My main point in writing the diatribe above was to deter the type of pleasant but dull middle manager who thinks that all they have to do to solve their teams’ problems is psychologize them. I’ve actually noticed this as a larger cultural trend: people blaming their own minds or the minds of others for what is an actual real problem in the world. If I can help clear the wool from a few low-level programmers eyes to help them see that they aren’t so different from an accountant or the fry cook at their favorite bar (and that this is not a bad thing!) I feel like my job is done.
The trick is to find people like you, get you engaged and feeling like you can actually fix the shit that's stopping you from being productive, while also getting you to give space for people to fuck up now and then, because people fucking up and feeling okay with that sometimes leads to really great insight when instead of fucking up they do something great.
Basically, "safety" is letting people feel not-terrible for taking a risk and having it blow up in their face. That should be allowed on a team, and Google's research seems to show that teams who allow people to fuck up without making them feel bad about it tend to make better shit than teams who punish people for fucking up.
...to a point. If all you do is fuck up, that also violates the safety, on the manager's side because then they're not feeling safe letting people take risks.
What it comes down to is a culture where decision making is transparent, questioning the status quo is encouraged and no one person holds the power to make / break a product. At the team level you’re always going to have good managers and bad managers, but with the right culture the bad managers blast radius will be diminished. A good manager can’t do a whole lot to overcome a shitty culture.
This is a utopia though. Every manager has their own manager right up to the company board. If you have to let people go, then how can you say you are not going to fire the guy who is the most checked out? If the person cannot deliver you cannot guarantee they won't lose their job.
It boils down to you really can't trust yourself to not be biased to those who are more open but more negative.
Simple, you cannot guarantee "they won't be punished".
Most checked out is not the same thing as can't deliver. In a well-functioning organisation one would hope that managers would assess people on how much they were actually delivering rather than how involved they sounded, and would have support from the structure above them in that.
Being able to be your "true" self is the observation, not "be happy". If your true self is a neurotic mess, "psychological safety" on a team would give you the space to do that without feeling judged or that negative consequences would arise (informal or formal) by acting that way.
You can improve "checked-out" engineers feelings by creating a way for them to express their concerns without worry that they'll be punished for it.
Those toxic teams I'm sure you've been part of, where everyone felt shitty and nobody felt connected to the work? They didn't have to be that way by leveraging "psychological safety", even if "reality" was immutable (also, it's not immutable but we can get to that).