 Hi, can you guys share my screen? Can you guys see my screen? So sorry Perfect. So I'll be starting it. Let me know if you can't hear it or if there's some sort of Disturbance, please let me know that recording has started. But something tells me that I shouldn't because This is a this is a real life friendship that we're gonna talk about during this talk and Yeah I think that people like just think that we're fun And maybe would want to hang out with us after they see us talking to each other Which would be fun because one day we'll actually get to go to conferences in person and actually hang out with the nice people I know, right? All right. We'll see. We'll see. Anyway Welcome everyone. Welcome everyone. I'm Jen Krieger chief agilist for the products and technologies division at red hat And I'm here with Hi, everybody, I'm Leslie Hawthorne and I'm a manager of vertical community strategy in the open source program office in the office of the cto at red hut And today Jen and I will be talking to you about how to create high-performing teams Some common barriers to accomplishing that and how each of us as individuals Leaders and managers can contribute to our team successfully getting stuff done. Well so To introduce the topic of our talk today psychological safety I'd like to give you a little bit of history on the terminology and why it's come into the common parlance of business discourse of late so In 2015 Google set out to do a an in-depth study to understand what produces the most successful engineering team possible And at the time google was well known for an extremely rigorous hiring process that focused on things like The quality of education a candidate had how many years of experience in depth knowledge of arcane algorithms And a variety of other factors that they felt would contribute to building the most successful group of people to build the world's best quality products and what they found after doing interviews with You know 200 plus employees And looking at more than 250 attributes of successful teams from more than 180 teams across the company They discovered that every single set of success criteria. They assumed would create the best possible team Had nothing to do with reality And in fact the top factors for determining a successful team were those that you see before you psychological safety Dependability structure and clarity meaningful work and having impact And a high performing team had all of those attributes But the most important attribute by far and away and in fact the lynch pin For creating the other four attributes was a psychological safety The feeling that you're able to successfully take risks and be vulnerable in front of one another And not have that diminish other people's view of you or their view of your ideas Um now This was really surprising to the folks who were running the survey who expected to you know to hear that actually the answer is that you went to Stanford University and had a phd in computer science But it wasn't actually particularly surprising for me as someone who worked at google in the early days and Didn't feel like I operated in an environment of psychological safety For my own personal experience, right? I graduated from uc berkeley, which for folks who know anything about stanford university and uc berkeley They are rival schools. So I came from the the not nice school I was one of the only Handful of women at that point working in the engineering department. I didn't have a computer science degree I had a degree in medieval english literature And I often felt like I just didn't belong there And maybe someone had made a mistake And you know, I was just waiting for the time when someone figured out that I wasn't really where I should be and that I should work harder and harder and harder and faster and faster and faster to prove Myself and to prove that I would be able to be successful in the environment where I was already successful in doing a good job so um, I don't know how many of you in the audience are This is resonating with you and you're thinking Yeah, I've been in that place and I bet all of you probably went and look for new jobs as quickly as possible, right? so instead of focusing on the ways in which We aren't feeling psychologically safe in our work environments. We'd like to talk about ways that that environment has actually created around us And then ways that we can all overcome that in our own personal experience over to you, Jen So we're going to start with five common barriers to to achieving psychological safety The first one being one that I am very familiar with in my career as a chief agilist and and you know 20 years of working with teams and working with people in in high stress environments There always seems to be this thing that happens where You could be in a team meeting And you could be having a most wonderful conversation about some requirement that is meant to be developed And the team could all be open and chatting and talking about Whatever it is that they they want to do in order to solve the issue that is in front of them And in walks your cio And immediately what I have observed happen is everyone in the room shuts down It's almost like if the door was over here and everybody was interacting with people right here The second that cio walks in everybody goes like this and it's like What what happens that dynamic in that team what really happens is it changes Almost almost like the social structure in which decisions are made shifts And it is literally It has literally happened at every single company I have ever worked for Every at least once a month. I have observed this even today working at a company like red hat Where we really do want to make decisions based on the the best idea winning We still fall into this trap of the highest paid person's opinion It is it is something that we collectively own It is something that isn't it's not like somebody said we had to listen to the cio we just Assumed based on hierarchical structure that they must know the right answer to any question that is on the table And of course their answer must be the one that we should go with right So that's not familiar everyone because geez it certainly sounds familiar to me The other the other thing that I want to talk about too is this concept of imposter syndrome and I recently had a very Uh interesting situation happened to me because I joined a new team at red hat. Um, we had a relatively large reorg and a changing of hands at the ceo level and that impact impacted my team as well and I joined a team of people that I deeply respect and deeply Look up to they're extremely smart people. They have so much knowledge and I kind of felt like I wasn't good enough like I felt like Gosh if I say anything I'm gonna I'm gonna put the cards on the table to show everybody that I am not an expert in anything I am not an expert in the situation and I'm not I'm not good enough for this team And you know the funny thing about that is I know better I I know better. I know better on so many different levels because my job Is literally to coach people out of imposter syndrome to help them understand that they don't have to be air quote The greatest expert to feel like they're good enough. They just have to be happy with themselves Um, but the strange thing that happened was is one of these people that had deeply respect in a meeting Just basically said, you know what? I don't know the answer to that question either We should probably talk about that And I suddenly realized that You know what because I feel unsure because I don't know the answer to everything doesn't necessarily mean That there's something wrong with me It just means that I don't know and that's okay too Thanks, Jen So one of the most common barriers for achieving psychological safety that I've experienced throughout my career is actually Manager setting really unrealistic expectations Just simply through their own behavior and how they engage with their work and how that trickles down to Their teams and in fact to everyone in the company I recently worked for a startup where we had Folks in charge who were those nice people who really only need like five hours of sleep a day Or they at least think they only need five hours of sleep a day And who would be online at literally all hours You would be having a random conversation about something that you didn't think was particularly important And then all of a sudden someone with a c-level title would jump into the conversation and start Explaining to you why your opinion was in fact completely wrong and then you also look at the clock and realize it's 2 a.m. for them and when you As a manager as a leader Set the example that people have to be always on and always available and also always somehow outperforming their very very best self at all times You create an environment where people are Constantly in fighter flight mode, right if you are never actually able to sit back and simply reflect If you feel like somebody who is in authority over you is constantly watching you is constantly Doing things is constantly being tasked with with stuff that they need to accomplish and How are you ever going to live up to that set of expectations? You can't and your work suffers and your quality of life suffers as a result leading to This is so huge. I know it's so me I was reflecting how so me it is because right now the state of colorado is on fire in a way that That is is unfortunate. Um, but I think um I think in in in the case here and I I was also reflecting as uh, Leslie was speaking about my own behavior as a manager of a team and how I have actively tried at least this this year to stop Responding to things after hours and I I realize in a global company after hours for somebody else is not after hours for me And so I give myself a pass for you know, answering an email at 4 p.m My time which is very very late for my for my co-workers in the Czech Republic but But I think the interesting thing about that whole situation is this this connection Of this overwork and the setting on real looks, uh, excuse me unrealistic expectations for individuals Really kind of contributes to this kind this concept of hero culture So if you are always as a manager air dropping into a situation to save the day You are setting the expectation with your team that they should also air drop into situations where they will be perceived as the hero and You know in companies where output is more Recognized as something that is measurable than outcome Hero culture really thrives and what I mean by that is if you are if you are the person Who is constantly first in line to fix whatever bug is on fire? Whatever thing is is broken and it is midnight your time I have to ask like is this really is this really healthy? Or is it just that you like you prefer working at midnight, right? These are these are generally um These are generally things that I I think about when I am interacting with folks and and