The Business Case For Psychological Safety

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Hannah Clark: People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. We’ve all heard it, we’ve all lived it. But it’s a trope for a reason, and when you’re the leader being left, it’s hard not to take that a little personally. After all, managing people is really hard, and our teams rarely have visibility into the real scope of work involved. We’re often so busy keeping our timelines running on track that it’s easy to deprioritize the human connection and support your team needs from you. When your team feels disconnected, it’s that much more tempting to disconnect from the company altogether.

My guest today is PM Coach Nancy Chu. With over 20 years of experience in product, Nancy has led product teams for major companies like Meta and Roku, and she’s seen how interpersonal dynamics affect product teams at every level, including business outcomes. We talked about the role of compassion and effective leadership, why it’s all too scarce in big tech, and how fostering a supportive culture is a long game with real rewards. Let’s jump in.

Welcome back listeners. I’m Hannah Clark with The CPO Club, and we are a community of tenacious product leaders here to share the weight of scaling your product. Our members are SaaS-focused PMs who genuinely love their work and are driven to help others succeed. So if that sounds like you and you want to hear more, head over to theproductmanager.com/membership.

Today, we’re speaking with PM Coach, Nancy Chu.

Nancy, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Nancy Chu: Thank you so much for having me, Hannah, super excited for this discussion.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, I’m really excited as well.

So first, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up where you are today?

Nancy Chu: Yes. My name is Nancy Chu. And my mission is to uplift product leaders who are in really demanding roles, accelerate their goals faster with more ease. And how did I end up here today? I didn’t plan to become a PM coach, but one thing led to another and here I am.

Hannah Clark: Today, we’re going to be focusing on compassionate leadership in a product team context. So to start us off, what are we really talking about when we use the word compassion?

Nancy Chu: I actually had to look up the definition for compassion because it felt like empathy. It felt like kindness. But what I learned by looking this up is that they’re all similar, but the difference between let’s say compassion and empathy is that compassion is one step more than empathy.

Empathy is when you feel for others. But compassion is actually taking a step to help another person out. So this is not my own definition. It’s what I learned when I was preparing for this podcast.

Hannah Clark: So in your view, what do you see as the role and value of compassion in leadership?

Nancy Chu: Well, I actually wanted to just talk about the most fundamental thing in terms of what people need, not just what product managers need.

It’s just human psychology wise, we’re hardwired to seek connection. And this is something that we learned from our ancestors. So from evolution standpoint, our ancestors learned that if we could lean on other people and learn and trust other people, our rate of survival would exponentially increase. And so our brains have evolved over time to really seek connection and community and network.

It’s for survival. And so when we just look at what people need, just in general, in the very basic sense, people would think food, shelter, and water. But what people don’t usually say when we ask this question about what do humans need in terms of the very basic hierarchy of needs is this sense of belonging.

And belonging really comes from a feeling that we are seen and feeling that we are heard. And so when we bring it back to the topic for today, which is compassion leadership, it’s nothing more than just needing community, needing to be seen and to be supported regardless of whether we’re at work or at home.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that sometimes we can lose sight of our human needs when we’re in a work context.

But tactically speaking, what does using compassion in leadership look like?

Nancy Chu: It actually isn’t a leadership move. It’s just a people skill. It’s people learning how to be nice to other people.

And we think about it in terms of leadership because not every leader has compassion. And so we’re combining multiple concepts into one, but at the most basic level, it’s really just, are we able to help each other out no matter what we’re doing? Because the rate of survival would exponentially increase if we’re able to help each other out.

And a lot of leaders in the business world today, they don’t really focus on helping each other. There’s this sense of dog eat dog. There’s also a sense of this world has limited resources. And when we help each other out, we are competing against the same pool of resources, and that’s why it’s not very common to see in organizations there today.

But what’s more important here is to actually study the really high performing teams and how they operate. So here’s what I learned when I was doing research for this podcast. The highest performing team probably does not exist in the business world, and that’s because it’s not really survival. So the highest performing team will exist if you look at the military, Navy SEALs or the Marines, they’re actually fighting for survival.

