Summer Special: How to Create Psychological Safety at Work with Amy Edmondson

Welcome to the first of a series of summer special episodes of The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. We will be running a series of special episodes of The Digital HR Leaders Podcast throughout the summer that will provide an outside-in perspective on HR. These will shine a light on how initiatives such as psychological safety, empathetic leadership, job crafting, data driven decision making and a more human centric approach can drive innovation, creativity, inclusion and ultimately success in our organisations during these turbulent times.

I can't think of a better way of starting this series than by taking a closer examination of the concept of psychological safety. In the workplace, psychological safety is the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. People feel able to speak up when needed with relevant ideas, questions or concerns without being shut down in a gratuitous way.

Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able, even obligated, to be candid. Those are the words of Amy Edmondson, my guest on this edition of The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Amy is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, Author of "The Fearless Organisation - creating psychological safety in the workplace in learning, innovation and growth." You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation, Amy and I discuss:

• The definition of psychological safety, what it is and what it is not

• The role of leaders and HR in creating psychological safety and the link between psychological safety and culture, learning, and innovation

• How to create psychological safety in virtual teams

• The relationship between psychological safety and transparency

• Examples of organisations who have created and embedded psychological safety and the subsequent benefits they have enjoyed

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested in the role that culture, leadership and trust play in driving innovation and growth. So that is business leaders, Chief HR Officers, Chief Learning Officers and anyone in a People Analytics, HR Business Partner or Talent Acquisition role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Insight222. To learn more, visit https://www.insight222.com.

Interview Transcript

David Green:  So today I am delighted to welcome Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, an Author and currently number three on the Thinkers 50 list to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Amy welcome to the show, it is great to have you on.

Amy Edmondson: Thank you so much for having me.

David Green: Can you provide listeners with a quick introduction to your background and current activities?

Amy Edmondson: Sure. I am a researcher and a teacher and I have been at Harvard for over 20 years now. I work with companies and students around the world to think about culture and strategic Human Resources issues.

David Green: Great. Well as I said, we are delighted to have you on the show. Your work on psychological safety was famously cited by Google in their research into what makes a great team. What exactly is psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson: It is a shared belief, It is a shared belief that the environment is conducive to interpersonal risks. Like asking for help, admitting a mistake or criticising a project and that can be challenging to do, so this is the sort of sense that this is a special place where that kind of activity is okay. Now it is not being nice or soft or guaranteed applause for everything you have to say, it is also not permission to whine and it is not permission to slack off. Right. It is a very energising but candid place.

David Green: As you say, it is creating that environment for people to speak up?

Amy Edmondson: Yes. Full stop. Right. Easier said than done.

David Green: Yes. Yes, I suppose that leads to the next question. What steps should leaders take to create psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson: For me it starts with, and in the midst of COVID now is a good time to talk about this, because I think it starts with being utterly clear and transparent about what we are up against. Specifically the enormous uncertainty and complexity and challenge of what we face. I call that “setting the stage” and when you are “setting the stage” by reminding people, of what you might argue we already know but I think it still needs to be said, you are essentially setting the rationale for why their voice might be needed.

Clearly anyone could see something that you miss or that others miss, so it starts with “setting the stage” But it is also about being proactive and inviting voice. You can't just say, well, gee, I am really eager to hear from people and I am sure they know that, you have to be proactive. You have to say what is on your mind.

What are you seeing? What concerns do you have? What questions do you have and just make it more difficult for people to remain silent than to speak up because you have issued those invitations. Then of course it really matters how you respond, you must not shoot the messenger. When people come forward with ideas or bad news or anything else, you have to just take a deep breath and respond in a forward looking appreciative manner. All of those things contribute to creating psychological safety.

David Green: I think when we spoke a couple of weeks ago in preparation, we talked about leaders being vulnerable.

Amy Edmondson: Yes. To me all of those behaviours are vulnerable, but yes, let's emphasise that one. Let's underline it if you will, because we are all vulnerable, but if we do not want to be seen as vulnerable we are in trouble. So leaders have to own their vulnerability. We are all vulnerable in the face of unprecedented challenges and situations, when we name it, when we are out there saying I need your help, that is a stance of vulnerability but it is also a stance of invitation.