mind you even though I work in a forward facing product division now at red hat the majority of my career was back office it I was that support person that you called when email was down I know what it looks like to fire fight because that's frankly the entire first half of my career was being first in line to answer the call when somebody wasn't able to use their computer and There is something it's almost like um Reflecting back on my own situation with this It's almost like there's a there's a hit of pleasure When you have somebody who calls you and says I really need this right now Can you please drop everything you're doing or even worse that phone call? You get a three in the morning when a server is down. Oh my god, right? Like there is this You go into an immediate panic like you have got to fix this thing right now because somebody can't do your job And oh my god, I'm going to get yelled at if if it doesn't get resolved Um, and and honestly in the earlier part of my career There was also a I must fix this right now to hide The fact that we did not do the right thing Because if I don't someone's going to get yelled at and potentially fired. I mean that was a reality of of it And for many of you it might still be your reality that still might be the uh environment in which you work in and so like this this vicious cycle of I'm going to be really hyper anxious and super stressed out. I'm going to fix the problem And then the user is going to be like thank you so much And they're going to walk away and you're going to feel victorious And it's going to be this thing that you train your brain into doing It's kind of like this pick up a phone when you're bored thing You're training your brain and you're training the culture of your company to do these things and You know This is not the talk about burnout But I will tell you that burnout is significantly bad and we don't we don't scientifically or even emotionally understand The long-term impact of burnout. We just don't yet But I can tell you having gone through it and now on the other side of it after I would say maybe what leslie like five years of experiencing like a cyclical Burnout phase in my career in my life. It is really hard to unwind yourself from So if there is if there is one thing that I could tell y'all to do related to psychological safety is please do not Please do not find yourself in the circle if or the cycle if you can avoid Absolutely So gen, you know did a really great job Explicating how like we build things into our culture that can damage psychological safety And one of the experiences that I've had with particularly with startup environments is creating company cultures that have norms and social interactions that actually exclude a lot of the people In the ad environment from feeling like they can be successful and they can be included, right? So Once upon a time I worked at a startup where there was a weekly foosball tournament And I mean honestly who does not like foosball foosball is fun Well, um, I don't like foosball because I am really bad at it and I have poor depth perception and Maybe not the best hand-eye coordination ever, you know, I like to watch it But you know what that effectively did was for the you know Two hours a week where we were all having social hour and the focus was on like watching people interact while they were playing foosball and having a tournament and points on the wall like I Could only be as included as that bystander who was sitting there Sipping a beer that she didn't actually really want to drink because alcohol is not my favorite beverage Um in order to feel like I was kind of part of the team Right and there are any number of ways in which we we do things that seem like they are well intentioned and good ideas that actually are incredibly excluding behaviors like Serving dinner for your employees at work. I mean who doesn't want a delicious dinner I know I do but what the message that that actually sends is If you're not dedicated enough to be here Working after hours If you have to go home, you know to care for your family If you have to go home and just put your feet up on the couch and watch Netflix because you are tired and you need to refresh yourself There is something wrong with you. You are not actually You know in it to win it with the rest of us and and Basically creating the the social norms that put pressure on people to always be on to always be focused on their work to Always be omnipresent in their job to the exclusion of all else not only stifles their creativity And their ability to feel like they can accomplish good things when they're on the job It also just makes people feel like this isn't the right environment for them And you may have really high performers who decide that they're going to go be high performers somewhere else In a corporate culture that values them having work-life balance, right? Which is a bummer. You don't want to lose good people just because they were not good at playing foosball Exactly. I mean, I wouldn't I I oftentimes reflect on the whole cultural phenomenon that is coming out of Silicon Valley for like literally my entire career of putting couches in people's offices so they can sleep there overnight and i'm Huh? Why is that a thing? Why did anybody agree to do that? Anyway, because jenneth don't know my dear This is a huge improvement over the time when you had a sleeping bag under your desk Oh, Jesus stay in your office over. This was a thing I did not hear