Hi, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with Meridian Point. Today, I thought we could have a conversation. Glenn Marshall and I would have a conversation about psychological safety and the paradox that we see with psychological safety and how some companies, seemingly with leadership that could be regarded as tyrants, are able to innovate the way they do, companies like Tesla and Apple, especially in the early days of Apple. Let me get Glenn on stage here, and we can continue our conversation about this.
This conversation started earlier today. Right, Glenn? We were sharing some text messages about an interview that you saw on the Meridian Point with Hugh Massey where he was talking about some of these elements that we're going to be speaking about. What was it about that interview that caught your attention and led to this conversation?
He mentioned Steve Jobs as one of the most inspiring people. And he also mentioned something that surprised me and that was a comment around toughness, and that was needed. Yet, obviously, if you're a tyrant, you're taking that too far. So there's a delicate balance in there. I hope we get the opportunity to read a quote from Johnny Ive that I thought encapsulated something rather brilliant.
It is interesting that Steve Jobs, you hear a lot about him and how he created this innovative culture, but, and Elon Musk as well, with all the companies that he's founded, like Tesla and SpaceX and The Boring Company and Neuralink. There are so many of them that he's created, and many of them have gone on to be very successful. Tesla and SpaceX are probably the most successful of his companies, one public, one private.
I think maybe we should talk a little bit about what psychological safety is. It's a nuanced thing, and it's not binary. The psychological safety for one company may be different than in another company. What would you say are some of the nuances with psychological safety, Glenn?
There are some nuances, but there's a basic definition, at least that I use in my training. And that is the perceived ability to speak up without fear of punishment or ridicule. You know you are valued. Your words will be taken seriously and you will be treated with respect. Now some people have a thick skin, some people have a thin skin, some people need to be more gentle with. Some people can be a bit rough. I've even heard people talk about, "Well, these guys are kind of rough, but they get stuff done." So it varies by personality. I'm sure it varies by culture, your experiences, your background, all kinds of things. But it's that you have to perceive that it's safe to speak up without fear of punishment or ridicule is what it comes down to.
It jives really well with research that Amy Edmondson did. She came up with the term psychological safety in her book and her research. What she defined it as is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Her research shows that high performing teams often combine psychological safety with high accountability, which she calls the learning zone. This helps explain how companies like Apple and Tesla can maintain high standards while still fostering innovation.
Psychological safety also exists at multiple levels. The most critical unit is within the team. Amy did work at Google for some of her research. I think she did. She worked with a lot of companies in promoting these ideas. And Google was one of them. It may have been the birth of the Aristotle project, where they did research on what were the factors that led to high performing teams. And one of the things they found was teams that had higher levels of psychological safety were the highest performing. Didn't have that much to do about their skills. Of course, they had to have skills, but it was more important that they had safety.
And one of the pieces of data that really struck me with that is there are some teams that on paper would look brilliant, all kinds of smart folks. But in terms of being productive, not so much because they didn't have psychological safety.
So you have all these super brilliant A players. They put them on a team together, but there's no safety. Because of that, they just don't perform.
One of the things that research by McKinsey did was separating idea evaluation from idea generation. So you need high psychological safety for idea generation. You need to be able to generate ideas without fear of being ridiculed for the ideas that you come up with. But then you also need high standards to evaluate them. They need to go through a standard that people understand, that they know it's going to be evaluated on certain criteria. And so it's okay to come up with them. You're encouraged to come up with ideas, but just know that they have to be evaluated against a standard. And the evaluation has to be perceived as fair.
And when you're critiquing something, you critique the idea, not the individual.
Exactly. So it's about the idea, not the person. The other thing they came up with was this idea of creating safety zones for early state innovation companies. Basically, it's the same idea. Lots of idea generation, but with high expectations for final output so that people are free to innovate and do the things they need to do. They have the safety to do that, but they also understand that there's a high level of accountability as part of it.