David Green: And I suppose vulnerability breeds vulnerability so if leaders are honest and admit that they need help then they can create a climate where employees can feel that way as well.

Amy Edmondson: Right? Ed Catmull has a wonderful quote, the President and Co Founder of Pixar, as leaders if you talk about your mistakes, it makes it safe for others to do likewise.

And it couldn't be more important that leaders, by nature of the role have to go first, if you say, gee, I want people to be vulnerable and speak up about what is not working as well as what is working, but you are unwilling to set that model and to go first then it is unlikely that they are going to really do it.

David Green: It is interesting you see a lot of leaders out there, we won't necessarily name any names, but the last thing that they would ever admit to is vulnerability.

Whether that is in politics or in business and obviously what they are actually doing is not creating the environment that they are going to hear that honest feedback, not just about them, but honest feedback from employees about what could potentially make the business better.

Amy Edmondson: That is right and I think they are under the mistaken belief that that is a stance of strength. Coming off as if you have all the answers, as if you make no mistakes and all credit for good things are due to you, but all problems must be from someone else that comes off as being strong.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We have all known leaders like that whether up closer or from afar and we don't find them admirable. We don't find them strong. In fact, we find them somewhere between pathetic and just not very compelling.

David Green: And I guess that is really coming to the fore with the COVID-19 pandemic, which you touched on actually already. We are in the midst of what is the biggest remote working experiment in history and probably ever will be, what additional steps or nuances are needed to create psychological safety in virtual teams?

Amy Edmondson: I think all of the above plus, the plus is as long as we have to be working remotely it does give us a few little tools that we can take advantage of whether those are the polls or the cold calls, the invitation for someone you can directly say, David, I would love to hear from you. Using the votes or the yes no checks in certain platforms. We might as well use these little tools that are there to prompt candor, to prompt voice and also it can be hard for people if you are on a good sized meeting, let's say somewhere between six and 12 people on a zoom call for instance, it is hard to just spontaneously jump in because there are little lags and people might be doing that at the same time and it doesn't feel appropriate. It feels more like you are on a television screen and you should be asked to speak as opposed to that sort of informal feeling we have around a table where we are leaning in and kind of adding, offering, pushing back and all of that stuff spontaneously. So without the spontaneity of face to face around a table I think it helps to use some of the tools that are in these platforms to engage voice in a more thoughtful, systematic way.

David Green:  A lot of the organisations that we work with are doing more frequent pulsing on a weekly basis, which is great, but if you have not created that climate of psychological safety, then you are not necessarily going to get honest answers back. And I guess in this particular climate people are more fearful of losing their jobs so they probably are even more inclined to say positive things and not really reveal some of the problems that are happening.

If you don't know, you don't know and you can't do anything about it.

Amy Edmondson: That is right and that is why I think you really have to be explicit in the stage setting. In every virtual meeting that you have it is helpful to restate the situation in a way, we have never been here before,

this is really challenging. We don't know how we are going to get this project done, working entirely virtually so ideas are welcome. What do you think might work? And I think it is also helpful to do systematic things like rounds just quick check-ins to find out where people are and to be extremely sympathetic to the possibility that people have all sorts of things going on behind the scenes that you are not aware of and that might impact their ability to focus in this exact moment.

David Green: I suppose a lot of people that are having to work remotely a lot of them haven't worked remotely before. Managers are managing teams where maybe they have not had to manage a remote team before they have had most of their people in front of them on most days.

And as you said, with a lot of children being off school as well if your partner is working as well, then suddenly you have got to share the teaching too. It is really important that organisations are aware of that and managers are aware of that and help employees so it really magnifies the importance of psychological safety.

Amy Edmondson: It really does because everyone is having to talk about things that are more personal than in the past. For example my children are here needing help or my parent is not well or things that we wouldn't necessarily ordinarily bring into the workplace has to be brought into the workplace to talk about vulnerability and space has to be created for that by necessity.

David Green: I think whether it is now in COVID or hopefully when we move post COVID, which will be nice, where does psychological safety fit into a broader set of practices in your organisation, such as learning and culture and innovation?

