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3 episodes with fearless organization
2 episodes with fearless organization
3 episodes with fearless organization
2 episodes with fearless organization
2 episodes with fearless organization
2 episodes with fearless organization
2 episodes with fearless organization
2 episodes with fearless organization
Cristina Cranga: Why Nice Teams Still Fail and the Power of Honest Conversations Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "Sometimes you can change people by only listening to them. Not giving advice—don't become an advice monster." - Cristina Cranga Cristina shares her experience of sensing that something was off with a team but being unable to pinpoint exactly what it was. Instead of jumping to conclusions, she paused, reflected, and created an intervention plan centered on one thing: starting honest conversations. Through one-on-one discussions with team members, she discovered that the problem wasn't performance or process—it was something deeper. Expectations weren't aligned with reality, and frustration stemmed from a company culture that didn't offer psychological safety. Cristina introduces the concept of the "advice monster"—someone who constantly tells others what they should do rather than simply listening. She emphasizes that as Scrum Masters, we need to recognize the three layers of our influence: control, influence, and no control. Even when we can't solve problems, being present and listening can create profound change. The key is self-awareness of our own vulnerability as humans and compassion for others who might be at 80% or 10% of their mental health and energy on any given day. In this segment, we talk about the importance of psychological safety and active listening in team dynamics. Self-reflection Question: How often do you enter conversations with the intention of truly understanding rather than solving, and what might you discover if you listened more and advised less? Featured Book of the Week: The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson Cristina chose The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson as her most influential book because it explains what Scrum Masters see every day but struggle to name. The book provides a mental model for why teams don't speak up and how to influence behavior without forcing it. As Cristina puts it: "She explains why nice teams still fail. Silence is not always alignment and politeness—most of the time, it's distrust." The book repositions the Scrum Master role from someone focused on ceremonies to someone who creates the conditions for psychological safety. It also explains why process alone doesn't fix everything and helps Scrum Masters measure what really matters in a team. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]
🧭 REBEL Rundown 📌 Key Points 🧠 We don’t know what we don’t know: Low experience can inflate confidence; true expertise usually brings humble certainty.🏥 ED relevance is universal: From central lines to transvenous pacing, over- or under-confidence shows up at every level—intern to seasoned attending.🧩 Metacognition matters: Accurate self-assessment is a clinical skill; reflection + feedback loops keep us calibrated.🛠️ Practice beats bravado: Skill decay is real; deliberate practice and HALO (high-acuity, low-occurrence) refreshers protect patients.🤝 Psychological safety ≠ niceties: “Confident humility” enables questions, feedback, and better resuscitation decisions—especially under uncertainty. Click here for Direct Download of the Podcast. 📝 Introduction Welcome to REBEL MIND—Mastering Internal Negativity during Difficulty. In this series, we turn the same critical lens REBEL EM uses for literature inward—into mindset, leadership, and psychological safety—so we can deliver better care outward to patients and teams.In this episode and blog post, hosts Mark Ramzy and Kim Bambach (Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, The Ohio State University) explore a deceptively simple question: How accurately can we assess our own performance? The answer hinges on a classic cognitive bias that touches all of us in emergency medicine. 🧾 Paper Kruger J, Dunning D. Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1999 Dec;7 PMID: 10626367 Cognitive Question How accurately can we assess our own performance? 💭 What is the Dunning-Kruger Effect? The Dunning–Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias where:Lower-skill individuals tend to overestimate their competence, andHigher-skill individuals often underestimate theirs.Translation for the busy clinician: early on the learning curve, confidence spikes (“Mount Stupid”) because we don’t yet see the complexity. As experience accrues, confidence dips (“Valley of Despair”) with growing awareness, then rises again—grounded in nuance and humility.Key insight: True expertise ≠ louder certainty; it’s often quieter, more curious, and more collaborative. How It Applies to the Emergency Department Procedures (e.g., central lines, TVP): Watching a 5-minute video creates “I got this” energy—until the wire won’t pass, the patient thrashes, or you hit carotid. Competence includes troubleshooting in context.Skill Decay is Inevitable: If you haven’t done a chest tube or a TVP in months, you’re not as sharp as last time. Without deliberate refreshers, you drift below the safe-performance line.Everyone’s a Novice Somewhere: New disease entities, evolving algorithms, new tools (POCUS, decision support) mean even attendings routinely re-enter novice zones.Feedback Blind Spots: Lower performers can both overestimate their skills and resist feedback—while many high performers (particularly women, per discussed literature) undervalue their abilities.Culture is Clinical: The ED demands decisive action amid uncertainty. Psychological safety + confident humility lets teams surface alternative diagnoses, challenge momentum, and correct course fast. ⏩Immediate Action Steps for Your Next Shift Run a 60-second debrief on two casesWhat went well? What would I do differently next time? Write one improvement you’ll test today.Play “What if the opposite were true?”Anchored on “lumbosacral strain”, Ask, What if fever/incontinence appears? How does that change my path?Solicit 360° micro-feedbackAsk a nurse, resident, and peer: “One thing I did well; one thing to improve.” Say “thank you,” not “but.”Schedule a HALO refresher this weekPick one high-acuity, low-occurrence procedure (TVP, cric, thoracotomy). Do a 10-minute mental model + equipment walk-through; book sim time if available.Adopt a pre-procedure pauseIf X goes wrong, I’ll do Y. Name two likely failure modes (e.g., “wire won’t advance,” “delirium/agitation”) and your first corrective step.Language shift on shiftSwap “I’m sure” → “I’m reasonably confident, here’s my plan B.” Invite input: “What am I missing?” Conclusion The Dunning–Kruger Effect isn’t a moral failing; it’s a predictable human pattern that every clinician rides—often multiple times per day in the ED. The antidote is metacognition: routine reflection, explicit debiasing, deliberate practice, and feedback within a psychologically safe culture. 🚨 Clinical Bottom Line Competence is quiet and curious. The more we know, the more we recognize what we don’t—and the better we become at caring for patients and each other. Further Reading Dunning D, Kruger J. Unskilled and Unaware of It (1999). Classic paper introducing the effect.Croskerry P. Cognitive forcing strategies in clinical decision-making.Kahneman D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Heuristics & biases in high-stakes decisions.Ericsson KA. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Deliberate practice & skill acquisition.Edmondson AC. The Fearless Organization. Psychological safety and learning culture in teams. Meet the Authors Mark Ramzy, DO Co-Editor-in-Chief Cardiothoracic Intensivist and EM Attending RWJBH / Rutgers Health, Newark, NJ Kim Bambach, MD Podcasting Manager Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine Ohio State University The post REBEL MIND – The Dunning Kruger Effect: Why Looking Inward Improves Patient Care appeared first on REBEL EM - Emergency Medicine Blog.
