The Fearless Organization

Key Concepts

Our challenges speaking up start with wanting to maintain our reputation with others

“Put another way, no one wakes up in the morning excited to go to work and look ignorant, incompetent, or disruptive. These are called interpersonal risks, and they are what nearly everyone seeks to avoid, not always consciously. In fact, most of us want to look smart, capable, or helpful in the eyes of others. No matter what our line of work, status, or gender, all of us learn how to manage interpersonal risk relatively early in life.” (p. 5)

Psychological safety is at the team level, not at the organization level

“The data are consistent in this simple but interesting finding: psychological safety seems to “live” at the level of the group. In other words, in the organization where you work, it's likely that different groups have different interpersonal experiences; in some, it may be easy to speak up and bring your full self to work. In others, speaking up might be experienced as a last resort – as it did in some of the patient-care teams I studied. That's because psychological safety is very much shaped by local leaders. (p. 11)

Questions to measure Psychological Safety

• If you make a mistake on this team, it is often held against you.

• Members of this team are able to bring up problems and tough issues.

• People on this team sometimes reject others for being different.

• It is safe to take a risk on this team.

• It is difficult to ask other members of this team for help.

• No one on this team would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts.

• Working with members of this team, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized.

Psychological Safety drives performance

“In any company confronting conditions that might be characterized as volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), psychological safety is directly tied to the bottom line. This is because employee observations, questions, ideas, and concerns can provide vital information about what's going on – in the market and in the organization. Add to that today's growing emphasis on diversity, inclusion, and belonging at work, and it becomes clear that psychological safety is a vital leadership responsibility.” (p. 26)

“Researchers Markus Baer and Michael Frese took this question up to the next level of analysis by showing that psychological safety increased company performance in a sample of 47 mid-size German firms in both industrial and services industries. Performance was measured in two ways: longitudinal change in return on assets (holding prior return on assets constant) and executive ratings of company goal achievement.26 All of the companies were engaged in process innovations. But process innovation efforts only led to higher performance when the organization had psychological safety. In short, process innovation can be a good way to boost firm performance, but a psychologically safe environment helps the investment pay off.” (p. 40)

Psychological Safety helps create a learning environment

“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. As a result, how psychologically safe a person feels strongly shapes the propensity to engage in learning behaviors, such as information sharing, asking for help, or experimenting. It also affects employee satisfaction. Hierarchy (or, more specifically, the fear it creates 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.” (p. 14)

“Taken-for-granted Rules for Voice at Work.”

• Don’t criticize something that the boss may have helped create.

• Don’t speak unless you have solid data.

• Don’t speak up if the boss’s boss is present.

• Don’t speak up in a group with anything negative about the work to prevent boss from losing face.

• Speaking up brings career consequences.

Psychological Safety helps teams get over other challenges in working effectively

“It's increasingly common for teams to have members working in different locations around the world who may not even have met in person. These so-called virtual teams face the related challenges of communicating through electronic media, managing national cultural diversity, coping with time zone differences, and dealing with shifting membership over time. Psychological safety has been shown to help such teams manage these challenges.” (p. 43)

“Teams are often put together to leverage diverse expertise. But too often, the challenge of integrating diverse knowledge, perspectives, and skills is underestimated, and the hoped-for synergy never materializes. One recent study showed that psychological safety can make or break achievement of team performance in diverse teams. The researchers surveyed master's students participating in 195 teams in a French university and found that expertise-diverse teams performed well when psychological safety was high and badly otherwise.” (p. 44)

Where safety is important, the lack of Psychological Safety is a risk

“In many workplaces, people see something physically unsafe or wrong and fear reporting it. Or they feel bullied and intimidated by someone but don't mention it to supervisors or counselors. This reticence unfortunately can lead to widespread frustration, anxiety, depression, and even physical harm. In short, we live and work in communities, cultures, and organizations in which not speaking up can be hazardous to human health. (p. 77)

Changing the culture is more complex than simply saying, “I want everyone to speak up”

“Exhorting people to speak up because it's the right thing to do relies on an ethical argument but is not a strategy for ensuring good outcomes. Insisting on acts of courage puts the onus on individuals without creating the conditions where the expectation is likely to be met.” (p. 82)

“A culture of silence can thus be understood as a culture in which the prevailing winds favor going along rather than offering one's concerns. It is based on the assumption that most people's voices do not offer value and thus will not be valued.” (p. 91)

“By now you're well aware that speaking up is easier said than done. There's no switch to flip that will instantaneously turn an organization accustomed to silence and fear into one where people speak candidly. Instead, creating a psychologically safe workplace, as we'll explore in depth in Chapter 7, requires a lot of effort to alter systems, structures, and processes. Ultimately, it means that deep-seated entrenched organizational norms and attitudes must change. And it begins with what I call “stage setting.” (p. 138)

“Speaking up is not a natural act in hierarchies. It must be nurtured. When it's not, the results can be catastrophic – for people and for the bottom line. But when it is nurtured, you can be certain that it is the product of deliberate, thoughtful effort.” (p. 146)

