The Bosshole® Chronicles

TBC Flashback - The Fearless Organization with Dr. Amy Edmondson

Share episode



Click HERE for Amy's LinkedIn profile

Click HERE to purchase The Fearless Organization

Click HERE to purchase Teaming

Click HERE to download "What is a Fearless Organization."

Check out these other episodes on Psychological Safety:


HERE ARE MORE RESOURCES FROM REAL GOOD VENTURES:

Never miss a good opportunity to learn from a bad boss...

Click HERE to get your very own Reference Profile.  We use The Predictive Index as our analytics platform so you know it's validated and reliable.  Your Reference Profile informs you of your needs, behaviors, and the nuances of what we call your Behavioral DNA.  It also explains your work style, your strengths, and even the common traps in which you may find yourself.  It's a great tool to share with friends, family, and co-workers.

Follow us on Instagram HERE and make sure to share with your network!

Follow us on X HERE and make sure to share with your network!

Provide your feedback HERE, please!  We love to hear from our listeners and welcome your thoughts and ideas about how to improve the podcast and even suggest topics and ideas for future episodes.

Visit us at www.realgoodventures.com.  We are a Talent Optimization consultancy specializing in people and business execution analytics.  Real Good Ventures was founded by Sara Best and John Broer who are both Certified Talent Optimization Consultants with over 50 years of combined consulting and organizational performance experience.  Sara is also certified in EQi 2.0.  RGV is also a Certified Partner of Line-of-Sight, a powerful organizational health and execution platform.  RGV is known for its work in leadership development, executive coaching, and what we call organizational rebuild where we bring all our tools together to diagnose an organization's present state and how to grow toward a stronger future state. 

Send us a text

John Broer:

Very happy new year to all of our friends up there in The Boss hole Transformation Nation. This is your host, John Broer, and we are going to be kicking off 2026 with a TBC flashback. This is an episode, by the way, if there were a Hall of Fame for The Boss hole Chronicles, this episode would be at the top of the list because this has been, over the last three years, our most downloaded episode from Dr. Amy Edmondson, the person we consider to be the pioneer of psychological safety. And back in January of 2023, Sara and I had the chance to interview Dr. Edmondston for absolutely essential information. And I wanted to use this to kick off 2026 because between psychological safety and emotional intelligence, we are going to revolutionize or transform the way people manage and Bossholef prevention. Let's jump in. The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode. Amy, welcome to the Boss Hole Chronicles. It's great to have you here. It's great to be here. I'm going to pitch it over to Sarah, and uh we're going to just jump right into us to some questions about the work you do and how you're impacting the world.

Sara Best:

Thanks, John. Um, Amy, I'll just start by saying, hey, psychological safety, it's being talked about all over the place. It's not a new idea. What is it and why is it important now?

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

Well, very simply, it is a belief that you can speak up, a belief that you can take what I call the interpersonal risks of disagreeing, of admitting a mistake, of asking a question, of asking for help. Those are all naturally interpersonally risky. And psychological safety is an environment that lowers that interpersonal risk. It makes it possible. There's just a feeling, and this is important. It's not a perception that it's easy and natural to speak up, but that it's expected and possible.

Sara Best:

I love that. Since it's not a new idea, but but it's it's you know has this resurgence now. Um, can can you just connect for us and for our listeners, why do we need to be focusing on it and developing it in our organizations now?

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

I think the answer to that question is that we are sort of finally fully aware of the uncertainty that we face, right? Of the of the fact that to be excellent in today's world requires people to speak up, requires people to notice things, requires people to take the interpersonal risks that naturally come with coordinating and collaborating with other people. And the pandemic has left us far more aware of uncertainty, far more aware that we don't have a crystal ball, that we don't always see the future. So we're far more skeptical about our ability to just develop plans and execute them, right? That just doesn't, that mindset doesn't work anymore, right? The mindset, and I think more and more people are realizing this, that works today is the learning mindset that sort of I can I can make sense of what I'm seeing, and I'll be partly right and partly wrong, and I need other people and we need to team up to do great work. None of that can happen without psychological safety.

