Does the team at Facebook have psychological safety?
And other musings on how to build resilient teams to navigate outages and pandemics
Hello dear builders! Thanks so much for the feedback from last week’s newsletter. Always fun to write something that people read and connect with. Still trying different types of content to see what resonates (and to see what I enjoy writing about most), so please let me know when something strikes a nerve. At some point I’ll figure out how to add a survey to the bottom of these posts, but with two children and a full time job it is a small miracle that I found time to type this out in the first place. Send me an email instead. I hope you have an awesome weekend!
-Nickey
Ooooo Facebook outage, can we talk about it? The drama! So much to discuss when the world’s largest communication platform straight-up ghosts us for over SIX hours. Anytime your services, platforms, whatevers go down it’s a great moment to check-in with how it impacted you. If you’re a business owner or influencer who lost contact with your customers for the entire business day, it is time to diversify and outage plan for the next time this happens (says the newsletter writer whose entire subscriber base is on Substack. Pot, kettle, black).
Anytime there is a serious outage or issue with a technology product, I can’t help but think about all the juicy details in the forthcoming postmortem (and wish desperately that I could read it). For those of you working in technology, you are no stranger to outages. They happen, and never quite in the way that you’ve planned or prepared for. The chain of events is almost always unique and always a surprise. People fail, processes fail, technology is fallible by nature, and teams are often caught holding the bag with, in Facebook’s case, billions of users waiting for them to just fix it already.
I personally am no stranger to outages. A long time ago I was a Forums moderator at Etsy and the site would always combust at 11:57pm when I was up alone. This was before automated alerting was invested in, so I would literally notice the site was down because I couldn’t access the Forums and would send out a panicky bat signal. THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE! I would dutifully ping (in an IRC channel, before pager duty was a reliable alternative) a handful of engineers who would drop everything to troubleshoot and discuss in #warroom. Sometimes those outages were true technology failures. Servers would fall over, pushed code would break tools, or third party integrations would go boom. The other half the time they were community crises, like the one time we forgot to put an American flag on Etsy’s homepage on the Fourth of July and therefore Etsy was suddenly anti-American. 🤦🏻♀️🤪
While the level of ridiculousness varied deeply depending on the day, the way we were trained to deal with these things never wavered. It was a strong early team who showed-up with zero ego and just worked through the shit so we were more resilient for the next crisis. I didn’t realize at the time how abnormally healthy this was, especially for a start-up!
Lots of people are going to sit down this week to write about how to run postmortems and how to build blameless culture to act as a backbone for outages like Facebook’s on Monday. But not me. Yes those things are important but there is a more important thing that ALWAYS GETS MISSED when discussing these types of issues and that thing is psychological safety. Specifically creating an environment where it thrives, so in these moments when shit really hits the fan people can drop the pretext and dig deep with each other to figure it out quickly.
What is psychological safety again? Psychological safety is the creation of an environment that allows you to show up unencumbered by a fear of the assassination of your ideas, your performance, or your character. It removes the literal stress rocks from your brain so you can suggest creative solutions and to raise your hand even though you’re at the very bottom of the org chart. It is often shared by a team. If one person doesn’t have it, it’s rare that everyone else does. I’ve worked on teams with and without this and when you don’t have it and it’s not shared as a team, it’s like one rower in your crew boat is using their arms instead of paddles. It slows you down drastically.
Psychological safety has always been important, but it’s more important now than ever. Why? Because your team is already very stressed out right now. They’ve spent the last 19 months (!!!) of this pandemic living in a recurrent stress state. Their amygdalae quite literally have not had a vacation since the start of March 2020 (here is your quarterly reminder to use your vacation days even if you can’t go anywhere!). Psychological safety is difficult to create and maintain under normal times, yet the shared sense of danger we’ve felt in the last year(s) has heightened some teams psychological safety while completely doing away with others.
Most of us don’t work on products as central to the world’s social fabric as Facebook’s. Our outages are still a big deal, but less scrutinized. Yet, how we respond to them is still critically important. Our teams and customers are watching. Also, as the pandemic has dragged you can literally substitute “outages” for any type of business issue that is urgent. The same skills to solve them apply!
Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard that studies psychological safety, talks about the 2003 Columbia space shuttle explosion that killed seven astronauts. She postulates how the true root cause of that issue was not just an equipment failure, but rather the lack of psychological safety that discouraged a young engineer to speak up about something he saw and thought was not right. The engineer said, “I just couldn’t do it, Linda Ham was way up here and I was way down here.” Woof!
As I was writing this out, I also remembered a study that was shared around a few years ago from Google where they tried to map common characteristics of their top performing teams. What ended up being a commonly shared characteristic of their top teams was psychological safety. Teams that had it performed better, responded to emergencies better, recovered better. Given the state we find ourselves in as leaders, navigating a never-ending pandemic that continues to fry our people in new and novel ways, it’s good to invest in this, you never know when you’re going to need it.
So, as a builder, how do you work to create this in your organization, on your team? It’s hard, I don’t have all the answers, but I do have strong opinions (loosely held):
Build psychological safety at the very bottom of your organization. If the folks at the bottom of your org (who typically happen to also be closest to your customer) have it, the entire chain of command will as well.
Find time to connect in person. The last couple years have been weird as many former fully-IRL teams switched to remote work and still aren’t coming together regularly. As soon as it’s safe, come together (even if you’re going to go back to being remote). Trust is hard to build remotely, invest in it IRL.
Build process that encourages and celebrates new ideas. Good strategy comes from everywhere. During times of crises, the quality of the ideas that flow out of your team are incredibly important. Having a culture that is designed to squash those ideas is only going to hold you back.
Invest in the right process. People see this word and tend to blanch. But not all process is bad, especially when it’s designed to help create safety around respectful dissent, idea sharing, and meaningful collaboration. A good example of this comes from one of my favorite books The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, where he talks about how process (in his case literal checklists used by surgical teams in the operating theater) can help destress decision making to save that brainpower for moments when things go off script.
Nominate yourself to be the psychological safety ally. Meaning, if you think it’s not there, or you see people not wanting to speak up and share their thoughts, bring this up to leadership. Why is this happening? How can you and leadership help address it? Note, this will be hard (or impossible) if leadership doesn’t have it.
Normalize respectful disagreement. It’s okay to disagree! I repeat, it’s okay to disagree! What isn’t okay is to build culture where the disagreements are aggressive, overly negative, or toxic. Constructive discourse helps during the dark times, but if people are too scared to bring forth ideas, you’re smoked.
Hire and recognize leaders who do this well. Obviously!!!
And finally, if your team is fully remote or hybrid, understand how this will impact psychological safety and take steps to address it. We’ve shifted our ways of working drastically in the last year plus. Make sure to check-in with your teams and new processes to make sure they aren’t hurting what you’ve worked so hard to build.
As I was reading about the Facebook outage this week, watching the whistleblower indictment on the teevee, and generally thinking about the decision to pause development on Instagram for Kids after public backlash, all I could think about was what it would be like working there right now and how stressful that experience would be. Maybe I’m wrong (love to be wrong!), but my hunch is that the leadership layer and the bottom of the org chart are far from aligned, many folks in that organization don’t have true psychological safety, and you’re seeing more and more issues because of it. I’m going to noodle on that this weekend and I think you should too. Take these lessons back to your organization and re-invest in the most important safety net you can create for your team … psychological safety. And if you have any good examples of ways to create psychological safety that missed above (and I am sure there are so many more) share in the comments below 👇🏻