Photo by Pedram Farjam.
Unless you run a travelling psychic circus, your colleagues aren’t mind-readers
It would be easier if they were. It would clarify a whole bunch of shit. And we hear this implied request from leaders a lot. Things like:
- well they ought to know
- no one told me and I figured it out
- it’s obvious
These leaders don’t think they’re asking for mind-reading. And maybe it’s true that, given the time, their people could figure it out without appeal to the paranormal. But the thing we always ask them is: why? Why should that be the test? Why should it be hard to figure out things like:
- Am I doing well at my job?
- Did that meeting go the way it should have?
- Are my suggestions helpful?
- Do I have a future here?
Self-reliance is a fine thing. Maybe it’s a thing you pride in yourself and want to see more from others. And if you have a colleague who’s incapable of independent exploration and learning within their domain of expertise, I see why that would be frustrating.
Self-reliance stops at someone else’s mental state, though. If you have feedback for a person: give it to them, don’t make them guess. If you don’t know what someone thinks: don’t guess, ask them. It’s hard. I know. It’s scary to be on either side of that when you don’t have the skills and the practice to do it gracefully. But the anxiety that is lifted off your shoulders when you stop trying to read minds, or waiting for others to read yours… well, in my experience, it’s heavier than you thought it was.
(And seriously: if you do run a travelling psychic circus we would love to know how you found out about this newsletter.)
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s Reading
Science Confirms It: People Are Not Pets – Research on the efficacy of rewards tells us that we can’t bribe others into doing what we want.
I don’t love busy as a state of being. I find it tiresome when you ask how friends are doing and they say busy. It’s a punt. Say overwhelmed. Say underwater. Say prioritizing work over my social life. Say incapable of setting and holding boundaries for myself and others. Say any of the other, more expressive alternatives to busy.
But just because I’m not a fan of busy doesn’t mean I’m not susceptible to the trappings of modern life. Of too much to do and limited time and (particularly in Canada right now) limited daylight. One of the first things to go is my open tab count. I click on articles and hope to read them at some point and find myself, weeks later still wondering what that clickbait headline was all about.
Science Confirms It: People Are Not Pets is one of those headlines. C’mon. How are you gonna not click to find out more? The piece had been sitting in an open tab for nearly a month.
It’s about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. Something bosses care a lot about. And while the research on contingent rewards has been going on for decades, researchers continue to surprise themselves with their own findings…contrary to hypothesis.
The short version is that bosses should be incredibly skeptical of pay for performance motivation specifically and basically all rewards in general. The long version is in the article, and the 40 years of research the author neatly summarizes thusly:
“By now it should be clear that the trouble doesn’t lie with the type of reward, the schedule on which it’s presented, or any other detail of how it’s done. The problem is the outdated theory of motivation underlying the whole idea of treating people like pets — that is, saying: Do this, and you’ll get that.”
What Johnathan’s Reading
Amy Edmondson on psychological safety
Amy Edmondson has been talking about psychological safety in particular, and effective teams in general, for a while and it’s all good stuff. If you haven’t encountered the term before, the quartz article above is extra-worth-it because, in the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Psychological safety does not mean being a psychological softie.
Psychological safety describes a team that feels safe and confident in how the team works. It means that every member of the team can say things like, “Others can disagree with my ideas without attacking me.” Or “I can ask questions without fear of ridicule.” Or “I know what happens when I fail.” It means that the members of that team can take risks.
The cool thing about creating teams with high levels of psychological safety is not only that you get to be a good manager. And an ethical human. And generally not hate yourself. Those are all good things. But the real icing on the cake is that your teams will also outperform all the hard-charger, A-player, maximum-hustle, cliche-rich monstrosities that other folks are out there perpetrating. Teams with high psychological safety demolish all that nonsense. By a wide margin.
The thing is: huggybear bosses, who try to cushion every blow and avoid hard feedback, don’t create psychological safety. Without a boss who can be clear about what went well and what didn’t, employees start to feel like they have to guess. I felt like I screwed that up, why isn’t anyone telling me? Is my manager expecting me to read between the lines? Psychological safety doesn’t mean being gentle, it means being clear. (And no, assholes, “I tell it like it is and fuck your feelings” is not psychological safety either. Try harder.)
In the 2018 hellscape, “safety” has become a partisan word. People get called snowflakes for wanting respect and decency in their interactions. That sucks. But psychological safety is a term of art worth knowing if you ever, you know, work with other humans. And if you’ve ever been in a team with an abundance of it, you know how incredible it can be.