And so if you look at how they operate, you would see that it’s very different from how we operate in a business world. And a key aspect to how they operate is teamwork, actual teamwork, where the leader supports the people so that the people can actually go do what they’re supposed to do.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, this is a really interesting comparison, because I think we think of the military as being even more hardline and more cutthroat than the business world.

But it is true that you’re really leaning on the people in your respective squadron or whatever. I’m not really familiar with that many military terms, but in that context, the stakes are, they couldn’t be higher, right?

Nancy Chu: Stakes are high. And let’s take it down a notch and just look at the medical world. So, medical world, doctors and nurses and care providers, they’re actually saving lives. And how they save lives is by doing what they’re supposed to do. And their leadership, if leadership truly wants to optimize for saving lives, then the leaders in a hospital would need to really empower and care for the doctors and the nurses and the staff so that they can go and provide the care.

It’s not the leaders who are providing care to the patients, it’s the staff that’s providing care. And so unless the staff is well taken care of, they won’t be able to provide care.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, and I think that this is very true that we sometimes see like two dimensional attempts at supporting teammates, you know, maybe like having free snacks available or something like that.

What would you say would be a better approach if let’s say we’re speaking to a startup leader who’s or maybe they’re scaling their team and they’re starting to now have to be compassionate at scale or care for a larger team? What are some things that you think someone in that position could do to really foster that sense of support that allows people to reach their full potential?

Nancy Chu: Well, first, we have to understand why it’s important. We also have to understand that this is a long game that we’re playing. It’s not a short term game. If we’re very short term focused, then we don’t really need to invest in having the right support system in place. So it’s the difference between a sprint and a marathon.

In business, there really isn’t like an end to your business. Assuming this business goes on, right? You can’t really just stop. Ideally, you want to keep on going. And if you know that the game that you’re playing is infinite, you would need to have the infrastructure in place. So the mindset will be very different if you’re sprinting versus running a marathon.

Hannah Clark: I can see that manifesting in the kinds of leaders, I think that there’s one mindset that exists that’s like, I have to push my team to have the highest potential output right now versus one that’s thinking I need to take care of my team members so that they’re not burning out six months a year into their role and I’m having to replace them all the time. I mean, that’s just what I see over and over again.

Do you think that there’s any kind of warning signs that we can look at if we’re in a leadership position, any kind of red flags that we need to be self screening for to make sure that we aren’t drifting too far to one side of the spectrum?

Nancy Chu: I mean, it’s hard because in the business world, you have to have results. And same thing as running a marathon, you have to have these milestones in place. But the difference here is if we reward people by short term impact that they’re driving per milestone, then they will repeat that behavior over and over again.

And that’s just how we operate. We repeat our behavior if it gets rewarded. And so you can reward people based on impact. And, or you could reward people based on behavior. And at the end of the day, the hypothesis here is that there’s certain types of behavior that allows people to play the long game.

And you might not be able to see short term gains. It’s like investing in a stock market. When you invest, you have a plan to invest for a certain time horizon. And if it’s short term focus, your choices in investment would be more conservative. But if you’re investing for a longer term, let’s say 10 years or 20 years, you would be making different types of choices.

So same thing here when you’re in a leadership position, when you invest in the people you want to think, is this short term focus or is a long term focus? Most of the leaders out there have a short, shorter term focus.

Hannah Clark: It makes sense because right now, I think most of us need to operate under, you know, what is going to get us in a competitive position right now, because this is a world that changes so quickly and we have, there’s always new competitors and new technology that comes out that threatens our business. I feel it’s very tempting to take a reactive approach.

How do you think a good leader finds the balance between keeping their eye on the short term while also managing and being accountable for the short term goals that are critical for business survival?

Nancy Chu: Yeah, it’s to be very intentional on what you’re doing.

So it’s perfectly fine and reasonable to be in survival mode. If we have to survive, then we make certain decisions out of survival needs. So my favorite framework when it comes to survival and just hierarchy of needs is the Maslow’s Pyramid. And so at the bottom of the pyramid, you have your fundamental needs.

And in human terms, it’s really just food, water, and shelter and belonging. In business terms, it’s, can we survive this quarter? And it’s okay to be in that mode, but just be very intentional about it. And knowing that once we’re out of survival mode, we don’t always have to make the same decisions the same way.

But I don’t know that the leaders are actually intentional about the choices that they’re making.

