Dr. Amy Edmondson - The Fearless Organization
What a great way to kick off the New Year! We are so pleased to have had time with the remarkable Dr. Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School. Amy shares more of her groundbreaking insights on Psychological Safety and how it must be a central theme for managers if they are to truly tap into the performance capabilities of their teams. This is one for the ages in the world of Bosshole® Transformation!
Links and Resources from the Episode:
Click here for Amy's LinkedIn profile
Click here to purchase The Fearless Organization
Click here to purchase Teaming
Click here to download "What is a Fearless Organization?"
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The Bosshole® Chronicles
“The Fearless Organization”
Original Publish Date: 01/10/2023.
Guest: Dr. Amy Edmondson
Hosts: Sara Best, John Broer
Sara Best: Hi Everyone. Welcome back to the Bosshole Chronicles where we never want to waste an opportunity to learn from a bad boss. AND we get this incredible opportunity to learn from true subject matter experts on how to prevent Bosshole behavior, how to stay out of the Bosshole Zone, all those good things. Wow. Today is a new pinnacle for us – a new high. We got some great subject matter experts. John, I would love to have you introduce our esteemed guest for today, if you would, and our topic for today. It’s powerful and it’s something we urgently should understand and start to try to build in our organizations.
John Broer: Absolutely, Sara. Happy to be here, it’s good to see you, and you’re right. We continue to be blessed by amazing guests, and this subject matter expert really is remarkable in that I remember reading her work back in the early 2000s on psychological safety. At that time, I knew this was something transformational. We have the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Amy Edmondson to the Bosshole Chronicles today. Before we jump into our discussion with Amy, just to let everybody know, she is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society. Amy has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011. And, this is really cool, most recently, was ranked #1 in 2021. That comes as no surprise. She has also received the organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017. She studies teaming, psychological safety, which is going to be the focal point of our discussion today, and organizational learning. Her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review. I have to say, I don’t usually get starstruck, Sara, but I’ve got to tell you, in the world of people development, I think this is …
SB: She’s a guru, that’s for sure.
JB: Yeah, it’s great to have her. So, with that, we are going to talk to her – Amy Edmondson. Amy, welcome to the Bosshole Chronicles. It’s great to have you here.
Amy Edmondson: It’s great to be here!
JB: I’m going to pitch it over to Sara and we’re going to just jump right into some questions about the work that you do and how you’re impacting the world.
SB: Thanks, John. Amy, I’ll just start by saying, hey, psychology safety – it’s being talked about all over the place. It’s not a new idea. What is it and why is it important now?
AE: Well, very simply, it is a belief that you can speak up. A belief that you can take, what I call, the interpersonal risks of disagreeing, of admitting a mistake, of asking a question, of asking for help. Those are all naturally interpersonally risky, and psychological safety is an environment that lowers that interpersonal risk. It makes it possible. There’s just a feeling – and this is important - it’s not a perception that it’s easy and natural to speak up, but that it’s expected and possible.
SB: I love that. Since it’s not a new idea, but it has this resurgence now, can you connect for us and our listeners, why do we need to be focusing on this and developing this in our organizations now?
AE: I think the answer to that question is that we are sort of finally fully aware of the uncertainty that we face. Of the fact that to be excellent in today’s world requires people to speak up, requires people to notice things, requires people to take the interpersonal risks that naturally come with coordinating and collaborating with other people. And the pandemic has left us far more aware of uncertainty, far more aware that we don’t have a crystal ball, that we don’t always see the future, far more skeptical about our ability to just develop plans and execute them. Right? That mindset doesn’t work anymore. The mindset, and I think more and more people are realizing this, that we’re in today is the learning mindset that I can make sense of what I’m seeing, and I’ll be partly right and partly wrong, and I need other people and we need to team up to do great work. None of that can happen without psychological safety.
JB: Is it safe to say, I mean you’re at the heart of it at Harvard Business School. I mean we actually have a number of colleagues who are graduates of Harvard Business School who said, “Hey listen, my education was amazing, but the one thing, the people side of it, is one thing that could really enhance the way we are equipping leaders and managers.” But you talk about a mindset, it almost seems like we spent the better part of the last century creating a mindset that has sort of, well, kept us in the Bosshole Zone, or some managers there. Is it just a necessity that we’re breaking free of that or are organizations realizing without this there is no success. We can’t possibly be successful.
