Psychologically safe reliability management

Psychological safety is crucial for reliability teams and should be a top priority - it allows teams to learn from mistakes without fear

Chronic issues that go unaddressed erode psychological safety and team trust. Address problems early before they become systemic.

Build team culture with the most vulnerable people in mind first - this creates better environments for everyone

Avoid relying on “hero culture” and individual heroics - these create unhealthy dependencies and burnout

Create robust feedback loops through:

• Blameless postmortems
• Regular retros
• Multiple channels for raising issues
• Clear SLOs and error budgets

Three key approaches to reliability management:

• Preventative: Build processes to avoid issues
• Proactive: Monitor and address emerging problems
• Reactive: Handle critical issues that arise

Leaders must take responsibility for organizational failures while creating psychological safety for teams to raise issues

On-call processes should balance standardization with flexibility and empower engineers to make improvements

Trust needs continuous renewal through:

• Clear expectations
• Following through on commitments
• Accepting mistakes as learning opportunities
• Taking action on feedback

Sustainable leadership distributes power, reduces dependencies on individuals, and builds resilient teams through empowerment