The Power of Psychological Safety
November 24, 2019
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth is one of the most important books of the past several years for educators and for leaders in every field. It can help improve learning, productivity, happiness, and just about every other personal and organizational variable you might consider. Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson (@AmyCEdmondson) weaves together massive amounts of evidence from a variety of contexts and cultures to make powerful arguments that should inform everything from the language we use in the classroom and in meetings to the way we provide feedback to how we encourage greater levels of creativity and innovation.
Edmondson begins with a puzzle: Which team has a greater number of errors the one with high psychological safety or low psychological safety? Based on the preceding paragraph, you might guess the latter - low safety equals more errors. But the answer is more circuitous than that. In fact, her data from a groundbreaking study of medical errors suggested just the opposite - that teams with high degrees of psychological safety actually reported more errors. But that is not because safety led to sloppiness. On the contrary, teams with high levels of psychological safety were more likely to report errors and learn from them, while teams with low levels of psychological safety were more like to cover up errors or attempt to quietly compensate for mistakes, preventing any systematic individual and organizational learning. We see the same phenomenon in the classroom all the time. The teacher asks, “Is everybody with me?” Heads nod and hands flutter, but rarely does a student honestly say, “Actually, I don’t get it at all, and I’m completely lost.” What do you think the teacher’s actions might be? In many classroom observations I have made, the student who openly expresses confusion is met with a facial expression that betrays disappointment, a sigh of exasperation, and a quick repetition of the lesson. The illusion of perfect learning continues in those classrooms right up to the point that the students and teachers are confronted with assessments that show that the students were not nearly as proficient as the teacher thought.
Are the students nodding their heads and waving their hands to express understanding just devious little liars who are eager to get the lesson over with? That’s one explanation, but a better one, Edmondson argues, is that they do not feel safe asking questions and appearing to be foolish. Certainly, they don’t want to disappoint one of the major adults in their young lives – their teacher. And even though teachers often say, “There’s no such thing as a dumb question,” the conversations in the faculty lounge suggest otherwise. The same is true of staff meetings when the principal brusquely asks, “Are there any questions?” with the clear expectation of silence. My fellow providers of professional learning don’t get off the hook either. We can get so consumed in delivering eloquent presentations that we rarely conduct meaningful checks for understanding. I watched presenters addressing veteran professionals react in the same way our theoretical teacher did to the honest student who admitted his failure to understand a lesson. After all, if we presented a lesson expertly to a group of college-educated professionals, what could possibly go wrong?
A lot, Edmondson argues. Her research suggests that only about 20 percent of organizations have high levels of psychological safety, while the other 80 percent maintain the veneer of collegiality, burying conflict, questions, and mistakes – and the learning that goes with them – in a deeply concealed organizational shaft. It is why, as I wrote in the “Myth of Buy-In,” leaders who claim to have buy-in from everyone are much more likely to have simply sent signals that bury or punish dissent.
In a psychologically safe environment, people ask more questions, are willing to be more vulnerable, and give and accept more accurate feedback. Even when doing the same tasks and with people with the same capabilities, environments of psychological safety dramatically improve not only organizational safety but also the personal satisfaction and engagement of employees.
Edmondson is one of those generous researchers who places her survey instruments in the public domain so that anyone can use them (we try to do this at Creative Leadership as well). She is also the sort of scholar who, even though she is clearly the leading expert in the field, shares credit throughout the book with researchers around the world. Leaders will be talking about this book decades from now, just as Jim Collins’ Good to Great is still widely followed. I just hope that we don’t miss this book’s essential message for teachers, parents, and students, all of whom are perhaps more important than any corporate CEO in creating and maintaining the models of psychological safety in schools and homes that the world’s future leaders will need.