The accountability is interesting. I'm always talking to my teams about the notion of experimentation. There's no such thing as a failed experiment. It's just data. We're not sure. Let's try it. Let's see what we get. And even if it turns out that wasn't a good decision or a good approach, that's actually valuable information because you know not to do it anymore. But so many people are afraid of so-called failure. Organizations have a culture or proceed to a culture where failure is very visible and you're criticized and sanctioned so people then avoid taking risks. And there's safety at the organization level as well. Wise leaders and managers will do exactly as you said, create a safety zone.
I want to pull it back to Google for a moment. There's, I call it a fashion, and you see this happen. I think it started with Facebook. Facebook actually had a good reason to lay off some of the things that Facebook was taking advantage of, were shut down particularly with Apple products in terms of privacy, and that hit their bottom line very hard. So that was arguably defensible. But Google, who had the Aristotle project promptly thought, well, we'll lay off 20,000 people too. And psychological safety was a core value at Google. And this just blew a huge hole in it, and they had a town hall, and they were ripped for that, justly in my view. I found that very puzzling. Perhaps it's because the founders of Google were no longer in a leadership position, but I thought that was astonishingly self-sabotaging.
You mentioned this before. I like the term you came up with, and that is the analogy that it's more like an amputation than just a layoff. You're cutting off your arm, to serve the public's expectations for that company's profit goals or whatever it might be. These public companies have to answer to shareholders. And if they're not generating sufficient profit gains, then they got to do something.
I don't know if this is related to the founder's paradox. If the founder isn't still running the company and it's somebody else, if they're less inclined to stick to the values, the cultures, and the principles that the company was founded on and just go for the bottom line: we got to make our numbers next quarter or our stock's going to get punished. What are your thoughts?
It's like trying to lose weight through amputation. Not a good plan. That doesn't end well. There is hurt. There is pain. There is bleeding. There is a healing period needed. I think the analogy, it's a bit graphic, but it's powerful. This is not to say you should be unhealthy. If you are overweight, then go and do some exercise, but don't amputate your leg. We can play with the analogy a little bit. I don't want to be an idealist here. If the limb has gangrene and it's going to kill the rest of the organism, clearly, there are times where serious interventions are needed, but those are rare. And companies seem to just casually lay off people, to lose a few pounds. And that's a destructive plan that harms psychological safety and starts a culture of fear. Everybody is looking over their shoulder because they're thinking they're going to be next. And there's always good people who leave afterwards. "Well, I don't like the way they're treating those guys. I'm going to leave too." It's enormously self-destructive when done casually.
I'm with you. I'm wondering if we can explore a little bit about Elon Musk. He's obviously in the news lately with his involvement in the DOGE and the Department of Government Efficiency. We've talked about him already a little bit about his leadership of Tesla, from really nothing to the biggest automobile company in the world many times over worth more than the combined value of most other major car manufacturers together.
He founded SpaceX, which is not public, but it is probably if it does go public, which I think it will sometime this year or next, it'll be valued in the billions of dollars from their IPO. So he's definitely had success building these huge, successful companies. Very innovative, very creative. He was the one that brought EVs to market when people didn't think it really was a viable alternative to traditional automobiles. What do you think he does well in terms of the paradox of psychological safety?
The public perception of Elon Musk right now is probably as low as it's ever been. We need to come back to psychological safety, in terms of what it's not and what to do. But let's continue with Elon. Even though there's reports of him being very harsh with people and rage firing, clearly, that can't be pervasive, or his company simply would not be producing what they're producing.
Let's not forget reusable rockets. Like, now that's a thing. It took us fifty years to figure that out. Elon figured it out. And Starlink. I forgot about that. I'm not sure I'd want to hold shares in a land-based cellular company once Starlink gets going. So he's rather like Steve Jobs in terms of hit after hit after hit.