Click HERE for Amy's LinkedIn profileClick HERE to purchase The Fearless OrganizationClick HERE to purchase TeamingClick HERE to download "What is a Fearless Organization."Check out these other episodes on Psychological Safety:Aaron Dignan - Brave New WorkJohn and Sara - Psychological SafetyJohn and Sara - Above the Line, Below the LineHERE ARE MORE RESOURCES FROM REAL GOOD VENTURES:Never miss a good opportunity to learn from a bad boss...Click HERE to get your very own Reference Profile. We use The Predictive Index as our analytics platform so you know it's validated and reliable. Your Reference Profile informs you of your needs, behaviors, and the nuances of what we call your Behavioral DNA. It also explains your work style, your strengths, and even the common traps in which you may find yourself. It's a great tool to share with friends, family, and co-workers.Follow us on Instagram HERE and make sure to share with your network!Follow us on X HERE and make sure to share with your network!Provide your feedback HERE, please! We love to hear from our listeners and welcome your thoughts and ideas about how to improve the podcast and even suggest topics and ideas for future episodes.Visit us at www.realgoodventures.com. We are a Talent Optimization consultancy specializing in people and business execution analytics. Real Good Ventures was founded by Sara Best and John Broer who are both Certified Talent Optimization Consultants with over 50 years of combined consulting and organizational performance experience. Sara is also certified in EQi 2.0. RGV is also a Certified Partner of Line-of-Sight, a powerful organizational health and execution platform. RGV is known for its work in leadership development, executive coaching, and what we call organizational rebuild where we bring all our tools together to diagnose an organization's present state and how to grow toward a stronger future state. Send us a text
Is 'Move Fast & Break Things' just permission to be reckless?Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Consultant Om Patel as they examine Mark Zuckerberg's (in)famous mantra and reveal how it may have metastasized from breaking code to breaking laws, teams, and even contributing to real human harm.Watch or listen as we explore the critical dimensions of this philosophy, including:BREAKING SOFTWARE: How the original meaning of 'break things' (emphasizing first-mover advantage) evolved from rapid iteration of code to justifying regulatory evasion and monopolistic behavior.BREAKING TEAMS: Using Harvard research that shows 'always-on' cultures decrease productivity by 20% and spike turnover to discuss how intensity without recovery is just exploitation (and what to do instead).BREAKING PEOPLE: Discussing the human costs of unchecked speed, from Facebook's alleged role in the Myanmar genocide to Uber's systemic harassment culture to Theranos's fraud.LEARNING OVER SPEED: We discuss Eric Ries's seminal work: The Lean Startup and how it went out of it's way to emphasize learning velocity over shipping velocity. WRONG (we guess)!PUSHING BACK (WITHOUT GETTING FIRED): We brainstorm for frameworks to use for challenging speed-obsessed leadership, including trade-off and discuss real-world experiences.Whether you're running a business, a product manager, or a team member just trying to keep up, this episode arms you with arguments and frameworks to advocate for ethical innovation.What's your take on 'move fast' culture? Have you seen it more of a positive or negative?#ProductManagement #TechEthics #AgileLeadershipREFERENCESMove Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin (2017), Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power Greed and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn Williams, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (2011), The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson (2018), Susan Fowler's blog 'Reflecting on One Very Very Strange Year at Uber' (February 2017), UN Human Rights Council 2018 report on Facebook and Myanmar, Harvard Business School research on always-on cultures (2009), Agile Podcast E22 - Interview with a Scrum Trainer: Fred Mastropasqua (August 2021), Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink, The Social Network (film, 2010)LINKSYouTube https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagileSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596Website: https://arguingagile.com/
In this episode of the podcast Rethinking Leadership, Roemer Visser speaks with Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong, about what is required of leaders in a world defined by uncertainty and interdependence. They discuss how many of today's senior leaders were shaped in environments where problems were predictable and expertise could reliably determine the “right” answer. That era, Amy notes, has passed. “The taken-for-granted mental models that many leaders grew up with just don't work in a highly uncertain context.”
Learn more about Michael Wenderoth, Executive Coach: www.changwenderoth.comWhen does your influence cross the ethical line at work? What sends people to the “dark side” that causes personal pain and derails careers – and how to make sure that never happens to you? Richard Bistrong can tell you from personal experience: He went to prison for bribery. And if you think that can't happen to you (most people don't), or you've felt the pressure to cut corners to advance at work (most people do) -- then you really need this episode. Richard Bistrong, CEO of Front-Line Anti-Bribery, wants to make sure you navigate tough ethical decisions that can arise in the ambitious pursuit of your career, getting things done, or influencing others. He and host Michael Wenderoth discuss what blinded Richard and practical steps that you – and your organization – should put in place to stay out of trouble, and smartly accelerate your career. SHOW NOTES:Risk will sneak up on you when you think: “That would never happen to me”Why Richard was sent to prison – and what that was likeHow Richard accidentally started Front-Line Anti-Bribery LLC, to address an underserved “middle”Cheating is always a choiceThe call Richard never madeThe case of the Dutch police official: How conspiracies and bribery usually occurSunshine, chocolate and tolls vs. “commiting transnational crime”: How euphemisms and “non-terms” don't sound so bad lead to moral fadingWhen an internal compliance officer needs to walk around with body guards – in their OWN companyAre people inherently good – or evil?If Richard could go back and make the call, how would he have done it?Not a “one and done”: Proactive outreach and what the company could have done“The voice of business”: How company's can get over the first awkward call, by using open ended questions – and making sure those calls don't just come from the Compliance officerTraining vs Preparation, Wall posters vs Operationalizing through Structures and Governance: What most companies missHow to identify your blind spotsAssembling “truth tellers” to manage conformity and your own confirmation bias“Ethical mistakes age like milk, not like wine”How to know when you are crossing the lineNavigating the “deep grey” when it comes to influenceRichard's safety check: Are you becoming somebody else's ambassador?Tips on how to assess a company's ethics – “You can always walk out, but you don't always have to walk in”“The lack of competing narratives” and other red flags that Richard looks forChanges in how the FCPA is being enforcedThe question