Making the most of your people: key takeaways from the book ‘The Fearless Organization’
Bring Your Brain (And Your Voice) To Work
Overview
We live and work in an increasingly fast-moving and complex world. To succeed and win, organizations need their employees to be engaged and switched-on; to use all their talents, creativity, and problem solving skills. In short, they need us to bring our brains to work.
They also need us to bring our voices to work. We need to feel comfortable in speaking up: to collaborate with colleagues, to suggest ideas, to ask questions, to give feedback, to voice concerns, to acknowledge failure.
But speaking up can be scary. We worry about looking stupid, or that we’ll be told to ‘stay in our lane’, or maybe that we just won’t be listened to at all.
To ensure their own success, organizations need to make the most of their people, and to do that they need to intentionally create an environment where everyone feels safe to speak up, an environment where psychological safety thrives.
Introduction
The book ‘The Fearless Organization’ by Amy C. Edmondson has been on my ‘Books to Read’ list for quite some time. The book has been crucial in highlighting the importance of psychological safety in organizations. We hear the term ‘psychological safety’ used a lot in IT and software delivery, and increasingly it seems that psychological safety is an essential factor in creating effective and successful teams. When Google ran their Project Aristotle research to determine what was the most important aspect determining high performance in their teams, they uncovered the surprising truth that it is in fact - you guessed it! - psychological safety.
I was interested in finding out more about what psychological safety actually is, what difference its presence (or absence) can make to an organization, and hopefully get some practical suggestions for how we go about creating psychological safety in our teams and our workplaces.
Edmondson is regarded by many as being the leading expert on the topic of psychological safety. She is Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, and is the author of many articles and books on organizational behaviour and learning, teams, and psychological safety.
‘The Fearless Organization’
‘The Fearless Organization’ is a relatively short book but it packs much into its 200 or so pages. Having said that, I found it to be an easy and enjoyable read. The book is split into three parts.
The first part introduces the basic ideas and understanding of psychological safety, and also gives a brief history of the subject and of the growing interest in it.
The second part covers psychological safety at work and includes a good number of case studies to illustrate the various benefits and dangers of psychologically safe and unsafe workplaces respectively. These are from a wide variety of organizations and situations including the diesel engine scandal at Volkswagen, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan, and reducing the number of accidents in South African mines. I really enjoyed the different case studies - it helps to have real-world context and examples to illustrate the different concepts being explained, plus it just makes the book much more interesting. Who doesn’t enjoy a good story!
The final section goes on to describe how to establish psychological safety and create a ‘fearless organization’. This is the part of the book where Edmondson really gets down to practicalities and sets out a brief framework for leaders to follow. (Thankfully, she makes the point that leaders can and do exist at all levels of an organization.)
Key Takeaways from ‘The Fearless Organization’
For me, there are several key takeaways from the book ‘The Fearless Organization’; crucially, psychological safety is something that must be nurtured and grown rather than something that just magically appears.
1 - Make it safe for people to speak up
Speaking up is risky. Whether it’s to report a mistake, ask a question, give some feedback, suggest a better way of approaching a piece of work, or simply to say “I don’t know”, when we choose to use our voice at work and speak up, we are taking a risk. In teams where there is psychological safety, people aren’t afraid to speak because they know that they will be listened to, their input will be valued and they won’t be humiliated or judged in any way for what they say.
2 - Demonstrate humility: you don’t know everything (and nor should you)
Being humble isn’t about false modesty or pretending not to know things that you do. It’s about being honest about not knowing things when you don’t, and acknowledging that, in our fast-changing and complex world, it is pretty much impossible for any one individual to have a handle on everything that is going on and to have all the answers. Edmondson cites the work of MIT Professor Ed Schein who calls this ‘Here-and-Now Humility’. I like that way of thinking about it - I think we could all do with demonstrating a bit more here-and-now humility when dealing with our team mates and colleagues and asking for help when we need it.
3 - Psychological safety helps to make organizations more self-aware
There are many benefits to creating workplaces which are psychologically safe. People contribute their ideas, give and receive candid feedback, report mistakes, acknowledge and learn from failure. Reporting mistakes, responding to feedback, learning from failures, and sharing candid feedback are all examples of things that help self-awareness to emerge at an organizational level. This ‘organizational self-awareness’ is crucial for the whole-organization agility needed in the modern, quickly-changing world. (We have begun to explore these ideas of organizational self-awareness through our conference on organizational sensing, SenseConf).