John Broer:

Is it safe to say, I mean, you're at you're at the heart of, I mean, at Harvard Business School, I mean, we have actually uh a number of colleagues that are graduates of Harvard Business School who said, hey, listen, my education was amazing, but the one thing, the one, the people side of it is one thing that could really enhance the way we are equipping leaders and managers. But you talk about a mindset, it almost seems like we've spent the better part of the last century creating a mindset that has sort of well, kept us in the bosshole zone or some managers there. Is it just a main, I mean it's a necessity that we're breaking free of that or are organizations realizing without this, there's no success. We can't, we can't possibly be successful.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

I think you're right. I think, I think we are realizing finally the necessity of this rather than this isn't about nice to do or let's be nice bosses. It's it's about, huh, I depend on the talent that I hire to actually use their knowledge, use their skills, their expertise, their curiosity to do great works. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense to simply hire people and then you know, do various things to prevent them from using the very skills you hired them for. Right. And that's what toxic bosses or just not very good bosses end up doing.

Sara Best:

As I think about, you know, what you described as uncertain, you know, uncertain times, we know that in this modern economy, there's a lot riding on innovation, creativity, and spark. So you reference the learning zone. And we we know to be true that there has to be the right amount of psychological safety and accountability to get into that learning zone. What have you seen work? Well, how are how are leaders, how are organizations able to develop, you know, that that find that sweet zone uh for learning?

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

I think it's a combination of clarity and transparency about what lies ahead. Right. So being being honest and willing to keep emphasizing that we don't have all the answers, right? Keep saying um we kind of need you, we need your voices, we need your um, we need your ideas. Um it's the it's that that clarity about the necessity of people being in all in and being honest and and and um and emphasis at the same time on the purpose, on why it matters, on who we serve, right? And and when we're clear about why the work we do matters and that doing it well requires people to take interpersonal risks and and and jump in, then then you're you're doing both, right? Because accountability or felt accountability or psychological ownership, however you want to talk about it, comes from believing that what I'm doing today matters. And if we're if we're when people believe that what they're doing matters, that they matter, then that's where I think that little extra effort comes from. And when people believe it's actually safe to bring their voice forward, their ideas forward, to experiment, to take risks, then they're willing to do that. And that's the learning zone.

Sara Best:

As you say that, Amy, I can't help but think about the idea that psychological safety is not about a nice to do or a, you know, nice to create. Uh, it's it's it's about results. Say more about that.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

It's about results, absolutely. If if you think about you you brought up innovation, right? You can't get innovation. And innovation is defined as something new and useful, something new that customers actually want or that makes a difference or solves a problem. You can't get innovation without experimenting. You can't experiment without some failures along the way, right? So you begin to see where I'm heading. It's the kinds of things that really create value in today's economy depend on our willingness to get things wrong on the way to getting them right. Right. So there's a um, it's about results. Psychological safety describes an environment where good, high-quality knowledge work, including, if not especially, innovation, can be done.

Sara Best:

Well, and and you touched on this sort of in a roundabout way in your previous comments, but leaders have to be transparent, they have to be honest, and they have to be vulnerable. I was um particularly enlivened by an article that you co-authored in, I think it was in 2020, um, today's leaders need vulnerability, not bravado. And just talking about why that's essential. We have to move from that command and control to more agile, uh adaptable, empowering leadership. Based on your work and what you see and what you see out there, what are some simple things that leaders can do to be more vulnerable?

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

Well, let me let me almost rephrase that, right?

Sara Best:

Okay, here please.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

I think, I mean, I want to answer that question, but I often think it's helpful to say, guess what? Vulnerability is a fact. It's it you don't get to choose whether or not to be vulnerable. You can you can choose whether or not to reveal your vulnerability, but you are vulnerable in in the following way. You are vulnerable to the uncertainty that lies ahead. You're vulnerable to missing something that you really wish you would have seen simply because of being a human being. You're vulnerable to people not speaking up about crucial things because they were afraid to do so.

Sara Best:

Right.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

I mean, think about CEOs of companies like VW Dieselgate, right? When when, you know, you could you could say that that CEO, Martin Wintercorn, was vulnerable, but he didn't know it. Right? He was vulnerable to a massive scandal, but he didn't know it because he was in the dark. Why was he in the dark? Because he was he was a boss who thought fear worked. He was brought up that way. Fear worked. If people are afraid enough, they'll work really hard. So let's go back to the principle or the fact that you're vulnerable because you don't have a crystal ball, because you're not omniscient, because you depend on the willing participation of those you've hired. When you start to really understand that intellectually, that you're vulnerable, then you have a choice. And the behavioral choice is am I going to be open about that or am I going to pretend it's not so? The pretend it's not so option is not very effective in today's world because, in a way, people see through it. And the bravado can easily be seen as a kind of out-of-touchness. Like, do you not know how challenging this market is right now? Right. So, you know, the happy talk and the bravado talk doesn't actually compel people to follow you, heart, hearts, and hearts and minds. And that's what you want. So by acknowledging your vulnerability, I'm really advocating more transparency, just being more open. Like, you know, here's reality, right? Here's what I see, and I believe we can get there. Right. So it's not it's not saying I don't have hope, or it's not saying don't be positive. I believe, I believe leaders should be quite positive, but also realistic about the the challenges that lie ahead and their very real need for other people.

