The psychologically safe workplace with Amy Edmondson

The psychologically safe workplace with Amy Edmondson

Creating a fearless organization

I've got a great interview for you with Amy Edmondson. I know many of you in the Talent Development Community have heard of Amy and are fans of her work, especially if you have done work to build a culture of psychological safety in your organization, you've probably come across Amy's work or read her books or studies. Google famously made a major shift towards psychological safety based on a study they did and they based some of that on Amy's work as well. For those of you who are not familiar, Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. She established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society. Amy has been recognized by the Biannual Thinkers50 Global Ranking of Management Thinkers since 2011 and was ranked number three in 2019.

She's also received that organization's Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019 and Talent Award in 2017. She studies teaming, psychological safety and organizational learning. Her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly and several others including the Harvard Business Review. Her book, The Fearless Organization Creating Psychological Safety In The Workplace For Learning Innovation, and Growth offers a practical guide for organizations serious about success in the modern economy and has been translated already into eleven languages, probably more by now. She has other books such as Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate And Compete In The Knowledge Economy and Teaming To Innovate and Extreme Teaming.

She studied teaming a lot and now moving quickly into this area of psychological safety, which we know is very relevant to the times we live in now. Note that this interview is in June of 2020 right in the middle of the Black Lives Matter Movement and so we do address that and talk about it when we're publishing this. I want to make that clear as well as how organizations have adapted with people working remotely under COVID-19, which is something we're going to be seeing for quite a long time. As always, I appreciate you reading. I would love for you to leave us a review on iTunes. It helps other audience find the show. A shout-out appreciation to our sponsor, Advantage Performance Group, which helps us host and has provided many great guests to the show as well. Thanks, everybody, for reading. Now here's my interview with Amy Edmondson.

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I am excited because I am with Amy Edmondson, who is the Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School and the author of the book, The Fearless Organization, and others as well. Amy, welcome to the show.

Andy, thanks for having me.

It’s great to have you on. I've heard your name mentioned many times by different people I've come across in the Talent Development World, especially when this topic of psychological safety comes up as well as modern leadership. I’m excited to get you on the show. I'd love to start with a little bit of background for those that don't know who you are and how you got to where you are today.

The Pursuit For Knowledge

I'm a researcher and professor. In a sense, I have these two hats and they're very different hats. The hat of a researcher is the geeky hat of burrowing into some topic, getting data, running analytics and spending more hours than anybody wants to know writing. The professor hat, the classroom hat is the ham hat. It's being out there, interacting with students, getting into their space, having some fun pushing them, pushing the envelope and pulling the learning forward. Those are the two primary hats that I wear. I've been at Harvard Business School for years. Before that, I worked in consulting and before that as an engineer. It was a gradual transition over about a decade to that recognition that I was an academic at heart and then headed in that direction.

Psychological Safety: When you start a research project, you need to make sure that you’ll be working on things that are highly relevant and interesting to the people who will consume it.

Not just in academics but being at Harvard Business School is the pinnacle, that’s how I think about it, in business schools and studying in business. What are 1 or 2 things that you attribute to getting you to that place that puts you near the top of the mountain?

Persistence for sure. I want to comment on that pinnacle idea because I think HBS is a pinnacle. It's a pinnacle of a big corner of business or management academia. We are at the top of the people who care deeply about what we call rigor and relevance. That means that we want and expect people to be doing good work publishing in the top journals. If it isn't relevant for practitioners or it doesn't deliver something that can inform managers and practitioners of all kinds to help them do their work better, then we're not interested. It's a nice space to be because you get the depth and the fun of doing research, but you're doing it for a larger purpose to have that impact.

You're in this place and you've got a platform to take that research and be able to get it out there in front of more people which means you need to make sure that things are highly relevant and interesting to those that are out there. When you start on some type of new research project, where do you start? How do you know that something is going to be relevant to people?

You don’t and there are a lot of dead ends and rabbit holes in the research. I certainly have a file drawer of things that never made it to the big league, but I have a particular approach. It's not the approach everybody takes, but I'm driven by a triangle of three things. I'm going to put at the top of that triangle problem. It’s some real-world challenge that people are wrestling with. It could be a range of things. It could be reducing medication errors in a hospital or solving the challenge of strategic decision making in the executive suite. As long as it's a genuine problem that people haven't fully resolved for themselves. The next corner of that triangle is I've got to get out there, into the field, and talk to real people and practitioners who are wrestling with this problem and know more about it than I do.

