Amy C Edmondson - The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

1. Chapter 2
2. Chapter 7

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 7

Amy C. Edmondson

HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

Copyright 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Edmondson, Amy C., author.

Title: The fearless organization : creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth / Amy C. Edmondson.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2019] | Includes index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018033732 (print) | LCCN 2018036160 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119477228 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119477266 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119477242 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Organizational behavior. | Organizational learningPsychological aspects. | Psychology, Industrial.

Classification: LCC HD58.7 (ebook) | LCC HD58.7 .E287 2019 (print) | DDC 658.3/82dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033732

Cover Design: Wiley

To George

Whose curiosity and passion make him a great scientist and leader and who knows all too well that fear is the enemy of flourishing.

No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Edmund Burke, 1756.

Whether you lead a global corporation, develop software, advise clients, practice medicine, build homes, or work in one of today's state-of-the-art factories that require sophisticated computer skills to manage complex production challenges, you are a knowledge worker. Just as the engine of growth in the Industrial Revolution was standardization, with workers as laboring bodies confined to execute the one best way to get almost any task done, growth today is driven by ideas and ingenuity. People must bring their brains to work and collaborate with each other to solve problems and accomplish work that's perpetually changing. Organizations must find, and keep finding, new ways to create value to thrive over the long term. And creating value starts with putting the talent you have to its best and highest use.

While it's not news that knowledge and innovation have become vital sources of competitive advantage in nearly every industry, few managers stop to really think about the implications of this new reality particularly when it comes to what it means for the kind of work environment that would help employees thrive and organizations succeed. The goal of this book is to help you do just that and to equip you with some new ideas and practices to make knowledge-intensive organizations work better.

For an organization to truly thrive in a world where innovation can make the difference between success and failure, it is not enough to hire smart, motivated people. Knowledgeable, skilled, well-meaning people cannot always contribute what they know at that critical moment on the job when it is needed. Sometimes this is because they fail to recognize the need for their knowledge. More often, it's because they're reluctant to stand out, be wrong, or offend the boss. For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge! This means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas. In most workplaces today, people are holding back far too often reluctant to say or ask something that might somehow make them look bad. To complicate matters, as companies become increasingly global and complex, more and more of the work is team-based. Today's employees, at all levels, spend 50% more time collaborating than they did 20 years ago. Hiring talented individuals is not enough. They have to be able to work well together.

In my research over the past 20 years, I've shown that a factor I call psychological safety helps explain differences in performance in workplaces that include hospitals, factories, schools, and government agencies. Moreover, psychological safety matters for groups as disparate as those in the C-suite of a financial institution and on the front lines of the intensive care unit. My field-based research has primarily focused on groups and teams, because that's how most work gets done. Few products or services today are created by individuals acting alone. And few individuals simply do their work and then hand the output over to other people who do their work, in a linear, sequential fashion. Instead, most work requires people to talk to each other to sort out shifting interdependencies. Nearly everything we value in the modern economy is the result of decisions and actions that are interdependent and therefore benefit from effective teamwork. As I've written in prior books and articles, more and more of that teamwork is dynamic occurring in constantly shifting configurations of people rather than in formal, clearly-bounded teams. Teaming is the art of communicating and coordinating with people across boundaries of all kinds expertise, status, and distance, to name the most important. But whether you're teaming with new colleagues all the time or working in a stable team, effective teamwork happens best in a psychologically safe workplace.