CM 122: Amy Edmondson on Maximizing Team Performance
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Which work environments are the most effective at leveraging their people’s talents, skills and abilities?

Amy Edmondson, award-winning Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of the book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth, has spent her career trying to answer that question. What she’s learned is that organizations that prioritize psychological safety do it best.

Amy has written three other books, as well as over 70 articles and case studies, on leadership, teams, innovation, and organizational learning. Her findings have been corroborated by a number of studies, including Google’s recent multi-year research on its teams. In their quest to uncover which traits accounted for the highest-performing teams, Google learned that, among five important traits, psychological safety was the single most important.

As Amy explains in this interview: “Psychological safety isn’t a nice to have, it’s must have for excellence. Only in psychologically safe environments are we going to be able to energetically, and openly, and candidly work well together to get the job done.”

Episode Links

@AmyCEdmondson

Amy’s HBS faculty profile

Psychological safety

Edgar Schein

Warren Bennis

William Kahn

What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team by Charles Duhigg

Volkswagen emissions scandal

Curious Minds interview with Jason Fried of Basecamp

Inside the Pixar Brain Trust

The Leader’s Toolkit

Julianne Morath