Michael use to pose to his sales teamHow Richard finds foreign (non-US) countries approach business ethics differently from their US counterpartsFocus on the frozen middle in organizations BIO AND LINKS:Richard Bistrong is the CEO of Front-Line Anti-Bribery, a consultancy focusing on real-world anti-bribery, ethics, and compliance challenges. His expertise is in Ethics, Compliance and Ethical Decision Making Under Pressure. He hopes to share the benefits of ethical business practices by the identification of blind spots in decision making. His work has appeared in Fast Company and The Harvard Business Review. He has also been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times. You can connect with Richard on LinkedIn and follow him on Instagram. Richard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbistrong/Richard's website: www.richardbistrong.comRichard is on Instagram at @richardbistrong (and on YouTube, X under his name; and on Facebook under Front-Line Anti-Bribery.His TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDnGVxAc7ikDorie Clark's book Reinventing You: https://dorieclark.com/reinventingyou/Ron Carucci “How to Fix Our Trust Recesssion” (EP25 on 97% Effective): https://tinyurl.com/39cdawcpSpeak Out, Listen Up (Book by Megan Reitz and John Higgings): https://a.co/d/56zuYWxThe concept of “dangerous silence” in Amy Edmonson's book, The Fearless Organization: https://a.co/d/08U3fDM“Why High-Performers are More Subject to Ethical Risks” (Forbes): https://tinyurl.com/5yp558vw“How to Approach Business Ethics When Global Consensus Breaks Down” (HBR article by Richard and Anna Romberg): https://hbr.org/2025/03/how-to-approach-business-ethics-as-global-consensus-breaks-downMichael's Award-Winning book, Get Promoted: What Your Really Missing at Work That's Holding You Back https://tinyurl.com/453txk74Watch this episode on video, 97% Effective Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@97PercentEffectiveAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
In this dynamic episode of The ASHHRA Podcast, hosts Luke Carignan and Bo Brabo chat with Maxine Carrington, Chief People Officer, and Matt Kurth, Deputy Chief People Officer at Northwell Health. Fresh from the ASHHRA Executive Summit in Savannah, they explore how Northwell—a powerhouse with 104,000 employees, 28 hospitals, and recent mergers like Nuvance Health—navigates massive changes while fostering a bold, people-first culture.Maxine and Matt discuss leadership transitions (including CEO Michael Dowling's retirement), Epic's largest-ever EMR rollout, UKG implementation, and digital transformation. They emphasize Northwell's mission as a "movement" to raise health standards, driven by curiosity, humility, and innovation. From HR overhauls to psychological safety via book clubs on Amy Edmondson's "The Fearless Organization," they share strategies for employee engagement and whole-family well-being.Key takeaways for healthcare HR leaders:Bold Leadership & Succession: Manage executive retirements with advisory roles and knowledge transfer for seamless transitions.Cultural Innovation: Embrace "just a little unsatisfied" mindset to drive progress; learn from failures and external partners.Employee Experience Elevation: Use AI, data nudges, and family-inclusive benefits to support whole-person health and proactive care.HR Transformation: Shift priority-setting to customers; align OKRs with operations for impactful solutions.Community Impact: Extend wellness education to households; incentivize healthy actions to catch issues early.Discover how Northwell turns challenges into opportunities, inspiring HR pros to demand innovation and accountability. A must-listen for those in healthcare leadership, employee well-being, and organizational culture.From Our Sponsors...Optimize Pharmacy Benefits with RxBenefitsElevate your employee benefits while managing costs. Did you know hospital employees fill 25% more prescriptions annually than other industries? Ensure cost-effective, high-quality pharmacy plans by leveraging your hospital's own pharmacies. Discover smarter strategies with RxBenefits.Learn More here - https://rxbene.fit/3ZaurZNStreamline HR Compliance with oneBADGEhealthcareSimplify screening, credentialing, and compliance for healthcare HR. oneBADGEhealthcare from ISB Global offers a tailored solution to keep your workforce compliant and efficient. Built for healthcare leaders, it's your all-in-one compliance tool.Get Started here - https://isbglobalservices.com/onebadgeunitedstates/ashhra/ Support the show
What if failure wasn't the end but the beginning? Dr. Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Fearless Organization and The Right Kind of Wrong, says that failure is not proof you're falling behind – it's proof you've taken a risk. And if you set it up right, it can actually be the key to progress.In this season finale of This is Small Business, host Andrea Marquez sits down with Amy to explore why our relationship with failure shapes how far we can go as entrepreneurs. From the science of “psychological safety” to the three types of failure – basic, complex, and intelligent – Amy offers a crash course on how to fail the right way, what to learn from it, and why the best entrepreneurs are the ones who stumble, recover, and keep moving forward.If you've ever worried about making mistakes or held yourself back from starting and taking risks because of the fear of failing, this conversation will help you reframe failure as momentum, not defeat. Got a bold leap of your own? Share it with us in an Apple Podcasts review, Spotify comment, or email us at thisissmallbusiness@amazon.com – you might hear it in a future episode.In this episode, you'll hear: (1:45) Why do conversations and team dynamics matter so much for success? Amy explains how the quality of everyday interactions shapes an organization's performance.(3:43) What is psychological safety in the workplace and why should entrepreneurs care about it? Amy explains why people need to feel safe to speak up, ask questions, and admit mistakes in order for teams to learn and innovate.(5:40) How do you actually create psychological safety on your team? Amy shares a simple three-step framework: set the stage, proactively invite voices in, and respond with appreciation.(9:03) What's the real difference between a mistake and a failure? Amy breaks down her three types of failure – basic, complex, and intelligent – and shows how intelligent failures are actually discoveries that fuel growth and innovation.(12:57) Can failure actually lead to breakthrough ideas? Amy tells the story of her first big research failure and how it unexpectedly led to her pioneering work on psychological safety.(15:49) How do you make failure safe without encouraging the wrong kind of failure? Amy explains why innovation requires failure – but only in the right contexts – and shares three dimensions every entrepreneur should check first: human safety, economic cost, and reputational risk.(18:34) How do you know if a failure is one you can come back from? Amy shares her four criteria for an “intelligent failure” that could help you improve without causing lasting damage.(20:19) Do successful people fail more often than the rest of us? Amy explains why the best in any field – from science to sports – tend to have more failures, not fewer.(22:41) How can entrepreneurs stop being afraid of failure? Amy explains why nobody's in the “perfection business” and how reframing setbacks as “catch and correct” moments can build resilience.