about that now. I'm even more horrified. So I guess the couch is a I guess the couch is an upgrade Yes All right This is you my dear Okay, cool. It's me. So how do we go about engendering psychological safety in the work environment? and I think that the the key element here is Through building trust. So let's talk a little bit about how we can actually build trust um, you know I so The only thing I can tell you is safe safety has got to start with trust Um, there is no situation Just just to be clear. There's no tool you can buy. Um, there's nothing you can install Uh, no no company has a framework that you can purchase to coach to there. There's nothing out there that that will Be purchasable for you to actually Have this trust engendered in your organization um, the most important part and the most important thing for you to understand Is that this is hard and messy human work? And that is that is the bottom line and so here's the rules And and this is going to be really hard. So just don't don't feel like if you if you fail to do it one day You're done and you can't try again the next day being transparent at work being clear about your needs and Your own goals when you're talking at work isn't an easy thing to do, but you must do it Um, you must do it because if you are not transparent about what is going on No one will ever feel like they can be transparent with you. Um, that is the bottom line and I have found at red hat especially this year, especially in times of of weird social political unrest pandemics You know what? There were a lot of people on my team who really were struggling with their home environments And it wasn't until I said something about my own struggles that they felt like having their own struggles was okay Like there is some and I'm not the person who sets unrealistic expectations I try my best to be very reasonable about what I am asking from my team And I always say, you know, you need to push back if I'm asking for too much. Tell me when I'm being unreasonable be be transparent with me Um, it's it's the hardest thing we're going to do. It's it's the hardest step forward Um, and don't feel like you have to be transparent. Uh, like Leslie and I are going to be later in this talk um Take a baby step be transparent like saying hey I've got to get to my kid to school in the morning. I'm going to need 15 minutes later meeting start That's okay. Start start with something small and safe to you and then grow as you watch your team expand into um The second thing is while you are being overly transparent about your needs Like be strong-willed and and be very clear But also understand when somebody else is has a need that is maybe in conflict with yours like for example, um For for me personally starting my day at seven in the morning is about where I want to start But because of where I live and because of the people that I work with I typically start my day around five in the morning um, so while I understand that Folks on the east coast of the united states would like a meeting at you know, seven in the morning their time um, because uh, the reality is that red hat once once nine a.m. Hits about Uh, the the it's like it's essentially like a three-hour block of the most busiest time for the entire company because of the overlapping um work hours between North america and amoeia And to a certain degree, you know apac that Understanding where we all fall in line there understanding the fact that I really don't want to have a five a meeting And they need to have a seven a meeting And maybe I don't need to be on that meeting and so maybe we can figure out some compromise that creates a situation where we both win And then finally Be a real person. Um, I think there is a picture. Yes, there is yay Um picture ever, uh, you know, it is the best picture ever It is from my personal selfie collection if you would like to be in my personal selfie collection Look me up once we get to go back to real conferences um If you don't bring your whole self to work, um You know, I just I struggle with this concept of not being me at work It it it would be so hard for me to To shut down my personality. It would be so hard for me not to be playful to want to have fun This is something that was truly built into my social um upbringing, um the you know growing up in a very loud irish, uh, italian family with with Card playing on the weekend with jokes with all of those stereotypes, you you know to be true You know talking with your hands, right? This is something that if I couldn't bring this whole self to work I would be lesser of a person And so bringing your bringing your real self to work bringing your whole self to work is something that that will help others Bond with you help them understand who you are as a person help them understand how to compromise with you So, um, I think that All of this like bringing your whole self to work I think the way that I ground it in my mind is to think about it in terms of like vulnerability So first and foremost, we've been talking about a lot of heavy stuff. So let us all admire this beautiful cat picture for a moment Oh So I I look at um Vulnerability is actually a primary leadership skill, right if I cannot um Admit when I am wrong if I cannot admit when I do not know the answer If I cannot be completely and totally honest about having made a mistake and the repercussions of that mistake And also self-aware and reflective to let people know what I have learned from that situation and