Refactoring Podcast Building Psychologically Safe Teams 🛡️ — with Meg Adams
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Oct 10, 2025 Meg Adams, Senior Director of Engineering at The New York Times, shares her transformative journey from education to tech leadership. She explores neuroleadership, emphasizing how neuroscience enhances decision-making in teams. Meg introduces the SCARF model, highlighting how status and certainty impact engineers, and discusses designing processes to promote psychological safety. She provides insights on effective communication during uncertainty and the importance of modeling behaviors to nurture thriving team cultures, drawing on her experiences at Etsy.
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From Retail Manager To Self-Taught Engineer
- Meg taught herself HTML, CSS and JavaScript after managing retail to break into tech.
- She spent years as an engineer before returning to leadership, which was her original career goal.
SCARF Links Social Cues To Brain States
- The SCARF model maps social drivers to brain reward and threat systems using five domains.
- Leaders can use these levers to predict when people feel safe or threatened at work.
Threat States Reduce Cognitive Capacity
- Threat responses divert blood and oxygen to survival systems, reducing planning and creativity.
- Psychological safety is therefore a physical enabler of cognitive capacity, not just a 'soft' nice-to-have.