Today’s Focus: “Psychological safety is the enemy”

It seems like a good time to actually write about this, as Elon Musk is being positioned as a “super genius” by President Elect Donald Trump: he’s expected by Trump to bring immense operational efficiencies to the government. While watching him run various companies has been insightful, I found some of the biography from acclaimed writer, Walter Isaacson, to be very telling:

Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase “psychological safety.” It made him recoil. He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was “hardcore.” Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, flower-smelling, work-life balance, and days of “mental rest” were not his thing. Let that sink in.” – Source

Reading and listening to accounts of Elon pushing staff at SolarCity/Tesla Energy to do in a day what was previously only possible with many more days, watching him fire 80% of staff from Twitter, ripping out data centers (despite advice to the contrary): does that chaos sound familiar? The job got done, but, at what cost?

Yes, he can accelerate timelines: but, that’s not the only thing that matters. There is only a certain type of profile of person that will work sustained, crazy hours, to do the impossible, and even those eventually get tired. Whether you’re talking about Tesla, the legal industry, or other “meat grinder” situations, it’s not sustainable. While this can drive innovation, the other impacts on people (you know… those things that aren’t robots, even if you get them to try to act like them) are felt.

• They’re felt in relationships.
• They’re felt in the quality of work.
• They’re felt in the quality of the life and even health

Elon is now lining up to be an efficiency monster: how many civil servants, even those that totally buy what the incoming President wants to do, will put up with “dark demon mode“?

Can chaos and energy create and change things? Yes, it can… but, what will it create?

My expectation is that bringing in Elon (who has a pattern – like everyone) to bring efficiency to the government, will be the same playbook that we saw at Twitter. Push people HARD, cut a whole bunch of people VERY quickly, and let me tell you: for anyone who is unwilling to embrace the new mode of working, they are probably not going to enjoy work.

Do you really know what you’re talking about?

Amy Edmondson is often credited as the coiner of the term, psychological safety, but she is not (I just learned this in researching the topic for this article). I reached out to her to clarify what I found (that she is, in fact, the originator on TEAM psychological safety, but not psychological safety proper), and she shared:

Absolutely. It frustrates me no end how hard that is to drive home.  Of course, I never imagined my 1999 academic article would give rise to such a (delayed, but extensive) conversation…  

In an article with the Financial Times, Dr. Edmondson shared it seems like neither Musk nor Isaacson knows what psychological safety is, because psychological safety is explicitly about being uncomfortable (paywalled). Today is a day where mental anchors are created by people, who may not actually know what those terms mean: we reduce terms like “DEI” and “Critical Race Theory” to “bad”, meanwhile, we don’t actually understand what they mean. You’ve probably been privy to some of those conversations, non?

Just last week, Amanda Rajkumar, Chair of the Black British Initiative and contributing writer for Raconteur | B Corp™ shared a post which discussed the continuing pattern about DEI discussions: as I shared with her,

“It’s amazing to me that EDI/DEI/DEIB and variations are so demonized. It is such an obvious outflow of polarization and politics. Diverse teams and companies perform better: what else do we need to know?”

It’s a real challenge at work, of course, because we see the impact of people who don’t understand topics get power, or, use influence, to make assertions based on half-baked, half (or less) truths. I still remember being in a conversation where the CEO was talking about digital marketing: “Yes, I understand STO”, (while attempting to describe Search Engine Optimization): what was the “T” in that equation? Of course, the first rule of the Dunning Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member.

The question for government workers will be, “What are you willing to endure?”

My suggestion? Take your vacations, smell the flowers and keep your mental energy where it needs to be: you only get one brain, after all, and one life.

We’ll see what the super genius does in good time. Meanwhile, if you’re working for a super genius, always plan your escape to Mars: you never know when you’ll need a backup plan.