An Atana Exclusive
To build psychological safety in organizations, the right environment is critical—and learning and development (L&D) is the vital key in cultivating that positive atmosphere, says Amy Edmondson.
As Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, Edmondson is the go-to expert who coined the term team psychological safety while researching employee and business performance for her doctorate in 1999. She is consistently recognized with Thinkers50 top rankings and has received the organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award and Talent Award. A multi-published author and frequent contributor to academic and professional journals along with mainstream media, Edmondson’s latest book is Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.
In an exclusive conversation with Atana, Edmondson shared her insights on how L&D can enable the high levels of psychological safety needed to drive superior performance in today’s organizations.
What is Psychological Safety?
Psychological safety is a belief that your work environment
is conducive to taking interpersonal risks—
like speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns,
and yes, even mistakes...
Amy Edmondson
Atana: What do you see as the most important roles or contributions of the L&D function in building and maintaining psychological safety in organizations?
AE: I think the most important role of the L&D function with respect to psychological safety is training people in people management skills, or interpersonal skills more generally. Because the interpersonal skills that we all need to really thrive and contribute at work start with those that can be categorized as learning skills.
In a way, psychological safety describes a learning environment. That sounds innocuous enough, but a learning environment doesn't happen easily, unless people are willing to come from a place of not knowing.
L&D’s most important role is
delivering training in
people-management and
interpersonal skills.
As humans, we spontaneously come from a place of knowing. We each have expertise, past experience, and so on that have given us good knowledge. But our cognition is wired such that we see the world through a place of knowing. We are under the illusion that we are seeing reality, rather than seeing reality through our own filters of expertise, past experience, and other biases.
It is not a given that people come to work thinking What can I learn? and What can I learn from my colleagues, my subordinates, my managers? But psychological safety and learning are mutually reinforcing.
The more I take the risk of learning and nothing bad happens to me, then the more willing I am to do it. And the more I learn, the more I am helping create a learning environment for others.
Atana: When you think about the ways you’re seeing learning functions support psychologically safe working environments in organizations, what’s working? And are there things L&D functions are doing now that you think they should stop or do differently?
AE: The first thing that comes to mind is how learning and development is framed. I think the biggest error is having it framed as either a support function or a siloed activity, when the most effective learning programs and skills training are integrated into every aspect of operations.
Most companies today are knowledge-intensive organizations. Their success depends on the use and creation of knowledge which more often than not is a collaborative, collective activity. That just means that learning has infiltrated into everything. It's in the factory, it's in marketing, it's everywhere.
It’s fine to have a learning and development function. If what it offers and does is going to help make the organization really succeed, then that function needs to be highly collaborative and working with—teaming up with—people from all over the organization.
The most effective
learning programs and skills training
are integrated into every aspect
of operations.
It is easy to say that we’re partnering with others and to think that we've done it. But we have to be both listening and explaining, listening and offering, giving and taking—learning. I think that learning is at the very heart of being a good partner.
Atana: Most companies monitor organizational culture and workforce sentiment through employee engagement surveys. What questions do you advise including as a means of gauging the health of psychological safety in those organizations? Or is there a better way of assessing that?
AE: The first and most formal answer to that question is yes, surveys. There is a survey measure of psychological safety that is quite robust. The original measure has seven items. You really don't need all seven, it works quite well with as few as three or even fewer. The chances are pretty good that most employee surveys have a few items in them already.
Most likely, you are already asking questions like: It's easy to ask for help when I don't know what to do. Or, It is easy to speak up in my team. One of my favorite items that isn’t quite as widespread is: If you make a mistake it's not held against you. So, yes. The items are publicly available and can be used or incorporated, or you probably already have them.
The more informal answer is to get people managers in the habit of reflecting on this question:
What percent of what you're hearing in a given week is red versus green?
Meaning: problems (I need help. I disagree. Etc.)versus no problems (All’s well. Everyone is agreeing. Etc.). In a complex, uncertain, volatile world, if everything is green it is probably not an accurate portrait of reality. So that then becomes a kind of implicit signal that psychological safety may not be where it needs to be.
Atana: How would you advise L&D functions to get senior leadership buy-in on the need for culture change in organizations that lack psychological safety?
AE: There are so many ways to answer that. One is that there is a fairly large, growing, and robust body of research literature that shows strong correlation between psychological safety and team effectiveness. So there is plenty of evidence that psychological safety is a precursor to good performance. I think the biggest reason for that is that learning is a precursor to performance in a changing world.
Don’t sell leaders on psychological safety, sell them on performance.
But my more provocative answer is don't sell leaders on psychological safety—sell them on performance. Get them to pause and reflect. What does it take to be truly excellent? What does it take to find and delight and keep customers? Start to unravel the answers to those questions and you’ll soon have employees who are willing to go the extra mile.
Exactly what you need – whether it’s people who are good problem solvers, those who are very creative, or something else—depends on your industry. But you tell me what you need to do to win in your marketplace. Then you can pretty quickly reverse-engineer what it takes to get that. That’s where psychological safety and learning behavior are playing vital roles.
I worry that psychological safety is framed as a goal in its own right. To me, it's the means to the goal of delighting customers. So, it can be downright problematic to try to convince executives that they should care about psychological safety. They will care about it when the connection is made in their brains that psychological safety is what it is going to take to succeed. They don't think about it as an outcome, nor do I. You want to think about it as a part of how we need to be in order to do what we're supposed to do.
Atana: You’ve said that psychological safety is a team concept and not an individual one. Could you tell us more about that
AE: Obviously, it is individuals who fill out survey items, but they are filling them out about their team—about their work environment. The same person would answer differently in a different context. All you have to do is ask people about a great team that they were on. Or about a lousy team they were on. Then ask them about those experiences. They will very quickly generate descriptions that have aspects of psychological safety in them: It was easy to be myself. People were incredibly helpful. I felt like I mattered. I was contributing. All of those good things which happen in a more candid psychologically safe environment will describe a great team.
Probably the cleanest way to say this is that in every organization that I (and others) have studied, psychological safety varies significantly across teams. Most companies have a pretty strong culture, and there are things that are similar for people across that company. But this interpersonal context will vary across groups within the organization. So it is something that is an emergent property of a group.
Further, it is not correlated with Big Five personality dimensions like extroversion or introversion. You can be an introvert and feel very psychologically safe in your team. Or an extrovert, and think, Oh no, I'm not speaking up around here. It is really about your assessment of the consequences of speaking up, of being candid. Are they good or are they bad?
We really have to help managers of teams and departments manage in a way that invites voice and clarifies that failure is not catastrophic.
Now why does this matter? If it is a group-level phenomenon, that means we really have to help managers of teams and departments to be managing in a way that invites voice, that clarifies that failure is not catastrophic. What's fascinating to me is how different psychological safety can be within the same organization based on local leadership behaviors. In an ideal world, you would have no variance across teams because levels of psychological safety would all be high. That is not the world we live in…yet.
Special Bonus: Amy Edmondson Reveals How Unconscious Bias Hampers Freedom to Fail
Is your L&D or HR team responsible for diversity and inclusion training? Don’t miss this special short bonus perspective from Amy Edmondson on why aspirations to succeed must include license to fail—especially for women and minority employees. Read the post.