That combination right there generally leads me to have to spend knowledge boundaries, meaning expertise boundaries either with people in the field who are practitioners who have different expertise than I do or with people from other academic disciplines. As soon as you get into real problems, they don't live nicely in the silo of the academic discipline. If you're a psychologist, there are things that you need some finance person to help you understand and so on. In the middle of that triangle is the literature. A lot of academics start with the academic literature and they say, “What's the next contribution I can make or brick I can add?” I don't ignore the literature but it's not my starting point. I get out there, mess around, come back, and figure what do people already know about this problem? I read. When I read what people already know, you discover they've already got this. Other times, you discover they've got it wrong and we can add to it. It's this very messy iterative process.

I love the pursuit of knowledge and figuring out what's out there and what problems need to be solved, interviewing experts as you said, people that know more than you. Somebody who will make the mistake and they're always trying to be the expert when if you continue on a constant pursuit of knowledge, you know that we never truly know everything. We are always looking for more information.

The world keeps changing. Even if we thought we knew everything, which we don’t. We can't possibly know everything that will be available to know tomorrow.

Psychological safety is being able to say what you think about your work. Click To Tweet

Shifting In A World Of Changes

Speaking of the world-changing, you and I are recording this in June of 2020. There have been a lot of changes going on lately. You've been seen as an expert on this topic of psychological safety and already speaking a lot with organizations, with Harvard and with the research you've been doing. I feel like there's been a major shift in how people work as we've gone to more remote work starting back in March 2020. Some companies are sending some people back to the office, many are not. I know you've already written some papers on this and had some interviews. From your perception, what does that shift look like? You saw in academia. You were telling me that you almost had a seamless shift from the classroom to doing things virtually.

I wouldn't say it was seamless. I would say it was quick by necessity, but we had to do it. Everybody else did too. That's been a good thing because I have empathy and some experiential understanding of what people are up against when they are suddenly sent to work from home. People like myself periodically stayed home if I'm deep into some data analysis or into some writing. Sometimes that's the best place to be is home, free from all the noise and all the interaction. Other people have certainly had that and maybe even thought, “This home thing is nice,” but when it's day-in and day-out and not an end in sight, it's a whole different ball game.

There were many other elements as well. I've been working from this home office for years now but this was the first time I also had small children here at the same time, my little coworkers, who would burst into my office in the middle of interviews, meetings, and other things going on. The interesting thing is thinking about this idea of inclusiveness and people have been talking about bringing your whole self to work for years. We are now because I'm seeing people's real true lives. I'm meeting their kids and their pets. A lot of people told me that has changed the game with the interactions that people are having with their colleagues.

Like it or not, it's made us more vulnerable. I think that's largely good because most people have a work face, a little bit of a facade. You put your work clothes on and work face on, then you go in. You might talk about your children, but having them run through your interview is a whole different story. By necessity, we have found ourselves having to be a little bit more open about what's going on around us and what we're up against. Some of that is a good thing because we're seeing the humanity in each other and we're getting experience lowering a guard or at least some portion of our guard. That doesn't mean this is easy and working perfectly for everybody at all times.

The Fearless Organization

I want to ask you about this topic of psychological safety. This is something you've written a lot about. Your latest book is called The Fearless Organization. Can we start by defining that? I'd like to talk about the importance and how that has shifted under COVID and people working remotely.

Psychological safety describes a climate. It’s like a subpart of culture inside an organization. It’s the interpersonal climate that is characterized by a belief that I can say what I think about the work that I can speak up. I can ask for help and question and admit a mistake. None of that is easy. If we have a psychologically safe workplace, that doesn't mean it's easy for me to raise my hand and say, “I made a mistake,” but it does mean I believe and you believe that I have an obligation and more importantly an ability to do that. The shortest way I can say that is the sense of permission for candor.

A sense of permission for candor in the workplace, allowing people to be more of themselves, not having to put on that work face or hide or be some certain way, which also creates more inclusiveness as well.

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

Psychological safety is a key element of going from diversity to inclusion. In diversity, that's a reality. You can create it if you want to, which you do. That doesn't mean you have inclusion. Inclusion is the experience that I am included in. My voice is welcome and I can take that risk of speaking up.

