Psychological Safety at Mavenlink
“Psychological safety is the ability to voice opinions, ideas and mistakes without repercussions. I think it’s really important to enable creativity and innovation and the ability to make mistakes and experiment without any shame or things happening afterwards.” — Ellyx Jolley, Mavenlink Senior Engineer
Psychological safety describes an environment where individuals feel empowered to take interpersonal risks within a group setting. First pioneered by social scientists in the 1960s, the study of psychological safety gained momentum in the 1990s through the work of scholars like Amy Edmonson as well as more recent research by institutions like Google’s re:Work program.
Mavenlink strives to maintain a psychologically safe work environment for its employees. JB Steadman, Mavenlink’s SVP of Engineering, sat down with our VP of Engineering Andy Leavitt and Senior Engineer Ellyx Jolley for a conversation on psychological safety. Together, they examined strategies for creating psychological safety among their teams, and the benefits of adopting such practices for individuals.
JB: Ellyx, you’ve been leading some discussion within the company about psychological safety and its value. So why don’t you let us know, what is psychological safety?
Ellyx: Yeah, sure. Psychological safety is the ability to voice opinions, ideas and mistakes without repercussions. I think it’s really important to enable creativity and innovation and the ability to make mistakes and experiment without any shame or things happening afterwards.
JB: Why is that important? What kind of benefits does a team or a company receive if they’re able to establish psychological safety?
Ellyx: I think it really makes your product a lot better. People feel free to take risks and look in areas that they wouldn’t usually look into, and create new ideas and new approaches to building a product. I think that innovation and creativity sort of sets Mavenlink apart from non psychologically-safe teams.
Andy: Yeah. I think, as we think about the kind of work that we do as engineers, as computer programmers, software designers, every day, we are doing things that have essentially never been done before. We don’t often as teams address the fact that there’s a lot of risk built into what we do. Will this work? Will it be accepted by the industry? And for us to truly be innovative and do the things that are exciting for ourselves and for our customers, we need to feel like we can take those risks.
“As facilitators, as leaders, we’re creating a space where we’re able to bring up the kinds of things that are hard to bring up, and then fully explore them in a way that’s safe, blameless. Hopefully, it leads to some action item that makes this process meaningful and worth it to the team that’s participating.” — Andy Leavitt
JB: Cool. Ellyx, how’d you become interested in psychological safety?
Ellyx: So, the first time I really heard about it was from Google’s re:Work set of articles about building good teams at work. I then really dug in with author Brené Brown, and started reading basically all of her books and digging in and seeing how that’s applicable to my team. Specifically the book Dare to Lead has been a big influence.
JB: Yeah, Dare to Lead. What are some of the major points you learned in that book?
Ellyx: The major point is that being vulnerable at work is okay. It brings in a lot of interesting new ways to work. It brings in humanity and emotion. Brown digs into different leadership styles where you’re not engaged with people — where you’re not vulnerable and you’re very defensive — and she compares that with being wholehearted and engaging in a different way with vulnerability and emotion. That changes the nature of leadership, and really builds trust between people on the team.
JB: Right on. Showing vulnerability at work is not the way a lot of us have been conditioned, it’s not the way the workplace has kind of evolved through the decades. What are some ways that teams can break that down and make vulnerability feel safe to participants?
Ellyx: Yeah. I think bringing your authentic self to work and not just focusing on the work is one step in doing that. Talking about things you care about, your values, what’s important to you, and engaging in those conversations I think is important and brings vulnerability there.
JB: And what are some examples of showing vulnerability at work?
Ellyx: Saying “I don’t know” is a big example of that, sort of admitting that you don’t know everything, and that’s normal and that’s okay. As a leader, setting that tone is important. Another way of showing vulnerability is talking about how you’re feeling that day. If you’ve had something in your life that’s going to affect your mood, communicating that to your team, knowing they’re willing to engage with you. We’re still able to get our work done, even though there’s influences outside of work that are coming onto play.
