Psychological safety, power, and Mary Parker Follett

Power dynamics are closely intertwined with psychological safety. 

We’ve highlighted power dynamics in previous issues, but I wanted to dive into it a bit more this week. Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), writer, social worker, political theorist and organisational consultant, has been called “the woman who invented management” and was referred to as his “guru” by Peter Drucker. Drucker revolutionised management thinking in the 1950s by considering businesses and corporations not just as economic systems, but social systems too, and much of that insight was directly inspired by Mary Parker Follett. Due to society’s attitude to women at the time, Mary’s ideas and writings were not well known outside of a limited group, but she remained one of the first women ever invited to address the London School of Economics, and was sought out by US President Theodore Roosevelt as his personal consultant on managing not-for-profit organisations.

Mary breathed humanity and common sense into a world dominated at the time by Tayloristic perceptions of work as a machine – with humans as simple components. Instead, Mary framed business organisations as social institutions, consisting of complex interactions between people, processes, tools and economics. Mary also focused on the dynamics of power: power could be created and kindled, or smothered and killed through the acts of authority. 

Mary conceptualised three types of power:

Power-over is extractive. Power-over is extracted from other people, the natural world, etc. Power-over means getting more of the pie. 

Power-with is gained when we work together, i.e, collective action. Power-with means making the pie bigger as a result of all of us making pie together. 

Power-to is productive and generative. Power-to is the power we have to create new things. Power-to means making the pie bigger in some new way or even making a new and different pie. 

Thanks to Cat Swetel for the above descriptions in this excellent piece on power. 

Mary also described the social interdependence we experience in an organisation and framed these three expectations: 

Expect to need others.

Expect to be needed.

Expect to be changed. 

In her paper “Dynamic Administration“, Mary writes “To sum up our consideration of powerover. Powerover can be reduced: (1) through integration, (2) through recognising that all should submit to what I have called the law of the situation, and (3) through making our business more and more of a functional unity. In a functional unity each has his functionand that should correspond as exactly as possible with his capacityand then he should have the authority and the responsibility which go with that function.“

When Mary uses the word “integration”, she means a form of “non-coercive power-sharing“, and what she’s describing here is what David Marquet has more recently described as “moving authority to where the information is” (as opposed to trying to move information to where the authority is – which is both harder and slower). In the military, this concept is known as Mission Command. It’s also one of the foundational concepts of The Toyota Production System, DevOps, Agile, and SLAM teams: teams should possess the autonomy to make decisions about the work, because they’re in the best position to do so – not someone  in “management” who is far removed from the reality of daily work.

And in order to make those decisions, work together, create generative power, and bake a bigger pie, we must foster greater psychological safety within teams and organisations. Considering power: dynamics, distance, gradients, structures and effects, is crucial for creating psychologically safe learning organisations. 

Psychological Safety In the Workplace: