Quotes from Amy C. Edmondson

the existence of procedures does not ensure their use. Without psychological safety, micro-assessments of interpersonal risk tend to crowd out proper responses.

But for jobs where learning or collaboration is required for success, fear is not an effective motivator. Brain science has amply demonstrated that fear inhibits learning and cooperation.

neuroscientists have discovered that fear activates the amygdala, the section of the brain that is responsible for detecting threats.

Fear inhibits learning. Research in neuroscience shows that fear consumes physiologic resources, diverting them from parts of the brain that manage working memory and process new information. This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving.15 This is why it's hard for people to do their best work when they are afraid.

when not handled well) reduces psychological safety. Research shows that lower-status team members generally feel less safe than higher-status members. Research also shows that we are constantly assessing our relative status, monitoring how we stack up against others, again mostly subconsciously. Further, those lower in the status hierarchy experience stress in the presence of those with higher status.

Treat people superbly and compensate them fairly.

unless a leader expressly and actively makes it psychologically safe to do so, people will automatically seek to avoid failure. So how did Teller reframe failure to make it okay? By saying, believing, and convincing others that "I'm not pro failure, I'm pro learning.

OpenTable CEO Christa Quarles tells employees, "early, often, ugly. It's O.K. It doesn't have to be perfect because then I can course-correct much, much faster.

Emphasizing interdependence lets people know that they're responsible for understanding how their tasks interact with other people's tasks. Interdependence encourages frequent conversations to figure out the impact their work is having on others and to convey in turn the impact others' work has on them. Interdependent work requires communication. In other words, when leaders frame the work they are emphasizing the need for taking interpersonal risks like sharing ideas and concerns.

When Uber's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, first came on board in August 2017, one of his priorities was to meet with women engineers. Alert to the damage done to the company's culture, he began by laying the groundwork for a psychologically safe workplace. As Jessica Bryndza, Uber's Global Director of People Experience, commented, "He [Khosrowshahi] didn't come in guns blazing. He came in listening."58 The operative word here is "listening.

The Braintrust's recipe is fairly simple: a group of directors and storytellers watches an early run of the movie together, eats lunch together, and then provides feedback to the director about what they think worked and what did not. But the recipe's key ingredient is candor. And candor, though simple, is never easy.

Pixar director Andrew Stanton offers advice for how to choose people for an effective feedback group. They must, he says, "make you think smarter and put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time."6 Stanton's point about having people around who make us "think smarter" gets to the heart of why psychological safety is essential to innovation and progress. We can only think smarter if others in the room speak their minds.

For speaking up to become routine, psychological safety – and expectations about speaking up – must become institutionalized and systematized.

301.10 Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.

What they had discovered was that even the extremely smart, high-powered employees at Google needed a psychologically safe work environment to contribute the talents they had to offer. The team also found four other factors that helped explain team performance – clear goals, dependable colleagues, personally meaningful work, and a belief that the work has impact.

Speaking up is only the first step. The true test is how leaders respond when people actually do speak up. Stage setting and inviting participation indeed build psychological safety. But if a boss responds with anger or disdain as soon as someone steps forward to speak up about a problem, the safety will quickly evaporate. A productive response must be appreciative, respectful, and offer a path forward.

For over a century, we've focused too much on relentless execution and depended too much on fear to get things done. That era is over.

Psychological safety enables candor and openness and, as such, thrives in an environment of mutual respect. It means that people believe they can – and must – be forthcoming at work. In fact, psychological safety is conducive to setting ambitious goals and working toward them together. Psychological safety sets the stage for a more honest, more challenging, more collaborative, and thus also more effective work environment.

But the two most frequently mentioned reasons for remaining silent were one, fear of being viewed or labeled negatively, and two, fear of damaging work relationships.

Our survey measure rated three behavioral attributes of leadership inclusiveness: one, leaders were approachable and accessible; two, leaders acknowledged their fallibility; and three, leaders proactively invited input from other staff, physicians, and nurses. The concept of leadership inclusiveness thus captures situational humility coupled with proactive inquiry (discussed in the next section).

Another way to think about the voice-silence asymmetry is captured in the phrase "no one was ever fired for silence." The instinct to play it safe is powerful. People in organizations don't spontaneously take interpersonal risks. We don't want to stumble into a sacred cow. We can be completely confident that we'll be safe if we are silent, and we lack confidence that our voices will really make a difference – a voice inhibiting combination.