AE: I think you’re right. I think we are realizing, finally, the necessity of this rather than - this isn’t about nice to do or let’s be nice bosses. It’s about, “Huh, I depend on the talent that I hire to actually use their knowledge, use their skills, their expertise, their curiosity to do great works.” It doesn’t make sense to simply hire people and then do various things to prevent them from using the very skills you hired them for. And that’s what toxic bosses, or just not very good bosses, end up doing.
SB: As I think about what you described as uncertain times, we know that in this modern economy, there is a lot riding on innovation, creativity and spark. So, you referenced the learning zone, and we know to be true that there has to be the right amount of psychological safety and accountability to get into that learning zone. What have you seen work? How are leaders and organizations able to develop, to find that sweet zone for learning.
AE: I think it’s a combination of clarity and transparency about what lies ahead. It’s of being honest and willing to keep emphasizing that we don’t have all the answers, to keep saying, we need you, we need your voices, we need your ideas. It’s that clarity about the necessity of people being all in and being honest, and emphasis at the same time on the purpose, on why it matters, of who we serve. And when we’re clear about why the work we do matters and that doing it well requires people to take interpersonal risks and jump in, then you are doing both, right? Because accountability or felt accountability or psychological ownership, however you want to talk about it, comes from believing that what I’m doing today matters. When people believe what they’re doing matters, that they matter, then that’s where I think that little extra effort comes from. And when people believe it’s actually safe to bring their voice forward, their ideas forward to experiment, to take risks, then they’re willing to do that. And that’s the learning zone.
SB: As you say that, Amy, I can’t help but think about the idea that psychological safety is not about a nice to do, or nice to create, it’s about results. Say more about that.
AE: It’s about results. Absolutely. You brought up innovation. You can’t get innovation - and innovation is defined as something new and useful, something new that customers actually want or that makes a difference or solves a problem. You can’t get innovation without experimenting. You can’t experiment without some failures along the way. You begin to see where I’m heading. The kinds of things that really create value in today’s economy depend on our willingness to get things wrong on the way to getting them right. So, it’s about results. Psychological safety describes an environment where good, high-quality knowledge work, including, if not especially innovation, can be done.
SB: Well, and you touched on, in a roundabout way in your previous comments, but leaders have to be transparent, they have to be honest and they have to be vulnerable. I was particularly enlivened by an article you co-authored in, I think it was in 2020, today’s leaders need vulnerability, not bravado. And just talking about why that’s essential. We have to move from that command and control to more agile, adaptable, empowering leadership. Based on your work and what you see and what you see out there, what are some simple things leaders can do to be more vulnerable.
AE: Well, let me almost rephrase that. Right?
SB: Please.
AE: I want to answer that question, but I often think it’s helpful to say, “Guess what? Vulnerability is a fact, right?” You don’t get to choose whether or not to be vulnerable. You can choose whether or not to reveal your vulnerability. But you ARE vulnerable in the following way: you are vulnerable to the uncertainty that lies ahead. You are vulnerable to missing something that you really wish you would have seen, simply because of being a human being. You’re vulnerable to people not speaking up about crucial things because they were afraid to do so. I mean, think about CEOs of companies like VW “Dieselgate” when you could say that CEO Martin Winterkorn was vulnerable, but he didn’t know it. He was vulnerable to a massive scandal, but he didn’t know it because he was in the dark. Why was he in the dark? Because he was a boss who thought fear worked. He’d been brought up that way. Fear worked. If people are afraid enough, they’ll work really hard. So, let’s go back to the principle or the fact that you’re vulnerable because you don’t have a crystal ball, because you’re not omniscient, because you depend on the willing participation of those you’ve hired. When you start to understand that intellectually - that you’re vulnerable - then you have a choice. The behavioral choice is, am I going to be open about that or am I going to pretend it’s not so. The pretend-it’s-not-so option is not very effective in today’s world because, in a way, people see through it. The bravado can easily be seen as a kind of out of touch-ness. Like, “Could you not know how challenging this market is right now?” So, the happy talk and the bravado talk doesn’t actually compel people to follow you, hearts and minds. And that’s what you want. By acknowledging your vulnerability I’m really advocating more transparency. Just being more open. Like, “Here’s reality, here’s what I see, and I believe we can get there.” It’s not saying I don’t have hope or it’s not saying don’t be positive. I believe leaders should be quite positive, but also realistic about the challenges that lie ahead and their very real need for other people.
