Psychological Safety: Anonymous Feedback and “Woke” companies

Welcome to the Psychological Safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You’re amazing. This week is a short-form issue and has content on anonymous feedback, layoffs, “woke”, psychological safety misunderstandings, innovation and more.

More exciting news! The meetups are back! The next psychological safety online meetup is planned for April 18th, 7pm-8:30pm UK time (2:00-3:30pm EDT), and it is all about “The Spectrum of Psychological Safety” – what happens when a team’s psychological safety is lost? What is the point of no return? 
Thanks so much to Cherisa Zafft and Patrick Senez who are going to be your facilitators for this one! Register here! 

Psychological Safety in the Workplace

I once had a boss who, with great intentions, built a system for everyone in the organisation to provide each other with anonymous feedback, digitally and instantly. It was disastrous. It damaged psychological safety, and fostered resentment, distrust and fear. Here’s a great piece from Gustavo Razzetti that dives deeper into the harm that anonymous feedback can have on teams and people. 

[And head here to dive further into feedback and psychological safety from a previous issue.]
 There is apparently chaos at Meta amongst mass layoffs after Mark Zuckerberg declared that 2023 will be the “year of efficiency” at the firm. Of course, layoffs are sadly sometimes a part of business reality, but the crucial thing is how a company handles them. Creating a competitive environment as per this comment: “They’re saying it’s ‘Hunger Games’ meets ‘Lord of the Flies,’ where everyone is trying to prove their worth to management.” is not conducive to performance in the long term, and damages psychological safety between team members who now feel they’re in competition, rather than collaboration. 

“Woke” is a term that seems to often fire emotion. When I asked people on Twitter what the word meant to them, people replied with points such as:

• Being conscious of other people, where they are coming from, being respectful of differences.
• Understanding, listening to different voices, and thinking critically about different perspectives.
• Becoming aware of the diversity around us, respecting people for what they are and including them. Becoming aware of own privileges and using it to help others. 

And here’s a great article in Rolling Stone that highlights the successes that “woke” companies (those who actively recruit people of colour, encourage vaccination, affirm human rights or donate to LGBTQ charities) have enjoyed over the past year.

I like this article from Lasse Olsen, who points out two common misunderstandings about psychological safety: 
#1: “Everyone needs to be friends with everyone”
#2: “Everyone should be able to deal with honest feedback”

Lasse makes the critical point that psychological safety is emergent: “It’s a result of having worked in volume together, laughed and argued together, failed and won together, learned and experimented based on why we are as a team and what we are trying to achieve.”


Here’s a nice transcript of a podcast episode “Taking Fear out of Innovation” with folks from MicKinsey. Erik Roth recounts a story of “holding a full-blown Korean funeral” to bury the idea that failure is something to fear. I like the idea of a visceral, real, rejection of the fear of failure and I’d love to find out how it worked out.

This is another great Work Chronicles cartoon. Feeling psychologically safe isn’t just restricted to voice – it applies to emails too!

Things to do and try:

@curiousbecks on Twitter is a newsletter reader, a lovely person, and a valuable contributor to the field of psychological safety. Becky is creating this timeline of psychological safety, and I love it. 
 

I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait a little for this, but soon, you’ll be able to use this book club facilitation guide for Amy Edmondson’s book, The Fearless Organisation that I’m helping Viktor Cessan and Magdalena Björkman create!
 

This week’s poem:

American Sermon, by Jim Harrison

I am uniquely privileged to be alive
or so they say. I have asked others
who are unsure, especially the man with three
kids who’s being foreclosed next month.
One daughter says she isn’t leaving the farm,
they can pry her out with tractor
and chain. Mother needs heart surgery
but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking
with pork fat. My friend Sam has made
five hundred bucks in 40 years
of writing poetry. He has applied for 120
grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps
strict track. The fact is he’s not very good.
Back to the girl on the farm. She’s been
keeping records of all the wildflowers
on the never-tilled land down the road,
a 40-acre clearing where they’ve bloomed
since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries
with a young female bear who eats them. She’s being
taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down
to Lansing where Dad has a job in a
bottling plant. She won’t survive the move.