Discomfort is what the truth costs the person hearing it. Harm is what it costs them when you don't say it, or when you say it with pressure. When a team is behind and tired, the kind instinct is "now's not the time to push." This Sidebar takes one line from Tuesday's conversation with Bart Bailey, "I don't have any problem with discomfort. I do have a problem with harm," and goes all the way into it.

The same move shows up three times. Urgency is attention on the process; pressure is attention on the person, and it raises the error rate even on work you do every day. Teamwork is having somebody's back; collaboration is letting an idea you didn't have change your plan. Then three things to try this week, and one test for whether your hard conversations land as discomfort or as harm: do people speak up more afterward, or go quiet?

The full conversation: 0017, Fear Is Data, with Bart Bailey https://thelaggingteam.com/podcast/0017-fear-is-data

Bart Bailey (he/him): Owner, Courage to Care LLC · Author, It's in Our Bones

Go deeper:

Discomfort vs. harm

Amy C. Edmondson and Michaela J. Kerrissey, "What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety," Harvard Business Review, May–June 2025 https://hbr.org/2025/05/what-people-get-wrong-about-psychological-safety

Julia Rozovsky, "The five keys to a successful Google team," Google re:Work, Nov. 17, 2015 (180+ teams; archived copy) https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdhhs/Google-and-Psychological-Safety_684425_7.pdf

Kim Scott on Radical Candor and ruinous empathy, Stanford GSB Insights, Sept. 5, 2023 https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/radical-candor-communication-shift-can-transform-your-career

Urgency vs. pressure

John P. Kotter, A Sense of Urgency (Harvard Business Press, 2008); excerpt: "Complacency and False Urgency Impede Change" (AMA) https://www.amanet.org/articles/complacency-and-false-urgency-impede-change/

Teresa M. Amabile, Constance N. Hadley and Steven J. Kramer, "Creativity Under the Gun," Harvard Business Review, Aug. 2002 (9,000+ daily diary entries) https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=12846

U.S. Department of Energy, Human Performance Improvement Handbook, Vol. 1 (DOE-HDBK-1028-2009) https://www.energy.gov/documents/doe-hdbk-1028-2009volume1pdf

Teamwork vs. collaboration

Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi and Thomas W. Malone, "Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups," Science 330 (2010), 686–688 (699 people in 192 groups) https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1193147

Google re:Work, as above: "Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact."

Talk about your team: https://thelaggingteam.com/start?episode=0018-the-courage-to-care&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=the-courage-to-care