SB: Yeah. I’ve never heard it framed quite that way. You know, it is a fact. You’re right. We are always vulnerable. How cool that we have an opportunity to become aware of it and then utilize that to see what our options are.
AE: Well, I was just going to say, utilize it to see what our options are and utilize it to compel people to want to step up because ultimately the job of a leader is to harness the efforts of others…
SB: Yeah…
AE: …to get things done and, you know, what works. If you step back and think about the leaders you and your listeners have had, the leaders that have motivated them to give more than they thought they could, to work hard, to care, you will not probably start to envision a leader who was full of self-importance and bravado.
JB: Right.
AE: Someone who believed that he was the only important person or the smartest person in the room. I think we view people who were candid and compelling about why this matters and why they needed you.
JB: Well, the fear and intimidation, coercion, command and control approach, I mean you can still get tremendous profitability in an organization and still use that, but you’re going to have a toxic environment that isn’t close to what it could be. Amy, I remember when I first started reading your work on psychological safety (by the way, just for our listeners, go into the show notes. Amy’s work includes a number of great books – all of her books will be in there) but The Fearless Organization is what we’re talking about here – get the book. In the early parts of it, what I loved is how you talk about your research (and I’m going to invoke a term from Bob Ross, you remember the painter?) The happy accident. Maybe that’s too sophomoric a way to put it, but you came across this psychological safety really by accident based on your research. That had to be such an amazing moment of clarity. Can you just, for a moment… When you realized, “Oh my gosh, this is it!” I know you’re saying now is the time - there’s an awakening. Now is the time to really leverage this. But this was back in the 1990s. That moment where you realized this is something unique. Just share a little bit of that with us.
AE: Well, you know, it was, I think you are absolutely right. It was a happy accident. But it wasn’t happy in moment one, because moment one is essentially my staring at a computer screen to see that my hypothesis was apparently dead wrong.
JB: Okay.
AE: My hypothesis - and this was a study of medication errors – and my hypothesis was that better teams, and by the way, better led teams, a key variable in this study was the behavior in others of course, the perceptions of the behavior of the nurse managers. These are like middle managers in complex tertiary care hospitals who very much influence the life of those that they lead and manage. My hypothesis was that the better teams with better leaders would have fewer medication errors. This was pretty straightforward, right? Teamwork matters and leadership matters and we’re going to have high-quality care and all will be well. Well, the data seemed to suggest, at first glance, the opposite. It looked like the better teams (according to a validated teams survey instrument) had higher, not lower, error rates. So that was quite problematic, painful, scary even, to me in that moment. I was a PhD student and I kinda thought I’d get kicked out of school or something like that. But it was a few hours later, not that many even, probably two, that it occurred to me – it was sort of a blinding flash of the obvious – that maybe the better teams aren’t making more errors, maybe they’re more willing to reveal them. Maybe they’re talking about them more. And what comes with that insight is the possibility that our measures are not very good of the errors. And that turns out to be right because the errors were being measured essentially by visits to the teams and asking them about what was going on, what they had seen. Now it seems foolish to have ever thought that would work, but at the time, I think people thought it would. So, at the end of that study, I could not say anything – this is important – I couldn’t say anything about the actual error rates. But I could fairly definitively say (because I did some follow up qualitative work) that the interpersonal climate across these teams – in the same hospitals, within hospital across groups – that the interpersonal climate was wildly different. I didn’t call it psychological safety at the time, I called it interpersonal climate. And the insight was that that climate differs very much because of boss behavior, right? And that it matters because if today’s work, back then, today’s work requires learning behaviors to do it well, we’ve got to have people able to engage in learning behaviors, and learning behaviors come with interpersonal risks. And, you know, lo and behold, ultimately, I called that psychological safety because my next study was designed to study it on purpose. To sort of see if those kinds of differences exist in other industries, in other settings. Can it be measured? Is it predictive of learning, is it predictive of performance?
