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Psychological safety 🤝 your successful platform engineering effort.

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Psychological safety and platform engineering

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the best work environments are often the ones that promote a high degree of psychological safety. 🧠

If an individual feels psychologically safe, they feel comfortable and confident contributing ideas, thinking creatively and challenging the status quo without worrying about receiving judgement. Psychological safety helps individuals feel valued and appreciated, learn more, and grow professionally. For organizations, ensuring psychological safety for employees increases the likelihood of having a diverse time, accelerates time-to-market, and drives innovation, among other benefits. 📈

To cultivate psychological safety for your platform engineering team, you can treat psychological safety like products:

• Engage empathetically with team members
• Admit when you make mistakes
• Iterate on policies and procedures to implement fresh ways of thinking 💡
• Gather regular feedback from your team to understand what’s going well and where you can improve
• Lead by example. Ask questions 🙋 and take advantage of learning opportunities.

How do you know if your efforts are successful? It looks different for everyone, but here are four markers of success you should keep an eye out for:

• Inclusion. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 If everyone feels a sense of belonging to the team, you’re on the right track
• Learning. Team members should feel safe asking questions and pursuing new learning opportunities
• Contributing. Individuals should feel free to contribute their ideas to the team
• Challenging. 💪 Folks feel empowered to challenge the status quo without fear of retaliation

Psychological safety is a spectrum, and cultivating it is a continuous process. But, with some effort, you can transform your engineering organization into one where teams can feel empowered and be creative.

Check out the full webinar here.

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

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🥐 Here are 5 unconventional ways to boost your code quality. 📈

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🥐 A meme for you:

Last but not least, have you joined the Platform Engineering Slack channel? If not, you're missing out. Here are the highlights:

• Which config management tools are suitable for a company that mainly deploys its apps on AWS serverless infrastructure?
• How to build frameworks/capabilities as part of the platform engineering team
• What GitOps platform do you use and why?

Do you want to be a Trailblazer for PlatformCon? Read more here.

And that’s a wrap on this week! As always, this newsletter is a community project. So if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way.

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

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