Amy Edmondson on Creating Better Organizations by Building Psychological Safety in the Workplace

“Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.” ⁠— Amy Edmondson 

Have you ever had a question you’ve been dying to ask in a meeting but couldn’t because when you look around, everyone is simply nodding their heads, agreeing to everything the boss says? 

No one wants to look incompetent or ignorant, especially at work. We prefer to look smart, helpful, and that we go everything covered. To avoid being labeled as ignorant or incompetent, people choose not to ask questions or admit to their mistakes. 

Sadly, innovations are delayed, and great ideas don’t come to light every time this happens. 

In this episode, Amy Edmondson will be joining me to discuss her book, The Fearless Organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. We talk about how organizations go wrong because people lack psychological safety and never speak up due to the fear that they might never get that promotion or worse lose their job. 

Giveaway! Fearless Organization is an incredible book and I’ll be giving away 3 books to the first 3 who tweets out this podcast highlighting Amy’s work with the hashtag #fearlessorganization and tags @worktransformed @AmyCEdmondson @brandonlaws 

Example Tweet: 

I loved the @worktransformed podcast with @AmyCEdmondson and host @brandonlaws discussing the #fearlessorganization. Listen here: http://bit.ly/2Fz4kCb 

In this episode, you will learn about:

• Amy’s thoughts on her book Teaming and why she wrote it
• What is psychological safety and why is it vital in the workplace
• Why teams are more effective in a psychologically stable workplace
• The lack of psychological safety in a hospital setting
• Why better teams have higher error rates
• Open communication transparency
• What went wrong with Volkswagen and Wells Fargo and how could such incident be avoided
• How dangerous fear at work is
• Nokia and their challenges being in a competitive environment
• How to build psychological safety in the workplace
• What makes up a really good question 

Resources Mentioned:

• Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy by Amy Edmonson
• The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy Edmonson
• Amy Edmonson’s list of written articles and books
• Amy Edmonson’s TED talk
• Brands and companies mentioned - Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, Nokia, Google, Apple, Pixar, Uber