what I intend to do better the next time I'm not going to be able to be an effective teammate or an effective manager or an effective leader Because you know people are going to look at me and think oh all this person wants to do is place blame This person doesn't understand how they contributed to the situation being difficult This person isn't willing to admit how they are flawed. This person isn't willing to show up and be a real person, right? I think my favorite ever Um discussion of of leaning through vulnerability was actually um carl fogle Who is super famous fancy pants for having written the book on um open source software. It's called producing open source software And you should totally read it um talked one time um about how he as part of the process of uh encouraging new contributors to the subversion project how he would Um instead of going over his responses to email 15 times, which he would normally do because he was a super meticulous person He would you know, check it once or twice and then just let it go knowing that there would be errors in it So that new people to the project could see those errors and say hey Oh wonderful super important fancy pants person. Did you notice this error over here? Maybe we want to fix the error and he could say oh, yes, absolutely We should fix that Because that vulnerability created psychological safety for the people he was working with people understood that he too was a human being He too could make mistakes and that perfection was not the expected standard for participation, right? so by by Experiencing your own vulnerability and not expecting perfection from yourself. You leave space for other people to just Be themselves to make mistakes, but to do better because of those mistakes. They made I mean none of us were like Born full sprung from the head of Zeus being amazing and perfect And if you were we would like to talk to you about participating in our next talk. Thank you very much Yeah, you know the other thing I was thinking in this space too and it as you were talking I was like, oh my god, this is exactly what I tell teams when they're building things To to not gold plate them because the more the more gold you put on things The more emotionally committed you are to the way that you built it And if you bring this gold plated perfect, you know crown of code Into a situation and somebody looks at it and says I don't think you did that the right way If you have literally poured your heart and soul into this What do you think your emotional response to somebody rejecting it's going to be of course, it's going to be negative So draft code Maybe partially built things all those are all really good things to to do That's a really fantastic story Leslie. Thank you So, um, we've talked a lot about like how psychological safety is important and different ways that it can be Blocked or why it's important to achieve it But I think it's also important to just ground our conversation a little bit as well in the importance of it for the business Because you know, obviously we all work for companies. We all want to get paid So, um, one of the interesting things that psychological safety brings to the table is the ability for Organizations to build out more diverse teams, right? If we are all In lockstep with one another, we all look the same act the same Think the same we don't have to worry about psychological safety because no one is different And therefore we produce what could very well be described as probably mediocre results, right? If we do not have a plethora of perspectives and voices informing the decisions that we make We're not going to make products that are You know that much better for the entire marketplace. We're not going to be able to have better ideas We're not actually going to be able to be creative and innovative. We're just going to do exactly what we've always done the entire time And that sounds great in practice like in theory But according to McKinsey because we backed up the slide for just one second. Sorry. Oh, yeah, that's awesome like that um Companies that have a more diverse workforce have financial returns well above their industry mean and that's to the tune of like 35 percent. So there's an actual bottom line impact making sure that you have a psychologically safe work environment and then we move on So I think that you know, we talk about we talk about diversity We talk about you know, wanting to make sure that we have a plethora of perspectives and voices But it's not enough to just say We want to create a work environment that is diverse It is great to have a diverse work environment But what we actually need is an inclusive work environment. We don't just want to have A whole bunch of different people who come to work every day We want to have a whole bunch of different people who come to work every day and feel like their their contributions are valued That their voice matters and that they They we want them to express their differences of opinion their own perspective is their own unique voice, right? so diversity And psychological safety together create an environment of inclusion, right? And if we do not create inclusive work environments All of our work to create this diverse perspective just means that we get people in the door and then they have no motivation to stay And the business loses out on all of the time energy and effort brought it, you know to recruiting these people Training them getting them prepared to actually be