Sepideh ist Psychologin und Beraterin für Organisationsentwicklung. Im Podcast sprechen wir über psychologische Sicherheit und wie Du sie förderst, um Innovation und Veränderung wirksam zu gestalten.ShownotesVideo "Amy Edmondson: Creating Psychological Safety at Work"Buch "The Fearless Organization" von Amy EdmondsonWebsite von Sepideh Powerhouse. Empowering Humans.www.dno.de
Host: Dr. Ashlee Gethner, LCSW – Child of a Police Officer Jennifer Woosley Saylor, LPCC S – Child of a Police Officer Guest: Chief Deputy Justin Miller, Kenosha Sheriff’s Office Episode Overview: In this insightful episode, Ashlee and Jennifer, welcome Chief Deputy Justin Miller from the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office. Chief Deputy Miller shares his journey from serving as a Navy psychiatric technician to law enforcement leadership, opening up about how personal experiences and organizational gaps in mental health support shaped his mission to prioritize officer wellness. Key Topics Covered The Struggle for Support: Chief Deputy Miller recounts moments where, due to budget cuts, Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) and peer support teams were unavailable, leaving officers without organizational resources for mental well-being. Personal Impact: He discusses the life events that first drew his attention to the importance of officer mental health, from the suicide of a significant other to his own family losses, and the organizational culture’s lack of compassion. Culture Shift in Law Enforcement: The conversation delves into the challenges of changing a deeply ingrained “rub dirt on it” mindset, and how being promoted doesn’t always mean having a real voice for change. Innovative Wellness Initiatives: Chief Deputy Miller outlines current strategies in his department. Breaking the Stigma: Chief Deputy Miller explains how officer education, transparency, and leadership modeling are critical for long-term cultural change. Family & Community Impact: The importance of involving officer families in wellness programs—offering access to resources, education, and community-building events. Advice for Leaders & Providers: For law enforcement administrators - Be humble, open to new ideas, prioritize serving your people, and build cultures where feedback leads to actionable change. For mental health professionals - There’s a pressing need for more providers trained to understand first responder culture, as well as resources tailored for both officers and their families. From Struggle to Success: Chief Deputy Miller shares that Kenosha has achieved zero vacancies in both patrol and corrections—a rarity in the current law enforcement climate—and credits a strong, invested culture of wellness and leadership development. Resources Mentioned: Cortico Wellness App Smart Dollar (Ramsey Solutions) The Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmondson The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni If this episode resonated with you or if you have stories to share about living with a first responder, reach out to Ashlee and Jennifer on their social media platforms! Thank you for tuning in! Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review "When The Call Hits Home" on your favorite podcast platforms! Follow Us: - Facebook: When The Call Hits Home Podcast - Instagram: @whenthecallhitshome - Whenthecallhitshome.com --- This podcast does not contain medical / health advice. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment and should not be relied on as health or personal advice. The information contained in this podcast is for general information purposes only. The information is provided by Training Velocity LLC and while we endeavour to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the Podcast or the information, products, services, or related graphics contained in the podcast for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is strictly at your own risk. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE NOR LIABLE FOR ANY ADVICE, COURSE OF TREATMENT, DIAGNOSIS OR ANY OTHER INFORMATION, SERVICES OR PRODUCTS THAT YOU OBTAIN THROUGH THIS PODCAST. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before undertaking a new health care regimen, and never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast.
Dr. Amy Edmondson is the Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, a world-renowned expert on psychological safety, and the pioneering researcher who first identified and defined the concept. She is a #1 ranked management thinker by Thinkers50 and the award-winning author of several groundbreaking books including "The Fearless Organization" and her latest work "Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive." Her research on team learning, psychological safety, and organizational innovation has transformed how leaders approach building high-performing teams across industries worldwide.Questions for personal reflection & journalingWhat specific moments in your life have shaped your relationship with failure, and how might these experiences be limiting your growth today? Consider the learning opportunities you might be missing by avoiding certain risks.What elements create psychological safety for you in your most comfortable environments, and how might you recreate these conditions in teams you lead or participate in?How do you typically respond when someone shares a mistake or failure with you, and what would a more curiosity-driven response look like in practice?What language patterns do you use when addressing setbacks with others, and how might you better separate events (failures, mistakes, losses) from a person's identity or worth?What specific questions could you introduce in your next team meeting to invite diverse perspectives, and how might these questions shift your team's dynamic toward greater psychological safety?Download my FREE 60 minute Mindset Masterclass at www.djhillier.com/masterclassDownload my FREE top 40 book list written by Mindset Advantage guests: www.djhillier.com/40booksSubscribe to our NEW YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@MindsetAdvantagePurchase a copy of my book: https://a.co/d/bGok9UdFollow me on Instagram: @deejayhillierConnect with me on my website: www.djhillier.com
Guests: Teresa Schwab & Phyllis Collins (Ad Astra Coach Alliance)Host: Andy HuckabaIn this episode, we explore the hidden dynamics of trust in the workplace—how to define it, assess it, build it, and repair it. Teresa Schwab and Phyllis Collins join Andy Huckaba for a deep and thoughtful discussion that blends personal insight, leadership experience, and practical advice. Together, they examine how trust and psychological safety relate, how power and past experiences shape trust, and what leaders can do to create environments where trust can thrive.Defining Trust and Psychological SafetyTrust = Expectations of othersPsychological Safety = Feeling safe to take interpersonal risksThey are distinct but interconnectedHow Trust is BuiltThrough consistent, congruent, and authentic behaviorSmall “marble jar” transactions over time (inspired by Brené Brown)Reliability, presence, and alignment with stated valuesThe Role of Power and ExperiencePeople carry stories about authority into workspacesTrust in a role can be eroded by past negative experiences—even before personal interactions occurLeaders must separate themselves from the role and model trustworthy behaviorPractical Tips for Leaders to Build TrustCommunicate clearly and consistentlyInvite genuine feedback and respond constructivelyShow vulnerability and take ownership when mistakes happenLive out values and model integrity in decision-making“Trust is invisible when it's working—and painfully obvious when it's not.”“If you spend more marbles than you have, you damage the relationship.”“Power doesn't automatically get you trust—it might get you obedience.”“People don't distrust the person—they distrust the role based on past experience.”Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization.Covey, S. M. R. (2006). The Speed of Trust.Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust.Brené Brown – Dare to Lead and Daring GreatlyAmy Cuddy – Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges“Trust is the conduit of influence, and the only way to establish real trust is by being present.”Visit: www.adastracoachalliance.comFollow us on LinkedIn and your favorite podcast platform for future episodes and resources.We welcome your feedback and topic suggestions!Explore more content and join the conversation online using these hashtags:#TrustInTheWorkplace#PsychologicalSafety#LeadershipDevelopment#AuthenticLeadership#ExecutiveCoaching#BuildingTrust#TeamCulture#PeopleFirst#InclusiveLeadership#GrowthBeyondBoundariesTag us @AdAstraCoachAlliance and share your thoughts or takeaways from this episode!Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):License code: 1AF9FYKW2TNQNGG1
