Creativity and a learning mindset are essential to succeed. Learn how these innovators put
these skills to use to become the best in their fields. Welcome to Innovators
to Know. Brought to you by Idemics Today. It's a pleasure for me
to welcome Professor Amy Edmondson to our show. She was one of my professors
at Harvard Business School many moons ago, where she's now a professor of Leadership
and Management, and she's particularly focused on and interested in how leaders enable the
learning and collaboration that are vital to performance in any dynamic environment. She's written
seven books, with more on the Way It Sounds Like and various scholarly papers
published in academic and management journals. She's also sought after keynote speaker with a
worldwide following. The New York Times best selling writer Daniel Pink had this to
say about Amy's book, The Fearless Organization. It's a book that every leader
should read and heed. Amy, Welcome to the show. Thank you,
What a pleasure to be here. So maybe your work has focused on human
interactions that really lead to the creation of successful enterprises that are also contributing to
bettering society. That's kind of a lot in a way, right, Yes,
that's a lot. Yeah. And and let me say that the second
part is really just a premise, right, Okay, it's almost an active
faith, I assume, Yes, I assume that well, and it's not
always the case, but that when organizations thrive and their employees are engaged in
meaningful work, this is good for society. Yeah. No, absolutely,
I agree with you, even though that sometimes doesn't happen or it's lost,
often falls off the wrong direction. And I think it at various economic moments,
it you know, kind of either fades into or comes more into the
four right, tell us about how you view your work within the mission of
your role and organizational psychology. So I increasingly view my work as about helping
people swim upstream, right, swim upstream against cognitive biases, group dynamics,
you know, sort of broader forces that lead us to not naturally do some
of the things we need to do to get the results that we want.
And so for instance, we need to really team up and be curious and
humble and you know, unselfish in a way. If you and I are
going to work together to sort of create something really hard to do. That's
not easy. It's going to take discipline, it's going to take a genuine
interest in each other, and a willingness to disagree, and all of these
things that are absolutely essential to the quality of work, but not easy,
right, don't come naturally. So leadership is the art of helping people do
hard things and helping them in a way want to do those hard things.
And the number one hard thing or the category that I'm interested in is learning.
Right. We have to keep learning, but it's not just individually.
We have to keep learning together, which is hard, right, because we're
more comfortable knowing. Yeah, no, absolutely, And in a way I
think in our society, within organizations, we have placed a much higher value
on knowing than learning right, right, And so we've created a sort of
cultural construct of you must know coming in to a conversation, rather than you
must ask the questions to learn and then eventually know it's right. I think
you know. Historically, managers were the ones who had the answers and who
would tell you what needed to be done and then evaluate how well you did
them. And today I think good managers and good leaders are the ones who
have the questions and who know that they're not subject matter experts in everything.
Nobody is. Yeah, but they're really good at sort of helping see where
we might be missing something, helping draw people in and along and developing people
and sort of dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty. They're more like, you know,
a great manager today is more like a scientist than an old fashioned manager.
Yeah. So in this sort of arc of businesses and our economy and
the relationship that work that individuals have to work, this is a relatively recent
occurrence what you're describing, which is that managers should be helping enable learning and
asking the right questions and actually have to do that. I have to give
their teams, right, It's not as sort of nice to have, It's
an existential thing. What is it do you think that necessitated that shift?
Like why was it okay to not do that before? In a way,
it's some of this has been gradual, but I think there's that there's a
speeding up of this change, and it's the change from work, you know,
a hundred years ago, being largely physical, you know, known standardized
tasks, execute on the task, whether even whether that be a customer service
task or a production task, to work that is largely knowledge intensive problem solving
work, and a great deal of it is collaborative work, meaning multi disciplinary,
different people bringing different bits of the puzzle to get it done. And
as work becomes more about or more dependent on problem solving and ingenuity and collaboration,
then the job of managing is more about creating the conditions where that can
happen. Yeah, you know, rather than sort of commanding it to happen.
