Psychological safety is particularly important for teams that manage service reliability. The vulnerability that comes with mitigating failures in production requires principles of trust, transparency, and inclusion that can only come from cultures that minimize harm and enable empowerment.

Cultivating this kind of culture requires leaders to think proactively about how to build processes and systems that enable teams to be healthy, productive, and effective, while being adequately prepared for situations when failure inevitably happens.

We’ll review the cultural consequences of chronic issues and the strategies we can use as leaders to align with our shared goal of building excellent teams. We’ll touch upon themes of privilege, power, and accountability.

The lens I take this talk from is one that’s informed by trauma informed teaching. I thread these different principles throughout the rest of my talk, starting with an overview of chronic issues (I provide a definition), followed by three sets of strategies for addressing chronic problems preventatively, proactively, and reactively. The end of the talk focuses heavily on the responsibility leaders must take for these issues and what that looks like.