Psychological Safety: Power and Mary Parker Follett

Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses power, rituals, 360 feedback, and psychological safety in the military.

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.

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 In the Workplace:

We mentioned rituals in last week’s newsletter, and this week I’m highlighting them again, this time from Charity Majors (who also featured last week!) – in this piece, Charity describes the excellent book “Rituals For Work” by Kurt Ozenc. I really like Charity’s takeaway:

I always endorse and encourage team rituals and ceremonies as powerful ways to build psychological safety in teams. As Ozenc describes, rituals build team cohesion, reinforce positive habits and good behaviours, and improve the practice of daily work by building expertise and reducing cognitive load. In my workshops on psychological safety, we examine and encourage existing team rituals, as well as considering more rituals to explore with the team.

This is a good piece from Rasheeda Childress about creating psychological safety for innovation. Childress references a good paper on psychological safety by Radislaw Nowak that we covered in issue 46, and highlights a well articulated point about diversity, homogeneity and psychological safety – “When we have more homogeneous groups of employees, we will expect higher cohesiveness,” Nowak said. “We know diversity is critical because it generates a different scope of ideas that we can use to help us innovate. On the other hand, we know diversity can generate conflicts and disagreements and could actually be bad for collaboration and information sharing.” I’d only add that diversity is critical because it’s ethically and morally right, as well as being good for business, and this also reflects other people’s excellent work, including this piece by Amy Edmondson and Henrik Bresman that shows how psychological safety acts as a catalyst for performance driven by diversity.

Liz Ryan tweeted this about 360 degree feedback, and articulates something that has been gnawing at me for years now – essentially that this form of feedback is often (nearly always?) executed so badly that it does more harm than good. This form of feedback is often forced (🚩), anonymous (🚩), indirect (🚩), lacking context (🚩) and can harm trust and genuine interactions inside teams.

I’ve always disliked 360 feedback, both receiving it and having to provide it, and Liz has helped me understand why. I can’t help but feel that 360 feedback is an artificial compensation for a lack of psychological safety which, if present, would enable direct, timely and contextual feedback between team members – which is far more powerful. And worse than that – I feel that 360 feedback is intended to compensate for a lack of safety, but actually risks damaging the psychological safety that it’s meant to compensate for.

Listen to this great podcast episode from Emotional Inclusion by Mollie Jean De Dieu featuring Amy Edmondson, talking about psychological safety and how it fits into the context of emotional inclusion (Ei). I like the point made in this about speaking up being important, but at a personal level, feeling like someone is actively listening matters even more.

This is an excellent recent report from the UK Ministry of Defence, examining psychological safety in major projects. The MoD carries out incredibly high-value, high-risk, and complex programmes of work, and this report explicitly recognises the importance of psychological safety in delivering successful projects, as well as learning from both failure and success in order to continuously create and improve learning organisations.

There are a lot of excellent takeaways from this report that apply directly to the MoD’s work, but also apply to (most) other contexts and projects too. Definitely worth a read, and also very useful for the next time someone suggests that psychological safety is nothing more a wellbeing initiative. Just the bold imagery itself might bring certain types of psychological safety detractors on board!

Things to do and try:

Thanks to John Cutler for sharing his great North Star Framework Library. There are a bunch of excellent resources in here, including templates and videos to show how to use them. The leading / lagging metrics provide excellent clarity, and the North Star Statement Exercise is one of the most useful tools I’ve used to distil strategic goals into actionable tasks and experiments.

This week’s poem:

Keeping Bees, by Jeune Price, 1997

I’ve been thinking about keeping bees
I’ve been thinking about keeping bees for as long as twenty years.
in that time
you’d have kept bees
eaten honey
hung a notice on the gate
started a candle-making business
set a trend sold up
found a new hobby
three times over.
I’m still thinking about keeping bees
I think I’ll join the Beekeeping Association
and maybe go to classes
about keeping bees.

Thanks Rob Price for sharing with me this wonderful poem that his mum wrote.

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.

power psychological safety rituals work

Tom Geraghty

Tom Geraghty, founder and CEO of Iterum Ltd, is an expert in safety cultures and psychological safety. Leveraging his unique background in ecological research and technology, Tom has held CIO/CTO roles in a range of sectors from tech startups to global finance firms. He holds a degree in Ecology, an MBA, and is pursuing a Masters in Global Health at the University of Manchester. His mission is to make workplaces safer, higher performing, and more inclusive. A renowned speaker, Tom has shared his insights at major events such as The IT Leaders Summit and the NHS Senior Leadership Conference. Connect with him on LinkedIn (@geraghtytom), Twitter (@tom_geraghty), or explore his work at https://tomgeraghty.co.uk and https://psychsafety.co.uk.