Amy Edmondson: Right squarely in the middle of those things. But let me back up a little bit and say psychological safety is not a practice, it is a description of the climate or the environment. For example check-ins are a practice, I suppose culture levers can be thought of as a practice if we were to get into what those are, but psychological safety is a mechanism that very much helps explain why certain practices lead to certain outcomes like innovation or quality improvement. The levers are things you can do, check in at the beginning of the meeting for example, that check in might create more of a sense of my voice is as welcome here. Then that might allow me to raise a crazy idea during the meeting or to ask for help when I am in over my head and those kinds of behaviours can lead to things like quality improvement or innovation or creativity and so forth. But I think the more important thing about that question is, it is a spot on question, because psychological safety is not a silver bullet, it is not the sort of a panacea for organisations they will suddenly be fixed if they have psychological safety. In fact most simply I think psychological safety needs to be paired with ambition, is one way to put it, but it needs to be paired with a motivation to really do great work.

So when I want to be very simple, I want to say the two things that leaders need to think about all the time are what have I done lately to enable excellence? What training, what coaching, what clarity about goals and so forth. All those things that we all need to do great work and what have I done lately to create psychological safety? Where people are not holding back, they don't have one foot on the brake.

When you have got both of those dimensions going strong then you are, in today's world, in the high performance zone.

David Green: Clearly innovation is important to every organisation in the world, but so is learning increasingly as well. There was some research that IBM did that they said the average time it takes to close the skills gap I think it increased from four days or something in 2014 to something like 35 days in 2018. As you said, it is one of the key things that leaders need to be thinking about.

Amy Edmondson: Right. Well just the other thing that is getting a lot of attention nowadays is the learning mindset or the growth mindset, Carol Dweck’s work, as opposed to the fixed mindset. Lots of companies like Microsoft and others are quite eager to have their employees have a learning mindset or growth mindset where they understand that stretch assignments are ways to get you smarter and better, not ways to show that you are not good enough. I think that is a really important thing and then I think a growth mindset really thrives in a psychologically safe environment.

So growth mindset plus psychological safety seems like another really synergy opportunity or formula for innovation and excellence.

David Green: Yes and I suppose if you feel safe to take on new challenges and new tasks, that maybe you are not an expert on, and people are going to let you fail initially. That not only helps the individual but helps the organisation grow as well.

Amy Edmondson: Right? I mean, if you think any failure will be a de merit or a black mark on your resume then you won't do it, you will be very thoughtful about only engaging in safe tasks and that is what I call playing not to lose. If you are playing not to lose you might succeed in not losing, but you don't win in the broader sense.

David Green: So the majority of our listeners work in HR, not all of them but the majority, what is or what perhaps should be the role of HR and People Analytics teams, thinking about actually measuring it as well, in helping to create, grow and measure psychological safety and support leaders in doing that?

Amy Edmondson: The three categories and you said one of them already, measure, training and coaching I think. Measure of course is important and many times when people think about measuring psychological safety, they will write to me and they will ask, what is the right number that we need to hit to have it? Well that is not necessarily the right question. I think the right question is, where is the variance in your company and why?

And by variance I mean, in every company I have ever been in and studied what we find is real pockets of excellence in psychological safety sprinkled throughout the company, but then the other groups or regions or business units or whatever don't have it. The learning you can do from variance, I think is so much more important than worrying about the mean.

Because people interpret survey items differently and one company might have a more cautious response or they just don't like to use the ends of the scale for example and another company does use the ends of the scale. So the means interpreted across companies can be somewhere between tricky and meaningless, but the variance within companies is deeply meaningful because then that shows you where the bright spots are.

You can learn more about what the bright spot people are doing and help spread some of those practices across the company to get everybody up.

So training obviously speaks for itself, but I think giving people a little bit of information about what this is, what it is not, why it matters, is a deeply important aspect of the HR role.

Then coaching and one of the things that is a real opportunity today is not feeling like you have to do all that work yourself. But one of the most powerful ways, and Google did this, to coach people, is train internal employees who have other jobs, coding, new product development, engineers, whatever they might do in their regular role, train them to be coaches who volunteer some small portion of their time to go hang out with other teams who have asked for help. Then they can sort of say, this is how it works in my team and they can be a sounding board because they are not part of that immediate team.