In some situations, being afraid to voice a concern or ask a question of someone in authority can mean the difference between life and death. That may sound a bit dramatic but there are several case studies in the book where this is the simple truth - for example, when two planes collided on a runway resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people because a flight engineer felt unable to challenge or even question an order given by his captain.
4 - Psychological safety is not about being ‘nice’
Psychological safety is not about being nice all the time, it’s not about never disagreeing with your colleagues. On the contrary, psychological safety is about candour. It’s about speaking up when you disagree with how something is being done, or giving honest feedback when you think that someone is not meeting the expected standards.
5 - Psychological safety is not a perk
As Edmondson observes, psychological safety cannot be regarded as a perk or a ‘nice-to-have’ for any organization engaged in the business of knowledge work - software delivery, for example - that is striving to succeed in our fast-moving and complex world. To succeed in such a world (which is often described using the acronym ‘VUCA’ - volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) organizations need their employees’ ideas and voices to be heard.
6 - Psychological safety is not a happy accident
Reading ‘The Fearless Organization’ it is quite clear that psychological safety is not something which is just going to happen by happy accident. When faced with situations that require us to speak up, our natural inclination is apparently to weigh up almost instantly the benefits and risks of doing so. Leaders must act with intent to create the environment that makes us want and feel able to speak, and must also continue to nurture that environment as otherwise it can easily disappear.
How to get started with encouraging a fearless organization
In the final part of the book, Edmondson sets out a ‘leader’s toolkit’ for creating a ‘fearless organization’. It is straightforward (at least on paper - no doubt it is harder to actually put into practice!) with just three steps.
Setting the Stage
This is about framing or reframing the work to set shared expectations about uncertainty and failure, and to identify why the work matters and for whom. Edmondson makes the important point that not all failures should be treated and celebrated in the same way. She sets out definitions and common causes of different types of failures and describes how they should be handled.
Inviting Participation
The second step leaders must take is to invite participation. They do this by demonstrating ‘situational humility’ (by admitting that they don’t know the solution to every problem), asking good questions and listening intently to the answers, and setting up processes and structures within the organization that encourage input. Edmondson shares the attributes of ‘powerful questions’ as identified by the World Cafe organization; for example, powerful questions are thought-provoking, generate curiosity in the listener, and evokes more questions. This is a useful resource in its own right, and one that I shall definitely refer to in the future.
Responding Productively
When people do participate and give their input, leaders must respond to that in a productive way. It’s important that they express their appreciation that someone has spoken up - it doesn’t matter if they don’t like or agree with what has been said - but they must acknowledge the effort that it took to do that, and express their thanks. They must also destigmatize failure by offering help and helping to determine the next steps that need to be taken towards continuous learning.
How does Psychological Safety relate to DevOps and software delivery?
I am a self-confessed software delivery and DevOps enthusiast, and I’m sure it won’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me that I regard psychological safety as being an essential part of many DevOps and agile practices. As Edmondson puts it, it’s the “extra ingredient” that enables other success factors. Practices such as blameless post-mortems which can only work when people feel safe to make themselves vulnerable - to talk about problems and mistakes, and where failure is generally regarded as being a Good Thing because it enables us to reflect and learn and improve.
I also see parallels between psychological safety and DevOps in that they are both aspects of modern technology organizations that are essentially ‘win-win’: good for people and good for business.They both help to create more humane workplaces where people are able to focus their energy and their efforts in being creative, collaborating to solve problems and create new products and services.
The final word from Edmondson is a lovely analogy likening the path an organization must take in its quest to create psychological safety to the zig-zagging journey taken by a sailing boat as it ‘tacks’ against the wind. The point here is that there’s no direct or quick route; instead patience and perseverance are required, it will be necessary to take stock and make many adjustments along the way. This too reminds me of DevOps. I often say that we have to ‘baby-step our way to DevOps shininess’ - it seems the same is true of psychological safety too!
Summary - psychological safety is an essential ingredient
Psychological safety is about making people feel safe to speak up, enabling and empowering them to make full use of all their talents and creativity at work, and not be silenced by fear. To thrive in today’s complex and fast-moving world, organizations need to make the most of their people; they need them to bring their brains and their voices to work. For that to happen, they first need to create psychological safety.
In her book ‘The Fearless Organization’, Amy Edmondson describes exactly what psychological safety is, the positive benefits it can bring for organizations and for individuals, and gives us a clear framework for how we can start along the road - zig-zagging though it may be! - to create psychological safety in our own workplaces.
If, like me, you’ve heard the term ‘psychological safety’, have wondered what it’s all about and are interested in finding out more, then you should definitely read this book.
