Amy Edmonston, The Fearless Organization and Teaming
As a longtime admirer of the work on psychological safety and teaming of Harvard Business School professor of leadership and management, Amy Edmondson. and her books, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Wiley 2017) and Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (Jossey, 2012), I was happy to have the opportunity last week to interview her. I began by asking about the impact of her books. How many fearless organizations do we have now?
How Many Fearless Organizations?
Amy Edmondson: Not enough! That's the first answer. Yet I'm incredibly gratified by the attention that has been paid to the concept of psychological safety. It’s stunning how much it's been talked about. I interpret that as having something to do with people's appreciation for a deep need to matter. All of us want to matter at work. We want our voices to count. We want people to listen to us. We want real people to care that we're there. The industry context that I know best is health care delivery. And there, discussions of psychological safety are very common now.
Denning: Looking at a longer term perspective, we have had wonderful writers on this subject, from Mary Parker Follett in the 1920s. Elton Mayo and Chester Barnard in the 1930s, Abraham Maslow in the 1940s, Douglas McGregor in the 1960s, Peters and Waterman in the 1980s, and on to Smith and Katzenbach in the 1990s, and Richard Hackman and Atul Gawande in the 2000s. There’s a continuity of thinking about what’s involved in creating great workplaces. But you're telling me that there are still not enough fearless organizations after all this writing. Why is that?
Edmondson: First, I love being in that long lineage, but second, there’s nothing really new under the sun. People in my field keep rediscovering human truths. We're good diagnosticians. But we're not as good at producing the result we seek. And so the reason fearless organizations are still unusual is because it's actually very hard to fight against aspects of human nature. It's human nature to put self-protection first. And that is deep and old and it came from a legitimate place. If you didn't try to fit in and not anger the elders in the tribe, you might be truly at risk of dying from exposure or starvation. So, our instincts for self-protection, especially in a hierarchy, are real and deep.
Denning: So it’s human nature?
Edmondson: Nothing shameful about that. But it’s problematic from the perspective of value creation and working together to get things done. So you have to crack the code of humility, curiosity and true connection.
Denning: Have we cracked the code for generating humility and curiosity?
Edmondson: Yes, we have cracked the code in that we know what we need to do, but it's hard to do it. And that's the knowing-doing gap. What needs to be done has a lot to do with adult development. We're asking people to kind of continue to grow as people to grow in ways that may make us more interested in what we can do for others.
Denning: So, it's human nature that is unchanged?
Edmondson: There have always been people at different stages of development in terms of wisdom or generosity of spirit. And the more of them you have in your organization, the better. But we don't necessarily recruit for them. We're often recruiting for the more obvious signs of accomplishment.
The Priority Of Psychological Safety
Denning: So, could it be that organizations themselves are not really giving very high priority to this issue and perhaps that is one of the reasons why we're making so little progress? Is that a hypothesis we should be exploring?
Edmondson: It could be, indeed. And it wouldn't take us too long to collect the data to support that hypothesis. Let me give you an example. I was with a pharmaceutical company—a very impressive one. And their stated aspiration was a better culture, a more learning oriented, more psychologically safe culture. You don't want people holding back their ideas, their observations of mistakes and so forth. And they wanted more collaboration. They really wanted more and better teamwork And then someone happens to mention, “Did anyone tell you that we still do forced ranking of staff here?”
So. it's an obvious disconnect. Everybody's aware of it. What it does is send the signal that despite all this talk about collaboration and teamwork, in a way, we don't really mean it. And it becomes undiscussable.
Denning: So, should we be discussing it?
Edmondson: Yes, we should be discussing it. In fact, the answer to almost everything is to make it discussable. So many of the things that plague us in organizations will plague us less if we can talk about them out loud and together. That’s because once we name it, it becomes awkward to just live with it. Once its’ discussable, it becomes a team problem and a solving opportunity. Now we've got to figure out how are we going to sort of close this gap between our aspirations, which are real and important, and the various shackles that are keeping us back.
The Role Of Maximizing Shareholder Value
Denning: Over the last half century in the U.S., there’s been an increasing emphasis on maximizing shareholder value and compensating executives with extravagant compensation for pursuing that goal aggressively. Is that compatible with creating great workplaces?
Edmondson: Honestly, I think it's the biggest source of waste in any sector anywhere. The waste of paying people well in excess of what’s reasonable. And it happens because of comparisons effects and ratcheting effects. Nobody ever takes a job and says, “Please pay me a little bit less than, my counterpart over there.” They always say, “Okay, what's he making? Okay, I need to make that, plus.” And so, it ratchets up. That’s the biggest source of waste we have. Money is just going out the window that could be spent on other things, including better wages for the rest. And the amounts that are discussed are often not amounts that anyone could ever arguably need or even want. And so, it sends the message every day that others aren't valued.
Denning: This was the official policy of American business since 1997, when the Business Roundtable said explicitly this was what firms should do.
Edmondson: “I think we're beginning to see the error of our ways. The data since that time are overwhelming, showing how shortsighted that was. The theory was that, if we just make it simple, with single metric, and focus on that, that will somehow magically align all of the rest of the firm with operational excellence, and employee engagement.
The quarterly return became the slave driver. That arguably destroyed value because one of the better ways to get good returns this quarter is to underspend on R&D. It’s pretty simple. Instead you buy back shares. There are so many ways to make the numbers look good for the quarter other rather than through operational excellence.
Denning: So, this is a fairly deep problem?
Edmondson A very deep problem. It’s related to the interpersonal dynamics through which decisions get made, products get developed, services get delivered..
Denning: What would it take to get change?
Edmondson: And probably the best arena for that is among the executives who arguably have the job of making the important decisions that impact society for years to come. In uncertain world, you need to make high quality bets. And high quality bets come from high quality conversations. And those are rare. There's more pontificating. There's what Chris Argyris would call advocacy. Not enough inquiry, not enough genuine learning, and not enough genuine problem solving. Executives do have to worry about shareholders. But they can also have more thoughtful conversations about how to navigate the stormy waters ahead.
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