In the very old world in which I grew up -- a few years ago -- the clear rule was: don't bring your personal life to work. Way back then it was not all that unusual, therefore, for a client to inadvertently express a confusion. The client could still think a leader showing interest in others had merely to ask about what someone did on their weekend and to remember the names of their partners and children. To show interest in another human being on the job required only a minimal crossing of that line between work and personal life. That was it. "How was your time off?" "How's Judy?  How's Tom?" The rest of the job was simply about authority, giving direction about what to do next, and making sure it got done.

That was never engagement, never the vulnerability of a real exchange, a real connection.

But this inheritance may help to explain why it is that behind the current fraying historical contract between managers and employees there is a kind of nervousness, one that comes from not really being sure how to show up for one another.  Today's workplaces are different than ones in the past -- if they are moving forward at all. 

Consider just one dimension, that our workplaces demand greater collective intelligence and learning than ever before -- because change is ubiquitous. In turn, there is a need for greater transparency and voice from everyone in order to continuously improve and to innovate.  But this new transparency, no surprise, also requires greater psychological safety as people take the risk to surface previously "undiscussable" mistakes and problems and suggest changes that are disruptive at many levels, including to peoples' emotions and thinking.

And there you have it -- the new nervousness about what it actually means to show up for one another and to be real.  Can we do it?

In this month's Leadership Conversation, Amy Edmondson illuminates the new world beautifully and brings thoughtful, practical strategies that offer perspective and relief, that "bring back a sense of humanity" at work.

This, I believe, is exactly the right direction.  And yet how is it to be defined, this return of humanity?  We can put words on it, alright -- words and phrases, like:

--being true to ourselves while being respectful with others

--caring and forgiveness, patience

--compassion, support and help

--building trust and doing the right thing

--welcoming differing views, ideas and values

--working through conflicts with integrity

--displaying vulnerability

--being self-aware

Maybe these words and phrases will be useful, and maybe not. It seems like what's underneath, beyond all the obvious words, might be where the most valuable sense of how to show up humanly may be. Part of the sunlight of the human spirit is knowing what love is, our most profound word for what goes beyond language and imitation, corporate codes of conduct and prescribed cultural norms. It is with love, after all, that we reach farther, toward greater realms of knowing and being and giving to one another.

Leadership and Co-Design  Although the term, co-design, has more specific, formal meanings, I like to think of it very informally as two or more people thinking together as equals about some specific change they want to make. In my field of organization dynamics, that could be shifting how the work is done or how an organization is structured, for example. It could involve any kind of strategic project or initiative.  Co-design in organizations, thought of in this simple way, is powerful precisely because of what it violates: old habits of hierarchy and our images of "leadership" and "management" from the past.... Read More...

LEADERSHIP CONVERSATION

Amy Edmondson Identifies Breakthroughs for Innovation, Improved Leadership and Culture Change

Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, is one of the most sensitive, provocative and plain-spoken writers I know on culture change.  Her latest books, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy and Teaming to Innovate  offer brilliant roadmaps for innovation - not only to tangibly address service, product and competitiveness issues, but also to overcome the very workplace patterns and practices that have traditionally inhibited new thinking and collective intelligence. Over the years she has authored more than 70 articles and papers, and received many awards for her breakthrough research and writing.

 

Amy's formative background includes work as a young professional for Buckminster Fuller, the famous inventor and visionary. As we began our conversation, she mentioned how this experience reoriented her sense of what matters and what it means to do work that aims to make a better world. She shared with me that her time with Fuller taught her independent thinking, systems thinking, and the importance of working hard on challenging, cutting edge problems. Then in his eighties, Fuller, Amy explained, was "a man full of joy."  In turn, this early work prepared her for her own distinguished, joyful and highly productive academic career. 

 

To learn more about Amy and find her contact information, please access this web page. 

 

Q. Amy, in your view, what is it about the current culture of organizations that often prevents innovation, even as people understand that innovation is vital?

 

A. We seem to be cognitively hardwired for, and rarely challenge, certain beliefs that inhibit innovation - and we still operate with these beliefs as if our survival depended on it.  For example, we don't ask for help. We don't speak up. At one time, survival probably did depend on our ability to please those higher in the hierarchy, and so these instincts determined our success or failure, but today they're clearly counterproductive.   The emotional legacy of this hardwiring is that we now are more naturally inclined to look for approval than to rock the boat.  Even as we acknowledge the value of innovations, such as open source or Google, and recognize the need for entirely new ways of being, many of us still have a little Henry Ford inside our heads telling us that we must have all the answers - rather than, for example, having good questions.  Indeed senior executives often still believe they should have all the answers, and those who report to them also may see the answers as the bosses' responsibility. This dynamic is "self-sealing" in the sense that these beliefs are counterproductive in their own right, but also contain the message that they should not be challenged.  Overall, it seems to me we do not talk enough about how this inheritance hurts us. 