So one of the best ways to help the whole organisation improve its skills is to leverage the internal people who have passion about this.

David Green: Back to the variance thing I think this is really where People Analytics teams come in to it. If you have got for instance, let's just make it really simple. If you have got several sales teams but your data is telling you that we have created this culture, this psychologically safe environment within this team and look at this team's results in comparison to other teams where we are seeing from our survey and our data that we are not getting this. Then that can be used to inspire other teams but also see what are the different traits between leaders and also what the results could be by actually changing.

Amy Edmondson: Absolutely and analytics can certainly help with that because they can point to performance differences, as the Google project Aristotle famously did and many other studies as well, performance differences between the high and low psychological safety teams in roughly the same type of job.

Then I think that also helps people understand why this matters. If one hand is tied behind their back, they are not going to be performing as well.

David Green: And a lot of it is about giving insights isn't it? Because as a manager, you want your team to be successful, hopefully you want your team to feel engaged and happy in what they are doing as well.

If you get those insights that actually say, if you do X you can expect Y to happen then hopefully that can change behaviour effectively.

Amy Edmondson: Well yes that is the theory, that is the idea.

David Green: So I suppose that leads on quite nicely to the next question. What are the benefits typically enjoyed in organisations or teams rather because as you said, it might not necessarily be the whole organisation, that have created and embedded psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson: I think the first ones that come to mind, at least to me, are innovation and creativity. People are unleashed to be a little more outside the box and by doing that with each other they can make progress toward things that really are useful and viable. So innovation really is a big one.

Another kind of category and of course it depends on which industry you are in as to which one of these is most meaningful, but failure prevention or error prevention or worker safety, which is a kind of error prevention. When people are able to speak up about the small things that seem to be slightly out of whack or the concerns they have that it doesn't seem to be right in some way and they raise it rather than feel foolish in doing so, or even more boldly they are willing to tell a fellow colleague or even a manager don't do that, you need your safety glasses first. So there is a kind of ability when people are psychologically safe to prevent certain failures that did not need to happen. We have many, many case studies of that.

Then finally, I would say a big one is inclusion. Psychological safety increasingly is a marker for people feeling and being included in important decisions and feeling a sense of belonging as well.

David Green: That leads on quite nicely to the current situation with Black Lives <atter and highlighting that there is still too much racial injustice in our society, but also in our organisations as well. I think the latest research from McKinsey shows that it is not just about diversity it is about really driving inclusion and sense of belonging within teams.

Amy Edmondson: Diversity is something we can measure reasonably easily. It is also a lever that with some effort we can pull, we can hire specifically for more diversity. But that does not mean instant inclusion, not even close. Inclusion happens when the diverse workforces that we take care to assemble actually are diversely represented in the important decisions, the important roles in the company.

And finally belonging is really the highest standard, which is that everyone in your workforce feels that they really do belong in this company.

David Green: You highlight it again so when you think about innovation, have you got any examples of when you have seen that within organisations?

Amy Edmondson: Well the classic classic example, and this is one that I write about in the book The Fearless Organisation, is Pixar. Pixar is obviously an innovative company. They have had something like 17 hit movies in a row, in an industry where that is essentially unheard of, so they are innovative. They produce something brand new that has never been seen before that is both critically and commercially successful, so that is innovation. They do that both by creating an environment of psychological safety, where people are unleashed to express themselves, but also free to critique. They set it up very carefully so that people feel able to criticise the evolving product, because if employees are looking at it and going, I'm not moved, audiences will not be moved either. But if you don't want to hurt your colleagues feelings or your bosses feelings you are going to hold back those kinds of ideas.

So the Pixar case, which is almost a pure play case if you will, because we all understand what they do and all they do is have innovation in a way that a more traditional company, let's say an automotive company, it has R&D, it has innovation or has a very real need for innovation and it also has a real need for a whole lot of routine and precise replication work. Thinking about Pixar is helpful because it was in fact created with effort, both by modelling the right behaviours at the top of the organisation, by creating structures that invite voice and make it safe for people to speak up even when multiple layers of hierarchy are in the room and by just a habit of mind that says, this is how we roll, this is how we do it.