This notion of psychological safety, I would imagine you've studied how a lot of organizations have done this and the ones who were doing it well and the ones who were making mistakes. We can even think about this in the pre-COVID world. What are organizations doing to create that great culture of psychological safety?

The biggest thing is honesty at the top of reality. That sounds funny but when an organization's leaders are repeatedly, and sometimes with a sense of humor, calling attention to the reality of the challenges that lie ahead, they are inadvertently saying, “We don't have all the answers we need to hear from you.” I call that framing the work. The phrase VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. If you took seriously that you were in a VUCA world, which we are in it, but we don't take it seriously. If you took it seriously, you would realize anyone's voice might have that critical idea that is our next innovation or might see that impending crisis that we could stop if we get on it now. The organizations that have taken this seriously are willing to say what we know, what we don't know and why we need you to get in there, roll up your sleeves and make it happen.

Driving Innovation

I'm glad you brought that up. I was going to ask you about how psychological safety can drive innovation. Some of these companies are trying to be innovative to avoid being disrupted like so many others have been. I've studied this a lot as well. There's so much importance around creating an innovative culture, which allows people to share different ideas and stops the notion of, “We've tried that. We already know it doesn't work or we've always done it this way,” which is the number one cause of the disruption.

There are two reasons why psychological safety is critical to an innovative culture. One is if you want innovation, you're going to have failure along the way. You have to then therefore not be afraid of failure whether you have to accept that a whole lot of the things we try won't work, that's okay and that's part of the process for it. The other is that it's rare that a single person has the winning idea fully baked like, “Here it is. Let's go sell it.” It's like, “I have an idea.” Frankly, it's not a very good idea,” but it makes you think of something. This messy failure-laden process forward and we get to innovative output. If you show me a company that's good at innovation, I'll show you a company where the climate is very psychologically safe.

Many people and companies are spending so much time trying to avoid failure. I like what you bring up there because not only do we learn so much from failure, but sometimes we need to suggest a bad idea or have a failed idea for other people to see that and go, “That makes me think of this over here.” I'm sure you've experienced that yourself with your research when you went down one path and someone said, “Someone’s already covered this before,” but there's an angle of this that is not being covered.

I had a hypothesis for early study in graduate school that turned out to be dead wrong or at least the data that I got suggested it was dead wrong. That wrong discovery led me to a much more interesting discovery. If I had been right, it wouldn't have been as interesting.

Psychological safety is a key element of going from diversity to inclusion. Click To Tweet

How has this shifted under COVID-19 with people working remotely and now you don't necessarily see them every day, but we still want to create this culture?

First of all, it's bimodal. I think there are people for whom the reality of now being at home, as we were talking about earlier, is helping them open up to be a little bit less anxious about what they say and don't say because you can't pull it off. The anxiety related to the broader picture can be much more troubling for some than others and people have health conditions they don't want to disclose or family situations that they don't want to talk about and that's created real challenges. Here's a more everyday problem, which is communicating like this and this is what you do all the time but if you don't normally communicate like this, there are a lot of non-verbals that are lost.

If you're in a meeting with your colleagues and someone floats an idea, you can tell by the energy in the room that it isn't quite there yet or that people have something to add. Even that little emotion that says, “Andy, do you want to weigh in here?” When I've got a screen full of little postage-sized faces in front of me, I can't be looking at them all at once. I can only look at one at a time and I can't take in those cues. There's an awful lot of data, visual, and tone that we lose that makes it hard to read the room and hard to know when people are holding back and when to try to get them more. It means that we've got to use some of the tools that the platforms like Zoom and Teams and others have. Use the breaking outs, polling or hand raise functions. Make sure that you use them to intervene in what might otherwise become a non-psychologically safe space.

Someone told me that some aspects of this can create a more inclusive environment and that people cannot take up too much space in a meeting. We're all having equal little postage sized box as you mentioned. It still depends on the leader and how they are perceiving reading everyone and including people in the meetings.

They need to work a little harder to include people. Use the chat or use the polling. I heard about one meeting where a person who was routinely quiet in this setting ended up having the critical idea that pushed them in a different direction. Once it came out by using a forced ranking function and getting people to then explain why they thought what they thought.

Psychological Safety Q&A

I have some questions coming in. This is from Sabina Silat who asks, “How do I convince my leadership of the importance of psychological safety?” The follow-up question is, “What do I do when my leaders think our culture is psychologically safe when it is not?”