Because you can't command it to happen. So I think we've just we've
first gradually, but now all of a sudden, it's just blindingly obvious,
right that you can't you can't sort of require people to be great modeled.
It just doesn't work. It's dead. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a
lot of sense. Over a lot of your research, and among the seven
books you've written, two big themes have emerged so far. I'm sure they're
more to come. Teamwork and psychological safety. I want to take a quick
look at this clip of you explaining teaming. This remarkable story is a case
study in the power of teaming. So what's teaming. Teaming is teamwork on
the fly, It's coordinating and collaborating with people across boundaries, of all kinds,
expertise, distance, time zone, you name it. To get work
done. Think of your favorite sports team. Okay, because this is different.
Sports teams work together, that magic, right, those game saving plays
now they win. Sports teams win because they practice. But you can only
practice if you have the same members over time, and so you can think
of teaming. So sports teams embody the definition of a team, the formal
definition. It's a stable, bounded, reasonably small group of people who are
interdependent in achieving a shared outcome. You can think of teaming as a kind
of pickup game in the park in contrast to the formal, well practiced team.
Now, which one's going to win in a playoff? The answer is
obvious, right, So why do I study teaming? It's because it's the
way more and more of us have to work today. Right, with twenty
four seven global fast paced operations, crazy shifting schedules and ever narrower expertise,
more and more of us have to work with different people all the time to
get our work done. Right, We don't have the luxury of stable teams.
Now, when you can have that luxury by all means, do it,
I mean, tell us about teaming in the modern day workplace, and
how we can facilitate environments where that happens more seamlessly. Ah yeah, teaming.
Teaming means we're reaching across boundaries, we're working with other people, and
that's not easy. So what do you need to do? I think it
really it starts with purpose or something that is worth teaming for. And so
that could be a compelling purpose, that could be just a you know,
a really exciting stretch goal that people find themselves motivated to do. It also
requires our willingness to sort of learn about each other, right, So boundary
spanning sort of. I need to know more about your ideas, your expertise,
and I need to tell you more about mine. And that's you know,
that's a crucial part of it. The part that I've spent the most
time on is psychological safety, which is an environment where people believe that candor
is expected, candor's expected, candor's welcome, not that it's easy, not
that it's going to be fun or comfortable, but that this is what we
have to do because of what's at stake. So I'm willing to ask for
help when I'm in over my head. I'm willing to admit a mistake that
I've made. You know, I'm willing to point out a flaw in your
argument. Yeah, and that's that's not again, that's not the norm,
right, that's and and that's what a psychologically safe environment is like, and
it's essential for effective teamwork. Yeah. And and candor I love that word,
you know, but distinct from sort of the radical candor, that radality
or a bridge water sort of espouses. Right. So, how so I
will say, not necessarily distinct from, but that You're absolutely right, there's
a spectrum of you know, a little bit of candor that's not sort of
normal, but maybe a little more open or I need help, you know,
all the way up to absolutely radical candor of the way you're handling yourself
is you know, just terrible. And let me tell you why. And
so I don't I don't think it's it's so much of a distinct categories as
just degrees of either directness and where where you go. So part of Ray
Dalio's model is that a great deal of it is candor about personal feedback,
like how you show up, how you come across, which the spirit of
it is developmental, right, it's to help you learn and grow. Now.
I think it's fair to say that many organizations don't want to go there,
and that's probably okay, But Bridgewater does want to go there, and
they have a particular reason for wanting to go there. They have a theory
that says each of us have to continue to develop ourselves with self awareness,
understand better the impact we're having on others if we're going to be really effective
in the work we do. Yeah, so that's their theory. They've done
a great deal of work to sort of make it possible. Yeah. But
even without going to that extreme case, let's just say your clinicians taking care
of patients in a hospital setting. It is far more natural than most people
would think that if you're not quite sure about something, you might just wait
and see or hold back, or if you think someone's about to give the
wrong dose, you sort of second guess yourself and you go, oh,
it's I'm probably wrong, right inside your head or often without even thinking about
it. So that just the tendency to hold back rather than to lean in
is natural. It's socialized. There's many, many factors that explain it.
