Managing Other Product Managers Part 3: Psychological Safety

See the Part 1 of Managing Other Product Managers for an introduction.

For your team to do their best work, they need to know that they will not be punished for taking appropriate project-specific or interpersonal risks. The name for this kind of confidence is psychological safety.

You may have noticed that managers who are jerks don’t tend to have highly productive teams. Sure, sometimes they have some standout team members, but for the most part, their teams tend to produce middling work. The term “psychological safety” is relatively new to the business lexicon, and it speaks directly to a key reason why jerky managers tend to produce sub-par output: teams cannot excel when they don’t feel safe to take chances.

If you’re reading this post and you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably not one of these jerky managers. However, every manager of product managers can benefit by thinking about what they are proactively doing to ensure project-specific and interpersonal psychological safety for their team.

Project-Specific Psychological Safety

Product managers need to make a lot of guesses and bets about the projects that they prioritize. These guesses and bets should be informed by a combination of data, experience, and instincts. However, like all bets, they don’t always pay off. Every PM will sometimes advocate for things that end up being wrong or not the best choice. Project-specific psychological safety means that a PM isn’t afraid of being punished when appropriate actions on their part lead to sub-optimal outcomes.

Overall risk tolerance varies by organization and depends on factors like company and product stage, market dynamics, and the type of product being worked on. Your job as a manager is to make sure that your PM team understands the risk tolerance that they have to work within. Their job is to work within those bounds as best as they can. When your team is taking risks within the acceptable bounds, whether they win or lose, your job is to support them and back them up. If you don’t, they will begin defensive positioning and will stop proposing what they think is actually best.

Evaluating what happened when things go wrong with product priorities is tricky and nuanced. But when things do go wrong, that’s when you get to show your team what kind of a manager you are. For example, let’s imagine a scenario in which a PM defers an infrastructure upgrade that eventually leads to a security breach with significant consequences. What happens next? It’s often the case that people (maybe including you) will have the instinct to punish or chastise the PM. However, you need to proceed carefully, because if you don’t handle things thoughtfully, you may decrease psychological safety for your team and reduce overall productivity.

In the above scenario, the question you need to ask is: was this employee operating at the level that I expect them to when they made the decision that led to the bad outcome? You need to ask follow on questions like:

• Should they reasonably have anticipated the adverse outcome that occurred?
• Did they ignore relevant information that you would have expected them to take more seriously?
• Did they fail to do a reasonable amount of research?
• Would other PMs on your team have handled things differently?

Sometimes, when things go bad, it’s just bad luck. When that happens, you need to defend the PM and their process.

Alternately, you may determine that the PM didn’t do their job at the expected level. If that doesn’t happen much with this PM, your best move may be to talk things through with them, tell them that they did not perform at the expected level, do a root cause analysis, and discuss what could have been done differently. On the other hand, if missing expectations is happening regularly, then you need to start a conversation with the PM about their performance.

If you maintain project-specific psychological safety for your team, they will know that you have their back, and they’ll be able to deliver more for the business.

Interpersonal Psychological Safety

PMs take all sorts of interpersonal risks throughout the work day. They might suggest a new concept without knowing how it will be received, or they might need to tell stakeholders that a project is running late, or they might want to tell their manager that they feel awful because their kid is keeping them up all night and they aren’t getting enough sleep.

When a PM is punished for taking these kinds of interpersonal risks, they don’t feel psychologically safe anymore, and their productivity goes down. I don’t mean “punished” here in terms of being formally punished; I mean not being listened to and not being respected.

What does being punished sound like in these scenarios? Like this:

• “No, forget that idea. We already tried it two years ago, and it didn’t work.”
• “It’s delayed again? Maybe I should get more closely involved to get things into shape.”
• “I’m sorry your kid is keeping you up but that’s your personal life and you need to figure it out.”

If a manager communicates to an employee in this manner, the employee gets the message: “It’s not worth it for me to care about this job”. And if they get that message, that’s bad for you and the business.

So how can you give PMs the feedback they need in a way that won’t make them feel smacked down? The solution is to use direct and caring feedback as advocated for in the book Radical Candor.

Here are some examples of what that looks like:

A PM is suggesting an idea that was tried before and didn’t work? “Yes this is an important problem and we tried to solve it before. It didn’t work. Let me tell you what happened and then let’s talk through your idea and see if it’s time to take another look.”

A project is delayed again? “I know you’re focused on getting this project out. My concern is that we are seeing repeated delays and we have a deadline that we need to meet, and it’s not okay for this project to be delayed further. Let’s talk about what you think is going on, and what we can do to get this project shipped.”

Their kid is keeping them up all night? “Wow — that sounds tough! I want you to know that I’m supportive of you doing what it takes to bring your best self to work. What can we do that might help you?”

(I’ve had that last conversation with team members several times. Particularly for parents of young children, it’s important for them to know that if they’re exhausted, it’s okay for them to go home and rest or take a nap.)

When a team member opens up to you, it’s an important moment. Listen to them. Empathize with them. Do not make it about you or your experiences. Do not solution for them. Make it clear to them that you want to support what is required for them to bring their best self to work. You will be rewarded with a team member who feels psychologically safe to deliver for the business.

Up Next

In part 4 of 4 on the topic of Managing Other Product Managers, I will discuss continuous improvement. Look for a post coming at some point! I do plan to get around to this but clearly I’ve been a bit distracted as of late…