You can never convince anyone of anything so what can you do? The most important thing you can do is make it psychologically safe where you sit, with your colleagues, peers or anyone on your team. You can do that by the genuine expression of interest in what someone else's thinking. The most powerful tool you have is the art of asking a good question. If you are there asking people, and you can ask your managers as well, but if you ask people genuine questions like, “What are you thinking about this? What are you seeing? What's on your mind about project X?” I'm not recommending like, “What are you thinking about?” but “What do you think about this issue?”

Psychological Safety: A psychologically safe workplace gets people to believe that they can ask for help, ask questions and even admit mistakes.

It's a gift. It's a human tendency for all of us to look up and say, “They're not doing it.” I almost have to put that in the category of God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and start doing great stuff where you are and then watch that catch on. If they're not doing it and you find yourself in an environment that doesn't work for you where you can't express yourself and you can't contribute, at some point, you owe it to yourself to find another opportunity. In the meantime, you might be wrong that they don't want you to take risks or hear from you. I would do those small tests. Try speaking up with something. Try going a little bit outside of the comfort zone and see what happens. At least test the hypothesis that people don't want people to be fully engaged and speaking up.

One of the biggest mistakes generally across the board people make everywhere is making assumptions, not asking questions, assuming that leadership or anybody else's coming from doing something because of X without finding out what it is. I talked to a lot of people about this in the corporate world. I run leadership development programs and more and more I'm convinced that curiosity is a core tenet of great leadership. I stole that from Liz Wiseman and her book, Multipliers. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but I run a program based on that. Liz spoke at my conference and has been on the show. I'm a big fan of her ideas that have come from that. No matter what the situation, curiosity is one of the biggest things you need to lean on because you never know where people are coming from, why they're acting the way they're acting.

Curiosity is our birthright but the problem is by the time you're a working adult, you start to push it aside and you forget to be curious. We forget to be curious because we assume we already know. We make those assumptions as you said. Back to making assumptions about the people above you and this tendency we have to look up, I have not once, not twice, but a handful of times been working with groups of let's say a big and global company that are 1 or 2 levels from the very top. That means there are 100 or 14 people above them and 30,000 or 100,000 below them and then they will ask that same question which is, “They’re not on board.” I look back and I say, “Are you kidding me? You are they.” You are they to thousands of people. There's either 100 or a couple of dozen people above you, whatever the situation might be. They're not the problem. Get on it and start making it happen where you sit, but it's such a tendency.

I love that revelation, you are they. Put yourself in their shoes, think about where you come from and how people perceive you.

People are looking at you and making that same inference so get on with it.

The follow-up question or inference we can make from that is that even if you are working in an organization where the culture is not as great as you'd like it coming from the top, it's not that psychological safety culture, you still have the ability to create that for your team around you.

It's one of the most robust findings in the psychological safety research is that it exists in pockets. I'm not sure there will ever be a company that's 100% uniformly, psychologically safe throughout where this branch is better than that branch and this team is better than that team. What that means is very directly, the most important force is the leaders in the middle, not the very top. They matter. They often, as we all know, set the tone. They can have such a positive difference, but the leaders in the middle don't underestimate their impact on the team because they're the ones who are creating that spontaneous climate for voice or for holding back.

Anyone’s voice might have that critical idea that could become the next innovation. Click To Tweet

We've got some other questions here. Kelly Durbin asks, “We saw many informal leaders emerge and teams during the initial crisis. As we move to the longer haul marathon of COVID and our new normal, any advice of keeping people engaged and continuing to work for the greater good?”

It's such a challenge. The truth is we've never been here before. There's no playbook. There's no real answer to that question. The most important thing is to make it discussable. Where this gets us, where we start to feel exhausted even irritable is where we think, “This is going to go on and on and I'm not sure I can do it. I don't know what it's going to look like. How many of us are going back to the office? How many of us are not?” If the sheer duration of this thing is a topic that we feel okay talking about, it lightens the load. Make this very good question a shared question. Make it something that we're all talking about and not to make noise about it, but to truly problem-solve together. The answer is not going to be something that we have already in some playbook. The answer is going to be something that we co-create together.

