Psychological Safety: The Key to Learning and Performance

In this episode of the L&P Podcast, I speak with Amy C. Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership & Management at the Harvard Business School (HBS), about team learning and performance. Thinkers50 #1 Management Thinker in the world, Amy is most well-known for her pioneering work on psychological safety and its key role in promoting team learning, collaboration, and innovation. She's the author of countless journal articles, books, case studies, and other content on leadership, teaming, and learning. Amy most recently published The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well (2023), a book about how we can all leverage failure to our advantage. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband George and is the proud parent of two terrific young men.

In our conversation, we touch on a range of topics relevant to managers, leaders, and other professionals seeking to enhance the learning and performance of teams and organizations, including:

• Psychological safety and its role in team learning and performance
• Myths about psychological safety
• Psychological safety vs. accountability
• Can there be too much psych safety?
• The three different types of failures
• The 4 elements of "intelligent" failures
• The role of leaders in making it safe to speak up and fail
• A whole lot more!

Mention in the conversation:

• Psychological safety
• Humans as unconscious calculators
• The critical role of psychological safety in facilitating learning
• The 4 stages of learning
• The variability of psych safety on teams in the same organization
• Myths about psych safety
• Psych safety vs. safe spaces
• Chris Argyris on learning-oriented conversations
• Can there be too much psych safety? https://hbr.org/2024/01/can-workplaces-have-too-much-psychological-safety AND https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-downside-of-psychological-safety-in-the-workplace/
• Psych safety vs. accountability
• Three types of failure
• The 4 criteria of intelligent failures
• Air Florida Flight 90 - A basic avoidable failure
• The Checklist Manifesto
• Learning from mistakes
• Deliberate practice
• The challenges of creating psych safety on remote teams: https://psychsafety.co.uk/psychological-safety-in-remote-teams/ AND https://hbr.org/2020/08/how-to-foster-psychological-safety-in-virtual-meetings
• The importance for leaders to frame work
• Framing
• Research on employee experience as it relates to connection to purpose and meaning, culture and community, learning and development, and material well-being, and how they relate
• Ed Catmull on crappy first drafts
• Growth mindset
• Buckminster Fuller on naivety

Connect with Amy:

• HBS page
• LinkedIn
• Twitter/X
• Instagram