In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Jim Detert, John L. Colley Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business and author of Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work. In this conversation, Jim Detert shares how we can become more courageous by developing our courage capabilities. Jim Detert also shares how leaders can nurture a psychologically safe organizational culture, enabling and encouraging more courageous interactions and decisions at work. Some highlights:-Why attributing courage just to historical figures can be counterproductive -The importance of being more courageous and how to develop our courage muscle-Jim Detert on the benefits of courage at work-How leaders can create a psychologically safe environment that encourages team members to speak up and contribute their best at workMentioned:-Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School and author of Fearless Organization and Creating Psychological Safety-Vanessa Bohns (Listen to Partnering Leadership conversation with Vanessa Bohns)-Gary Bolles (Listen to Partnering Leadership conversation with Gary Bolles)-Difficult Conversations by Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone, and Sheila Heen-Radical Candor by Kim Scott-Giving Voice to Values by Mary C. Gentile -The Silent Language Of Leaders by Carol GoldmanConnect with Jim Detert:Jim Detert WebsiteChoosing Courage on AmazonJim Detert on FacebookJim Detert on LinkedIn Connect with Mahan Tavakoli: Mahan Tavakoli Website Mahan Tavakoli on LinkedIn Partnering Leadership Website
Psychological safety at work is one of those topics everyone talks about but few truly understand. Today, we're joined by Hord Wbi, a driving force behind Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Rabobank. He's sharing how they're not just talking about change but embedding it into the heart of their workplace culture. If you've ever wondered how to take DEI from theory to action, this episode is for you.Rebels, lets do this! Highlights:(3:33) Rabobank's Mission and Philosophy(12:00) The Three Ships: Mentorship, Sponsorship, and Allyship(16:38) Challenges and Progress in DEI(20:20) Supporting Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)(29:10) Behavioral and Structural Inclusion(34:03) Psychological Safety at RabobankFind out more:The Fearless Organization by Amy EdmonsonTake the Aurora 360 Quiz: How Effective Is Your Company's Wellbeing Strategy? Click HereConnect with us here:Website: aurorawellnessgroup.co.ukLinkedIn: NgoziLinkedIn: ObehiAurora Company Profile 2024Book a Call here
"Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth"
What makes a team intelligent? Brian and Linda Rising explore the surprising factors that foster group intelligence, from psychological safety to diversity, backed by groundbreaking research from MIT and Google. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with Agile thought leader Linda Rising to explore the concept of group intelligence. They dive into what makes teams intelligent, discussing the importance of diversity, psychological safety, and social perceptiveness. Using research from MIT and Google, Linda also highlights how storytelling and a growth mindset can enhance team dynamics, leading to more effective and innovative collaboration. References and resources mentioned in the show: Linda Rising Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas by Mary Lynn Manns & Linda Rising MIT Center For Collective Intelligence Project Aristotle The Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmonson Amy Edmonson’s TED Talks 3 ways to better connect with your coworkers - Mark T. Rivera’s TED Talk Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® Agile For Leaders Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Linda Rising is an internationally recognized consultant, speaker, and author with a Ph.D. in object-based design metrics. Known for her expertise in agile development, retrospectives, and the intersection of neuroscience and software, Linda has authored five books and numerous articles. In 2020, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Agility Forum for her impactful contributions to the industry. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back here with you for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I am with you as I always am, Brian Milner. And I wanted to introduce you today to someone I think you're really gonna enjoy here on this episode. I have the one and only Linda Rising with me. Linda, thank you so much for coming on. Linda Rising (00:09) Okay. It is my pleasure, Brian. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's a beautiful day here in Nashville, Tennessee. Brian (00:32) In Nash Vegas, yes. I actually spent a couple years in Nash Vegas. So I know that area back in the day, back in the day, because I worked at Opryland. So that'll tell you how long ago it was. Yeah, back in the dark times, right? But Linda, for those, if anyone who might not be aware, Linda is an author. She is... Linda Rising (00:33) Yeah! wow okay Brian (00:58) really what people would call an agile luminary. She has been involved with this movement for quite a while and has really, I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say shaped the conversation around this a lot with her research and other things that she's provided. we wanted to have her on because she, well, because it's Linda Rising, right? We wanted to have her on for that, but. Recently, she spoke at the Scrum Gathering, the regional Scrum Gathering that took place in Stockholm, and her topic just sounded really fascinating. I thought it would be fascinating for us to talk about. It was a topic of group intelligence. So Linda, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there like me that when they heard that the first time thought, I have no idea what that means. What does group intelligence mean? Linda Rising (01:43) Yeah. Actually, normally when I do anything, give a keynote or an interview on a podcast or the interviewer or the person who's inviting me will say, what would you like to talk about? That's what you did. What would you like to talk about with the idea that I could come up with a list of things I was interested in that I wanted to talk about because I knew something about it. Brian (02:09) Yep, it's true. Linda Rising (02:20) But in this case, no, it was, want you to be the opening keynote for this amazing gathering in Stockholm. and by the way, we want you to talk about group intelligence. So. That was about a year ago and I thought to myself, I don't know anything about, well, maybe I do. Maybe I do know something about group intelligence. But I have spent the past year getting ready for that talk. It was just a few weeks ago and along the way, what I found was it pulled together the research around this topic. pulled together a lot of things that I have been thinking about and it is still not over. I had to give that talk, there was a date for that, but now there are little threads that, as you say, I'm following those down various rabbit holes because they're connected to other things that I'm interested in. So this turned out to be, even though I didn't pick it and I didn't know a whole lot about it, It's turned out to be a great introduction to a different way of thinking. So we know what intelligence is, I think. Don't you? Do you know you have an idea? And aren't you intelligent? Brian (03:41) That's so awesome. Well, that's a quite a loaded question, right? Linda Rising (03:53) Of course you are and and so are our listeners our listeners are intelligent and what's interesting is that the psychologists who measure that They don't really have a definition for intelligence. What they do is they can test for it So have you ever had you know an intelligence test You know, an IQ test. Have you? Have you ever had one? Brian (04:25) You know what, I don't think I ever have, but I know my wife has, my daughters have, I'm very familiar with them, but I can't point back to one to say, hey, I know what my score was. Linda Rising (04:28) I'll bet you have. Well, sometimes you're given that test at a particular point, maybe in high school, and they didn't tell you that it was an intelligence test. You just took it along with the other battery of tests that you were taking at the time. And maybe they didn't tell you, you have an IQ of 145. They didn't tell you how smart you were. Brian (04:47) Yeah. Linda Rising (05:06) but somebody, somewhere, somehow along the way, they did. They measured it. And that's without having a definition for whatever it is. So what that test does is it says you're pretty good at solving a bunch of problems. And that's what the test is. Brian (05:17) That's amazing. Linda Rising (05:32) it asks you to look at some math problems, logic problems, spatial problems, different kinds of problems, and you either solve them pretty well or not so well, and when they are finished with that, that score on that test says something about how well you do at solving those problems. And that's what they're calling intelligence. Brian (06:03) I think I see where you're going with this because to me, if we're going to try to be very precise with words on that, I would