The Fearless Organization

That idea, I think very thoughtful, was more or less dormant for 30 years until the idea started to be picked up again, possibly because the intensity of the need to learn and change and engage in knowledge work was obviously growing in that time as well.

But I stumbled into the need for this term quite by accident in some of my earlier research. I was trying to do a study of medication errors and what factors led to them being higher or lower, and unfortunately I discovered something even more fundamental, which was that people in different workplaces were more or less willing to speak up about error, and that seemed important to me.

So, I first was calling it "interpersonal safety" or "safety climate" – a variety of things. But then when I discovered this other term in the literature, I realized that's what I was talking about and I needed to reinvigorate it.

Rachel Salaman: So how would you define it, now?

Amy Edmondson: I define psychological safety as a belief that one's voice is valued, needs to be heard; that it is safe to speak up with work-relevant ideas, questions, concerns, and yes, even mistakes.

Rachel Salaman: And it's probably worth asking, what is it not?

Amy Edmondson: Ah, it's a great point! It's not being nice, it's not only saying nice things – in fact it's quite the opposite, because of course it's about being candid, and that means sometimes we'll have to say things to each other that could feel harsh or could feel not nice.

So, it's not about being nice. It's also not a license to just whine – it's not an invitation to sit back and just start saying everything that doesn't work – it's an invitation to be productive and engaged. It's also not soft or "touchy-feely," and it's most certainly not an invitation to relax, to sort of lower the performance expectations.

So it's really just trying to recognize, and put a name on the fact that if we aren't open and candid and willing to take interpersonal risks, our organizations will face much bigger risks.

Rachel Salaman: And how important is psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson: Well I think it's incredibly important, and primarily because, at the most abstract level, we live in the knowledge economy. We live in a world in which our knowledge (not our physical tasks) [is] by and large the value we're offering our organizations.

So, when knowledge is important that means what's inside my head is important, and if what's inside my head is not coming out, it's wasteful. And it's more important than ever because it's more and more the case that organizations need creativity, knowledge, ingenuity, a willingness to team up with other people to create new value.

None of those things can happen without a sense of psychological safety that allows us to take these interpersonal risks.

Rachel Salaman: And have you seen that changing in recent years?

Amy Edmondson: One of the things I've seen changing is awareness of this. I think more and more people in organizations realize that silence is invisible. That when someone isn't speaking up with an idea or a question or a concern, you can't see it… but you don't know, so you don't know what's being held back, and in a very competitive marketplace of any kind (and especially where innovation matters) I think people are more and more realizing that there's a cost to this, that there's a cost to people "playing it safe."

If you recognize that employees everywhere are likely to be playing it safe and holding back, rather than diving in and giving it their all, you can easily recognize the cost to that. So that has changed, and of course the intensity and dynamism and need for teamwork and agility and all of that has also intensified over the last few years.

Rachel Salaman: It was interesting that in your book you say that psychological safety is not just another word for trust, so I wondered what is the relationship between trust and psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson: It's a terrific question. And the relationship… they are very highly related, but the relationship is, in a sense, the focus. The focus of trust is on another person or entity: "Can I trust that individual to do what he or she says he or she will do? Can I trust that company to act with integrity?"

Those are the kinds of things we think of when we are talking about trust: we're talking about our perceptions of another person's integrity, willingness to follow through, and all of that.

Psychological safety is, alas, a lot more self – the focus is on [the] self. The focus is on, "Do I feel OK around here? Is this a place where I can bring myself forward?" Part of my assessment of whether this is interpersonally safe for me right now is based on my perceptions of you and your trustworthiness, but the construct pertains to my perception of the climate.

Rachel Salaman: As I mentioned you've been studying psychological safety for many years – what's the most significant research you've carried out on this topic?

Amy Edmondson: I think the most significant research I've done on this topic has been in healthcare delivery. So in hospitals, where speaking up or not speaking up can easily be a matter of life and death.

And one study that I'm particularly moved by was a study of intensive care units in North American hospitals. And in that study, in the whole population (of about 1,100 clinicians, physicians, nurses, and respiratory therapists) we found significant differences in psychological safety based on role and role status.

So, in the overall population that we studied, those with the highest power and status had the highest psychological safety, which wasn't a surprise, but what was more surprising was that in some of these intensive care units there were no differences based on role. In other words, it was absolutely flat, flat and high.

These were places where the status differences were just as real, but the way in which those status differences were handled was markedly different. In other words, the physician (and particularly the most senior physicians, the medical directors) went out of their way to say things like, "I need to hear from you, I might miss something. Tell me what you're seeing." Which of course creates more psychological safety for these other roles.