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I imagine it’s very difficult to be focused on goals both for the bottom line of your business as well as what’s best for your employees well being. I think that’s probably just a constant challenge for any leader of any level.

Nancy Chu: Right. It also means as an employee, when you join an organization, you want to know if this organization is in survival mode or not.

And so if you join an organization knowing that this is survival mode, then your expectation will be different, that it’s okay to join with your eyes wide open, knowing that it’s going to be sprint after sprint, and you’re taking care of yourself in that way. But there’s oftentimes a mismatch in terms of expectation.

Employees sometimes have a high expectation. I want my managers to pay attention to my growth. Or I want management to want to grow me. But if your organization is in survival mode, that’s not going to be their priority.

Hannah Clark: I can see how knowing what kind of a mode or kind of goals or objectives an organization has right when you join can really impact the fit as well as whether you feel your skill set lends itself well to joining the organization.

We just had a really good conversation with Josh Doody about just that, like learning from the get go, what an organization’s goals and key pain points and challenges are. And I think that extends more, not just to what you can offer, but also, you know, are those the kinds of goals that are aligned with your skill set where you feel that you can move the needle in the way that is meaningful to that business’s current priorities. So that’s a really interesting way to think about it.

You mentioned it’s not really a priority for a lot of leaders to be, you know, thinking about compassion versus the bottom line and business outcomes. But I do feel that, you know, speaking to your reference to the military and other things that teamwork, if you want to put it in a different way, has enormous potential for business outcomes.

How might leaders wanna reframe how they think about compassion in terms of its place on that pyramid?

Nancy Chu: Well, compassion is probably not at the bottom of the pyramid because you don’t necessarily need compassion to survive, but you definitely need belonging to survive. So once you have this sense of belonging that you are in the right tribe, then you’re more likely to feel like, yes, I belong here. And once you’re in that state, then you could “afford” to be compassionate.

So we started by talking about the definition of compassion, which is actually helping out the people next to you. That comes from a place of feeling very secure about your own standing in this tribe. If you’re in survival mode, then you don’t have resources to help out others. And so when you’re surrounded by people who are just trying to survive, there’s going to be very low compassion. Because it doesn’t make sense in that environment.

Hannah Clark: This is an interesting train of thought because I also feel, and I don’t disagree with you, but I also feel that even in organizations that are in survival mode, you still need to invest enough in your employees that they do have that sense of belonging and that they still feel connected to that mission and don’t get frustrated and leave.

So what are some of the ways that even when on a let’s say a shoestring emotional budget that we can still foster that sense of belonging and make people feel like they’re contributors to a survival mode or a crisis mode organization?

Nancy Chu: So I looked into what it means to have a sense of belonging and it breaks down into four different factors.

One is frequent interactions with people in your tribe. So imagine that, let’s say, you’re in a remote setting, and you don’t really connect with your tribe. That frequent interaction is going to be pretty low. That’s going to make you feel a certain way about your sense of belonging. So that’s one of the four levers.

The second one is positive interactions. So if you feel like you could be yourself without putting on a mask every time you talk to a colleague, it’s more likely that you would have positive interactions. So that’s the second one. The third one is stability. Now imagine that people are getting laid off left and right, or you’re being pivoted left and right.

There’s reorgs left and right. You’re not going to have stability. So lack of stability is against the sense of belonging. Sense of belonging takes time. It builds over time. So stability is one. And then the fourth one is significant. So, I like this example where let’s say you follow your favorite celebrity on Instagram.

You feel like you’re connected to their posts every day, but it’s not going to feel very significant. Here’s another example where you might have frequent interactions, it might be positive, but it’s not going to be significant. It’s someone at the store that says, thank you for shopping here. That’s also not a very significant interaction.

But it’s frequent, it’s also positive. So you need these four things to feel this sense of belonging; frequency, positive interactions, stability, and then significance. Now when we have these four building blocks in place, and then people start to feel, okay, I belong here. Then you can work toward being compassionate for one another. So first comes sense of belonging, and then second comes empathy and compassion.

Hannah Clark: I love this framework, by the way, these four building blocks.

What would you say, I’m just mostly curious about the significance aspect because I can envision these more insignificant interactions. What would be an example of a significant interaction that would help to round out those four building blocks?