say that sounds more like education. If I know how to solve a particular kind of math problem, that's because I've been educated to learn that. It's not a measure of my... Linda Rising (06:13) Yeah. Yep, yep. And so those tests, yeah, those tests do have a bias. They're biased toward people who have a certain kind of education biased against people who maybe didn't have that kind of education. Also, it doesn't even begin to talk about music. Here I am in Music City. Doesn't talk about musical talent. Brian (06:43) Yeah Linda Rising (06:46) It doesn't talk about your ability to perform, say, some sports activity, whether you're going to be a great basketball player or a baseball player. There are a lot of things that intelligence tests don't even, they don't even think about. Now, it doesn't mean this isn't a valid exercise because those IQ tests have been around a long time and they do measure what they measure, they measure it very well. And they do correlate with a lot of performance activities. In fact, if you were hiring somebody, the absolute best thing, if you could just do one thing, would be to give them an IQ test. That correlates most strongly with any kind of performance on the job. So it's a valid test, even if it has some biases, some problems. So that's individual intelligence and we call that IQ. So now the question is, can you do that for a group or a team? Brian (07:53) Yeah. Linda Rising (08:03) Could you say this group, could we measure it somehow? And if so, would it have the same kind of validity? That is, if they do well on this test, would that mean they would do well in the workplace? If we had that, then could we use it to say, all right, this team. is really going to be great for whatever it is that we wanted them to do. Is that possible? So obviously the answer is yes, or I wouldn't be here talking about it. Yeah. So the research is fascinating and it would take a long time to actually go into it, but it was started at MIT. The organization is called the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. and they have been doing this now for over a decade. So this is not brand new out of the box. We're not sure where this is going. This has been happening and has been happening successfully. They do have a test. They can give it to a group. And what they find is that if the group does well, that group will also do well on other, just like IQ, other kinds of things that the test measures. And so, yes, they can measure group intelligence. Brian (09:38) Very interesting. This is really fascinating. Yeah. It's fascinating. I'm going to interrupt you for just a moment because I know, and forgive me if I'm taking you off track with where you were intending to go. But I know, having heard some of your other talks in the past on agile mindset and what you've written about, I know there's kind of this fundamental idea of the fixed verse. Linda Rising (09:39) It is interesting. Yeah. No, no, no, it's okay. Brian (10:05) growth mindset and the idea of intelligence being not necessarily a thing you're born with, but really something that you have the potential to change and grow. And how does that translate then to the group environment and the group's intelligence? Linda Rising (10:23) Yeah, so that's a great lead in because the next part of it was, well, okay, so we have this test and we can give it to a group, but we'd like to tease out some attributes of teams to say, you know, the teams that do really well on this test, they all seem to have, and they found there were three things that characterized Brian (10:26) Yeah. Linda Rising (10:52) intelligent group. The first one was called social perceptiveness. That is, are the people on the group, are they able to relate to each other? If one of the persons in the groups having a struggle for some reason, are they able to pick up on that? It's kind of hard to say, well what is that social perceptiveness? and we can come back to that, but that's first on the list. The second attribute is that when they have any kind of a discussion, that everybody talks. And that's pretty easy to see, and I know that you've probably been on teams as I have, where really not everybody talked, where maybe mostly one or two Brian (11:24) Yeah. Okay. Linda Rising (11:49) You know the loud people they did all the talking and the rest of us We just kind of sat in the corner and we said well, you know, whatever Yeah We've been there. Well, have we have we have seen that and I don't know how you're gonna feel about the third one But we all are concerned about diversity Brian (12:00) Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Linda Rising (12:17) We know that diversity is an issue. All organizations are struggling with the best way to deal with that. But the third attribute has to do with the percentage of women on the team. Brian (12:34) Really? Linda Rising (12:35) So this isn't like 50-50. This doesn't mean that you should have some women. It means the more women you have, the better. Ooh. You wanna think about that one? Brian (12:38) Yeah. You know what? I would not argue with that one bit because all the women that I've had in my life have been the most intelligent people I have known. So I would wholeheartedly concur with that. We're just a bunch of knuckleheads, the guys are. So I completely... Linda Rising (12:58) Ha! Brian (13:17) You know, I'm having some fun, but you're right. I can see that, you know? Like, I could see how that would be a really distinguishing characteristics. Linda Rising (13:22) Wow! So the researchers say maybe it's really not a gender thing because women are very good at social perceptiveness. And maybe what this third attribute, and they did a lot of statistical analyses, you you have to really dig down into the statistics and we don't want to do that. Maybe this third attribute is really a reflection of the first. And then if you, and here we're going to come to your growth mindset, if you could work with the people on the team who were not women, but who were these nerdy guys, know, could you somehow have them grow, improve, get better at social perceptiveness, then that would have the same effect as having more women on the team. And that's kind of where they are right now is can you do this? Are they equivalent? Are they really measuring the same thing? But they know that somehow that's what you've got to have is this ability to read. It's called theory of mind. Read the minds of the people on the team and that typically You know, we're stereotyping here. Typically men are not as good. So can you, could you, can you grow that characteristic? Can you get better? Can you get better at that? Brian (15:06) Yeah, I'll take a slight little side trail here and say that that makes perfect sense to me because one of the things that I found when I was doing my research on neurodiversity and specifically autism was that there's a book out there that I think I've shared on the podcast before, but it's called Autism in Heels. And basically the point of the book is to really examine autism in women. And one of the key points that's made in the book is the fact that when you see statistics about autism, you'll find that there's a huge number, there's a disparity. There's a large number of men, of males that are diagnosed and a few, a smaller percentage of females. And it gives the impression when you look at the data that you might think, well, this is a male thing, right? It's something that happens much more often than male. But this book is making the point that really, Linda Rising (16:02) Yeah. Brian (16:04) the criteria that was set aside to designate whether someone was autistic or not was really geared towards how it presents in males. So women were vastly underdiagnosed and still are to this day vastly underdiagnosed. And one of the things that makes it difficult to diagnose them is women are better at masking their symptoms. very much, they adapt to the environment around them. They pick up on the people around them. Linda Rising (16:18) Yeah. Brian (16:34) and they will mask the things that maybe are naturally a part of them, but they've learned in other parts of life how to do that. And so they're applying that to their autism as well. So that makes perfect sense to me. Linda Rising (16:43) Yeah. Yep, exactly. And of course, if we want to talk about women who have this tendency or on the spectrum, we have to mention Temple Grandin, who is one of the most famous female autistics in the world. I she's done more to gain attention for this problem, and she's definitely female. yeah, it's not it's not a male thing. But you're right that what's happened is that the women have had a growth mindset and whatever they inherited or were born with, they've done a better job at learning how to adapt given what they had as a limitation, adapting to working with others and using that as a strength. So that means that possibly, We could do that kind of thing to improve our teams if we included men in, well, what would it be? Would it be a training program? Would it be just coaching? Maybe this could be the job