Ep. 18 – Amy Edmondson – Are you missing one of your most important jobs as a manager‪?‬ The Breakdown with Chris Clearfield

In this episode, I speak with Amy C. Edmondson—the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard School of Business—about the concept of psychological safety, which she explored in her 2019 book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. We also discussed the importance of proactively eliciting feedback from colleagues, coming to terms with our fallibilities, and discarding outmoded management behaviors that should be left in the twentieth century.

During our conversation, we talked about:

- The renewed interest in the concept of psychological safety
- J.D. Thompson’s notion of “reciprocal coordination needs”
- How knowledge work does not produce objective or mechanical feedback
- The effect of anxiety on knowledge workers’ performance
- Amy’s Harvard Business Review article “Speeding Up Team Learning”
- The mechanical language of management (which hasn’t caught up with the nature of work today)
- Henry Ford-like management behaviors that are outdated but, nevertheless, still used
- How to understand psychological safety by practicing it (instead of just thinking about it)
- Coming to terms with our own fallibility
- Amy and Chris’s appearance on For the Love of Work podcast
- Learning to “listen up,” not just “speak up”
- Applying the concept of psychological safety to parenting