Yeah, but it's a problem. Yeah, Yeah, absolutely, it's I'm
struck by something I was reading as I was looking through your work, which
was you had described at one point that in the hospital context, and much
of your research I think is focused on that. Right, More teams that
feel a higher degree of psychological safety actually make more mistakes, but are more
productive. They may not make more mistakes, Okay. The funny thing that
I discovered many years ago was that better teams were reporting more mistakes, right,
And truthfully, we couldn't get accurate measures of how many mistakes get made,
right because unless they self report to lead into something terrible, in which
place we find out about it, more often than not, mistakes happen but
don't really cause undue harm. Yeah, So it's essentially self report. So
they're more willing to speak up about the mistakes. And why would they do
that, weird thing, because most of us don't love to raise our hands
and tell each other about our stakes. Because they have deeply understood what's at
stake. Yeah, that they understand that their individual willingness to do this hard
thing just may say the life at some point. Yeah, I mean that
makes a ton of sense. And that's certainly a liver dye type environment where
these things better more than anywhere. Right, And in part of what you
know, I didn't set out to study healthcare. It wasn't a particular interest
of mine. But it is a place where the dynamics are more extreme,
the consequences are more extreme. So sometimes it's like a laboratory where you can
you can just see things playing out more easily because of this more extreme context.
Yeah, so I learned a lot from healthcare that. Then I said,
Okay, let's let's go see whether this applause, you know, at
a Midwestern manufacturer. Yeah, it turns out it does. Yeah, that's
super interesting. You've also written and talked about this idea of extreme teeming,
so tell us about that. So I spend a few years very interested in
sort of large I'm still interested in large social problems, you know, sustainability
challenges, built environment challenges, you know, poverty or education problems in a
city. And you if you go and look at any one of these challenges,
you will find that they need to be addressed by not just multiple disciplines,
but by multiple multiple organizations and sometimes even multiple sectors. Right, So
you might have city hall involved, in local businesses involved, and educators and
business developers and they're they're coming together to try to put together a program to
say, you know, alleviate youth unemployment or building. I spent some time
studying the design and creation of some smart cities, smart city projects, and
again real estate developers, you know, software types, city hall very differentferent
mindsets, very different skill sets, different mental models about time frame. And
what I found pretty early on was that they're talking right by each other and
not even realizing it, that there's such culture clash between industries and the problems
are the work is so challenging that unless they sort of figure out how to
break down the walls between these sectors and disciplines, they just don't make progress.
They end up they end up getting stuck. So there's so many problems
in our society today. I know that this logic applies to right. Yeah,
we've almost become so specialized a society that the ability for people to have
a conversation, but more than just have the conversation, actually work on problem
solving in an interdisciplinary manner, so that there's a practical, measurable solution that's
delivered to some of these societal problems poverty, homelessness, healthcare access, so
many things, right, what is that breakdown about? Do you think how
is there a solution to that? Yeah? There isn't one solution. Yeah,
And I think there are many factors, many tactics that need to be
considered and experimented with. But you're absolutely right. I mean, the challenges
are immense, and I think sometimes that's a causal factor in its own right,
because it just seems too overwhelming, and then you just think, well,
I guess I'll just do you know, I'll do my part. I'll
do my job, and I'll try to do my job well. But if
I sit around and think about climate change, it's just too vague, it's
too hard. So we go back to our our silo or back to our
narrow focus and just try to do it well, which is understandable, yeah,
but ultimately doesn't solve the problem that we face. Yeah. And I
think there's also a dearth of sort of real leadership, you know, people
willing to kind of stand up and say I'm going to take this on,
yeah, and get people excited and energized and sort of willing to And do
you feel there's more of a lack of that real leadership here in the US
compared to other places you've worked and observed around the world. I haven't studied
that question systematically, but my intuition would be yes, yeah, and why
is that doing no? I think today in the US we are more focused
on material success than ever and the longest way to arrive at material success is
probably to address one of these really thorny, societal, wicked problems, right,
And so it's just people are looking for a short cut. I mean,
they're looking for what's what's the best way for me to be successful?