Nancy Chu: Yeah, so in a business setting, it’s very easy for a relationship to feel very transactional, right? Okay, let’s have our weekly meeting this week. And then you start the meeting and you end the meeting, and then that’s it. And you don’t have any other discussions around that. That’s not going to feel very significant.

It’s going to feel positive just to meet everyone’s schedule. It’s going to be a frequent thing that happens every week. But it’s not going to be significant. And so significance, to me, comes from the one-on-one conversations and paying attention to how your colleagues are doing. So an example that comes to mind is by how to run a weekly meeting and I probably was not the best version of myself that day.

But a colleague reached out and just checked in. He said, hey, everything okay? You sounded different. That simple exchange made me feel like, Oh my gosh, I am seen. People actually care, right? So it’s that level of interaction that you could have in a business setting that will really contribute to the four blocks that would ladder up to a sense of belonging.

Hannah Clark: That’s a great example. And I do think that often we get so caught up in the minutiae of our role that it’s difficult to take the time to acknowledge whether it’s that someone was off that day or that they did made a contribution that was really significant. And I know that there are some tools that can be integrated as well, you know, into Slack or whatever, to help make that more of a systematic thing and encourage people to share more.

But I like that thinking about that as something that’s fairly critical and allowing people to feel involved, to feel that they belong with an organization.

Nancy Chu: I had a very interesting experience with my assistant. So I am in a business of one person, but I recently decided I need help. So I started working with an assistant and I didn’t think that much about how I could welcome my assistant, and I didn’t really plan to really optimize for this relationship.

I’m just going with the flow, and it’s also my very first assistant ever, so I’m still learning. And then, because I really like to have a sounding board, and I like to ask for her opinion. Oh, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? To me, that’s a very normal type of interaction.

But her response, I did not expect her to say, Oh my gosh, thank you for asking me. And it turns out it’s because when you work as an assistant, people assume that you would just execute and you would just do the thing that you’re told to do. But I was just asking her for her opinion and it made a difference and I didn’t know that I would.

So sometimes you don’t really think about these little things that you do that could really move the needle. And by itself, it’s probably not going to make a big difference. But every little interaction adds up over time and that’s how you build a relationship. That’s how teamwork can be fostered and the sense of belonging.

Hannah Clark: Oh, I love that. I think that’s such a great way to think about it too, is that we are all creators of the culture that we have at work and we all contribute to what the culture is by virtue of what we do and what we say and how we interact with others.

That kind of connects in my view to the concept of emotional safety or psychological safety, which is something we’ve talked about on the podcast quite a bit, and it’s something that I think is really important to be thinking about.

How can leaders find a balance between promoting emotional safety within their teams and ensuring that the team is also operating efficiently and effectively?

Nancy Chu: So even though I don’t have data points on this, but logically speaking, if you feel safe, which means you’re no longer in survival mode, you could then tap into the creative part of your brain that actually allows you to think about new ideas and see if you could exponentially innovate. Emotional safety and psychological safety allows us to operate above survival.

And so in terms of the hierarchy of needs, that comes after you actually feel safe. And that’s why emotional and psychological safety are so important. It’s because when you’re out of survival mode, when you know that you don’t have a tiger chasing you, then you could actually climb the tree and get the apple that you really love.

Like if we’re just thinking of cave men and women terms. Right, so apple on the tree is like a nice to have. You don’t need the apple to survive, but it’s really delicious. But as soon as there’s a tiger behind you, or as soon as there’s a tiger by the tree, you’re going to run, you would abandon all your dreams, you would abandon all the creative ideas that you might have because you’re in survival mode.

And so what happens when we don’t feel safe is that we’re just fixated on that tiger. We’re not thinking about the apple anymore. And that’s why safety is important. And again, that’s the long game that we’re playing.

Hannah Clark: I couldn’t agree with you more. I think that in my experience also, I feel that people do their best work when they don’t feel imminently under pressure, where they feel safe and supported and also accountable.

And I think that’s that delicate balance to strike where you don’t want people to feel like there’s a tiger chasing them, but you also want them to feel accountable to their work and to want to do their best and to feel that they have gained your belief in your trust, and they’re trying to give their best back to, you know, to keep that relationship alive.

