Amy Edmondson on L&D’s Role in Building Psychological Safety at Work

An Atana Exclusive

To build psychological safety in organizations, the right environment is critical—and learning and development (L&D) is the vital key in cultivating that positive atmosphere, says Amy Edmondson .

As Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, Edmondson is the go-to expert who coined the term team psychological safety while researching employee and business performance for her doctorate in 1999. She is consistently recognized with Thinkers50 top rankings and has received the organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award and Talent Award. A multi-published author and frequent contributor to academic and professional journals along with mainstream media, Edmondson’s latest book is Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.

In an exclusive conversation with Atana, Edmondson shared her insights on how L&D can enable the high levels of psychological safety needed to drive superior performance in today’s organizations.

Atana: What do you see as the most important roles or contributions of the L&D function in building and maintaining psychological safety in organizations?

AE: I think the most important role of the L&D function with respect to psychological safety is training people in people management skills, or interpersonal skills more generally. Because the interpersonal skills that we all need to really thrive and contribute at work start with those that can be categorized as learning skills.

In a way, psychological safety describes a learning environment. That sounds innocuous enough, but a learning environment doesn't happen easily, unless people are willing to come from a place of not knowing.

As humans, we spontaneously come from a place of knowing. We each have expertise, past experience, and so on that have given us good knowledge. But our cognition is wired such that we see the world through a place of knowing. We are under the illusion that we are seeing reality, rather than seeing reality through our own filters of expertise, past experience, and other biases.

It is not a given that people come to work thinking What can I learn? and What can I learn from my colleagues, my subordinates, my managers? But psychological safety and learning are mutually reinforcing.

The more I take the risk of learning and nothing bad happens to me, then the more willing I am to do it. And the more I learn, the more I am helping create a learning environment for others.

Atana: When you think about the ways you’re seeing learning functions support psychologically safe working environments in organizations, what’s working? And are there things L&D functions are doing now that you think they should stop or do differently?

AE: The first thing that comes to mind is how learning and development is framed. I think the biggest error is having it framed as either a support function or a siloed activity, when the most effective learning programs and skills training are integrated into every aspect of operations.

Most companies today are knowledge-intensive organizations. Their success depends on the use and creation of knowledge which more often than not is a collaborative, collective activity. That just means that learning has infiltrated into everything. It's in the factory, it's in marketing, it's everywhere.

It’s fine to have a learning and development function. If what it offers and does is going to help make the organization really succeed, then that function needs to be highly collaborative and working with—teaming up with—people from all over the organization.

It is easy to say that we’re partnering with others and to think that we've done it. But we have to be both listening and explaining, listening and offering, giving and taking—learning. I think that learning is at the very heart of being a good partner.

Atana: Most companies monitor organizational culture and workforce sentiment through employee engagement surveys. What questions do you advise including as a means of gauging the health of psychological safety in those organizations? Or is there a better way of assessing that?

AE: The first and most formal answer to that question is yes, surveys. There is a survey measure of psychological safety that is quite robust. The original measure has seven items. You really don't need all seven, it works quite well with as few as three or even fewer. The chances are pretty good that most employee surveys have a few items in them already.

Most likely, you are already asking questions like: It's easy to ask for help when I don't know what to do. Or, It is easy to speak up in my team. One of my favorite items that isn’t quite as widespread is: If you make a mistake it's not held against you. So, yes. The items are publicly available and can be used or incorporated, or you probably already have them.

The more informal answer is to get people managers in the habit of reflecting on this question:

What percent of what you're hearing in a given week is red versus green?

Red meaning problems (I need help. I disagree. Etc.) versus Green meaning no problems (All’s well. Everyone is agreeing. Etc.). In a complex, uncertain, volatile world, if everything is green it is probably not an accurate portrait of reality. So that then becomes a kind of implicit signal that psychological safety may not be where it needs to be.

Access Amy Edmondson's free personal and team psychological safety surveys.

Visit Atana.com to read the rest of the exclusive conversation Amy Edmondson had with Atana, including how she would advise L&D functions to get senior leadership buy-in on the need for culture change in organizations that lack psychological safety.