You don't want psychological safety to be an excuse for low standards, incompetence, poor quality, or laziness. So there's an accountability aspect there as well. But creating a safe space where you can feel safe to fail, to have an idea not work. But it can't be so excessive that you're afraid to go and speak up.
Let's bring up that Johnny Ive quote, if I may.
I do. And while you're doing that, I'm just going to ponder a little bit about Musk's paradox. I'm thinking that maybe part of his success is the mission that each of these companies that he's founded has been founded on. Like SpaceX: the mission was to make humanity multiplanetary. Tesla: to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Neuralink: to create brain and machine interfaces to address neurological challenges.
These are huge, very inspiring missions. And I think that people that go to work for these companies that have the skills and the ability to do this type of work, this mission-driven approach, they might take, they might be more open to some of the psychological safety or lack of psychological safety that may exist with these companies. If you're so mission-driven, you so much believe in the mission of the company, you may be more forgiving for some lapses.
I think there's something to that. I remember reading about the supercharger team. Elon axed them all. And I remember hearing from one of the people he hired back how the director who was not brought back said, "Look, we're on a mission. We want to bring EVs to the mass market." And even though I think he was treated rather shabbily, having the whole group laid off, at least he was brought back. And he remembered that mission from the former director who presumably got it from Elon, how they had a very important purpose. So mission and purpose absolutely is a big part of it.
Here's a quote from Steve Jobs who was accused of being harsh at times. He certainly did not tolerate incompetence or poor quality. But Steve treated the process of creativity with a rare and wonderful reverence. He understood better than anyone that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, the demon has fragile, barely formed thoughts so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished. So he had discernment.
I suppose Steven Steve Jobs and Elon Musk probably share some of these same characteristics. Steve Jobs is very technical. He was very smart, and he surrounded himself with really smart technical people. But he was able to engage with the engineers on the floor, in a way that maybe Elon Musk as well can do. But he was able to engage them, challenge them. And if I'm working in an environment like that I'm going to feel challenged. I'm going to feel more empowered to come up with ideas. And thrive in an environment like that.
Again, I don't know that's what's happening at Tesla or SpaceX, but I suspect it must be to a certain extent for them to be able to come up with the kinds of innovations that they have.
And there's a tension there. Challenged, but in a healthy way, not so much that you're stressed, but that you're motivated. So it's a healthy challenge, not an unhealthy challenge.
I remember my days as a developer, and I had a very demanding boss. I wasn't intimidated by him. He was demanding, but he challenged people to think outside the box. And so the team that I was on, we all did that. And it was rewarding when we could figure things out because this guy could have easily just done it for us, but he didn't. He challenged us to do it. And we did it.
I don't know if Musk is that way, but I suspect that there's a little bit of that going on that when you have really talented engineers and scientists working for you, they would feel challenged rather than threatened because they know that this guy, Musk, or Jobs, they understand the challenge, and so they're there to help them, and not hinder them.
Another thing that Musk has, I don't know if Steve Jobs did this as well, but Musk certainly has, he's talked about it, he's written about it, is this idea of first principles thinking that enhances psychological safety, at least the idea generation part of psychological safety. "We want to cut down to the most simple solution to a problem. Let's brainstorm. What ideas do you have?" I think that lends itself to a free flow of ideas and the validation part, it has to be more rigorous. But I think that environment creates a structure for which these engineers can do that.
I think both Elon particularly today, Steve for a number of years, but it seemed to get better, through about six or seven years of out of the park home runs. They got an awful lot of bad press because they disrupt things. I think they had a lot of ego, so they would display temper from time to time. But it couldn't have been so common or so unreasonable or nobody would have worked for the guy. A true tyrant, everybody hates. They're terrified. They won't tell the truth. They basically hide things and lie to the boss, which is dreadfully unproductive. But Apple wasn't like that. I do remember Steve being cited as relentlessly focused on the customer, not himself. And if you had an idea that would improve the customer experience, he was all ears. And as long as you improve the customer experience, he didn't care.
