The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth

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This book reminded me of what the Anna Karenina-principle. Successful organisations are often alike one another, whereas every failed organisation (usually) has an interesting story to tell. However, avoiding mistakes will only get you so far (as the author does point out), so doing things right takes gut and effort. Bizarrely, the author singles out the James Damore firing for discussion, not seeing the irony of praising Google for their research findings WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY firing people who voice complains internally! I mean, HELLOOO! I quote her part: Responding productively which encompasses expressing appreciation, destigmatizing failure, and sanctioning clear violations which, in turn, should achieve company-wide orientation toward continuous learning. Richard Rumelt wrote one of the best strategy books I’ve ever read:“ Good Strategy, Bad Strategy“, and highlights three central premises of “Guiding Policy”, “Coherent Actions”, and “Strategic Diagnosis. This is a great article by JP Castlin on Rumelt’s “Guiding Policy”. Castlin states, “ it is enough to think of guiding policies as means of resolving uncertainty about what to do, about how to compete, and about how to organize.” Based on Edmondson's work and in collaboration with Amy C. Edmondson herself, Bright Instruments developed The Fearless Organization Scan. After completing the survey you'll see how team members experience the psychological safety within their team on four different areas.

Fearless Organization Engage - Fearless Organization

It's unmanly to admit, but sometimes I'm afraid. I worry about what might happen. Sometimes the problem is beyond my strength. I can attest that if anxiety takes hold, it dominates my thoughts. This leads to my biggest point of agreement with Amy Edmondson. You can't think clearly when you're afraid. I want to create a safe environment in my office. I don’t want my team to burn calories on anxiety so that they don't have the resources to do their best.

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Her research focuses on teaming, psychological safety, and organizational leadership. She has written and coauthored five books and numerous articles on the subjects. We work hard at X to make it safe to fail. Teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they're rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager, me in particular. They get promoted for it. We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than 30.48”

Making the most of your people: key takeaways from the book

As I've written in prior books and articles, more and more of that teamwork is dynamic – occurring in constantly shifting configurations of people rather than in formal, clearly-bounded teams.4 This dynamic collaboration is called teaming.5 Teaming is the art of communicating and coordinating with people across boundaries of all kinds – expertise, status, and distance, to name the most important. But whether you're teaming with new colleagues all the time or working in a stable team, effective teamwork happens best in a psychologically safe workplace.” psychological safety exists when people feel their workplace is an environment where they can speak up, offer ideas, and ask questions without fear of being punished or embarrassed (15)TL;DR A great intro book that scratches the surface of this concept, but deems it necessary to explore the cited materials, because it fails to go into depth itself. If leaders want to unleash individual and collective talent, they must foster a psychologically safe climate where employees feel free to contribute ideas, share information, and report mistakes. In 2015, CEO Bob Chapman and co-author Raj Sisodia published Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, a book whose title concisely declares the company's mission to “measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.” Caring for employees – “team members” in Barry-Wehmiller-speak – using tangible measures of employee well-being has proved to be a sure recipe for establishing a psychologically safe workplace where learning and growth thrive.” Achieving high performance requires having the confidence to take risks, especially in a knowledge-intensive world. When an organization minimizes the fear people feel on the job, performance — at both the organizational and the team level — is maximized. But how do you make your organization fearless in a way that builds its capability?