And in that study, we were ultimately able to show that there is a difference. The sort of high, flat psychological safety, that some intensive care units had and others didn't, was associated with lower morbidity and mortality – that's death and harm, so probably the first time I could really point to psychological safety as a factor at work that was literally saving lives.

And yet I don't want to downplay its significance in a software firm or retail firm – anywhere you work, you want people to feel that their voices matter, their observations matter, for all the reasons we've already discussed, but also an additional one, which is it turns out that when people don't feel psychologically safe not only do they hold back but they don't feel engaged, their heart is not in it.

And sometimes they don't feel as good about themselves. They leave work at the end of the day and don't have that satisfaction of knowing that they made a difference, that they contributed, and that's painful and wasteful as well.

Rachel Salaman: You've observed that psychological safety lives at the level of the group. So to what extent is it the responsibility of the group leader?

Amy Edmondson: Well, I have to admit, I assign a fair amount of responsibility to the group leader. And the implications of that result (which has been a very robust result in every organization I've been in) and others who have used this variable as well, that there is heterogeneity, that different teams or different groups, different units within the same organization, vary substantially in psychological safety.

The implication of that result is that it's the leaders in the middle that matter. It's those folks who lead a branch of a bank, or a restaurant in a restaurant chain, or a unit in a hospital, a ward: those leaders in the middle matter enormously for creating the workplace climate.

They don't utterly change the organization's culture – which is that description of those things we have in common throughout an organization, those beliefs and values and things that we hold in common – but they do very much shape the climate of voice, which means how they show up matters for other contributors.

Rachel Salaman: And in your experience how much does their personality play into this?

Amy Edmondson: It's a hard question to answer, because by and large I would argue this is more of a skill than a personality. So if you think of personality as being described by the big five in psychology – extroversion, introversion, agreeableness, etc. – "agreeableness" is certainly a predictor of psychological safety, "neuroticism" is a predictor of low psychological safety, but the effect sizes are not big.

You can have whatever personality you have (or think about the Myers-Briggs, and all of the different ways that we show up at work) and none of them are bad or problematic personalities in their own right, as long as you're engaging in what I call "leadership behaviors" – the kinds of leadership behaviors that get people excited about following, excited about participating.

Rachel Salaman: You do include, though, a section in your book with tips for team members, rather than leaders. Could you share a few of those?

Amy Edmondson: Sure. It's funny because anyone (you don't have to be a leader) can exercise leadership in this domain. And by exercising leadership I mean small actions that just contribute in smaller and larger ways to creating a slightly safer workplace for others.

The most important of these small actions is asking a good question, and a good question is one that you don't already know the answer to, so that you're all ears! You really are listening. It's also a question that gives someone a little bit of room to respond: how are you thinking about this project right now? Or what's on your plate, or what are you worried about?

All of those are good questions, because they are an invitation to another person to share what they're thinking. And that invitation is such a precious gift – it's a small thing, of course, but it's really quite large as well, because if someone asks me and then appears to be interested in listening to me as I answer, they have for that moment created a small space for me to respond, and in that small space I am, almost by definition, psychologically safe: you've got my attention, you have expressed an interest in what I'm thinking.

So, doing that once is a good idea. Doing that kind of routinely helps draw your colleagues out, helps make your team, your workplace, just that much better, that much more engaged.

Rachel Salaman: Does everyone in the team have to buy into this approach in order to create a psychologically safe work environment?

Amy Edmondson: I think they have to not actively oppose it. So they don't have to buy in or make this the most important thing on their agenda right now, but it's certainly helpful if people aren't acting in ways that shut others down.

If you say something and I say that's stupid, and I'm a person whose opinion you think might matter, you're going to feel less psychologically safe and you're going to be holding back next time. And the thing you say next time might have been mission-critical, and by the way the thing you just said might have been mission-critical too, or at least it might have been a good starting point.

The idea I just called stupid might have been like, "Oh, that's an interesting way to think about it!" And it led someone else to think of something else that really takes us somewhere. So, any time we actively insult or turn our backs on someone else we are creating lower psychological safety and creating that risk.

Rachel Salaman: So, if we achieve a certain amount of psychological safety in our own team but we notice that fear is permeating or hampering other teams in our organization, where there isn't so much psychological safety, what should we do about that?

Amy Edmondson: That's a great question, and I'm noticing and I'm hearing from people in organizations of all kinds that, more and more, they often will have a sense that my team is great, and we have to interact with all these other people who are not so easy.

And it's not that you have to really get to know or love everybody else in the organization, but you do need to understand a few simple things. Specifically, what are they trying to get done? What obstacles do they see ahead, and what skills and resources do they bring?