Sara Best:

Yeah. I've never heard it framed quite that way. You know, like it is a fact. You're right. We are always vulnerable. How cool that we have an opportunity to become aware of it and then utilize that to see what our options are.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

Oh, I was just gonna say utilize it to see what our options are and utilize it to compel people to want to step up, right? Because that's ultimately the job of a leader is to harness the efforts of others to get things done. And you know what works. If you if you step back and think about the leaders you have and any all of your listeners, the the leaders that have motivated them to give more than they thought they could, to work hard, to care, you will not probably start to envision a leader who was, you know, full of self-importance and bravado, right, who believed that he was the only important person or the smartest person in the room. It will be the people who were candid and um compelling about why this matters and why they needed you.

John Broer:

Well, the the fear and intimidation, coercion, command and control approach. I mean, you can still get tremendous profitability in an organization and still use that, but you're gonna have a toxic environment and it it isn't close to what it could be. But, you know, Amy, I remember when I first started reading your work on psychological safety. And by the way, just for our listeners, go into the show notes. Amy's work, a number of great books, all of her books will be in there, but the fearless organization is what we're talking about here. Get the book. But in the early parts of it, what I loved is how you talk about your research. And I'm gonna invoke a term from Bob Ross, you remember the painter, a happy accident. Uh maybe that's a too sophomorical way to put it, but you came across this psychological safety really by accident, based on your research. And that had to be such an amazing moment of clarity. Can you just for a moment, when you realized, oh my gosh, this is this is it? And I know you're saying now is the time, there's an awakening. Now is the time to really leverage this, but this was back in the 1990s, that moment where you realized this is something you unique. Just share a little bit of that with us.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

Well, you, you know, it was I think you're absolutely right. It was a happy accident, but it wasn't happy in moment one, right? Because moment one is essentially my staring at a computer screen to see that my hypothesis was apparently dead wrong.

Sara Best:

Okay.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

My hypothesis, and this was a study of medication errors. And my hypothesis was that better teams, and and by the way, better led teams, a key variable in the study was the behavior, and others, of course, perceptions of the behavior of nurse manag of the nurse managers. Sort of the these are like middle managers, complex tertiary care hospitals who very much influence the life of those that they lead and manage. And so my hypothesis was that the better teams with better leaders would have fewer medication errors. I mean, it's pretty straightforward, right? Teamwork matters and and uh leadership matters, and then we're gonna have high quality care and all will be well. Well, the data seemed to suggest, at first glance, the opposite. It looked like the better teams, according to a validated team survey instrument, had higher, not lower, error rates. So that was quite problematic, painful, scary even to me in that moment. I was a PhD student. I um kind of thought I'd get kicked out of school or something like that. Um, of course, uh it but it and it was only, you know, it was a few hours later that it not that many even, probably two, that it occurred to me, it was sort of a blinding flash of the obvious. Maybe, maybe the better teams aren't making more errors. Maybe they're more willing to reveal them. Maybe they're talking about them more. And what comes with that insight is the possibility that our measures are not very good of the errors. And that turns out to be right, because the errors were being measured essentially by visits to the teams and asking them about what was going on, what they s what they had seen. And and so you can readily, I mean, now it seems foolish to have ever thought that would work, but at the time, I think people thought it would. And and so at the end of that study, I could not say anything, and this is important, I couldn't say anything about the actual error rates, but I could fairly definitively say, because I did some follow-up qualitative work, that the interpersonal climate across these teams in the same hospitals, within hospital, across groups, that the interpersonal climate was wildly different. I didn't call it psychological safety at the time, I called it interpersonal climate. And and the insight was that that climate, you know, differs very much because of boss behavior, right? And that it matters. Because if today's work, even back then, if today's work requires learning behaviors to do it well, we've got to have people able to engage in learning behaviors. And learning behaviors come with interpersonal risks, and you know, lo and behold, ultimately I called that psychological safety because my next study was designed to study it on purpose, right? To sort of see do those kinds of differences exist in other industries and other settings, and can it be measured? And is it predictive of learning? Is it predictive of performance?

John Broer:

And of course it is. And it was. Yep. Still is. And we will be right back.