Nancy Chu: The accountability is interesting because it almost has this undertone that people need to be held accountable. But in the perfect world, in an idealistic world, you don’t really need to hold people accountable because everyone is already accountable for themselves and for the team. And the need to hold people accountable again comes from, it’s based on fear, basically.

It’s like, if I don’t hold you accountable, then you’re not going to do your best. But what if everyone is already wired to do their best? Then you don’t really need to spend the energy on figuring out how to hold people accountable.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, this is a very good point. And I think that the making people overly aware of how accountable they are can contribute or kind of take away from that sense of security, where it’s like, Oh, they don’t really trust me to do my best work.

And therefore, maybe this relationship is in jeopardy, and therefore, maybe I’m not safe.

Nancy Chu: And again, all of these characteristics happen when we don’t feel safe. So the leader might not feel safe, right? The leader could feel like, Oh my gosh, my people might leave me any day. I have to hold them accountable, right?

That comes from fear or I don’t trust that my team will perform. Okay, I have to hold them accountable. But what if the team just naturally are intrinsically motivated to do the best that they can? And I do believe, and of course there’s always going to be corner cases, but I do believe that human beings are intrinsically wired to want to do good things for their tribes.

Once you experience the sense of belonging, then you almost feel like, oh, I don’t want to let people down. It’s like a give and take relationship. When you receive from your tribe, very naturally, you also want to give.

Hannah Clark: I very much agree with that. I think that proves itself to be true in so many different contexts.

Do you have any advice for new people managers who are facing the challenge of establishing that strong working dynamic with their teams?

Nancy Chu: There’s two things I want to add. One is a lot of the culture comes from the top. And again, it has to do with how people are naturally wired to do. We’re naturally wired to copy the leader.

We don’t even really need to try that hard to copy the leader. We naturally just look up to the people who are supposed to lead us, and then we try to model their behavior. It’s a very natural thing to do. And so, when you’re in a leadership position, you know that people will be modeling after you. And so, now is your chance to decide and have a say in how you want this culture to be shaped.

Because now you play a huge part in shaping the culture. And people also learn by all kinds of senses. So if the leader says things a certain way, we would start to say things a certain way. If the leader starts to behave a certain way, we’re going to start behaving a certain way. If we see that the leader prioritizes short term gain, we’re also going to learn to prioritize short term gain because in our tribe, that is the thing to do.

That’s the safe thing to do. So that’s a very natural way of just operating because we’re people and people are social animals and that’s just what we do when we’re in a tribal environment. And we do this because we don’t want to be kicked out of the tribe. Because being kicked out of the tribe automatically means danger.

It is safer to be in a tribe. And so we need to fit in and we need to do things the way that the tribe prefers to do things. And isolation is a very dangerous place to be. I remember visiting Alcatraz and they had these isolation chambers for the, I guess, when people are not behaving in an expected way, then they put some people in these isolation chambers, and that’s the worst form of punishment because you’re isolated.

But that’s also where your physical health declines and your mental health declines. And they’ve done studies on this. When you feel isolated and alone, your immune system shuts down, your cells age faster, and then you have all kinds of issues. And I’ve actually seen this in one of the organizations that I was in.

Everyone that I was talking to had some kind of health problem. And it’s all mysterious. And that was basically a signal that says there’s something going on here that’s making people sick and that’s not a good place to be. So to summarize, we model behavior by looking at how our leaders behave. And so when we’re in a leadership position, just know that other people will be modeling after us. So that’s one thing.

And the second thing is a quote that I found and I wanted to share with you. It’s a quote from The Alchemist, which is a very classic book. So the quote is, When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. And when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too. I just thought that is a very nice way to summarize what compassion is.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, I think that is the perfect way to encapsulate all of the takeaways here is, you know, by showing love to others, we are projecting what we want to see in our work cultures, in our personal lives and in the world, so.

Nancy Chu: Ripple effect.

Hannah Clark: Totally. That’s so beautiful. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been very almost meditative. I really have enjoyed this conversation.

Where can people follow you online?

Nancy Chu: Follow me on LinkedIn. That will be the best place.

Hannah Clark: Wonderful.

Nancy Chu: Thank you so much, Hannah.

Hannah Clark: Thank you.

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