JB: And, of course, it is.
AE: And it was.
SB: Yep.
AE: Still is.
SB: I have a question in relationship to the team leader. Is the presence of psychological safety completely the responsibility of the team leader?
AE: No. Here’s how I put it. The team leader has an outsized influence. We, all of us, the three of us right here are a team, for this period of time. We’re co-creating it. That’s true in any team. We co-create it by how we respond to each other. Are we appreciative when someone takes a risk and says, “Oh, I got that wrong” and you say, “Oh great. Thanks for telling me.” Are we making it okay to be human in this team? It’s an aspect of our species that we are particularly tuned in to hierarchy. Those with more power and status—like bosses, team leaders, business unit managers – are the people whose behavior we pay just a little bit more attention to. So how they show up, how curious they are, how much they ask questions, how they respond to things that go wrong have a greater-than-average influence.
SB: Makes sense. Outsized influence. I like that.
JB: Amy, as you know, we are always in the business here of Bosshole prevention and Bosshole® intervention, and we’d like to consider you part of the Bosshole Transformation Nation now that you’ve been on here. I hope that’s okay.
AE: I’m privileged to be a part of it.
JB: We started out 2022 with a very specific objective in mind. At Real Good Ventures our vision and our mission are that we want people to find meaning and fulfillment in their work, and it’s absolutely possible. We use people science and analytics to help provide objective data to do that. But this work on psychological safety, again, you did this back in the 90s into the 2000s, and yet, you look at Gallup results of disengagement – active disengagement – still at alarmingly high levels. We’re still generating Bossholes out there.
AE: We are.
JB: What do we need to do? We started out this year – what I started to say is, we started out this year to reinvent the role of the manager, and we are committed to that because we think it’s going to take a different kind of manager to develop people and to elevate, but what is holding us back? What is happening out there?
AE: Well, I guess my best answer to what holds us back is outdated mental models. And a mental model is a taken-for-granted map, you know, a taken-for-granted cognitive structure. It’s not even that you believe it to be true, you’re sort of unaware of even the possibility it might not be true. I think one of those mental models is that fear motivates. And fear does motivate, but it motivates not speaking up, it motivates holding back, it motivates not taking risks, it motivates playing not to lose rather than playing to win. If you, at some deeper level, just believe that for people to do hard work and excellent work they have to be afraid of me, which I believe is a faulty theory, then that would easily account for the fact that this doesn’t go away. Because it was for a hundred years, or more than a hundred years, it was a reasonably good theory in action. You could get away with that theory because if work is completely standardized, completely prescribed, and objectively assessable within a given time frame, then that theory of action will never be disproven. It will work, in other words. If you are leading in an assembly line a hundred years ago and you’re going to lead through fear, it will actually be effective. Now, fast forward to today where nearly everybody who’s in a managerial role is leading knowledge workers where you are utterly dependent upon them using their ingenuity, using discretionary effort, problem solving and teaming up with others, those are all behaviors that are depressed, literally depressed, by the state of fear.
JB: Yes.
AE: So, if you don’t sort of step back and appreciate that fact, you will be at risk.
JB: Aaron Dignan, who was on the podcast a few months ago, in his work – his book and his podcast, Brave New Work – talked about the shift from command and control to trust and autonomy. That is a leap for some, but that’s what you’re talking about, this knowledge economy. Our employees are different and we’re drawing on and relying on them and their expertise and skills, but lagging behind that are, as we like to say, Bossholes® beget Bossholes®. We’ve got a lot of bad habits and mental models that are really holding us back. Thanks for that.
AE: And role models. Right? We have a lot of bad role models…
JB: That’s correct.
AE: …and that inadvertently trains people. I mean, I’ve talked to those rare managers who have just 180 turnaround. I’ve talked to them about what happened. Well, they just didn’t know better. “My boss was that way,” or “My dad was that way,” and they didn’t know there was kind of another way to be.
