If your team is happy, are you doing a good job?

Brilliant jerks, ZIRP-era managers, and how psychological safety lost the plot. Part 3 of my conversation with Dr. Cat Hicks.

For those of you just catching up, Cat and I are having a dialogue about how teams are changing in the era of AI.

Part 1: Where do AI norms and values come from? Where should people start?, by me.

Part 2: How social identity is constructed, and how to defang the threat of identity loss, by Cat.

At the end of Cat’s piece, she ended with a question for me and an observation of her own. She asked,

“What gets us so stuck on believing we can’t have both high performance and good norms?”

And observed:

“It’s hard to get teams to open up, hard to get our companies to see the merit in this kind of practice, and hard to get people to see this as the hard cognitive science of problem-solving instead of soft, squishy feelings.”

All of these, I believe, are related. If leaders think that “treating people well” means “nobody feels bad”, of course they assume it trades off against performance. If people associate learning with soft, squishy feelings instead of an uncomfortable growth process, they probably aren’t really learning.

And because we’re wired to see people where there really are systems, we keep looking in the wrong place for fairness and equity.

This is a weird timeline. I’ll tell you how I think we got here. It starts when the idea of psychological safety upended our mental model about what excellence looks like, just over a decade ago.

The dark days of mad ‘boy geniuses’ in tech

Psychological safety entered the tech lexicon in 2015, when Google published the findings of Project Aristotle, their two-year inquiry into engineering team effectiveness. The research showed that high performing teams were differentiated by five internal dynamics: 1) psychological safety, 2) dependability, 3) structure and clarity, 4) meaning, and 5) impact.

You kids won’t remember this, but prior to Project Aristotle (and DORA, which launched a year earlier), our collective idea of excellence in tech looked very different.

Nowadays everyone talks about high functioning teams, but back then, the spotlight was on individual output. Managers and executives really did heap praises on people for firefighting and sleeping under their desks. Brilliant jerks were not only tolerated but cultivated, because of how closely genius and antisocial behavior were twinned in our minds and pop culture.¹

Back then, it was almost an article of faith that the rudest and most disruptive people were your top performers and should be catered to.² But DORA and Project Aristotle began their research from first principles, asking “what leads to the best outcomes?" and crunching the numbers. Year after year, report after report, the evidence compounds: individual performance is critical, but delivery and impact are defined at the level of the team, not the individual.

Psychological safety came unmoored from performance

The academic study of psychological safety, defined as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking,” has always been about achieving excellence. Researchers have long been adamant that psychological safety must be paired with accountability to be effective.

The research itself has a lot of complexity and nuance, most of which seems to have been lost on its journey to mass awareness. The one thing everyone remembers today is psychological safety, which is great. But the popular understanding of its meaning seems to have drifted far away from its origins in excellence, edging ever closer to “I should feel safe at work”, or even “I should never have to feel bad at work.”

I’ve seen people complain about their psychological safety being damaged due to hearing bad news, company layoffs, not getting an expected promotion, organizational reshufflings, their manager answering slack messages after 6 pm, even getting constructive feedback on their work.

But psychological safety isn’t important because it makes us feel safe, it’s important because it enables learning, which leads to higher performance.³ Somewhere along the way, we started putting the feelings ahead of the outcomes — a very 2010s thing to do, in retrospect.

“If your team is happy, you’re doing a good job”

The second time I became a manager, I kept asking my boss how he would know if I was doing a good job or not. His response: “If your team is happy, you’re doing a good job.”

This answer was typical of ZIRP-era management philosophy, when money was easy, growth was free, and headcount seemed infinite. The managers and directors of my generation went all in on things like psychological safety and “bring your whole selves to work”, which was progress, even if in practice this mostly got watered down into “please be nice” and “it’s okay to be openly gay at work now.”

In part, this was in reaction to the generation of managers we came up under, who mostly came in two flavors: the super-IC who didn't really want to be managing, and the command-and-control type who assigned tasks and checked boxes. Neither was big on feelings.

My generation of managers was determined to do the opposite, as I’ve written. And we did. We were coaches, sponsors, and support networks for our direct reports. We made time for people’s feelings and talked about our personal lives. We urged people to take time off, talked about “servant leadership”, and said things like “being a manager is all about people.”

But it’s not. It’s not all about people, it’s about achieving success at business and then, ideally, good outcomes for everyone involved.

As I recently wrote:

“The most effective leaders are the ones who are kind, caring humans and skilled business operators. The second most effective leaders are the ones who are crappy humans but skilled business operators. After that comes everyone else.”

Aristotle would like a word

“If your team is happy, you’re doing a good job” is not an answer that stands up to a whiff of scrutiny. If happiness was the goal, I should have just given everyone six months off, tripled their salary, and told them that “moving forward, your job consists of taste-testing fancy ice creams.” That would have made a lot of people very happy.

Or would it?

Aristotle — yes, he who the project was named for — didn’t think so. He distinguished between eudaimonia, the kind of happiness you feel as a result of a full and flourishing life, through action and virtue, and other, lesser types of happiness you feel as a result of chasing wealth, pleasure, fame, etc.

