This week’s post took an unexpected turn. Last Friday, I was indeed planning to write another post on the layoffs in tech, discussing to which extent Elon Musk’s recent decision to ‘pluck’ Twitter was a rationale decision or a desperate move to bring a cash-bleeding venture into black figures territory. On Friday night, though, as I was looking for something to read before going to bed, I stumbled upon a book that I had planned to read several years ago and had forgotten it even existed: The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmonson, published in 2018. The subject matter seemed so topical and the content so fascinating that I read it in one weekend and decided to make it the subject of my column this week instead.
Let’s be clear first on what Edmonson means by ‘fearless’: this book is not about breakthrough innovations (even if some examples stem from the tech space) or law-breaking organizations. Actually, the subtitle says it all: the book aims at ‘Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth‘.
Edmonson defines ‘psychological safety’ as “the belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. The concept refers to the experience of feeling able to speak up with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able – even obligated – to be candid.” Differently said, psychological safety “relates to whether others will give you the benefit of the doubt when, for instance, you have asked for help or admitted a mistake”. The first chapters describe situations where lack of communication, due to fear of retaliation (‘my boss is not going to be happy if I say this’) or shame (‘if I speak up whereas everyone agrees I will likely sound stupid’), has led to dramatic, sometimes deadly, outcomes. And the plague is far from minor: Edmonson states that “in one study investigating employee experiences with speaking up, 85% of respondents reported at least one occasion when they felt unable to raise a concern with their bosses, even though they believed the issue was important”. Scary.
“Another way to think about the voice-silence asymmetry is captured in the phrase “no one was ever fired for silence.”
Amy Edmonson
Edmonson discusses the dangers of silence from two perspectives: the more obvious, that of the person who does not dare to speak out for fear of the consequences, and the more insidious “Cassandra syndrome“, in which the bearer of bad news speaks out but is simply not listened to.
She then dedicates a couple of chapters to the scientifically documented benefits of psychological safety, leveraging research from neurosciences as appropriate: higher employee engagement, improved learning, boosted cooperation. Google’s famous Project Aristotle also showed that psychological safety was the key factor explaining why some teams outperformed others. On the contrary, it is proven that fear “impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving”.
Edmonson also insists on the local and temporal nature of psychological safety: it is very rare for an entire enterprise, even benefiting from a strong corporate culture, to be homogeneously safe or unsafe, employees should expect to find “pockets” of high and low safety. The safety level can also evolve over time, especially when the environment changes.
In practice, psychologically unsafe environments can be ‘diagnosed’ when workarounds, instances of cheating and/or cover-up appear. According to Edmonson, “workarounds can occur when workers do not feel safe enough to speak up and make suggestions to improve the system”. The problem is simply transferred elsewhere, either in the future and/or to a different unit. As for cheating and covering up, they are “natural by-products of a top-down culture that does not accept “no” or “it can’t be done” for an answer”.
Fortunately, the author finds places she considers as ‘psychologically safe’: Ray Dallio’s Bridgewater (although I am not certain that his ‘gung-ho’ transparency policy represents a desirable outcome), the US Airways Flight 1549, Mark Costa’s Eastman etc. all have their place in this very well documented section. This also represents an opportunity for the author to stress the difference between safety and leniency: tolerating calculated risk-taking and thus accepting failure is not the same as lowering work standards.
“Your greatest fear as a CEO is that people aren’t telling you the truth.”
Mark Costa, Chairman & CEO, Eastman
Lastly, Edmonson uses these examples to help us answer the key question: ‘how do we create psychological safety in the workplace?’. She brings here some elements for reflection:
- The role and behaviour of the leader is obviously essential, and explains to a large extent the variability in safety across groups (“floors in a hospital, teams in a factory, branches in a retail bank, or restaurants in a chain”) within the same corporate structure. According to Edmonson, the leader should be ‘inclusive’, i.e. (i) approachable and accessible, (ii) ready to acknowledge his/her fallibility and (iii) proactively asking for input. Ex post, the leader should express appreciation in front of employees ready to take risks, destigmatize failure while sanctioning clear violations – being fearless is not being ruleless. Although leaders play an outsized role in shaping behaviours and expectations, moving the needle towards a psychologically safer place can become everyone’s job, says Edmonson.
- Linked to the previous point, a real change in corporate culture, that makes speaking up a blame-free expectation for each employee, must materialize to embed those behaviours into the ‘fabric of the firm’. This change also means that failure should be recognized as a natural part of an innovation journey and not as a source of blame or embarrassment.
- A new definition for ‘leadership’. Leading is not solely managing employees but also providing them with a “force that helps people and organizations engage in unnatural acts like speaking up, taking smart risks, embracing diverse views, and solving remarkably challenging problems.”
“Leaders who are willing to say “I don’t know” play a surprisingly powerful role in engaging the hearts and minds of employees.”
Amy Edmonson
Upon closing this book, the reader may wonder how to adapt Edmonson’s principles to a hybrid work environment. This book was indeed written a few years before the COVID crisis significantly changed our work habits, notably by promoting the growth of remote working. We have all experienced how difficult it is to get heard in a Zoom or Teams meeting, where body cues remain largely invisible and lags in signal transmission lead to an epidemic of ‘no sorry you go first’ – sounds familiar? For me the answer is twofold: first, in the short term, companies must push the ‘psychological safety’ harder than planned, using all opportunities to reinforce and implement the change, even if it means creating a somewhat ‘artificial’ environment; second, even if I risk making a lot of enemies, I think that physical contacts are essential to nurture a genuine climate of psychological safety and that, in the medium term, each company will have to recalibrate its remote work policy to take those benefits into consideration.
P.S.: For those keen to hear about Musk and Twitter, don’t worry, the draft is still safe on my laptop and only waits to be revived…