Announcer:

With employee disengagement at its highest level in nine years, your company can't afford to miss the mark when it comes to optimizing your hiring, management, and team performance practices. At its lowest level, employee turnover costs you $11,000 per person. And those are dollars you can easily save with the right set of people analytics. Real Good Ventures is a talent optimization consultancy specializing in world-class analytics, specific to your people and the critical role they play within your organization. Gain confidence in your hiring practices. Keep the boxholes from driving your talent away. Design your teams for flawless execution and create a culture that offers meaning and fulfillment. Real Good Ventures has a family of validated diagnostic tools specific to the human aspect of business because we know that all business issues are people issues. Visit us today at www.realgoodventures.com and bring meaning and fulfillment back into your workplace.

John Broer:

Okay, let's get back to the program.

Sara Best:

I have a question in relationship to the team leader. Is the presence of psychological safety completely the responsibility of the team leader?

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

No, right? I I'll here's how I put it the team leader has an outsized influence. Like we all, all of us, here, the three of us right now are a team for you know this period of time. I like this team. We're co-creating it, right? Yeah. But in general, we're and that's true in in any team. We're sort of co-creating it. We're co-creating it by how we respond to each other. Are we appreciative when someone takes a risk and says, oh, I got that wrong? You know, to say, oh, great, thanks for telling me. You know, are we are we making it okay to be human in this team? Um, and it's an old, I think, aspect of our species that we are particularly tuned in to hierarchy. That, you know, those with more power and status, like bosses, team leaders, business unit managers, are the people whose behavior we pay just a little bit more attention to. So how they show up, how curious they are, how much they ask questions, how how they respond to things that go wrong, have a a a greater than average influence.

Sara Best:

Makes sense. Outsized influence. I like that.

John Broer:

So, Amy, you know, as you know, we are always in the business here of boss hole prevention and boss hole intervention. And uh, we'd like to consider. Are you part of the Boswell Transformation Nation now that you've been on here? I hope that's okay.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

Privileged to be a part of it.

John Broer:

We started out 2022 with a very specific objective in mind. I mean, at Real Good Ventures, our our our vision or our mission is that we want people to find meaning and fulfillment in their work. And it's absolutely possible. We use people science analytics to help provide objective data to do that. But this work on psychological safety, again, you you did this back in the 90s, into the 2000s. And yet, you know, you look at Gallup results of disengagement, active disengagement still at alarmingly high levels. And we're still generating boss holes out there.

Sara Best:

We are.

John Broer:

What do we need to do? Um we we we started out this year. What I started to say is we started out this year to reinvent the role of the manager, and we are committed to that because we think it's going to take a different kind of manager to develop people and to elevate. But what what's holding us back? What's happening out there?

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

Well, I I I I guess my best answer to what holds us back is outdated mental models. And a mental model is a taken-for-granted map, you know, a taken-for-granted cognitive structure.

Sara Best:

Okay.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

That you, you know, that you it's not even that you believe it to be true. You're sort of unaware of even the possibility it might not be true. And and I think one of those mental models is that fear motivates, right? And fear does motivate, but it motivates not speaking up, right? It motivates holding back, it motivates not taking risks, it motivates um, you know, playing not to lose rather than playing to win. And so if, you know, if you at some deeper level just believe, you know, for people to do hard work and excellent work, they have to be afraid of me, which I believe is a faulty theory, um, then that would easily account for the fact that this doesn't go away. Because it was, you know, for a hundred years, for more than a hundred years, it was a reasonably good theory and action. You could you could get away with that theory because when if work is completely standardized, completely prescribed, and objectively accessible within a given time frame, then that theory of action will never be disproven. Right. It it will it will work. In other words, if you are leading an assembly line 100 years ago and you're gonna lead through fear, it will actually be effective. Now, fast forward to today where you know nearly everybody who's in a managerial role is leading knowledge workers, where you are utterly dependent on them using their ingenuity, um, using discretionary effort, problem solving, and teaming up with others, um, those are all behaviors that are depressed, literally depressed by the state of fear. So, but if you don't sort of step back and appreciate that fact, you will be at risk.

John Broer:

Aaron Dignon, who was on the podcast uh a few months ago in his work, well, his book and his podcast, Brave New Work, he talked about, you know, the shift from command and control to trust and autonomy. That is a leap for some. Right. But that's what you're talking about. This knowledge economy, our employees are different, and we're drawing on, we're relying on them and their expertise and skills. But uh lagging behind that are, as as I we like to say, boss holes beget boss holes. We got a lot of bad habits and mental models that are really holding us back. Thanks for that.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

I think role models, right? We have a lot of bad role models. And then inadvertently trains people. I mean, I've talked to, you know, those rare managers who have a just 180 turnaround. And I've talked to, you know, well, what happened? Well, they just didn't know. It's like, well, my boss was that way or my dad was that way. And they didn't know there was kind of another way to be. Yes. They they didn't want to be the way they were. They thought that's what bosses do. Yep.