Vacation days and infinite ice cream are the type of happiness Aristotle would have sniffily dismissed as hedonic pleasure; a false joy, he would say, “fit for cattle”.

Granted, Aristotle lived a long time ago and didn’t have access to dopamine machines like video games and social media. But there is oodles of modern research (Gilbert, Kahneman) to back up his point, which is that we are bad at predicting what will make us happy or keep us happy. What we think we want looking forward into the future is almost never what we treasure looking back.

It’s easy to confuse “people’s feelings are important, and we should acknowledge and respect them” with “people’s feelings are a business outcome we should manage to.” The first one, yes; the second, absolutely not.

Making your team happy is not the job. Someone who can’t handle disappointing their direct reports or making them upset will never be an effective leader. Frustrating people and telling them “no” is part of the job, because growth is hard and part of your job is to challenge people. How they feel about this is under their control, not yours.

Learning feels terrible, which is why it builds trust

You know what else doesn’t always feel good? Learning. Learning involves introspection, which is often humbling, and expanding your boundaries, which means doing uncomfortable things.

It’s also deeply vulnerable. Towards the end of Cat’s piece she says,

I’ve seen even highly acrimonious teams start to soften the moment they allow themselves to ask: what did you learn last week? What did we learn together? Is there some way to approach this tough time with a focus on learning? Do we have any shared goals for what that learning will accomplish?

Showing up and not knowing the answers is a hard thing to do in front of our peers and colleagues. Which is exactly why it builds trust.

You can’t tell from the calendar invite

Furthermore, it’s awfully easy to clog up everyone’s calendars with meetings, conversations, and activities that look like learning, but actually just waste time.

If you ask ten or twenty people to step away from their work and have a discussion, what will it yield? Maybe it will be the most valuable hour of the month, or maybe it will be a total waste of time. Maybe it will become a distraction that derails people, sows confusion, and generates endless, fruitless slack debates.

You can’t tell by looking at the calendar invite. Worse, you can’t and won’t know until it’s over (if then). This makes a lot of leaders very skittish about spending on activities so loosely described as “learning”. For every leader that is overly skeptical of learning and development, there’s a leader who invests too much time, money and effort into learning and development, and gets nothing in return.

Learning pays off slowly. It is rarely a quick fix. Investing in learning is like investing in anything; you aren’t going to get great results if you spray and pray, you’re better off developing a thesis, testing it, investing in it, and measuring to see if you were right or not.⁴

(Here is where I was going to toss it back, saying “So Cat, why are metrics important?” But Cat complains that she has been writing about that for YEARS, and hey, I get it. Ask me “should I instrument my code?”, I dare you. 🔪🔪🔪 )

So let me try and end on a more interesting question.

We credit people for what structures do

People are walking, talking balls of weirdo biases. We are bad at knowing what’s good for us, worse at predicting how we will feel, and terrified of feeling bad about things, even though feelings are transient and can’t actually kill us. We project personality onto shitty products and faces onto grilled cheese sandwiches. We are all animists in a way, because we evolved to perceive individuals and intent in the unlikeliest of places.

Which brings us back to business.

People get cause and effect mixed up all the time. Winning feels good, and if you win at business, then you will feel good, and there will be more salary, raises, promotions, hiring, growth, products to build and operate, harder challenges to attack, all these things people love at work.

But we tend to attribute our joy or misery at work to people rather than structural factors. We think fondly of the manager who gave us a raise “because we deserved it”, rather than thinking fondly of the ones who were good enough at business to put more money in the pot for raises to be given out.

I can’t help feeling like we are holding managers to an impossibly high bar by expecting them to not only do their jobs capably but also make us feel good about ourselves while we’re doing ours.

Is that fair? Fairness matters a lot to us (another weird quirk of the species), yet it’s hard to know how to reason about systems where the outcomes are defined by the collective labor of hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people. We want to put a face on our experience so desperately that we give individuals too much credit and too much blame, and let the system off the hook.⁵

Cat, when you measure fairness, are you looking at people or systems? What do you actually look at?

1. As evidence I submit the BOFH, Bastard Operator From Hell, alter ego of operations teams everywhere, who cackled with glee while deleting users’ files and bossing around the PFY (pimply-faced youth) any time anyone had the audacity to ask him for help.

2. Plenty of less bombastic high performers (and nearly all women) were taken aside and advised on how to take up more space and throw their weight around. Good times.

3. The effect is strongest in work that’s uncertain, interdependent, or changing, where you need people to surface problems and adapt constantly. Psychological safety has much less effect on performance in work that is routine and stable. Anyone have a job like that?

4. Unless we’re talking about investing in the stock market, in which case 99/100 economists agree, do NOT try to pick stocks and beat the market, just put your money into index funds. Your thesis will not out-speculate high frequency traders and insider data.

5. With one exception. I think we can all agree that everything is always the CEO’s fault.