I was listening to Andrew Kelley (of Zig fame) in a podcast the other day. He talked about the fact that, because the zig foundation is a bunch of empowered experts, he doesn't really need to manage work because people following their own idea of good software leads to really great work. Having the psychological safety of "being trusted to do what you think is right" is critical.

I think there's so much in that (although how to scale it out is clearly a tricky question). The best places I've worked, have all had the ability to make changes when there's a clear benefit. The worst places I've worked have had the opposite, where it's so hard to touch anything beyond the remit of a ticket or feature item, nobody changes things that are obviously flawed and easily fixable.

Chapters 4 and 5 of "Crucial Conversations" were an enlightenment for me, as full of cringe as it is.

Their hypothesis (intuitive, no science there) is that fear has second side beyond passiveness, wall-building and procrastination.

Fight or flight: people attack mostly out of fear. People micro-manage employees mostly out of fear. At work you don't think much about this aspect, as boss is simply a "jerk". (Bad mouthing, yet another way to deal with fear.)

Yeah you are right about this, psychological safety is a key ingredient in what “good” looks like. Blameless culture stuff is a bit of another ball of wax, so I didn’t get into it too much.

Years and years ago I helped someone with a remote team (quite a while before remote was common) try to get his team to be more productive.

We'd sit and chat about the state of things, ups and downs since we last spoke, and try to figure out strategies to improve process and get things working more smoothly. For a few months virtually nothing changed despite all kinds of small efforts scattered around.

He was dealing with pretty insane stuff. Clearly competent developers were letting PRs languish for weeks. They weren't producing code to their own standards consistently. Designers were dumping deliverables last minute with no documentation or guidance for implementation. Just assets, hurriedly put together, with some palpable hope that they'd just get used and everyone would carry on without their involvement. There was no collaboration, very low communication, and hardly any cohesion across teams.

After a few months I came to realize that everyone was struggling in their role in some way or another, afraid to admit it, and unsure of how to catch up and keep up. Expectations of them were remarkably low, but no matter who fell behind they would eventually begin this oscillation between scrambling and vanishing.

I recommended that he let everyone know it's okay. We all fall behind, we've all got life going on, and having no deliverables happens. I suggested that the messaging would need to be sincere, clear, and personal in order for everyone to really believe that it was okay that they weren't performing well. After a week or so of figuring out how he wanted to address everyone about it, he did it over a group call and was a total human being about it, describing his own struggles, challenges with staying on task, his inability to program "well" due to his lack of training, and so on. It was great, and very sincere. He made it clear that he knew what was happening, but he wasn't upset and he wasn't pointing fingers.

The results were like night and day, though not immediate. Everyone gradually started explaining where they were. Maybe they had kid stuff in the way, got stuck getting a test to pass, didn't understand the problem well enough, no sleep, sick, etc. PRs got reviewed more often because there was less shame around letting them sit at all. Everything generally got better. Not perfect, but workable.

At the time that I recommended he do that, I felt a little bit insane. Like, what if this just permits everyone to be even worse? What if it comes off like it's a trap, and everyone gets even more paranoid and insecure? Am I just imagining everyone wants this because it's what I've wanted in the past?

Since then I consider it one of the most essential components of functioning teams. People can still be high performers in unsafe roles, but the team as a whole suffers for it, then the company does as well. Especially the company, over time.