for a coach can certainly watch. The behavior of the team can notice, for instance, for that second attribute, is the discussion. Brian (17:54) Ha Linda Rising (18:10) Does that involve everybody equally? That could be a first step. And to encourage the growth in that direction. So one of the experiments that was done to follow on with that was to try to get male members of the team who didn't do well, you can actually measure social perceptiveness. And you mentioned autism, one of the tests. for autism is called reading the mind in the eyes. And with that test, you can show that people are better than others. And so maybe this could help us identify people who might benefit from this experimental approach. And that is to have something like, you know, I'm a patterns fan. So a collection of patterns that we used to talk about back in the day was written by Joshua Kerievsky and it was for running a study group where you read a book together a chapter at a time and you talk about it. So in the experiment the hypothesis was that reading a book together would improve the theory of mind or the social perceptiveness if it were a book that was fiction. Brian (19:37) Huh. Linda Rising (19:37) It's a story. A story. There's a hero and a beautiful princess and an adventurer and a bad guy and a good guy. in reading that, you learn to identify with the characters. And you talk about it. What was the character feeling when the handsome prince ran in to rescue the what was he thinking? Brian (19:39) Yeah. Linda Rising (20:05) So in a structured study group situation like that, reading fiction together and the results so far are positive but not enormous. It does help. It does help. Brian (20:20) Yeah. Yeah, I can see that, because you're trying to collectively interpret and you're getting a peek into someone else's mind of how they might interpret a situation and that can help you to interpret other situations. Yeah, I can see that. Linda Rising (20:23) May not. Yeah! Yeah, especially if someone was not in the habit of doing that. There are a lot of people who say, I've never even stopped to think about how the other members of my team are feeling. Brian (20:43) Yeah. Linda Rising (20:56) So attached to all of this is an enormous project that Google also started called Project Aristotle. And their idea was we wanna know what the secret is, what makes great teams. And they looked at everything. They spent years. mean, Google collects data, data they've got. and statisticians and analysts, they got it. And they spent years collecting and analyzing. And the summary at the end of all that was they found nothing. Brian (21:38) Hahaha Linda Rising (21:40) Did you read that? Did you read about that study? Yeah. Brian (21:44) I I'm familiar with that study. I really like what they did. Because when you have that kind of data available to you across cultures, across business units, it was an ambitious kind of study. I'm really thankful that they did it because I think they had some good findings there that came out of that as well. you're right. Linda Rising (21:52) Yeah! Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, they didn't find anything. Brian (22:12) Right, they thought it was gonna be, you know, it's a skill, it's the right mix of skills that makes it a high performing team or expertise and none of that really had a bearing. Yeah. Yeah. Linda Rising (22:15) Get off! And what was interesting about all of this is it sort of all came together because the folks at Google kind of looked over and said, well, look at what these folks at MIT are doing. And they said, maybe we're just not looking at the right thing. And they had talked about this social perceptiveness and what is that anyway? And it was kind of serendipity at about this time. Amy Edmondson wrote a book called The Fearless Organization, and it was about something she called psychological safety. And it was bigger than what the folks at MIT had identified. This has, I am free, I feel safe. Well, that would mean that you could speak up in a discussion and that would make the discussion more, okay, now we would think about what, I mean, what she talked about kind of put a big blanket around all of it and said, hey, I think we might be all talking about this. And the folks at Google said, well, you know, that makes sense. Maybe that's what we're looking for. And how do we do it? How do we do this? So your listeners might wanna just wander out to the Google site because now Google's been very transparent about this. How do you make this work? How do you bring about this psychological safety? How do you get people feel free to talk and to discussion? How do you help people be aware? of what other people are feeling. And they've got a whole raft of suggestions for managers, suggestions for team members, for, you know, and they're really all singing the same song. It's about this awareness of others, feeling that you are safe and that thinking about what other people are thinking. can lead your team to behave in more intelligent way. Brian (24:41) That's so, that's awesome. Right, right. Linda Rising (24:41) It's kind like a miracle. It's like a miracle. It all just came together. They weren't planning that. know, here at MIT, going one direction, Google going another direction. Here's Amy Edmondson at Harvard, and that it all kind of came together. Brian (24:48) That's awesome. You came together now. Yeah, Amy Edmondson is definitely one of my heroes. we've tried to get her on. We tried to get her to come on, but I know that there's layers to get to people like that. so if anyone's listening and has an end to Amy Edmondson, tell her that this is a welcome, this is a psychologically safe podcast to come on. We'd love to have her, but yeah. Linda Rising (25:07) Yeah. Well, yeah. think she did go out and talk to Google. I think there's a Google talk about psychological safety. So they did have her come in and give them some ideas, some suggestions or yeah. And she's on to failure now because her book, After Fearless Organization, which was about psychological safety, the one that, in fact, I just finished it is about failure. Brian (25:44) Yeah. That, Linda Rising (25:59) and their case studies of failures and what can you do about failure and yeah but anyway so she she's on she's she's on to whatever but yeah. Brian (26:07) That's awesome. Yes, she does great research and it's it's chock full in her book So I highly recommend her writing to anyone who's listening if that if this interests you Yeah, definitely read Amy Edmondson's work. You'll really enjoy it Linda Rising (26:14) Yeah Yeah. So, and if you do, then the story is not over, it's still going, which is, not just Amy Edmondson, but there's a fellow named Kevin Dunbar. This is not Robin Dunbar who did the 150 is kind of the magic number. This is a different Dunbar, same last name, but he did a lot of studies about thinking and. especially in science, how do scientists think? And in particular, he was interested in failure. And you know that as a scientist, you propose some hypothesis and then you test it in an experiment and then you stand back and you do an analysis and you say, well, did this work out or not? And he found that some scientists don't... like it when things don't go well. What a surprise, huh? Brian (27:26) Yeah, right. Linda Rising (27:28) Yeah, and they just ignore it. They either pretend it didn't happen or they put it in a drawer saying, we'll come back and, you know, we'll look at it later. But some scientists do a really good job of accepting that failure, working with it, and building on it. saying, hey, this is something we didn't think about. Maybe we can, they, you know, and they're off and running. It doesn't slow them down at all. And it turns out that the scientists who have that characteristic, who are able to do that, are scientists in groups. and they're in groups that are intelligent. They're diverse and open. They let everybody speak. They think about what other people are thinking if they're discouraged or not with this bad result. So the characteristics of those groups of scientists who do well with failure is the same. Brian (28:22) you Linda Rising (28:40) as the groups that MIT identified, the groups that Google is trying to grow. And I think it's really what we want in Agile development. We want groups like that. Not just because we think, intelligence is what. No. We want groups that have that characteristic. We want groups that feel psychologically safe. We want groups that feel free. Brian (28:54) Yeah. Linda Rising (29:08) to express their ideas. We want groups of people who are aware of what other people are thinking. That's what we want. Brian (29:16) Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's so cool. Linda Rising (29:18) So they're all talking about the same thing. They may be using different words, but they are really, and one thing that we might wanna note right here is that all these different researchers made the same mistake in the beginning. And it's the same mistake organizations make. Is they thought in the beginning