 

I don't believe these particular artifacts of hierarchy are intended - they are side effects.  It's not practical or feasible (or even necessarily useful) to say, "Well, then, let's get rid of hierarchy." But what we can do is be thoughtful about the impact of these patterns on people.  For example, in a hospital physicians have legal and expertise-based authority and that's a good thing, but it becomes a bad thing quickly if that causes them not to hear critical information.  As a consequence it is vital for physicians to understand the dynamic and thoughtfully manage it. The same is true of other side-effects in all kinds of organization.  In general, at the core of what inhibits innovation I believe we find this "kernel" of leaders assuming they need to know everything and the fears that go along with that, including the fear of admitting ignorance. That's a side-effect of human cognition in hierarchies that we must increasingly become aware of if innovation is our goal.

 

Q. The concept of "psychological safety" has been a profound element of your research over the years -- the condition of feeling that it is okay to speak up, ask for help, share openly about problems, mistakes, experiments and failures without having to fall into patterns of blame. It seems that we first need leaders who feel psychologically safe themselves in order to create more safety for others -- and yet there are plenty of organizations where this just isn't so.  How do we break this cycle?

 

A. This is a matter of mutual support and awareness.  We have to help people name it.  When I talk about the need for psychological safety people already intuitively understand what I am talking about and they also know why it is important.  There is so much uncertainty and complexity and change in the world that people know they must have a voice to speak up about what they see and think.  That voice is essential to doing we are already doing well, and also to viewing the execution of work as a learning process. 

 

Frankly, we've been coming back to these themes for some time, through the work of Chris Argyris, Edgar Schein, and others. In this sense, the importance of psychological safety is easy to explain, but it remains difficult to get it into place.  The trick is often to help people at the top of the organization begin to talk about it, and then extend that conversation.  If leaders at the top are talking about it, others feel freer to join in.  As people talk and become aware, they begin to shed layers - layers we started adding as early as grade school. Our desire for connection with each other pushes against the organizational structures and interpersonal shells we have learned to use to protect ourselves.  Leaders with maturity and wisdom are the best ones to get the conversation going. They model what it means to be truly present with others, to not be tied up in their own knots, and what it means to make a human contribution.

 

All of this is about bringing back a sense of humanity and modeling that in the workplace.

 

Q. Do you sense that organizations value psychological safety more today than in the past?

 

A. Yes, generally speaking I believe that is true.  I've been asked to help two large, "iconic" organizations recently and they have both been familiar with the concept.  But overall, there are still objections I hear, perhaps the biggest of which is that somehow psychological safety undermines our notions of accountability. If people feel safe, they won't work as hard as they need to, won't achieve high standards - that's the negative belief. Of course, I express a differing opinion. Psychological safety is about permission to be straightforward and also permission to push back.  It's not about lowering standards.

 

I would say my views on psychological safety have evolved somewhat over the years.  At first, I was focused on the problem of speaking up.  Can a nurse, for example, talk about a medication error? But as time and research have gone on, I've become increasingly interested in the level of overall candor - and not just the climate but the actual skills of people and organizations. Correspondingly, I've also become more humble about how challenging it is to create organizations where a high level of candor is the norm.  In my early research, I focused on psychological safety as an antecedent of learning.  Now I tend to emphasize the importance of psychological safety for ensuring good outcomes whenever you're facing interdependent or uncertain work - in healthcare, for example.  I also emphasize the role of passion for the work that people may feel.  Passion and purpose motivate hard work.  Psychological safety, in turn, enables interpersonal risks that are inevitable in this kind of work setting.  Passion and psychological safety thus comprise a winning combination.  These psychological experiences ultimately shape the quality of care experienced by patients, for example.  In sum, I emphasize that psychological safety is not the driver of outcomes; rather it's a crucial enabler. 

 

It is increasingly clear that to create a genuinely candid environment we must tap our own best maturity and wisdom. Attempting that work reveals how much we have to learn. It confirms our need for humility.