David Green: I suppose if you are going to make the effort of bringing together a creative and cognitively diverse team you want them to actually be able to show that by being able to speak up about, as you said, things that are great, co-create stuff together, but also particularly if you are making a Pixar film, things that maybe aren't so great and won’t land well with an audience.

Amy Edmondson: That is right. In companies, so often the reason this is so challenging is that you can not measure the success you did not have. Let’s say you have a whole lot of talented, diverse thinkers in your organisation, but you are not hearing from them and you didn't get some new innovation that you could have gotten. You will never know that, it is the dog that did not bark. So many companies out there I would argue are unaware of all the value they are leaving behind, they are unaware of the brilliance that their employees have that they are not hearing from.

David Green: And that is a real challenge. How do you at least try and mitigate against that happening?

Amy Edmondson: Well, I think the best answer to that question is that in most organisations you do have variance again. So you will have higher and lower performers and when you dig into some of the factors that are explaining those differences, you are likely to find more engaged, more eager and more collegiality, more collaborativeness.

In fact, I should have said that earlier when you asked what are some of the benefits, because I take it so for granted I didn't even mention it, but probably the primary benefit of psychological safety is better teamwork. When I feel able to be with you and bring my full self and my full set of ideas and concerns to work, then you and I are just off and running.

David Green: And I suppose in Pixar it would be why was this a hit film? And then why wasn’t this a hit film? It might not be purely down to that but it would be a good place to start.

Amy Edmondson: A film is a pretty big investment. It is a pretty big project, but along the way there would be scenes that would be not so compelling and scenes that would be more compelling. So you get to learn from the variance within a really large initiative like that, as well as the variance between them.

Probably another example that is useful, I studied at some length at a children's hospital in the US. They did a very significant attempt to change the culture, a successful attempt, to make it more psychologically safe. Because what they were interested in was not that, of course, what they were interested in was patient safety.

The leaders had the recognition that without psychological safety to speak up about errors, then patients were more at risk than they would be otherwise. This is a good illustration of the overall phenomenon, because at a place like a children's hospital, it is a big 17 site organisation, there are lots of variance.

You can find spectacularly creative and open and engaged people over here and very top down, authoritarian, anxious people over there. So part of the change journey was about not one practice, not just here is some training we want everybody to do it, but I counted something like 35 different levers. Some bigger, some smaller, that were moved to change that culture. Everything from focus groups, to offering a new set of terms that people should use to talk about accidents rather than, what's the word, I guess it is errors versus accidents. Accident implying that something happened and error implying that there is a culprit who did it. A little bit of training, creating teams that would review things and just a lot of different activities and slowly but surely the culture changes and then the patients indeed get safer.

David Green: You can't want better than that in a hospital environment. So actually you have given a great example of creativity and innovation and mitigating risk. I think the other one you were talking about was inclusiveness. If you come across a good example of an organisation that has created that inclusiveness?

Amy Edmondson: Well the recent events in the US especially makes me want to reach for an example that is purely about race, but I don't have one. In the book I do talk about Uber's turnaround on the issue of sexual harassment and discrimination. Once they discovered, which they discovered very publicly and painfully with the case of Susan Fowler. She was an engineer who was subject to unwelcome harassment, obviously all harassment is unwelcome, by her manager. HR did nothing about it and even said, we are not going to, he is a high performer, you know, the classic but just inexcusable response. The company took note and went to great effort to try to change that. I would not say they are perfect, I would not say anyone is perfect, but it was a concerted effort. Driven especially by, and by the way I love pointing this out, because an important aspect of psychological safety is being tough on bad behaviour, it is not just encouraging good behaviours. When people do things that are wrong and against our values and against our behavioural standards there are consequences for that. So if you really want there to be a feeling of inclusion by all groups, you have got to really punish, to use that word, the people who are excluding people from other groups.

David Green: I guess if that is systemic in your organisation it is admitting that organisationally you have not done the right thing but that you are admitting it and doing something about it and then also showing that you have done something about it.