JB: Yes.
AE: They didn’t want to be the way they were, they thought that’s what bosses do.
SB: All the more reason bosses should get feedback. And then really dig in and try to understand the feedback and uncover these mental models that are very unconscious and very unknown. I think that’s a great takeaway for leader listeners. Amy, I want to ask you just two more questions today. When it comes to the push for organizations to have more diverse, equitable and inclusive environments that create belonging, we know that there’s a key with psychological safety. Could you just share your thoughts about what organizations should be thinking about as they aspire to create these cultures?
AE: Absolutely. I see psychological safety as a moderator of the relationship between diversity, belonging, and inclusion as well. Diversity is a fairly objective attribute. You can assess the diversity of your workforce according to whichever dimensions you wish to assess it by. That, of course, doesn’t automatically lead to inclusion. I mean, do those people have a seat at the table? Do they have an equal chance at being part of important decisions or the important tasks or the higher-level roles? So that’s sort of partially objective and partially subjective because sometimes people may not feel included. Belonging is entirely subjective. That’s the question of whether or not I believe people like me are welcome here, are full members of this community. I believe as we go from the more objective to the more subjective, psychological safety plays a larger role in whether or not you’ll be able to realize it – you know, bring it about. So you can do your very best and have the hiring and bring in more diversity. If you also have an aspiration (and I know your listeners will) of inclusion and belonging, then it can become really important to create psychological safety not as definitionally the same thing – it isn’t – but as an aspect of the environment that will help bring those other attributes about.
SB: And you’ve created some incredible resources. Our listeners should become students of psychological safety. There’s, gosh, you have seven books, multitudes of articles, you have You-Tube videos, just to hear it first-hand from your research and your work I think would be a great guide for people as they aspire to bring this into their way of being. The last question we want to ask is what’s coming up for you, Amy? What’s next and what are you focusing on and what should we be waiting for as you continue to expand your impact?
AE: Well, I’m finishing up a book now on failure. But, don’t worry. It’s a positive book.
SB: Sure!
AE: It’s not a negative book and it builds on psychological safety. I suppose the clearest connection to what we’ve been talking about is innovation. As we’ve discussed, innovation depends on a willingness to fail and to dare and take risks. The book tries to demystify the fail-fast, learn-from-failure mantra by trying to be much more clear about good failures and not-so-good failures. The kinds of failures we do want to celebrate and the kinds of failures we want to try to minimize and avoid. It talks a lot about the role of self-awareness and situation awareness and system awareness in failing well. So, it’s a book about the science of failing well which I think we all have to learn how to do. Every day I try to just get a little bit better at it myself.
JB: Well, that was one of the things we took away from The Fearless Organization. Just our certification in the scan was destigmatizing failure.
AE: Exactly.
SB: That’s both an individual, a team and an organizational endeavor, isn’t it?
AE: Yes.
SB: We talk a lot about how many of us are small on the inside and that we get activated and defensive and so afraid of failing because we don’t have the right size on the inside. We get too big on the outside. But all that to say, what a gift. I think your next book will just continue to expand our awareness and our ability to create more real environments. We just want people to be in an environment where they can be real, they can be accepted for who they are, they can bring their self to the work, bring their best ideas to the work. We know that that is what’s going to help our world survive and thrive through these challenging times. If it were not for the innovation that’s been made possible to date by psychological safety, we probably wouldn’t be here. Okay, that might be dramatic, but I think it’s pretty significant and important and that we talk about it with every client that we get the privilege to meet, for sure.
JB: Let me just take this opportunity to extend the invitation that when the next book comes out, please, I know how busy you are, but we would love to have you back on the podcast. Our work continues out there. We’re passionate about helping managers and supervisors and leaders just be great developers of others. We think that’s their number one responsibility, and the work you’re doing, Amy, is central to that and it’s just been such a pleasure having you here.
AE: I’d be thrilled to come back. It comes out in September, so sometime before or after then. It’s been a true pleasure to spend this time with you both.
SB: We will see you all next time on the Bosshole Chronicles. Good luck, Dr. Edmondson. Thank you again.