successful. And then if they don't feel like they can succeed they just leave Seems like a bad outcome That's what I want All right, so so we've we've we've talked a lot about um, you know Psychological safety and all of that and I think that um, one of the reasons that I love Jen so much is she and I are both big Believers in practicing what we preach and not just standing here and saying you should do things But we actually do those things ourselves. So We are going to talk a little bit about what psychological safety means to the two of us and it's actually very different So what psychological safety means for me? So we're going to do a really quick retreat into story time So about four and a half years ago. Um, I had the greatest thing ever in my whole life happened to me I had my little daughter caterina And that was an amazing experience, but it came along with um, undiagnosed postpartum depression like severely severe undiagnosed postpartum depression Um, and I didn't really know that it was happening to me. Um I didn't really know that I had postpartum depression until of all things I heard it described on a situation comedy tv show Which was pretty weird. I'm like, oh, I have that thing. Perhaps I should seek medical attention um So the result of of this was to seek medical attention for my clearly Failing mental health and the upshot of that was I ended up taking medical leave for seven months to get treatment um, which was really good and important, but it was really hard for me to do that because um I think workaholic once upon a time is a nice way to put it um, I definitely did a lot of defining of myself through my career and my work achievements uh, and I also just felt like Walking away from my job meant some kind of failure of myself as a person like I was letting my team down Like I was I was really humiliated about needing to say like I need to step away. I need to take care of myself Um, and it's important that I did and I came back to work. I think Five months earlier than like was expected like also seriously Kudos and shout out to red hat for their amazing handling of that situation. I'm super grateful to work at this company Um, I cannot I could not have asked her for better support um, you know, so I came back to work and I was really cheap ish and I don't know how to put it the right way maybe like closed off at first because I I just kind of felt like everyone was judging me and felt like I was a big screw up and You know just all of that like mental emotional baggage that you bring along to the party um, and uh, you know, I was I so then I ended up at uh at an event when I was chatting with one of my co-workers and you know He said, you know, we're glad to have you back and I said Yeah, okay, sure. And he said no no no no Leslie We have been waiting for you to come back We have missed you so much We have missed what you bring to our team. We have missed what you bring to our group. We are so grateful That we have you with us and I remember In that moment that all of that fear and all of that Just terror that somehow I was not good enough and that I had made a huge mistake and that how dare I be human Was just lifted and after that I wasn't afraid anymore. I wasn't ever afraid to to say like Today I am having a bad brain day. Maybe today will not be my best day I'm still going to show up and I'm still going to be here for you But if you want my best output, you might want to talk to me tomorrow morning after I've had my first cup of coffee And that that really made all the difference in the world for me So really special story. I I sat out rich bow and for being awesome. Yeah, I mean seriously I cannot thank you enough rich for For doing that for leslie because I think If I recall I might have said very similar things to you leslie, but I think I wouldn't listen to you You needed somebody other than me to say those same things to you like somebody who you Is not that you respect you don't it's not that you don't respect me is that you needed A colleague like a a troop here to say that to you in a way that um In the way that you can hear it and I I cannot I mean, it's so funny that i'm thinking rich not directly But I cannot thank him enough for for coming to work with his true self too because that took a lot of compassion um And a lot of I mean like he could have also been outside of his comfort zone sharing that with you because You might have responded very negatively to it. I mean who knows right like so kudos for him for being courageous um so On my side it was interesting. I was telling the story to leslie and when I told the story to her She said are you sure you want to And I said well, why not and then I realized exactly what she was asking me and maybe she didn't know that she was asking me that um, but so I grew up with a mother who has uh schizophrenia And we did not know at the time when I was a child that that's what She had it was a an undiagnosed mental illness. Um, we really weren't sure and It kind of shaped uh, it kind of it shaped My childhood and the way that I am as an adult in a way that I'm still learning what what it means like in fact, I literally had an epiphany while telling the story to her um, what amounts to like what was it like 20 minutes ago, right and I think I think the bottom line here is is that My mother spent her entire life trying to hide this from others And so what she did which which for those of you who understand anything about schizophrenia will understand