Sara Best:

All the more reason leaders and bosses should get feedback and then really dig in and try to understand the feedback and uncover these mental models that are very unconscious and very unknown. I think that's a great takeaway for leader listeners. Amy, I want to ask you and just really two more questions today. When it comes to the push for organizations to have more diverse, equitable, and inclusive environments that create belonging, we know that there's there's a key with psychological safety. Can you just share your thoughts about what organizations should be thinking about as they aspire to create these cultures?

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

Absolutely. So I I see psychological safety as a moderator of the relationship between diversity and belonging and inclusion as well. But you know, diversity is a fairly objective attribute that you can assess the diversity of your workforce according to whichever dimensions you wish to assess it by. That, of course, doesn't automatically lead to inclusion. I mean, are people uh do they have a sit at a seat at the table? Do they have an equal chance of being um in part of the important decisions or the important tasks or the or the higher level roles? Um that's so that's sort of partially objective and partially subjective, because sometimes people um may not feel included. And then belonging is entirely subjective, right? That's this that's the question of whether or not I believe people like me are welcome here, are full members of this community. And I believe as we go from the more objective to the more subjective, psychological safety plays a larger role in whether or not you're you'll be able to realize it, you know, bring it about. So you can sort of do your very best and have the hiring and bring in more diversity. Um, and then if you also have an aspiration, and I know your listeners will, of inclusion and belonging, then it can become really important to create psychological safety, not as definitionally the same thing. It isn't, but as a aspect of the environment that will help bring those other attributes about.

Sara Best:

And you've created some incredible resource. Our our listeners should become students of psychological safety. There's there's gosh, you have seven books, multitudes of articles, you have uh YouTube videos, just to hear it firsthand from your research and your work, I think would be a great guide for people as they aspire to bring this, you know, into their way of being. And I think, you know, the last question we want to ask is, hey, what's what's coming up for you? Amy, what what's next? What are you focusing on? And what should we be waiting for uh as you continue to expand uh your impact?

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

Well, I'm finishing up a book now on failure, but don't don't worry, it's a it's a positive book. It's not a it's not a negative book. It builds on psychological safety. And it's, I suppose, the the clearest connection to what we've been talking about is innovation, right? As as we discussed, innovation depends on a willingness to fail um and and and to sort of to dare and take risks. And and the book tries to demystify the sort of fail-fast, learn from failure mantra by being much more um clear about good failures and not so good failures, you know, the kinds of failures we do want to celebrate and the kinds of failures that we want to try to minimize and avoid. And um and and talks a lot about um the role of self-awareness and situation awareness and and system awareness in failing well. So it's a book about the science of failing well, which I think we all have to learn how to do. I every day I try to just get a little bit better at it myself.

John Broer:

Well, that was one of the things we took away from the fearless organization. Just our certification in the scan was destigmatizing failure. Exactly. Yeah.

Sara Best:

That's both an individual, a team, and an organizational endeavor, isn't it? I mean, I I think we talk a lot about how many of us are small on the inside and that, you know, we get activated and defensive and and so afraid of failing because we don't have the right size on the inside. We get too big on the outside, or but all that to say, what a gift. I think uh your next book will just uh continue to expand our awareness and our ability to create more real environments. We're we just want people to be in an environment where they can be real, they can be accepted for who they are, they can bring their their self to the work, bring their best ideas to the work. And we know that that is what's gonna help, you know, our world survive and thrive through these challenging times. If it were not for the innovation that's been made possible to date by psychological safety, we probably wouldn't be here. Well, okay, that might be dramatic, but I think it's pretty significant, important. And uh we talk about it with every client that we get the privilege to meet for sure.

Dr. Amy Edmondson:

It's been a true pleasure to spend this time with you both.

Sara Best:

We will see you all next time on the Boss Hole Chronicles. Good luck, Dr. Edmondson. Thank you again.

John Broer:

Thanks very much for checking out this episode of the Bosshole Chronicles. It was so good to have you here. And if you have your own Boss Hole story that you want to share with the Bosshole Transformation Nation, just reach out. You can email us at mystory at the Bosshole Chronicles.com. Again, my story at the Bosshole Chronicles.com. We'll see you next time.