Amy Edmondson: Exactly and the admitting it is so important. It is just being able to say, wow, we were wrong, we did this and now we are committed to doing better and we need your help.

David Green: Yes, well hopefully we will see some good examples of inclusiveness as we go through this crisis. It does certainly seem from the outside looking in that a lot of organisations are really getting behind this. Not before time it has to be said, but hopefully we will see some good examples.

Amy Edmondson: With the explosion of task forces.

David Green: I think with COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement and the whole topic around trying to get rid of this racial injustice that we have got within our organisations there is a lot of talk about transparency. I would be interested what is the relationship between psychological safety and transparency?

Amy Edmondson: Now, they are partners in a virtuous cycle. So transparency is what is enabled by psychological safety and practicing transparency being open and clear, dare I say it again, vulnerable about what we know, what is going on, what we don't know, builds psychological safety.

David Green: Good. I think certainly some of the companies we are working with, big companies as well, I think with COVID-19 in particular, because we have more stories about that. It is leaders actually coming out at all hands and saying we have not faced anything like this before, we are doing this because we think it is the right thing but we would love to hear from you all. Are we doing the right thing and actually inviting, as you said right at the start, inviting participation.

Amy Edmondson: I think one of the most powerful things that leaders at any level can say is, I need your help. Because it is humble, it is vulnerable, it is honest and it is an invitation.

David Green: Yes and it will be interesting as we, hopefully, get out out of this crisis, in years to come academics like you will do studies on different organisations and look at the variances perhaps and we may find that those who put employees at the forefront are those that maybe got out of the crisis quicker and recovered quicker.

But that is my hypothesis and hopefully you will be able to test it Amy.

Amy Edmondson: I think it is a darn good hypothesis.

David Green: This leads nicely onto the question we are asking all of our guests on the show this series. So in the wider context, in the work that you do, what can HR do to drive more value?

Amy Edmondson: I think HR needs to own its strategic role in the company to drive more value. Lets be real, we are in the knowledge era, nothing is more important than people in the company. That is where the source of value creation comes from and therefore the people who are most expert in people management and people development, who are HR, are in an absolutely crucial role to help shape the future of the organisation.

I think that starts with taking reality seriously. Meaning we are in what has been famously called a VUCA environment, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous and if you really take that seriously and you as a HR leader help your colleagues recognise that that threatens the old mindset of, top down and command and control, telling people what to do, divide and conquer. It threatens it absolutely. It simply will not work. What we need now is much more of a test and learn and test and learn and small cycle testing where we find out what works quickly

So as to scale it well and find out what doesn't work quickly, so as to cut it down.

HR can help their colleagues keep wrestling with reality, why it needs all of the employees to be much more like scientists than order followers and then help with building the tools and processes to promote contribution and collaboration, to support the shared goals of the enterprise.

David Green: And as it gets back to what we talked about throughout our conversation, really, actually being at the forefront of understanding variance within the organisation and trying to understand what drives high performance, maybe because there is a psychologically safe culture within certain teams and then trying to understand that, helps the organisation through communication, through learning to actually pick that up elsewhere.

Amy Edmondson: That is right and if you think about it, interpersonal skills are at a premium today because doing the kinds of things that we have been talking about in this program. Being direct and being humble and being curious, take a lot of interpersonal skill. For example they take helping people have the skills to not just say what they think, but to also stop and ask others what they think, skillful people do that. HR is the place where those kinds of skills and mindsets get promulgated.

David Green: Great. Well Amy, it has been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you very much for taking time out. How can people stay in touch with you and follow you on social media?

Amy Edmondson: Well, on Twitter I am @AmyCEdmonson and @workfearlessly. I am also on LinkedIn of course. There is the Harvard Business School website where you will find my faculty page and a great deal more in detail.

David Green: And you mentioned the book, The Fearless Organisation, that has been out for a while now.

Amy Edmondson: It has, it was 2019. You can do that and by the way, we also have set up, what we call a fearless organisations scan. It is easy to find the website just Google fearless organisation scan, and you can just go on and use the survey instrument and get a little feedback from it.

David Green: Great. Well we will make sure we put the links in the material that we send out to accompany the podcast. Amy, thank you very much for your time and stay safe, stay well.