Amy Edmondson on Psychological Safety

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, which is a Chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society. And in today’s conversation we certainly talk about Harvard, what it’s like to work on a college campus, and what it’s like to be specifically at that college campus during this time in 2023 as we record today’s conversation. Amy has been recognized by the Biannual Thinkers50 Global Ranking of Management Thinkers since 2011, and recently was ranked #1 in 2021. She’s received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019 and Talent Award in 2017. She studies teaming, psychological safety (which is going to be a core concept and competency that you’ve probably heard about at some point if you study environments and teams and groups), and we’re going to talk about the famous Aristotle study that Google did that found that psychological safety was the #1 factor in determining team success, so this is definitely a deep dive into that concept and something that hopefully you can take with your teams and organizations. She also studies organizational learning and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, and California Management Review. She’s written many books, so we’re going to talk about The Fearless Organization, which she wrote in 2019, we’re going to talk about her latest book, The Right Kind of Wrong, so a lot of this conversation is about mistakes and failures, and I highly recommend you check out that book. She’s also written books around this concept of teaming, including Teaming to Innovate and Extreme Teaming. At her core, you’re going to find Amy to be humble but brilliant, you’re going to find her to be nuanced and thoughtful when it comes to psychology and the science of humans, and she is someone that I feel as though, even though she’s got all these accolades, I feel like I could’ve talked to forever. 

Amy had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include:

“A mindset is something that happens inside your head. It’s an approach. It’s an orientation” (6:35).

“A psychologically safe environment in the classroom is mission-critical for learning and learners” (9:30).

“Safe spaces and psychological safety are almost at odds, almost two opposing ideas rather than compatible ideas [in an educational space]” (12:20).

“Classrooms can be environments where people can take risks and occasionally failures will happen… and through those we will learn and grow and get to be better versions of ourselves” (14:40).

“Psychological safety for me has always been about helping people take their foot off the brakes” (15:05).

“The day you decide you don’t need to learn anymore, and your mind is made up and your opinions about various people and groups is made up, is the day you cease to grow (16:35).

“It starts with a recognition that other human beings are just as important as you are” (21:10).

“We all want to feel that we matter” (23:15).

“The meaningful memories [on our death beds] have to do with other humans” (29:10).

“There’s an asymmetry [to psychological safety]” (30:35).

“Vulnerability is a fact” (33:00).

“If I’m unwilling to confront my vulnerability, then I’m at risk for unhappy surprises” (33:30).

“Neuroscience research suggests that some of the same neurons are firing when we get a psychological assault or harm, like being rejected by a group of friends…, as for a physical harm” (36:20).

“Emotions are incredibly important, incredibly powerful in shaping our human experiences (45:20).

“Probably the most important capacity people can learn, in sports and in life, is how to tame their emotions” (45:55).

“Your emotions can simply be data” (46:40).

“The more expert we get in any given field or domain, the more we can effortlessly process context and take it into consideration” (56:25).

“The best students, the unusually good students, are curious” (59:40).

“To cultivate curiosity and collaboration, you have to truly believe that it’s in your interest to do so” (1:00:35).

“A mistake is an unintended deviation from a known process… A failure is an undesired outcome” (1:03:15).

“There’s no such thing as a mistake in new territory” (1:03:55).

“It’s about creating the safe conditions in which [your kids] can fail” (1:14:30).

Additionally, you can find all of Amy’s information on her website, and also follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

Thank you so much to Amy for coming on the podcast!

I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers.

Thanks for listening.