Building a Fearless Organization
What I took away from Amy Edmondson’s amazing book on Psychological Safety
This isn’t a book review! I just want to make that clear to begin with. 🙅♂📕 Nor is it a book summary. Well, not exactly!
Instead, I want to use this space to capture some of the insights from “the fearless organization” by Amy Edmondson.
Insights can be personal and subjective (what is insightful to me, may not be insightful for you). 🔎
Even so, a fair amount of information in the book included the kind of stuff I had never run into before, and I hope you will find it useful too.
Some of the information is distilled out from the book, some of it is paraphrasing sections of the book. 🔖
About the book
“The fearless organization” was written by Amy Edmondson — currently (As of April 2020) the Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School.
From the book description: “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. … This book explores this culture of psychological safety, and provides a blueprint for bringing it to life.
What Psychological safety is NOT ⚔️
“Psychological safety is not about trust, lowering performance standards, or even a complete absence of fear”
Since the book focuses on psychological safety, it’s very important to understand what psychological safety is NOT:
Another word for trust. Psychological safety is experienced at a group level. Trust – usually between two entities. Psychological safety is usually a temporally immediate experience, trust is an expectation about whether or not the other party can be counted on.
About “lowering performance standards”. Wanting to create an environment that is psychologically safe does not imply that people should no longer hold each other accountable.
About the absence of fear. There may be fear present in an organization around long term prospects, ongoing emergencies, anxiety about some endemic issue etc. Individuals may be worried about their performance. Despite all of this, if people are able to engage in constructive dialogue with candour and authenticity, then they are feeling psychologically safe.
A personality trait. Psychological safety is the level of inter-personal risk that people in a group anticipate, or experience i.e. it is very much an experience that plays out between different people, and not an innate personality trait.
What psychological safety does, and a leaders role in helping to establish it
Amy Edmondson’s draws an interesting analogy between operating a car and “team dynamics”, to describe the role of psychological safety.
Leaders must carefully use the right amount of fuel / throttle 🚀 and braking 🛑 to ensure the car runs well.
Leaders need to:
🛑 Remove the brakes by building psychological safety to spur learning and avoid preventable failures.
🚀 Set high standards, inspire, and enable people to reach them.
🚀 Share, sharpen and continually emphasize a worthy purpose.
Why do people fear speaking up to ask questions / raise concerns
In situations where a person might speak up, but chooses not to, two most frequently mentioned reasons are:
Fear of being viewed / labeled negatively.
Fear of damaging work relationships.
On this note, one of my favourite parts of the book was the introduction of the notion of the “Asymmetry of voice and silence”: 🗣 🙊
Voice 🗣 is effortful and might (but might not) make a real difference in a crucial moment. Most of the time, the potential benefit will take a while to materialize, and might not happen at all.
Silence 🙊 is instinctive and safe. It offers self-protection benefits, and these are both immediate and certain.
Unfortunately, since not offering an idea is an invisible act, it is hard to encourage the expression of that idea, and engage in real-time course correction.
In other words, when an opportunity to speak up arrives, there is a cost-benefit analysis running in our minds, weighing the costs and benefits of speaking up.
Due to the asymmetry of voice and silence, benefits are unclear and delayed, costs may be immediate and tangible, and so this cost-benefit analysis always overweights silence.
The two broad sets of learning behaviours in organizations
Learn-what: independent activities like learning about the latest best practices and new developments in your profession. 📚
Learn-How: Team-based learning that includes sharing knowledge, offering suggestions, and brainstorming better approaches. 💭
Psychological safety results in an uptick in Learn-How behaviours, because people feel like they are in an environment where they are able to overcome interpersonal risk to engage in more “Learn-How” behaviours.
Confidence vs. feeling psychologically safe 👷
The more confident people were in their knowledge, the more they tend to speak up / raise concerns / ask questions. However, since the merit of an idea and confidence are independent variables — just because a person confidently says something, does not necessarily mean the idea / question / concern has merit — establishing psychological safety is important for facilitating knowledge sharing, and getting a spectrum of ideas.
That is, we want to create an environment where even those with lower confidence levels can speak up, because it feels safe for them to do so.
Interestingly, the frequency of communication among co-workers also led to psychological safety. The more we talk to each other, the more comfortable we become doing so.
The dynamics of effective teams
Project Aristotle (at Google) found that even the smartest / high-powered engineers at google needed psychological safety to operate, and contribute their talents. Four other factors explain team performance:
Clear goals 🥅
Dependable colleagues 🤓
Personally meaningful work 🌄
A belief that their work has an impact ⚒
But psychological safety was found to be the most important. Psychological safety is associated with higher work engagement, mental health, and lower turnover.
Fear of failure, and it’s effect on learning and innovation 👩🔬
Success requires constant innovation, fuelled by expertise, ingenuity, and teamwork. Without psychological safety, it is difficult for any of those to be put to good use.
Without the freedom to fail, people will seek to repeat something safe, that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. Experimentation, and the inevitable trial and error process are necessary to innovate. 👨🔬
From Astro Teller of GoogleX: “The only way to get people to work on big, risky and audacious ideas, and have them run at the all the hardest parts of the problem first, is to make that the path of least resistance, and show them that it’s OK to fail. 💪 It’s natural to fear what other people might think, and about losing our job. That’s why, unless a leader expressly and actively makes it psychologically safe to do so, people will seek to avoid failure.” 😰
From Carol Dweck and her work on the Growth Mindset: “When people believe their performance is an indication of their ability or intelligence, they are less likely to take risks, for fear of a result that would disconfirm their ability. But, when people believe that performance reflects effort and good strategy, they are eager to try new things and willing to persevere despite adversity and failure.” 🏋
Summary
I took a lot away from reading this book. There were some fantastic nuggets of information to be found🥇. The book gave me the tools to identify low levels of psychological safety, and tools to improve it in a group.
The book does an amazing job of driving home the consequences of neglecting psychological safety within a group, and the benefits to be gained from putting in the work to build a culture of safety and comfort around speaking up.
I hope you get a chance to read it and enjoy it too.