How to Set the Stage for Psychological Safety 

Reframing Failure: “Failure is a source of valuable data, but leaders must understand and communicate that learning only happens when there's enough psychological safety to dig into failure's lessons carefully.” (p. 159)

Clarifying the Need for Voice: “Framing the work also involves calling attention to other ways, beyond failure's prevalence, in which tasks and environments differ. Three especially important dimensions are uncertainty, interdependence, and what's at stake – all of which also have implications for failure (e.g. expectations about its frequency, its value, and its consequences).” (p. 162)

Motivating Effort: “Most leaders would be well served by stopping to reflect on the purpose that motivates them and makes the organization's work meaningful to the broader community. Having done so, they should ask themselves how often and how vigorously they are conveying this compelling rationale for the work to others. Our primal need to feel purpose and meaning in our lives, including at work, has been demonstrated by numerous studies in psychology.” (p. 167)

How to Invite Participation So People Respond

Situational Humility: “Humility is the simple recognition that you don't have all the answers, and you certainly don't have a crystal ball. Research shows that when leaders express humility, teams engage in more learning behavior.” (p. 168)

Proactive Inquiry: “The second tool for inviting participation is inquiry. Inquiry is purposeful probing to learn more about an issue, situation, or person. The foundational skill lies in cultivating genuine interest in others' responses.” (p. 170)

How to Respond Productively to Voice – No Matter Its Quality

Express Appreciation (p. 173)

Destigmatize Failure (p. 175)

Sanction Clear Violations (p. 178)

What's the Relationship Between Psychological Safety and Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging? 

“So let me start by saying that a workplace that is truly characterized by inclusion and belonging is a psychologically safe workplace.” (p. 201)

“Inclusion is more likely to function well with psychological safety because diverse perspectives are more likely to be heard. But it is not easy to feel a sense of belonging if one feels psychologically unsafe. As goal achievement becomes more subjective, psychological safety becomes more valuable; there is no way to know if you're achieving the goal without broad input from people in different groups.” (p. 201)

“At the same time, a singular focus on psychological safety is not a strategy for building diversity, inclusion, and belonging. These interrelated goals must go hand in hand. Great organizations will continue to attract, hire, and retain a diverse workforce because their leaders understand that that is where good ideas come from, and talented applicants will be drawn to work for those organizations. These leaders also recognize that hiring for diversity is not enough. They also must care about whether or not employees can bring their full selves to work – whether they can belong in the fullest sense to the community inside the organization. In short, leaders who care about diversity must care about psychological safety as well. It's that extra ingredient, as discussed in Chapter 2, that allows diversity to be leveraged.” (p. 201)

Quotables

“For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge! This means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas. In most workplaces today, people are holding back far too often – reluctant to say or ask something that might somehow make them look bad. To complicate matters, as companies become increasingly global and complex, more and more of the work is team-based. Today's employees, at all levels, spend 50% more time collaborating than they did 20 years ago. Hiring talented individuals is not enough. They have to be able to work well together.” (Introduction)

“That's why it's not enough for organizations to simply hire talent. If leaders want to unleash individual and collective talent, they must foster a psychologically safe climate where employees feel free to contribute ideas, share information, and report mistakes.” (Introduction)

“Whether explicitly or implicitly, when you're at work, you're being evaluated. In a formal sense, someone higher up in the hierarchy is probably tasked with assessing your performance. But informally, peers and subordinates are sizing you up all the time. Our image is perpetually at risk.” (p. 13)

“I do not mean to imply that psychological safety is all you need for high performance. Not even close. I like to say that psychological safety takes off the brakes that keep people from achieving what's possible. But it's not the fuel that powers the car.” (p. 21)

“In short, when companies rely on knowledge and collaboration for innovation and growth, whether or not to invest in building a climate of psychological safety is no longer a choice.” (p. 26)

“People at work are vulnerable to a kind of implicit logic in which safe is simply better than sorry.” (p. 32)

“First, many organizational leaders genuinely believe that “no news” means that things are going well. They assume that if people were struggling to implement some directive or another, they would speak up and push back. They take for granted that their own voices are welcome and fail to appreciate that others might feel unable to bring bad news up the chain of command.” (p. 56)

“We see here that explicit hierarchy and psychological safety are not mutually exclusive in a fearless organization. While the Bridgewater environment is clearly one where people must get used to speaking up often and openly, speaking up coexists with a hierarchy that is based in part on individual track records. But decision-making is not by consensus.” (p. 112)

“I don't mean to imply that working in a fearless organization takes more effort or a tremendously difficult undertaking. It doesn't. But initially, when we've been entrenched in fear and its attendant mental frameworks, it's not always obvious.” (p. 123)

“Framing the work is not something that leaders do once, and then it's done. Framing is ongoing. Frequently calling attention to levels of uncertainty or interdependence helps people remember that they must be alert and candid to perform well.” (p. 166)