Essentially, I was trying to figure out what's going on in teams, why they are having so much trouble talking to each other and how we can help them. The more we looked into it, the more we realised that some people were reluctant to speak up in certain situations. And we couldn’t understand why. Why were some people OK and then not others? And the more research we did, the more we saw that communication skills were not evenly spread in teams.

At the same time, we started to come across this idea of psychological safety, and the more we dug into that, the more we began to realise that this is what's holding some of our teams back. If we could unlock this, we could improve our team's performance and hopefully deliver more value to our users.

It's going to be mainly Staff+ engineers. But in terms of what I'd like them to take away from this is that it is leadership that can make a significant impact on psychological safety. But team members play an essential part too. The thing about Staff+ engineers is that they sit in a grey area between leaders and team members, and it's in this grey area that Staff+ engineers can make an impact that other people can’t. While they're not official leaders, they are looked up to by other team members. And while they're not official team members, they are getting hands-on with the teams. So, I hope we can enable Staff+ engineers to increase psychological safety in this space by modelling behaviours that show them speaking up and creating spaces that allow team members to speak up too.

This is for people who already think psychological safety is something we need in teams but still need to figure out how they can help. So the core aim of this talk is to discuss how can Staff+ engineers can help foster environments high in psychological safety. One of the key takeaways is that they can walk away with some steps to get started with psychological safety with their teams.

I'd also like to help those unsure of psychological safety and whether they should even care about it. And those that are maybe on the fence who think they don’t need to worry about this and perhaps convince them that they should focus on psychological safety a little more and that they can do something about it too.