um, my mom my mom doesn't regularly uh part, you know hear voices or regularly Uh see things uh as part of her schizophrenia. What she does is she retells stories and so for example She might go out of her house and have an interaction with the next door neighbor Which could be as innocuous as hello. Good morning. Maureen. How are you doing? um And she'll tell the story over and over and over as the course of the day goes on And her brain will inject things into the story that frankly didn't happen and so it'll go from Hi, hello. How are you doing today to all of a sudden the neighbor? Um had an altercation with me on my front porch and now I'm not safe and so she she is um She wraps this falsehood around a sense of being fearful of others and that really shaped my childhood It shaped it in a way that I think Um without my father involved in the situation. It may not have occurred. And so my father On the other side was always a truth teller. He was um Plain about about his his thoughts. He was very clear with with us as children About his expectations of what he wanted for us And so that juxtaposition of a of a parent who could never tell the truth Or she was telling her truth is probably a better way of putting it And the other parent who always saw the truth for what it really was and made us tell that truth Really shaped who I am as a person today and so psychological safety for me at work means I get to tell the truth um without fear regardless of the consequences and It is it is a trait Which I will tell you has a time ticker on it especially at at organizations because eventually You will tell the truth in a situation in which the consequences are severe and I will tell you in my career I have been in that situation more than once And I've always managed to tell the truth in a way that has has made it possible for me to be successful in my career But eventually eventually I will tell the truth in the wrong way at the wrong time And it will have severe impact but for me I will always continue to do that because I I see the damage that my mother did to me growing up. I see the damage that she did to my siblings I see the damage she did to our family unit And the fact that I don't have interactions with my cousins my extended family all that stuff I see the damage it did and I As a result has made me uh impatient with people who don't tell the truth It has made me impatient for folks who try to Manipulate or go around or or try to change the situation for their benefit And I will also tell you that as a communications expert as somebody who spends Their entire job observing people and their behavior. I know when people are not telling the truth And so if I could if I could even say the negative What makes me psychologically unsafe at work is when I know people are not telling me the truth And I and I see it all the time. So it's something that I feel very strongly about Making sure that others know the truth and making sure that that that truth Is as true as it can be and not necessarily just my own perception And so the other thing that is important about telling the truth is understanding when you are wrong as well Um, and we're going to talk a little bit about that in in at the very end of this talk. Yeah Um, so one important nuance about this is that we have just told you what psychological safety means for both of us And you will notice that they are completely different um There there is uh, there is truth in that and I think I mentioned earlier that It is really important for you know, we didn't start with the definition of psychological safety for one very important reason Which is it is not the same for every single person And so if you if you do nothing else start with writing down what it means to you And it might be something so unattainable and and you might feel like oh gosh, how am I ever going to get there? Um, I I'm here to tell you that just simply writing it down Is going to make it true Not writing it down will mean that you will never strive towards that goal And you might not even really remember it in situations where it's most important to you So write one down And since we both love actionable feedback We want to take you through a few things that you can do right now To help achieve psychological safety for yourself and for others in the workplace. Um So start off with compassion for yourself, right? And it is I cannot count the number of people in my life for whom we are our own worst critics and We will judge ourselves far more harshly than anyone else ever will Um, but you know, remember when you're having that terrible day And or maybe it's a terrible week sometimes that happens too And you can't get everything done that you want to get done and you feel like your work is suffering And you feel like people's opinion of you is suffering and you feel like there is no way that you're ever going to dig yourself out of this Whole of not awesome that you find yourself in It's okay To not be perfect all of the time In fact, if you think that you are being perfect all the time you are having a completely different problem Which is delusion and that can possibly be the subject of another presentation that Jen and I will not be giving Um, so remember be kind be kind to yourself, right? Everyone we should always be kind because everyone is fighting a hard battle And that starts with us if we can't have compassion for ourselves It's very difficult for us to have compassion for anyone else So start with yourself