JB: Andy, you’re the engineering leader for the Salt Lake office. You need to establish cultural norms by leading by example. What are some ways that you’ve tried to show vulnerability to the team?
Andy: I think by modeling the behavior that you’d like to see from the members of your team. One particular example of this occurred when I was leading a team. We made some architectural decisions that ended up bringing the application down. Brought it to its knees. Everyone felt bad. I personally felt really bad about what had happened, and as we went through a process of doing a blameless post-mortem, we captured all of the events that happened in a factual manner, as free from emotion as we possibly could. And then we talked through those things, acknowledging the mistakes that we made.
As a leader of that team, I felt like I had to show that this is a blameless post-mortem, we’re not looking to blame anyone. Acknowledging the mistakes that I had made freed the rest of the team to feel like it was safe for them to acknowledge there were points where we could have made improvements. And I think modeling that behavior, especially as a leader, is the key to allowing our teammates to be able to express those things themselves. Being able to go from a place of being defensive and building a wall, and toward more of a growth mindset of, how can we learn from this experience? What can we take away? How can we improve a process to enable us to improve as a team and improve our outcomes overall?
JB: So you were kind of forthright with sharing some of the mistakes that you made. Does that mean you’re not perfect, Andy? [laughter]
Andy: It’s true. I’m not perfect. And it’s not just in postmortems, but also in retrospectives and other meetings. An effective tool for me has been to call out my own mistakes first. And it’s genuine, because I do want to call out my own mistakes. I feel compelled to do that. But I also want my team members that feel like it’s okay to make mistakes. The team lead can make a mistake and no one’s getting fired.
In fact, acknowledging the mistake allows us to adapt and change, and respond to it instead of perhaps hiding it. Or feeling this concept of shame that Brené Brown talks about, where we go internally and want to hide under a rock and not acknowledge the things that happened. Instead, by getting it out in the open, that allows us to grow and to learn from the experience. So modeling that for my team and allowing that to happen on the team has been an important part of the growth of the teams that I’ve been on in the office.
JB: Ellyx, you recently started leading one of our development teams. What are some steps you’ve taken to promote psychological safety amongst the team and have you been seeing benefits?
Ellyx: I think one of the first things I like to do is build trust. And there’s a couple of ways of doing that. I think one-on-one conversations that include some personal time to talk, to catch up, to make sure that everything’s going good in your life and work — and if not, we’re communicating about it and we’re having empathetic experiences together. Brené Brown has her concept of B.R.A.V.I.N.G: Boundaries, Reliability, Accountability, Vault Integrity, Non-judgment and Generosity.
Going through those points, and making sure in the conversations we’re having as a team that we’re sort of looking at these things and making sure we’re setting expectations well so that boundaries are met. That we’re being reliable and accessible and accountable for what we do. That we’re keeping our conversations close to heart when we need to and asking if we want to share something.
For me, generosity is a big part of this. Our retrospective mantra is “everybody did the best they could with the information they had at the time.” We say that at retrospectives, but I think it also applies more broadly to individual teams. It’s really important to extend that generosity to everybody all of the time. The benefits are that we’re coming up with some really creative solutions to permissions that the whole team has become a part of. We’ve spent some time doing group discussions on our financial project, and it’s turning out to have some interesting different architectural nuances that I don’t think we would have if we had just run the team in a non-psychologically safe manner. Those are some of the initial benefits I’ve seen.
“I think it really makes your product a lot better. People feel free to take risks and look in areas that they wouldn’t usually look into, and create new ideas and new approaches to building a product. I think that innovation and creativity sort of sets Mavenlink apart.” — Ellyx Jolley
JB: And as you’re kind of observing the health and the morale of your team through the weeks, what are the signs of psychological safety that you’re looking for?
Ellyx: One of the big signs is actually disagreement, the ability to have a conversation and not see eye to eye. To be able to talk about it, and then come to a solution that’s the best for everybody. I think retros where we dig in, and are really getting at the root of problems and we come away with some solid to do’s, that’s another one.