What's the shortest path right in a way, and that isn't it? Yeah,
it's uh. I think you know, in the US, maybe we
had a time when economic success didn't feel like a zero sum game, and
now it feels like we've been in a period where more and more people feel
that's the case. And the impact that has on all these behaviors and the
lack, as you said, of individuals actually wanting to do something for more
than just their material success is it's a very small population. Really. I
think that's right. And if you if you think that, if even at
an unconscious level, if you think that your success is going to take away
some of my success, then the last thing you will be willing to do
is team up with others, you know, to tackle these really big challenges.
Yeah. Yeah, because you're inherently seeing others as competitors for scarce resources,
not as treasures, right, collaborators without whom you will not be able
to have an impact on the world. Yeah, totally, More on that
later. I want to take a quick look at this clip in which you
describe the environment that faces every leader today. Let's take a quick look.
One thing we know for sure is that more upheavals are coming in a completely
interconnected world. A single political uprising, a viral video, a distant tsunami,
or a tiny virus can send shockwaves around the world. Upheaval creates fear,
and in the midst of it, people crave security, which can incline
leaders towards the usual tropes of strength, confidence, constancy. But it won't
work. We have to flip the leadership playbook. So amy, so many
forces coming at every leader, whether in the middle or upper levels or wherever.
Really, in an organization public, private sector, for a profit,
nonprofit, how can they prepare for all of these unforeseen you know kind of
shocks almost coming at them? Right, there's probably no way to prepare technically.
You can't figure out what all these shocks are going to be, almost
by definition. So what they need to do instead is prepare themselves kind of
emotionally and cognitively for the reality that you will never have all the answers,
You will never know everything that's coming at you. So there's a great humility
there, right, just situational humility, not not false modesty, but a
sense that Okay, I don't know, so now what right? And then
that has to I think you have to prepare yourself by reinvigorating your natural curiosity
that often gets lost along the way, and develop your empathy muscles because I
great great leadership is about inspiring others to work really hard because they want to
write, because they think what they're being asked to do or invited to do
is meaningful, important, will make a difference. Can be done with other
people whom they respect and appreciate the chance to work with. And the leadership
model that allows that to happen is fundamentally humble, curious, respectful, yeah
you know, and passionate, And I think passionate about the difference we're trying
to make and coming back to that again and again. Yeah, so I
have my own theory about this, but I'm very curious to hear yours.
So CEO tenure has gone further and further down, right, Yeah, I
think you know, four talented individuals in almost every industry, the rate at
which we now expect them to evolve their roles and move on to the next
job. And you know, there's there's lots of this sort of up or
out and so on. Right, The result of it all is that even
though what you're describing really are a fairly intuitive set of principles, right,
and qualities that are just good to have at a human level for every person,
and yet the struggles with them are so real. Is it just idiosyncratic
an individual? Is it, you know, kind of some weird amalgam of
individual circumstantial? Why does it fail? Or why are so many leaders finding
themselves failing in situations? I think we have never had so much. Two
big forces that are relatively new, right. One is just the scrutiny,
right that you will be caught on camera. You will be you are just
visible all the time, constantly under your stage, under a microscope all the
time. And that's just a exhausting and be fraught with the potentials exactly.
