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:

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