NORTH SYDNEY WELLBEING
Learning a right kind of wrong By Living To Thrive’s Chuck Anderson A 2012 study conducted by Google codenamed, Project Aristotle, set out to answer this important question – “What makes teams successful?”. The most significant finding was that high performing teams must share a feeling of being psychologically safe. Essentially, employees must feel comfortable and 'free' to be themselves with their colleagues to truly flourish as a team. Harvard professor Dr Amy Edmondson first coined the term “psychological safety” in a 1999 journal article exploring its relationship to team learning and performance. She is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organisational learning and has been published in numerous academic and management outlets. What is psychological safety? Edmondson: I define psychological safety as the experience of feeling able to express yourself, to speak up with questions, concerns, mistakes, descending views, all the things that are somewhat interpersonally risky. Psychological safety itself is driven by the leader. What does psychological safety look like within a team?
Edmondson: Imagine you and I are at work, and I am not quite sure how to do something and I say, “Hey Chuck, can you help me with this?”. This means that our leader has built an environment where I feel safe enough to take such risks by putting myself out there for potential judgement from others. This is a rather simplistic way of answering your question, yet it gets to the heart of what psychological safety is all about. What are the first steps a leader should take to build psychological safety? Edmondson: It begins with the work. It is also about people of course, but it's about how people interact with the work. There is a technique I like to call framing. You frame the work as the kind of situation that urgently needs everyone’s voice. For example, as a leader, you might say, “There is great uncertainty with this project.” or “If we catch things early, we’ll save a lot of time and effort.”. How you frame the work depends on the type of work you're doing as one size does not fit all, i.e., an innovation project, a hospital environment or deployment of military supplies. The goal with framing is to make it clear that anyone's voice could make a difference. Framing is the kind of thing you do early and often to maintain a safe environment. The second thing is to proactively invite participation. It is the leader’s role to ask authentic and respectful questions to reinforce to the team that
Dr Amy Edmondson their voices are essential. Third, and maybe hardest thing, is to be thoughtful in how you respond as a leader. Most professionals work in a volatile, uncertain and complex world where things will go wrong at some point. The question is, how will you respond? Will it be with anger, frustration and immense disappointment? Or will you say, “Wow, thanks so much for letting me know. How can I help?”. The essence of a good response is appreciative and forward looking because it's difficult for people to bringup bad news. Don’t get me wrong, a look backward should happen, “Where did we go wrong?”, but our first response must be thoughtful, authentic and forward thinking, you know, “How can I help?”. I’d like to add that a leader must commit to doing some self-reflection before jumping into the leaders toolkit or building psychological safety in general. It is important for a leader to understand and examine any potential unhelpful attitudes or behaviours that could hinder their efforts of building psychological safety. I see there being three essential leadership behaviours that enable psychological safety. They include empathy, authenticity, mindfulness and vulnerability. What are your thoughts? Edmondson: It's a wonderful list! I even think that it matters that you started with empathy because you’re concerned for and connecting with others. Authenticity is clearly essential as if we aren't willing and able to take the risk of being ourselves, how can we expect others to do that? Mindfulness, which I think is important and is very closely related to something I have a chapter on in my new book around self-awareness. It’s about being a little better at knowing how others might see you. What are some of the business benefits to having psychological safety? Edmondson: One of the key benefits is
North Sydney Sun | April 2023 | Page 10
that it enables team learning. People feel safe to collaborate, ask for help, share solutions and so on. Second, it enables innovation because people will try wacky ideas. They'll experiment, take intelligent risks and think outside the restrictive box that is so often created when there is a lack of psychological safety. Third, psychological safety creates prevention. Big scandals like Dieselgate at Volkswagen or Wells Fargo in North America creating fake customer accounts were all preventable. Those kinds of things don't have to happen when people feel safe to speak-up early and in real-time. Last and most important is physical worker and customer safety. We’ve all seen instances in the workplace where someone’s safety is compromised but could have been avoided had people been unafraid to speak-up. You are releasing a new book The Right Kind of Wrong – The Science of Failing Well. Can you tell us a bit about it? Edmondson: Sure thing! The book provides a framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely. Outlining the three archetypes of failure— simple, complex, and intelligent. I discuss how to minimize unproductive failure while maximizing what we gain from flubs of all stripes. Most importantly, it talks about how organisations can embrace our human fallibility, learn exactly when failure is our friend, and prevent most of it when it is not. For more insights on psychological safety, you can purchase Edmondson’s bestselling book, “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth”. Also, reach out to me directly to attend my psychological safety leadership course for -on training at ChuckAnderson@LivingtoThrive.com.au.