I suppose that there are some structure elements that complement this type of leadership style. I would think that flat organizational structures are more complimentary of this type of roll-up-your-sleeves leadership style. I'm here with you. I'm going to work just as hard as anyone or harder than any of you work. We've all heard the stories about Musk sleeping on the factory floor to get the model three to production, working twenty hours a day, sleeping four hours a night. But you need to have a very flat organization structure for that. Wouldn't you say?
You do. I struggle with these deep organizational hierarchies.
One of the things that I remember reading about is that he's not a proponent for hierarchical chains. He says, "If you have a problem, go straight to the source of the problem." You can bypass all the managers that stand in your way, and you just go right to the person that you need to talk to.
Direct communication channels that bypass traditional hierarchy. And open floor plans, of course. And the technical ability that Steve Jobs and Musk both have in being able to have meaningful conversations with the engineers, the scientists, and so on that are working on these innovative products that we now take for granted. I think all of those things work in their favor.
What would you say are the other side of the coin? These are all great things because they've led to some amazing innovations from highly productive teams that had to have enough psychological safety to be able to innovate to create this. It wasn't all Musk. It wasn't all Steve Jobs. They had people doing a lot of this stuff. So it's undeniable that they have had success.
Their accountability is a big thing. High standards that are expected, but are not ridiculous. One of the quotes from Steve is he had the ability to convince people to do something they thought was impossible. So there's inspiration and charisma in there as well.
I've modified my view somewhat. I don't think that layoffs are a healthy thing, if you're short of a true financial emergency. I am a fan of the concept from the great game of business whereby when you have a division that, for example, lost a huge contract, you try and redeploy those folks to try and do other business, innovate, do research something.
I remember from the book, that this one group had lost a huge government contract, but they all focused on getting other business, and they got even more than they had before. So going through a difficult experience like that, that builds teamwork, and that builds psychological safety and a real sense of ownership in the company. So when you go through something like that, your morale goes through the roof. Whereas if you just cut them very harshly, your morale goes through the floor.
Let me go back to your question to a point you raised a moment ago with that manager who was very demanding. How did he respond when things screwed up, and how do you respond when you were successful and you achieved something?
I never screwed up, so I didn't have to see that side of him. But I would say that when people did screw up or make a mistake, he was definitely not the Steve Jobs or at least what you read about Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. He didn't go fire you. He helped you diagnose the problem. And so there was a certain safety there, in the evaluation process. So high standards. High safety for ideas and high standards for evaluating whether what you built was up to standard.
But I never felt that if I made a mistake and created something that wasn't quite up to par, that I was going to get fired. And I suspect that in Apple and certainly in Musk's companies, that is not the case. I think there's high safety in those companies for certain types of risks, technical risks, technical, conceptual, mission-critical things. There has to be, or how can you innovate? There's probably lower safety for other types of things like personal comfort, adherence to process, work-life balance. That's out the window if you work for a company like that that Elon Musk runs. You can kiss work-life balance goodbye because it's all about the mission.
There's an interesting comment from NASA around SpaceX. NASA does not like it when rockets blow up. SpaceX says, "We're moving fast." I think there's a quote that sums it all up. If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough. You're not taking enough risks. And there's truth in that, but it's embarrassing when a rocket blows up. But NASA actually congratulated Tesla. "Look how far you got. Yes, it blew up. But look how far you got and how quickly you did."
So there is something to that. But in order to do that, it requires serious psychological safety. If you're in a risk-adverse organization, you're going to test it and be very cautious. You've got to be bold. You've got to try things. And for that, you need psychological safety. And clearly SpaceX has psychological safety. It has to, or they wouldn't have made the progress that they have made over the past ten years.
Who would have thought that we would have reusable rockets that land themselves on a platform? It's really amazing. It's like science fiction that's come to life.