And if I can force myself to engage in inquiry first (seek first to understand some of these other colleagues who I may believe are not being helpful), I'll learn something, and we can establish at least something of a working relationship.

Abraham Lincoln once said, "I don't like that man very much, I must get to know him better." And it's a very powerful statement – very often the people outside our team, who we think are behaving in counterproductive ways, are simply behaving in ways that make sense given what's on their plate, given what they've been asked to do, and so on.

And if we could step into their shoes for just three minutes, we'd see it differently. So, in order to do that we've got to actually ask them some questions.

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Rachel Salaman: Now, your book is full of case studies of good and bad examples. One of the good examples shares a leader's toolkit for building psychological safety. So I wondered if we could talk about the three parts of this toolkit, starting with part one, "setting the stage." What does this involve?

Amy Edmondson: So, setting the stage – and again this could happen at the top of an organization or at the head of a team or project – is really twofold: one is "purpose, purpose, purpose." Remind people what's at stake, why it matters. Hearts and minds have got to be in it to make it worthwhile to take the risks of voice and innovation. So, starting with reminding people of what we're up against, what we're doing, why it matters.

But, more subtly, I like to say setting the stage involves "framing the work," and what does that mean? That means calling attention to the nature of the work and why this kind of work really demands candor and voice. So, for example, if we're trying to do innovation work, I need to remind people that this is the work for which great success only comes with small failures along the way.

That does two things: one, it makes people more willing to take the risks of experiments, that will sometimes end in failure; two, it allows them to speak up about them when they happen rather than keeping them to themselves – you know, they did it but they don't tell anyone else what they did and why.

And so you're saying… it's an invitation to speak up and take risk, because you're pointing out again and again that this kind of work requires failure. On the other end of the spectrum, let's say in healthcare delivery, you don't want failure, you don't want people taking unwise risks, but you do want people speaking up any time they see something that they're just not 100 percent sure is proper. And so there you'd be framing the work by saying this is an incredibly complex, error-prone system, we need to hear from you.

Framing the work is fundamentally the task of making explicit what you might take for granted, which is: of course this is complex work, or of course this is work that requires failure, but naming it, making it discussable, making sure that every single one of us is on the same page.

Rachel Salaman: I think that brings us to the second part of the leader's toolkit, which is "inviting participation." Does that involve the kind of things you've just been talking about?

Amy Edmondson: Yes. So after I've framed the work (if I've reminded people of what we're up against), that creates the rationale for voice, but then it's still helpful to explicitly invite it, to ask for it: "Rachel, what are you thinking? What did you see, what ideas do you have, what have we missed? Oh, why do you think that might work? Let's dig in!"

So, being proactive in inquiry is one skill, but also creating forums for voice: focus groups, team meetings, opportunities where it's almost impossible to hide and not be heard are very powerful aspects of inviting participation.

And the third tool in the toolkit is the tool of responding productively. So when people bring crazy ideas or bad news, take a breath – don't respond in a way that threatens to shut them down going forward. Take a breath and respond in a way that will encourage more of the same going forward.

So, for example, someone brings bad news, you say, "Thank you for that clear line of sight. It's so helpful to know that now rather than later, now let's roll up our sleeves and figure out what to do about it."

Rachel Salaman: You also talk, in this part of the book, about sanctioning clear violations. I wondered if you could talk a little more about that? Because it's something we don't hear about very much.

Amy Edmondson: You're absolutely right and it's so important because yes, I've been talking so far about having a positive and an encouraging response to people doing things we want them to do, like speaking up about a mistake. However, when people engage in what I sometimes call "blameworthy acts," the things that we really do know to be outside the bounds of appropriate behavior, it is absolutely crucial, if you want to continue to have psychological safety, for there to be sanctions for those.

Because it's almost paradoxical – if people behave in ways that bully, if they yell at a colleague, if they belittle, if they harass, any of those things that are truly unacceptable behaviors at work, if those go unpunished or unacknowledged, ironically, you've made the workplace less safe, not more.

So people need to know… if you know where the boundaries are, you're more comfortable operating within the boundaries, but if you don't know where the boundaries are, you're more likely to just hold back in case that was a boundary.

It might be if I have a boss who only wants to hear good news (or I think that, it may not be true), I've artificially set the boundary far tighter than it needs to be. But if leaders are not only clear about the boundaries, but also willing to say it's unacceptable and have some negative consequence for that, then I feel better about where I am and where I sit.

Rachel Salaman: So how should a leader go about drawing those lines? Sometimes it's quite difficult for leaders to establish what is a violation and what isn't a violation.