I know you're following the news, you're involved in talking to organizations and all the latest research. We've seen protests all over the nation since the death of George Floyd and with the Black Lives Matter Movement. Many companies and organizations are stepping up and saying, “This is wrong. We're ready to take action and make changes.” What are you seeing now and what do companies need to do to truly create real equality and inclusion?

I am seeing, and I hope this is right, a very different sense about this. Clearly, this is an issue. The issue of diversity and inclusion has been on the radar in the talent development discussions for years, but something tells me this is different. We can't go back. We can't just talk. We are going to have to break stuff. We're going to have to figure this out. That is going to only work and only happen if we approach this issue with enormous humility and by humility, I mean we don't know a lot. We don't know how to do this. Whatever group you’re in or come from you, you literally don't know what it feels like to be in the shoes of someone else. The humility then drives us back to the curiosity that you mentioned before, which is if I'm genuinely aware of my ignorance, I'm now able to be curious. If I'm curious, I'll ask questions and then God helps me if I don't then listen to the answers.

Back to curiosity and sometimes it's tough because these are awkward conversations.

Awkward is an understatement. They're awkward and scary. It's a new territory. There are issues around fear of that awkwardness but also shame. I certainly experienced shame on so many levels of the enormous advantages I've had in my life. Let’s start with great parents and education, then a lot of access to opportunities through that education and beyond that not everybody has. I'm grateful and gratitude is a good place to be and there is a little bit of shame, guilt, and pain about it as well.

The interesting thing is, as part of all of this, there's been a lot more conversation and awareness around white privilege and what that creates and what we have experienced were taken for granted.

Psychological Safety: A psychologically safe workplace gets people to believe that they can ask for help, ask questions and even admit mistakes.

Unearned privilege is a marvelous phrase because it tells you exactly what this means. There's a privilege that a very talented accomplished musician earns a privilege of being the first violinist, but that's earned the privilege. Unearned privilege is given to us because of our race.

It's interesting to see how organizations are shifting and pivoting here. It'll be interesting to see how those organizations change, what sticks and what doesn't if anything. You talked about fear and I've been studying this idea of fear for a couple of years, how it has held me back, how it holds lots of people back and how it causes people to act in certain ways. Fear and ego are the roots of all of this, whether it’s racism and how people are treated. There's so much that we can get from self-awareness to allow us to make those changes. Would you agree?

Absolutely. We joke about change and organizational work is often all about change, but that's what everybody is like, “How do we change?” Change is hard because we're afraid. Why would you be afraid of change? Some changes can be good. We're inherently afraid of the unknown because we haven't been there and it might be scary. It might be bad for me. We're talking about big change here where change seems to imply we were wrong and bad before rather than we were what we were. In order to embrace change, you have to embrace the recognition that we don't have it right yet.

We don't know where we're going. It takes a lot of courage. I was curious about why you decided to call your book, The Fearless Organization.

It was a statement of optimism. The truth is the research on psychological safety, much like Sabina’s question implies, suggests that it's much more often absent than present. I admit it, it was harder for me to find good cases than the bad cases. You open up the newspaper and you'll find yet another example of a company where people weren't speaking up and bad things happen. Part of the human condition and human condition in organizations, especially hierarchical ones and most of them are, is to lack psychological safety. You have to go out of your way to build it, but I didn't want the title of the book to be psychological safety. First of all, that sounds academic and psychological. It also sounds a little soft which is anything but. Fearless Organization has an aspirational quality to me. It's about speed, courage, going for it, playing to win rather than playing not to lose.

It's about what you can accomplish when you put this more innovation, better results.

Think of it this way. If you go to work, you've got the job you're supposed to be doing for your company and organization. You've also got this other shadow job which is the job of looking good, especially in the eyes of the higher-ups. The larger that job is for you, the less time and mental energy you have for the real job. The idea of a fearless organization is one in which very little of your conscious attention is tied up in that shadow job.

One of the biggest mistakes any leader can make is to make assumptions instead of asking questions. Click To Tweet

It makes me think of something else I heard which is about authenticity being the gap between reality and perception. The greater that gap is, the more stress it's going to cause people.

You've got to keep the facade up. That's hard work.

I have a couple more questions for you related to your learning and development space. Are there any other trends in terms of learning and talent development that you've been following related to all of this?

