Amy Edmonson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School, has written an important book – The Fearless Organization – Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth. The book makes a compelling case that it is the leader’s first and primary duty to create a workplace culture where it is psychologically safe for employees to work and collaborate. “Psychological safety is about candor and willingness to engage in productive conflict so as to learn from different points of view…In a psychologically safe climate, people will offer ideas and voice their concerns regardless of whether they tend toward introversion or extroversion”. Furthermore, “psychological safety relates to whether others will give you the benefit of the doubt when, for instance, you have asked for help or admitted a mistake”.
A culture where people are afraid to speak out is toxic and lowers employees’ performance. “When performance standards are high but psychological safety is low – a situation far too common in today’s workplace – employees are anxious about speaking up and both work quality and workplace safety suffer”. In contrast, “when standards and psychological safety are both high”, Edmonson calls this the “learning zone”, where “people can collaborate, learn from each other and get complex, innovative work done”.
Edmonson recognizes that “in many workplaces, people see something physically unsafe or wrong and fear reporting it…This reticence unfortunately can lead to widespread frustration, anxiety, depression and even physical harm”. Organizational cultures with low psychological safety suppress the voices of their workers and the consequences can be disastrous. Failing to speak up is a common cancer in today’s organizations. One of the chapters in the book cites NASA’s Columbia disaster and Japan’s “Great East Japanese Earthquake” as extreme examples of what can happen when there’s an environment where people don’t feel safe to speak out.
Edmonson writes that “On February 1, 2003, NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia experienced a catastrophic reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. All seven astronauts perished. Although space travel is obviously risky and fatal accidents seem part of the territory, this particular accident did not come “out of the blue””. Two weeks prior to launch, NASA engineer Rodney Rocha was watching some video launch-day footage and felt that something was amiss. “He thought a chunk of insulating foam might have fallen off the shuttle’s external tank and struck the left wing of the craft. As a result, Rocha “emailed his boss to see if he could get help authorizing a request for satellite images”. His boss denied the request. Rocha and his colleagues needed these images to “resolve his concern about possible damage”. In evaluating what went wrong, “a formal investigation by experts would later conclude that a large hole in the shuttle wing occurred when a briefcase-sized piece of foam hit the leading edge of the wing, causing the accident”. When asked at a press conference why he hadn’t spoken up, Rocha replied “I just couldn’t do it. I’m too low (in the organization)…and she (meaning Mission Management team Leader Linda Ham) is way up here, gesturing with his hand held above his head”.
The author concludes that “the psychological experience of having something to say yet feeling literally unable to do so is painfully real for many employees and very common in organizational hierarchies, like that of NASA in 2003”.
“On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake occurred off the northeastern coast of Japan. The quake produced tsunami waves up to 45 feet that struck the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. The earthquake itself killed an estimated 15,000 people but “it’s now universally accepted that the corollary disaster at the nuclear power plant was in fact preventable”. An independent investigation concluded that “the accident was clearly manmade” and the “direct causes of the accident were all foreseeable”. In 2006, professor Katsuhiko Ishibashi, an expert on seismicity and plate tectonics, “proposed that the group review the standards for surveying active fault lines and criticized the government’s record of allowing the construction of power plants, like Fukushima Daiichi, in areas with the potential for such high seismic activity”. He published a report that warned, “unless radical seeps are taken now to reduce the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to earthquakes, Japan could experience a true nuclear catastrophe in the near future, including one caused by tsunamis”. Ishibashi’s warnings were dismissed. Nuclear energy was a strategic priority for the Japanese government and so “the government and industry culture had not given due credence to the gravity of existing threats”. In fact, the culture at the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) did not promote psychological safety and so not a single person at the company spoke out. The rest is history.
Edmonson points out that “In 2013, a Stanford study concluded that a mere $50 million could have financed a wall high enough to prevent the disaster. Yet, the case shows how very challenging it could be to be heard – to have voice welcomed, explored and sometimes acted upon – when the dominant culture does not want to hear the message”.
Yes, the above examples are extreme but The Fearless Organization makes a convincing case that creating cultures where employees feel psychologically safe to speak out is paramount, not only to prevent mistakes, but to drive learning, innovation and growth.