And the other which is not unrelated, but it's the twenty four seven sort
of work expectations, right that you're never off, which is different than being
never visible. It's just plain work. There's this expectation that there's no it's
very little expectation that the sort of the workday ends and you go home and
you're with your family, you're you're out on the golf course or whatever it
does you want to do, right, So if you have one of these
roles. In fact, I had a CEO in my class recently who said
to the eighty five students in my classroom, I basically now have I have
my job, which you know he's very passionate about. I said, I
have my family and I exercise and that's it. I don't have friends.
I don't know. It wasn't because he was scared of having It's just that's
no time and having this CEO role, you know, of a public company
is such that that's all I can do. And that was not true historically.
So asking people to sort of essentially drop everything else and putting them in
the limelight where they're just visible all the time. That's a pretty hard job.
Yeah, I mean you're expecting them to totally subsume themselves to the job
in a sense, and it doesn't seem terribly healthy or and especially because we're
losing so much expertise and learning. If people are only in these roles for
a short time, by the time you really understand the place and are making
some progress towards very challenging long term goals, you're out of there and someone
else comes in. Yeah, that's so true. And yet we have some
of these leaders, right, like a Jamie Diamond and tons of others who
sort of stand the test of time and go from kind of success to success.
And is there a quality that you think some of those theaters share in
common. I don't know if there's a quality they share in common. But
they must must have figured something out about how to how to sustain their energy
and their engagement and their interest. So maybe they have found ways. Yeah,
it'd be worth looking into sort of a cycle of renewal for the cycle
of renewal to sort of when they go you know, when they go offline,
they go offline. Also, I do believe, you know, the
only way to really do this is it is to truly trust and empower others.
You know, if you are I don't want to put it this way,
but a control freak, you can't do it right. But if you
have a great team and you can trust them and they'll get in touch with
you. If some you know, absolutely unexpected thing happens and you need to
be gotten in touch with, but otherwise, if you can trust that team,
you're probably better off. So maybe that brings us the real skill is
the ability to build a great team. M Yeah, So so many leaders
are turning more and more to coaching to get objective advice when they feel they're
in a place that's somewhat lonely, right, I mean, there are some
questions you can ask of your teammates. There, there's advice you can gather
from the people surrounding you, and then in the end you're tasked with making
a decision for the team. What gold is coaching played in your life and
career? Oh, I'm embarrassed now to say I've never had a formal coach.
I certainly have had fabulous friends who you know, friends and colleagues who
have coached me. Yeah, I had senior faculty earlier in my career who
coached me. I've had, you know, people who've given me great advice,
but also great opportunities to talk and just be heard. So I think
it's so it's I think that's a very powerful experience today, heard especially,
and I think that's what good coaches do. I mean they're playing that role
of listening and being willing to honestly reflect and talk about what they're hearing and
what might be missing and what might help. And that is, you know,
that is the ultimate sort of safe space, psychologically safe space where there's
candor and where it's about learning, it's about your growth and learning, it's
about stretching a little bit. So maybe there's a relationship here between you know,
the growth in coaching's acceptability but also it's use may be related to the
fact that people are feeling too visible and unsafe in their roles, so they
need to have somewhere that they can retreat to and get into it. No,
I think that's so true. And as you were saying, you know,
being able to be coached by somebody who has an understanding of your context
because they understand, you know, what it's like to be in an HBS
classroom, or what it's like to be the CEO or your industry, whatever
that might be. You know, we find this all the time is hugely
important to a productive kind of coaching relationship. It is we also at HBS
have put together some programs for new CEOs where they come and it's very confidential,
chatam house rules and so forth. But they get great solace out of
sharing insights with each other and just realizing that they have so much in common.
Right, they're not alone, They're not alone, and they sort of
they can let their guard down in that room with free faculty present and talk
about some real challenges that they face. Yeah, makes sense. I want
to talk a little bit more in me about psychological safety. How do you
feel it's become distorted, Well, it has indeed become distorted. It's it
has become virtually synonymous with feeling comfortable. That psychological safety. Many people are
using it to mean that I get all my needs met at work. I
feel comfortable. I shouldn't be pushed or stressed or you know, unhappy in
some way, which is not what I meant. I mean, I can
understand the misperceptions. I think the term itself sounds very soft and comfortable.
