Iron Sharpens Iron

Psychological safety is NOT easy, comfortable, "sunshine and rainbows", or BS.

It is hard, confronting, realistic, and grounded.

Without constructive conflict, you fall for the Abilene Paradox (link in comments) when groups choose to conform rather than speak up; leading to a decision that reflects the preferences of no one.

How do you get to this state as a leader of cross-functional data product teams?

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Team of Teams by McChrystal and Playing to Win by Lafley and Martin suggest the following:

1. Engender Trust: It won't happen overnight and it won't happen without work.
   
   Make it an explicit priority. Establish norms for how failure is handled.
   
   Embrace productive conflict and the Socratic method. Yet lead by example - if you fail to build that trust in your actions as a leader
2. Embrace Learning: Frame working as a learning problem, not purely an execution problem.
   
   Teams and therefore people are constantly asserting a hypothesis, testing it, and learning from it.
   
   Embrace this.
3. Practice Humility: Recognize your own fallibility and biases. Decisions should not be from your singular point of view but one that moves toward open communication.
   
   Welcome feedback and respectful challenge and check your ego at the door.
4. Nurture Curiosity: Pre-mortems. "How might we's..." Product discovery. Retrospectives.
   
   There are dozens if not an infinite number of ways to cultivate curiosity.
   
   The goal is for everyone to ask a lot of questions > disagree and commit > build and test > analyze to start the loop all over again.