Agile is a big trend. By trend, it's moved from first to something that was in the software world to something that every organization wants to be agile. To a certain extent, that’s nowadays a learning organization. It comes with real practices and mindsets that say, “Move fast, figure it out, get the data, and always figure out ways to stay flexible moving forward.” It's an important trend. It comes with mindset issues, culture issues and lots of talent development issues there as well.

I'm hearing that more and more lots of organizations talking about agile. What would you say has been your greatest accomplishment or proudest moment in your career so far?

I was toiling away on this concept of psychological safety for a long time, meaning many years. I was doing other work too on teams and teaming. When I woke up one day and saw that The New York Times Magazine cover story said that Google had done an extensive study to find out what differentiated high-performing from lower-performing teams. I saw that like, “I better find out because Google has lots of data. They're good at analyzing it. This is my bread and butter. What did they find?” Long story short, they found after putting every variable but the kitchen sink in the model that the factor that differentiated high performing and low performing teams at Google was psychological safety. It was an astonishing thing to me to read that they had read my paper, use the variable, and come to this conclusion but then as you can imagine, soon after everybody read the New York Times article, the blogosphere was alight with interesting psychological safety. It took off at that point. I didn't see it coming and it was a huge thrill.

Was that Project Oxygen?

Psychological Safety: One of the most robust findings in the psychological safety research is that it still exists in pockets.

No, it was the next one, Project Aristotle.

What's the flip side? What's been your biggest failures or mistakes and what did you learn from it?

I made many mistakes, garden-variety everyday mistakes, screw up in a classroom or say something that falls flat in a meeting. The best big mistake that I can point to is that years ago, this was before I went to graduate school, I was writing a book about Buckminster Fuller's mathematical work. Don't even ask me why, but it seemed important at that time. It was about synergetic geometry, geodesic math. In order to support myself, I was going to do workshops. I did a workshop. It was an eight-hour thing. I talked at the speed of light for eight hours in a row. The faces glazed over. I don't think anybody took a single thing out of the room. I was so intent on giving them their money and time’s worth for that. I was going to give them every single thing I knew, like it or not. I gave them nothing. It felt flat and awful. I like, “That didn't work.” Education means to draw out. How do you draw out? How do you give people experiential chances to digest the material, to talk, and to engage? Fortunately, I never did it that badly again. I did get quite passionate about what good teaching looks like.

I'm very passionate about experiential learning and I've been running experiential workshops for years. A small company hired me and it seemed like they were more interested in my knowledge than the experience. I leaned too far that way as well and went into real lecture mode for a lot of stuff. I went too far with that. In the end, I talked way too much. We live and we learn. Besides your own great books, is there another book you recommend that made a big difference for you or do you often recommend this area of psychological safety, talent development building cultures?

There are many good ones, but the one that comes to mind is Leadership and Self-Deception, which doesn't even have an author. The author is The Arbinger Institute, so talk about humility. It's an extraordinarily powerful little book. It's a book that is about how we essentially lie to ourselves, that's the self-deception part, by blaming the things that go wrong on other people. It’s said in a workplace context but this is life stuff as well. It's done through a novel. I'm not going to say it's great fiction or great art, but it makes it quite gripping and quite a page-turner. Deep, psychological interpersonal truths are conveyed in a palatable and quite actionable way.

Last question for you. I normally ask about career advice at the end here, but we'll go back to this topic of psychological safety especially for those people in talent development and learning development, looking for ways to influence the organization and their leaders, and try to create this culture of psychological safety. What's one more piece of advice you would give?

It’s inquiry. An inquiry is driven by a genuine curiosity that has got to dominate your conversations. As we were describing before, it's so tempting and natural to fall into, “Here's what I think. Here's how I think it.” It's also important to let people know that this is hard. It's supposed to be hard like interpersonal understanding and making progress in a messy world. The soft stuff is the hard stuff. Be generous not only with yourself but with your colleagues. We're going to make mistakes. We're not going to get it right every time.

Growth mindset where you can go out, fail and try different things. Amy, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me, Andy. It was a delight talking with you.

• The Fearless Organization Creating Psychological Safety In The Workplace For Learning Innovation, and Growth
• Teaming: How Organizations Learn Innovate and Compete In The Knowledge Economy
• Teaming To Innovate
• Extreme Teaming
• Liz Wiseman – previous episode
• Multipliers
• Leadership and Self-Deception
• The New York Times Magazine - article