilisations: “The Prime Directive prohibits Starfleet personnel and spacecraft from interfering in the normal development of any society, and mandates that any Starfleet vessel or crew member is expendable to prevent violation of this rule.“

The Agile Prime Directive is specifically designed to create psychological safety during an agile retrospective, explicitly stating that participants won’t be punished for the things they disclose, and that blame will only ever be placed on systems, processes and technology, not people. It’s a powerful statement, and applicable in far more contexts than retrospectives too – it reminds us to avoid attributing any failure to “human error”, malice, or laziness. Of course, it’s not impossible for that to be the cause – it’s not unknown for someone to sabotage a project or act in their own self-interest – but we should default to the Prime Directive: we’re all trying our best, even we we haven’t done our best. 

This week’s poem:

Obligations 2, by Layli Long Soldier


                                                    As we


                                        embrace          resist


                          the future       the present      the past


             we work          we struggle          we begin          we fail

​

to understand       to find        to unbraid        to accept        to question

 

              the grief          the grief           the grief          the grief


                          we shift         we wield           we bury​


                                    into light               as ash


                                             across our faces


In case the poem doesn’t format correctly in your email, you can see the correct format here.

Thanks to Jonathan Cohen for the suggestion.

Mission statement

The mission of this newsletter is to make the world of work a better, safer, more inclusive and equitable place. We work towards this by sharing, as widely as possible, new research and opinion, case studies, news, practices and methods related to psychological safety. 

This includes topics such as inclusion, human factors, facilitation, safety critical environments, systems thinking, leadership and management, diversity and equity, mental health, organisational dynamics, culture, ethics, and more. 

A core goal is to amplify the voices of minoritised groups and those who are less represented in this field. This includes (but is not limited to) voices of people of colour, neurodiverse people, LGBTQ+ people, women in leadership and tech, and more.

Another goal is to share insights and best practices across different domains: for example, so that those of us in tech may learn from healthcare, and those of us in education can learn from aviation.

I believe knowledge is worthless unless it’s accessible. A key principle of this newsletter is to only share content that everyone can access. This excludes content behind paywalls, research papers that are not open-access, and proprietary tools that don’t open source their algorithms (preventing us from observing how systems make decisions about us). There may be some exceptions to this principle in practice, for example, where authors are able to share original texts of papers.

Whilst this statement will evolve this over time, the core principles of equity, amplification, and progressive & humanistic leadership shouldn’t change.