Amy Edmondson: It's true, and sometimes we'll only establish something as a violation after the fact, because it's a new behavior, we haven't confronted this before.

I know that in many organizations there will be a periodic session where we get together and just talk, make sure we're all clear, especially when you always have new employees, let's be clear about what our responsibilities and legal and ethical guidelines are in this workplace, so being clear about that matters.

So there are things that are universally true. But then if you have things in your organization… in any company or any organization, there might be specific behaviors that you really believe should not be tolerated. And they wouldn't necessarily be universal in your industry, and if so, it's absolutely critical to be explicit about that in advance, and then to sanction people for crossing the line if they do.

Rachel Salaman: There is one part of your book that I think is useful for general leaders, which is your frequently asked questions bit. Because I'm sure you get asked a lot the same kinds of questions, so I wondered whether we could pull out a couple of those now?

Amy Edmondson: Sure.

Rachel Salaman: I know you get asked a lot if we can have too much psychological safety, and your short answer is "no." But have you ever observed mission creep, where the nurturing side of psychological safety morphs into a kind of comfortable laziness, or even a pandering to – a favorite modern term – "snowflakes"?

Amy Edmondson: Yes, and I like to say that the antidote to that is not more fear, the antidote is more discipline. The antidote is let's be ambitious for the work we want to do. We want to make the very best possible contributions to the world, or to our customers, that we can and that's going to require hard work, and discipline, and ingenuity, and teamwork, and all of that good stuff.

So if you want to rein in some of the counterproductive behaviors implicit in your question, you don't want to do it by setting, let's say, just enough fear. I think you want to do it by setting just enough ambition.

It's better to have people err on the side of checking. Like, I have a thought, I have a concern, please check it. Don't hold back because you think it's slightly below the line of what should be checked, let's check it, let's move on. We can do this quite quickly and quite efficiently.

Now, if you find some people are just talking too much, airtime is a scarce resource so that's not good either. So, what those people are in need of and what they deserve is feedback, because nobody wants to be thought of as ineffective, nobody wants to be thought of as wasting their colleague's time. And so if they are doing so, the chances are that's not their intention, the chances are their intention is to be helpful, and so we all need feedback, we all need to know.

We are blind to the impact we're having unless people are willing to let us know.

Rachel Salaman: That's a good point. It seems such an obvious thing to say, but we all need to be thinking more about where the other person might be coming from in terms of their state of mind and what they're trying to communicate.

Amy Edmondson: Yes, it makes empathy and the ability to empathize, and the ability to step into someone else's shoes, absolutely crucial, and a competency that I think is of growing importance in today's world.

Rachel Salaman: Another common concern that pops up in your frequently asked questions is whether creating psychological safety will take up too much time. In the book you say that, on the contrary, psychological safety can save – rather than consume – time! So could you talk us through how that works?

Amy Edmondson: Yes, a crisp, candid, straightforward conversation, that's focused on the issue at hand, can take a great deal less time than a meandering, polite or holding-back conversation that ends up postponing the making of crucial decisions and often wasting time and resources.

So, in other words, our strong assumption is that a psychologically safe workplace would be one in which we waste time because people are talking too much – [it] is not true. Our assumption that our "business as usual" mode of operating is truly efficient is most certainly not true; in fact, most organizations don't even come close to efficiency because they're unaware of all of that time that gets wasted by non-candid conversations.

Rachel Salaman: Finally, if someone listening feels like their team or organization is lacking in psychological safety what are one or two first steps they can take to improve that, starting today?

Amy Edmondson: I think the most important step is just ask one question. If you feel that people aren't contributing just be the little trigger, be the little catalyst that helps that happen.

The other and closely related thing, but a little harder, is make it discussable. Be willing to take the risk of saying, "I sense that we may not be willing to share the ideas we have, or the concerns we have, and I think that puts us at risk. I'd love to hear from all of you, and what you think." So, I'm naming it and then I'm asking you for your thoughts.

I also would love to add that psychological safety, even for me, it's not the goal – it's a means to an end. The goal is excellence, the goal is to have people feel great about what they do, and to accomplish important work for their constituents.

I'm just making the argument that that's darn hard to do if they don't have an environment of psychological safety. So, I think it's a mistake to say we don't have psychological safety, let's put everything on hold while we create it; the best way to create it is in the service of the work itself.

Rachel Salaman: Amy Edmondson, thanks very much for joining us today.

Amy Edmondson: Thank you very much for having me.

The name of Amy's book again is, "The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth."

We also have in-depth reviews of her books "Extreme Teaming" and "Building the Future" in the Book Insights section of the Mind Tools site.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.

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