It's better. Have you seen the Starship? It goes back to where it launched from, and it lands on a pair of chopsticks. It's crazy. It is unreal.
This talk has helped me process it to a certain extent, Glenn. I can see where Musk is looking at the government and seeing, "My God. This is so wasteful. We just need to start fresh." And his MO has always been, you know, look what he did to Twitter. He basically cut 80% of the staff. They're running with 20% of the people that they had. And yes, it's had its problems, and certainly, you can argue the political side of this. But just from a purely technical perspective, Twitter, X, whatever, it still runs fine. It doesn't have as many users as it did before, but it still runs fine.
He was able to take a bloated organization and cut it down to a leaner state. And it runs okay.
We don't need to talk about content moderation. That's a whole other topic. I do think the government is different from Twitter, but I think that he's trying to do a Twitter type operation. I am concerned that there's a bit of an agenda behind the scenes. They're picking on certain agencies and not other agencies. It would be interesting to see what would happen if they went loose on Pentagon. Pentagon has some notorious cost overages and things like that.
I do see amputation which is harmful and needless. But there's a history of this, and I don't think the US government was gangrene. Was Twitter? I think it could have been done more gracefully. But maybe your former manager will tie it all together. Was your former manager perceived as harsh by his staff?
It depends on the staff. I think that there's a certain kind of people that thrive under the type of conditions that I suspect exist at Tesla or SpaceX or Apple under Steve Jobs, and it's a very challenging environment. And if you have the drive for that type of an environment, you will do really well there, and you will feel like you're totally safe and so on.
But for certain types of people, where the job is not their life, those people might be challenged because their personal life, their work-life balance would be challenged. And certainly, I had those moments when I worked for this guy, where I felt that this is too much. But I was younger then, and I was fine working extra because it was enjoyable to me.
I think there's more wisdom with Elon and with Steve than people realize. He couldn't go too far or people would have quit. So he was inspiring, but didn't cross the line into being a tyrant as perceived by his staff very often, but maybe he got close to it. And to your point about some people don't like it, maybe the horror stories that we hear about are people who left because they didn't like it. They couldn't see themselves in that kind of an environment. Maybe they were there for a little while. It was too much for them, and they left.
I think this is a good way for us to tie this with a bow. Psychological safety is not a binary thing. It's not that you have it or you don't. It's a very nuanced thing. And it the psychological safety, for one company may be different, totally different than in another company. And you can still create safety in very high pressure, high standards, high achieving companies and still feel safe, but it has to be with the right people, the people that want that kind of an environment. So you have to be very selective about who you hire into those types of companies, I think.
I think there's a lot of safety at the team level, and that's where the manager has a lot of responsibility or the team lead or the coach or the scrum master, whatever you're working under. And the manager needs to protect the team. There will be tyrant leaders that come in from time to time that can cause damage.
I've always been a fan of Steve's approach to focus on delighting the customer and the money will follow. Some people have it backwards. "We need to cut customer service. They're easy." Really? But you have to think deeply about these things. And you're right. It is nuanced.
The insight that I've got over these last couple of days is psychological safety is not coddling. Psychological safety and high standards go together.
That's right. So one of the things that's not binary, it's not about comfort. There are many different dimensions to psychological safety. It's inclusion safety. Are you being included? It's learner safety. Do you have the time and the space to learn and make mistakes? It's contributor safety. Can you contribute an idea and not get laughed out of the room? It's challenger safety. Can you challenge something, an idea that's maybe your superior came up with and not get fired?
And so it's many different dimensions of safety that need to work together in harmony. And I think that they all matter to a large degree. And then it can be selectively applied. Maybe you're very safe in very highly technical environments, but not so much with work-life balance, especially in companies like this, where in other companies, it may be more well-rounded. They want you to feel that you have a life outside of work, and all of the other things are there as well.