JB: On the flip side, Andy, what are some of the warning signs that the team might not have enough psychological safety?
Andy: Well, things like not bringing up problems. If you have a team meeting designed to inspect the process that you’re operating within, and nobody mentions any problems with the process, that’s probably a sign that people don’t feel safe to bring it up. Or, if you get minimal engagement in those conversations, where they may not feel like it even matters that we talk about this. When your team starts to show that disengagement, for example, “let’s just write the software the way that we’ve always written it because it worked then, it probably works now and we don’t want to rock the boat. Right?” If we are not continually examining our processes, not examining the way that we work and finding areas where we can improve, those are signs of a lack of safety.
Likewise, maybe engineers often feel like, “well, we just write this software, this feature, the way that we wrote the last feature and just change some names” — that’s probably a sign of lack of safety, where we don’t feel like we can solve the problem at hand. It shows lack of a growth mindset, a lack of risk taking, and the lack of innovation, the kind of innovation that we need to improve and essentially, do our best work.
JB: Right on. So Ellyx, you’re actually running a book club about psychological safety in Mavenlink. How does it work? What sort of input and participation are you seeing from people?
Ellyx: When I took over the psychological safety book club, we were reading Dare to Lead. We saw some good conversations come out of that. I think with Dare to Lead, what we dug into there was really different. Brené Brown calls it the Armor — the way we armor up and we get defensive, as compared to having a wholehearted experience. That was something we really dug into and discussed. Right now we’re reading Radical Candor by Kim Scott, and we have a document where people are adding comments and quotes, and then having a discussion together about those selections. It has brought up some really interesting topics.
Specifically, one of our engineering managers, Paulette, is doing a pilot program for our coaches where we’re doing direct feedback. Kim Scott talks about caring personally for our teammates as a way to make sure that when we’re giving feedback, it’s because we care about someone, and that we feel psychologically safe. Making sure that this person is going to take this feedback and know that it came from us because we care.
I think we’re seeing psychological safety permeate throughout our culture at Mavenlink. One of our values through Extreme Programming, or XP, is feedback, and we’re seeing these ideas be talked about and normalized. It’s important to let people know that, hey, vulnerability can be uncomfortable, psychological safety does take work, but it’s okay and we’ll do it together.
“For us to truly be innovative and do the things that are exciting for ourselves and for our customers, we need to feel like we can take those risks.”
— Andy Leavitt
JB: Andy, what are some approaches you take to ensure that as we bring new people on, as the team grows, that we’re able to preserve that culture of psychological safety?
Andy: There are multiple approaches. For example, I was participating in a team lead training on how to lead effective retrospectives on your team. The one bullet point that stood out to me was around being prepared for anything to happen in a retrospective. You’re entering an arena in which you don’t necessarily have control. And you need the skill-set to facilitate the conversation in the way that’s meaningful and impactful for the members of the team. Number one, we need to create a forum where these ideas can be expressed. And two, that we allow for that conversation to be meaningful for the participants.
As facilitators, as leaders, we’re creating a space where we’re able to bring up the kinds of things that are hard to bring up, and then fully explore them in a way that’s safe, blameless. Hopefully, it leads to some action item that makes this process meaningful and worth it to the team that’s participating. Retrospectives, obviously, are one way of doing this. I think in addition to those formal settings being available, being available as a leader to have those conversations ad hoc is also important. They don’t always need to happen on a schedule. We need to ensure that we’re prioritizing the people, and the feelings that they’re having, and making ourselves available to them when they need us. We have to make sure that folks know that they can come and talk to us when we need to. And then being able to sort of fully engage in that conversation whenever it happens.
JB: Great. Final question for both of you. Has this conversation felt psychologically safe for you?
Ellyx: Yes.
Andy: Yeah. I mean, we’re being recorded..I think that adds some anxiety, but it’s been an easy conversation to have. Appreciate the opportunity.
JB: Thank you very much.
