Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999. Since then, she has observed how companies with a trusting workplace perform better. Psychological safety isn't about being nice, she says. It’s about giving candid feedback, openly admitting mistakes, and learning from each other. And she argues that kind of organizational culture is increasingly important in the modern economy. Edmondson is the author of the new book "The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.”

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you
0:20.2	listen. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:45.0	It was the late 1990s, medical mistakes at hospitals were a big problem, and researcher Amy Edmondson had a moment of panic.
0:58.0	She had been studying different teams in the same hospital.
1:01.3	She wanted to know, do better teams make fewer mistakes, but what
1:05.2	she found was the opposite of what she expected. Turns out the most
1:09.0	cohesive hospital teams reported making the most mistakes, not fewer. That surprised her.
1:15.8	Until she realized maybe the better teams weren't making more mistakes, maybe they were
1:20.6	more able and willing to talk about their mistakes.
1:24.0	This became Edmondson's influential 1999 paper titled
1:28.6	Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in work teams.
1:33.0	Since then, the research has piled on, showing that psychological safety can make
1:37.0	not just teams, but entire organizations perform better.
1:41.7	It's been 10 years since Amy Edmondson was a guest on the
1:44.4	HBO Ideacast and she's back on the show today. She's a professor at Harvard
1:48.8	Business School and her new book is The Fearless Organization,
1:52.3	creating psychological safety in the workplace. book is The Fearless Organization,
1:52.6	Creating Psychological Safety in the workplace
1:55.3	for learning, innovation, and growth.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Harvard Business Review and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.