 

Q. What do you see as the core cultural conditioning that keeps us from finding our own psychological safety?

 

A. Well, at bottom, I think we want to be perfect, because if we are not, we might be unlovable, and if we're unlovable, we'll be abandoned, and then we will die.  That's an intrinsically unsafe place to be! I don't know how much of that desire for perfection is built-in evolutionary programming, but it certainly has had an evolutionary impact.

 

In practical terms, it means we have work ahead of us.  For me, for example, it means continuing to unlearn my academic voice in favor of a more open, less formal one. That's part of my own evolution.

 

Q. What work are you especially excited about now?

 

A. The work I enjoy the most these days is about getting past the academic terms and abstractions and working with individuals and teams in real organizations on what my concepts mean for them in practical terms.

 

For instance, I've been working for several months with a global organization that is establishing new strategic imperatives.  I'm helping the top 150 leaders look at these challenges, which include customer centricity and innovation. The questions they're wrestling with together pertain to what it's going to take from people to realize the new strategy, the new vision, and how the leaders can best help and support them, as well as each other.  On one hand, we are discussing how to communicate the "content," the words, terms and possibilities that are tied to specific strategic initiatives.  On the other, the work they are doing together is all about the deeper human element.  Making progress, I believe, is a matter of encouraging leaders to ask themselves, "How do I show up in a way that creates more psychological safety and productive risk-taking for all of us?" Their success may not be a sure thing but they are making progress.  Not everyone will completely buy-in to the importance of the human side of the work.  Not everyone wants to work in a new way -- but enough do.  Going back to Buckminster Fuller, this is an example of hard work at the edge of a hard problem.

 

I am also very passionate about learning how to accelerate radical collaboration to impact the sustainability agenda.  This is not about the technical solutions.  We already have many of those solutions - technically, we already know how to create beautiful green, self-sustaining buildings. The challenge is more how to team up across policy and political boundaries, how to transform out-dated regulations, for example.  How to change incentive systems to reward smart, sustainable solutions rather than rewarding the same old construction methods and results.

 

Q. Finally, in your book, Teaming, you identify some crucial leadership behaviors that facilitate psychological safety and the entire process of innovation. These include being accessible, acknowledging limits, displaying fallibility, inviting participation. Assuming I want to develop these skills, where do I begin?  What's a straightforward first step?

 

A. It begins, I think, with your own willingness to disclose to others the answer to a few key questions: what are you hoping to accomplish?  What knowledge and experience do you bring to the challenge? And, what are you up against?  You must convey the answers in a way that shows your own willingness to be open and human. And then, next, you can begin to ask others sincere questions about themselves. There is nothing like a genuine invitation to share your ideas, hopes and challenges with someone who is clearly interested in you and curious about your perspectives and feelings.

 

Being available and issuing invitations are good first steps.  But there is one more thing to express, something that must be constantly refreshed, which is acknowledging fallibility.  There are two kinds: "I'm fallible" and "Our organization is fallible." Sending both of those messages opens the door for others' contributions.

 

These steps woven together create an invitation that many people have not experienced with other leaders or in other parts of their work lives.  They are essential for setting up workplace relationships that enable innovation.

My Leadership Binder

More Resources to Foster Reflective Learning

 

* Four Questions and Three "Turnarounds."  Do you know the Work of Byron Katie?  Described as a "spiritual innovator," Katie experienced profound depression for over a decade until she learned to "challenge her own thoughts." What resulted was a full-blown human development method which she calls, "The Work." Her website is complete with exercises and videos -- all the content you'll need to experience her system, which revolves around four straightforward questions and three methods to challenge past truths.

 

* 70% of Management Jobs Still Held By Men. While interest in developing women leaders appears to be increasing, Joelle K. Jay, an executive coach, illuminates how companies can create real change, not just a change in image. See her Fast Company article, "Why Most Leadership Development Programs for Women Fail And How to Change That."

 

* A Psychodynamic Approach. Manfred Kets de Vries, INSEAD Professor of Leadership Development & Organisational Change, explains a basic model for the "inner theater" of leaders and how that impacts themselves and their teams in "First Know Yourself, Then Your Team."

 

* A Eulogy.  Radical management writer, Steve Denning, offers a personal salute to Warren Bennis, one of the first and best writers on modern leadership. "A Tribute to Warren Bennis, A Leader of Leaders."

 

* Worth a Thousand Words. Shirley Li of The Wire assembles an interpretive study of body language in "A Brief History of Vladimir Putin's Uncomfortable Photographs With Foreign Leaders." Whether or not you agree with her analysis, the pictures are indeed revealing -- and offer a reflection point for all of us regarding how we are seen and remembered at candid moments.

 

Click the image, find a poem.