And then after that remember compassion for others I think that if uh, if anything our current um tumultuous circumstances in the world have really helped us to have that compassion for other people because we suddenly have gotten a very intimate view of the pressures and the Uh, I want to say periphery our real lives outside of work are not our periphery But what what goes on and have people's everyday life that we never experience or know about because we've been very careful to craft This veneer of professionalism that never touches on What happens in our home life and then suddenly, you know, it's like wow It's probably really hard to have five kids You know, not in the middle of a pandemic bouncing around your house making lots of noise It's like suddenly we get a real opportunity to understand What each one of us experiences in their daily life are good or for ill right and having compassion for those moments of Well, this was not your most shining moment and that's okay because tomorrow I will have my not most shining moment, right? Uh, and since we know that we are going to make mistakes Frequently because we are all fallible human beings, right? It's okay to make mistakes. Just try and make new and better mistakes every day, right? New and better mistakes is a perfectly awesome outcome Okay, so I know this is super important Cultivate your friend network, right? Like so so Jen and I actually um, we put this in at the last minute and we had a debate about whether or not It was too cheesy, but I I think it's actually really important to talk about it like When you are, you know, when you are in your work environment You need people that you can just be a real person with like completely and utterly Unconstrained by any concerns of professionalism and I gonna am I gonna lose my job? Is somebody going to decide that I you know flip the bozo a bit on me and decide that they don't want to talk to me ever again? Right, I cannot count the number of times when I was working on a an extremely difficult project in the last two years That Jen was intimately familiar with where I would call her up and I would go okay Everyone thinks I'm dumb and no one wants to listen to me and I am a complete failure And she would say okay, so No one is listening to you that is true And here is why and you are not a complete failure and everything is fine And if I hadn't had that I I don't even Let's just say negative outcomes right because I have because I have the support of a friend network at redhead I'm able to be that much more successful and it is so important So, you know actually make buddies with people you work with and not just like oh Maybe we'll go get a beer together and like talk about sports like actual real friendships, right? You can have real friendships at work find them cultivate the Important pure successes human being yeah, and and your mental health and well-being and in my case I My my favorite my favorite situation for me has always been um Needing feedback, but also needing to have it be done in a way that is safe because you might correlate this concept with My situation as a child and what it might be like to have a parent who is Seriously unwell mentally right like you can you had to just imagine your worst nightmare And you you can be rest assured that that is exactly what happened to me as a child It is it is pretty true that this has long and lasting impact on on individuals and part of that is that I know that I'm not perfect I'm surprised. I mean I I need to to know that I am not perfect and the most important part. I know right thanks I don't believe you for a second The the interesting situation for me is that I also need psychological safety when I am learning about where I have my Might have failed and for me that comes in the form of a dear mentor who I've been working with for the past two years who Does work at red hat and does have the grace and also the skill to tell me when I might have misstep In a way that I can hear it But I will tell you something I would not have been able for her to do this with me if we did not have a friendship first that came first and It's something I treasure like I I need the real honest feedback about how I am approaching things and what I could do differently But it would not be very easy for me to hear it if I did not have that established relationship with her And so for me to grow as an individual Both personally and professionally It is important for me to rely on somebody that I personally trust to hear the things that I need to hear So I can't I mean it's it's the good part is you've got the support the friend base the people that are Are always lifting you up But it's also important because these are the people who are going to tell you the truth about what it is that you are doing And how it might have impacted somebody else negatively and so that is um You know positive positive of the situation to have that type of network so So friends we have come to the conclusion of our presentation We hope that you have found it inspiring and also enjoyable and delightful as we have enjoyed presenting it to you And we at the very very last we would like to thank all of the wonderful organizers of dev conf us for putting This conference together and overcoming very difficult circumstances to be able to present this event virtually We love you. Thank you. Thank you and we will look forward to seeing you at a dev conf near you in the future Thank you everyone. Cheers Cheers