Somebody Always Knew: A Conversation Between Amy Edmondson And Rita McGrath, Top-Ranked Global Think

Somebody Always Knew: A Conversation Between Amy Edmondson And Rita McGrath, Top-Ranked Global Thinkers Tips and tricks

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What is psychological safety?

It is “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”

What that means practically is that there isn’t the fear of bringing up ideas, concerns, questions or possible mistakes among people working together.

Speaking up, in other words.

Why don’t the messages get heard? People who saw the danger may not have felt empowered to speak up.

Or they weren’t organizationally in the right place. Or people in positions of authority didn’t want to hear the message.

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Why we struggle to say “you were right”

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In starting the conversation, I shared what I thought was a remarkable exchange between noted venture capitalist Fred Wilson (and husband of my Friday Fireside guest and entrepreneur Joanne Wilson) and Joah Spearman on Twitter.

Spearman, a Black founder in tech based in Austin, observed that, despite the recent murder of George Floyd and the protests for justice that it provoked, Wilson hadn’t noted it in a regular posting. Wilson, in a remarkable moment, simply said “you’re right.”

I raised this exchange with Amy, and we both remarked that it is really rare to have someone simply say “you’re right” and take action on it as opposed to being defensive and uncomfortable. So Kudos to Wilson and Spearman for offering a great example of dialogue which led to a productive outcome. As Amy points out, being wrong means you’re a human being and the world is an uncertain place.

The surprising origins of the psychological safety concept

The importance of psychological safety was actually a bit of an accident. In a study she was part of that separately measured the rates of medical errors and indicators of excellent teamwork, there was a surprising result. As opposed to what most of us would think, that high performing teams would have fewer errors, they actually had more.

After puzzling over this, Amy had a bit of a breakthrough. It wasn’t that they had more errors, it was that they were more willing to talk about then, and therefore to fix them.

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A fascination with failure

Amy and I share a longstanding fascination with the relationship between failure and learning. Fear of failure is a big reason people are reluctant to take interpersonal risks – they don’t want to look as though they don’t know what they are doing, or even worse, get put into a situation where they don’t know what they are doing, fail, and are punished in some way for that.

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Psychological safety is not about being “nice” This is one of the biggest misconceptions about the whole concept – that it involves being nice to people. Not that one shouldn’t be pleasant at work, but holding back uncomfortable information because you’re worried about hurting someone’s feelings or coming off as unsupportive is the exact opposite of what one should be doing. Amy has often said that she would rename it “radical candor” if asked to re-title the idea.

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So what can you do, wherever you are?

Look across and down. You can create a better experience for everybody at work by changing yourself and how you relate to colleagues and co-workers. Ask good questions and put energy into really listing to the answer.

You can put people on a bit of a stage when you do that – and signal that you are interested. Focus on creating safer conversational spaces wherever those happen at work.

And you can begin with your own manager – seek their views, and ask them what they would recommend.

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https://thoughtsparks.substack.com/