There is some concern about Tesla and burnout, how Elon drives people and they just burn out and then they leave. But there's another side here that we need to talk about. This is also, you need to have the safety. If you see someone make a mistake, then you help them to learn. Treat it as a learning opportunity. But if this is chronic, and tips into incompetence, you need to be able to be free to speak to that. So you're not going to tolerate incompetence, which comes back to the high standards. The other one, of course, would be poor quality or just non-engagement and laziness for lack of a better term.
It's not about comfort. It's about safety around the ideas, the work that you do, and taking pride in your work. That it conforms to the high standards that exist in the company for sure. But if your work-life balance is so terrible that your health is suffering, that gets, you can cross the line. I wonder about Tesla and driving people too hard. It seemed like Apple did not drive people quite as hard. Maybe Tesla could be even more successful if they drove people a little bit less.
Maybe there's a balance there that Musk and his companies hasn't explored. Or maybe we just don't know enough because all we see is the persona that he projects in public, and there's so much else that's going on under the covers that we don't know about in how the companies are run.
Elon is extremely unfiltered. I can't think of any CEO who speaks his mind like Elon does when he wants to. And I think a lot of the press is, he's certainly down in the press, and he's done some things that I am concerned about. But the press is absolutely taking every negative little tidbit and amplifying it. And I think it's overdone. I think there's some serious questions that need to be asked, but I think the press is being overdone.
I agree to a certain extent, although the things that he's doing now with the DOGE project is questionable at best. The techniques that he's employing, which are things that have been proven successful for him and his company ventures. But with the government, I don't know that they're the best way to do it. There is certainly something to be said about waste in the government. And people have tried to cut out and root out waste in the government for decades. But I don't know if this is the best way to do it.
He's following the Twitter model, and I think one of the reasons he's in such a hurry is because he knows that he will run out of time, and eventually, there'll be such a huge backlash. So he's trying to move quickly while he can before he gets knocked back, and he was pulled back the other day. The cabinet secretaries now get to make the final decision on layoffs, not Elon. So perhaps his time running flat out is coming to an end.
Any closing thoughts? I know we can probably talk about this more. There's certainly more to talk about.
I'm very glad we had this discussion. I thought about psychological safety a lot and Steve a lot. I think I was undervaluing high standards, and you need psychological safety and high standards. So this was an insight for me.
I wonder if there's a model for innovation focused psychological safety. If you were to say, "Okay. We want our company to be innovation focused. We want to be able to develop ideas rapidly, quickly, get them to market, test them, learn from them." Is there a model that will get us there? And I'm wondering if that would include these elements that we're talking about.
A need for radical thinking and high standards. You need both. And you need protection from well-intentioned failures. You can't be thrown out the door because there was a failure. But you also need to be accountable for excellence. And then another idea would be to be able to challenge without fear. So if there's something going on that you see as, "My God, this is not right," you got to be able to challenge that without fear of being thrown out the door.
And then being as an employee of a company like this, being driven by the mission, but balance that with some sense of sustainability, sustainable team dynamics so that you do have a life.
Correct. And the Agile manifesto talks about that. It's at a sustainable pace.
I think we've done a fairly good job here. And this actually answers a question I've had for many years, and that is how does Steve do it? And I think my understanding has been advanced. So I'm grateful to you for facilitating this conversation.
Well, thank you for joining me. This has been a lot of fun. There may be a part two because I think we want to look at the other side. What did Steve Jobs and what does Elon Musk get right? There's a lot of things they got right, but what did they get wrong? I'd be interested in exploring that with Apple a bit more.
And now I remembered what I was going to say. There's a personal dimension to this. It's what each individual perceives, which will vary by individual and will vary by team. Some teams can be rough, but people view it as safe, then that's fine. Some people might be more gentle, more polite. It's whatever the individuals perceive, and that varies by the individual.
Thank you again for joining me, and we will see you again in another episode. All of you viewers, hopefully you stuck around for the whole conversation and you got something out of it. And we'll see you next time.