I'd love I'd like to say it's actually about I think psychological safety could better
be described as a state of feeling comfortable being uncomfortable. Like that, you
understand. Yep, that's the human condition right now. I won't be comfortable
all the time. Sure, I'll be comfortable with my friends and all,
you know, various times. But there will be a lot of times where
I'm not comfortable because I'm growing and learning or doing something hard, or hearing
something I don't want to hear. Ye, But I'm willing, in fact
even eager to do that because of what's at stake, right is there?
Is there? Do you see a pattern in terms of a population or a
context where the term gets misinterpreted. Probably the most dominant one is in the
tech sector, I think, where a lot of people have interpreted to mean
again, I feel comfortable, job security. I can say anything I want,
but there'll be no repercussions for any of it. Versus I really do
feel able to learn and grow and contribute and do hard things. Yeah,
with others. It's also you know, in the end, I think the
context that you're talking about is professional and is work and sometimes not that it
Also, psychological transparency also lies in a sort of familiar or personal context,
right, but with a different set of people exactly, and with different relationships,
and the very nature of those relationships is different. Right. You know,
somebody asked me the other day whether psychological safety and belonging were synonymous.
I had to say no. First of all, they're defined differently, yes,
But second of all, you can you can envision a situation where you
feel a great deal of belonging, right, but no psychological safety to speak
up candidly. Yeah, you could be a nurse in a hospital and absolutely
have no question that you belong there, and yet you know someone is about
to do something wrong and you're not quite sure whether you can say something.
Similarly, there are families where you, yeah, you better believe you feel
you belong in them, but you'd never tell your parents you know what you
really did last night? Right, So no psychological safety, lots of belonging,
Yeah, very different terms, I totally agree, So lost question should
I mean? Apart from the leaders that we coach, we coach a number
of young professionals, many of whom, in these last few years have founded
an especially challenging time to be in the workplace. Yes, do you have
thoughts on this? I mean you must observe this in the classroom as well.
What do you think is causing that? I think we have we have
really generally underestimated the cost, that the impact, the sort of psychological impact
of remote work. I mean it's not that it's not that remote work is
bad, of course not, and hybrid work is certainly here to stay,
but we underestimate what it does to us when we are alone too much,
right, or we're not just around others. There is a certain magic and
a connectedness of just being together. There's there's the laughter, there's sort of
reading facial expressions, and I think people are feeling disconnected, they're feeling lonely,
they're feeling mental health challenges, and they're not knowing what to attribute it
to, so they're attributing it to whatever. It's just my life is hard,
or life is hard versus you know, maybe we just haven't made enough
eye contact recently, we haven't been together, we haven't had those spontaneous moments
of feeling connected. We are social animals. We need to be together.
Yeah, Yeah, any lost parting thoughts before we were at Bob, Well,
I suppose the the last thing we'll say is things will keep going.
We'll keep having challenges, right, We'll keep having failures, We'll keep having
learning opportunities. That's got to be accepted as the given, right anticipated.
But I do think they're easier to sort of accept and navigate skillfully together.
Yes, there's something wonderful about being able to team up with people you respect
and like to tackle these things. I mean, without it, I think
we just don't problem solve in a timely or particularly effective way because the lack
of anything about a single perspective really turns into an impediment for that s It's
A it's more fun, and then B it's actually higher quality problem solving.
Yeah, you go down a cognitive path of your own and you just don't
You don't really recognize the opportunity to sort of pivot and try something else.
Totally. Well, Amy, thank you, it's been a pleasure to have
you. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever
you listen and leave us a review. Find your Ideal Coach at www dot
vidmx dot com. Special thanks to our producer Martin Maluski and singer songwriter Doug Allen,