Level-up Engineering Creating Psychological Safety: Dan Rummel (Senior Director of Engineering at One Medical)
How do you build psychological safety in your team? Why is it important?
We sat down for an interview with Dan Rummel. He is currently the Senior Director of Engineering at One Medical, and he’s held engineering and leadership positions at various Bay Area startups.
He shares this invaluable insight with you on creating a workplace with psychological safety, so you get to understand his way of thinking and pick up actionable tips you can apply at your company.
In the interview we're covering:
- Why is psychological safety important?
- The difference between psychological safety and the comfort zone
- Requirements for psychological safety
- How did Dan build psychological safety?
- How to promote psychological safety as a leader?
Excerpt from the interview:
Leading by example
"Leading by example is often neglected. It’s a real challenge for leaders and managers because their typical personality types can take up a lot of space in the room. I think leading by example means making space for others.
We need to actively make space for others to chime in during meetings. It also helps a lot to show vulnerability, talk about some of your challenges, or throw out the occasional wild or even silly idea. Even if you know it will likely be shot down, this lets your team know you’re fair game for debate as well.
Perhaps the most important thing to do is to admit when you're wrong, and not make it a big deal. Just saying, “I was wrong; you've got it,” helps the healthy debate and makes it comfortable to rumble through ideas and to find the best outcomes.
The reason healthy teams produce better outcomes is that there's a diversity of experiences and perspectives that come to the table. When people can build mental models with everyone else's experiences, your outcomes get exponentially better, and you get beautiful results from those debates."