that what makes a smart team is smart people. Wrong. Not that you don't want smart people. Brian (29:48) Yeah. Right. Linda Rising (29:53) But that's just an okay thing to have. You can have a team of very smart people that doesn't have any of these other characteristics that is not intelligent as a group. So I think we really have to wake up and realize, first of all, that we're doing that, that we're valuing IQ or individual intelligence, smartness, you went to this school or you got that particular SAT score. It has nothing to do with that. It's not that there's no correlation, but it's weak, it's very weak. It's much better to have people who have these other characteristics. Brian (30:33) Yeah, let me just, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Let me connect it just a second to maybe someone who's listening who's a Scrum Master or someone like that, right? You might hear this and think, those foolish leadership people, they make these kinds of mistakes. I wouldn't make that kind of mistake. I know better than this kind of thing, right? Well, how much emphasis are you placing on whether your team knows all the details of what they should be doing in Scrum versus... helping them to know and understand each other, communicate with each other, right? How much effort and energy are you putting into those things versus the facts, right? I think that's where it can hit home for us is, these other areas, I think are, as you said, really much stronger predictors of success. And I think as Agilist, that's where we should be pouring our attention into because that's what's going to make the most significant difference. Linda Rising (31:40) Yeah. And I think since software development and I've been in it for a long time has had this really strong emphasis on smartness. We like smart people. And it's not that that's a bad thing necessarily. It's that it's not enough. So as a mathematician, you could say necessary, but not sufficient. Not even close. and that all of these researchers all said the same thing, that we thought it was going to be about smart people. We thought it was about IQ, that teams of smart people would be smart. And you and I both know that's not true. Brian (32:32) Right, right, right. I've been on some teams with some very smart people that were horrible teams. Linda Rising (32:35) Yes. Yes, yes, exactly. And I guess without belaboring it or beating it up, what's happening to me right now is that in reading about all of these different research activities, more and more things start to bubble up. that sort of are like the glue that holds all of this together. And the one that just, it just happened yesterday has to do with brainstorming. So I've been on a ramp to not, you know, I'm against brainstorming because there's plenty of evidence that it doesn't work. They've done experiments, they've said, okay, here's a group of people and they're gonna get together and they're gonna come up with ideas. Okay, we know how many ideas they came up with and whether they're any good or not. And now let's just take individuals and tell them individually, you come up with ideas and then we'll just measure. And the results are always the same, the individuals do better. So I have come up with explanations for that and I'm like, okay, well here's what. Well, I was wrong. Because in the research, it just was like an accident. I just happened to discover it in one of the papers that the groups that are intelligent, the groups that are aware, the groups that embrace failure, the groups that do well also do better at brainstorming. Why is that? Well, because everybody feels free to talk. Everybody feels psychologically safe. Everybody's aware of how other people are feeling and that impacts how they come up with ideas or think about things that other people suggest. So as a group, they do superbly at brainstorming. So it's not the brainstorming, it's the group and how they... Brian (34:43) Yeah. Ha Linda Rising (34:48) get in a room together and discuss things and share ideas. And so, you know, I hate to say this is gonna be the answer to all our prayers. And of course we still don't, we're still working on, well, how do you do this? How do you make this happen? And I remember a story. It's in fact, it's in one of the documents, I'm trying to think now on the Google website. It's a story of a team. Brian (34:58) Hahaha Yeah. Linda Rising (35:18) where the team leader tells the other people on the team that he has a terminal illness. And when he did that, everybody else on the team realized that they didn't really know anything about this guy. And they in turn began to share, well, I'm also having some struggles and here's my story. And going through that. cause that team to move up a notch, if you will, to become more intelligent, to be more aware, to suddenly be a little more respectful of how the discussions were. It was just telling stories about what you're going through so that everyone will be aware of how you feel, what you think is gonna be your... Brian (35:48) Yeah. Linda Rising (36:11) future in the next six months that they didn't have any training or study groups or they just told stories. Brian (36:26) They got to know each other as humans. And it's amazing how often we forget that that's who we work with. At least right now, we work with other human beings. And I hope that never changes, because that's where the best ideas, that's where the best creativity comes from. And yeah, it's fascinating, but you're absolutely right. I can see that point. Linda Rising (36:28) Yes, exactly. think for me, this is all, it's been really a hopeful journey because in the beginning, I wasn't even sure how it would go. I didn't know anything about the intelligence of groups. And in the beginning, it was all, okay, here's what MIT is doing and reading through, I mean, there were a lot of papers that I slogged through and it wasn't until about halfway through that, I discovered. Project Aristotle and I saw, this really connects. And now all these other things start to bubble up that really make a lot of sense. And of course, that it fits. It fits with Agile. It fits with the Agile message that the big things like that cause you, especially if you've had any experience with Agile, to sort of wake up and say, how do I miss this? Brian (37:50) Ha ha. Linda Rising (37:52) I should have seen this and it's news to me. So, wow, we're all still learning, I guess, aren't we? Brian (38:03) Yeah, I mean, you get presented with something like that and think, I've kind of intuitively known this all along, but I didn't have words for it. And now, now there's a vocabulary that can describe it. And I agree, right? That's exactly what it is. So yeah, you're absolutely right. Well, Linda, this is, this is such a fascinating discussion. And, you know, it's, I had no idea where, you know, group intelligence would lead us, but that it's all just fascinating. Linda Rising (38:09) Yeah Brian (38:32) the different threads of the spider web and where this kind of ends up. So I know it led you in a lot of places with your research and everything else. I really, really appreciate you sharing that with us and helping us to try to understand a little bit of the journey you've been on and kind of discovering this over the past year or so is what you said. Linda Rising (38:53) Yep. And I was going to say, anybody, I know most people don't want to spend the time reading the original research papers, and I don't blame you, that does take a lot of, you know, have a lot of investment in that. But there are some, I would call them sort of lightweight. There's some excellent, excellent Harvard Business Review articles that do a very good job of talking about. what is happening at MIT, what is happening at Google, that kind of a high-level summary, like Harvard Business Review does that like nobody else. And of course, there are TED Talks that Amy Edmondson has given, and there are all the Google Talks, of course, are also out on YouTube. And she has been to Google as well, so you can go listen to what she has to say there. So if you want to dig into this for yourself, there's a lot that you can get without having to read the book or read all the research papers. Brian (39:57) Yeah, we'll try to link to as much of this as we can in the show notes of this. So anyone who's listening, if you want to go down one of these rabbit holes like we talked about, maybe we can point the direction and say, hey, try this one. So we'll also include in the show notes some links to some of Linda's work as well so that you can find out more about her and maybe read one of her books as well and see some of the Linda Rising (40:11) Yeah! Brian (40:27) some of the insights she's already brought to this Agile community. And if you like what you heard here, I know you'll like her books as well. So Linda, thank you so much for making your time. I know it's very busy. Thank you for coming on the show. Linda Rising (40:41) It's been my pleasure. Can we close with some good wishes, some thoughts and prayers for all the people who are in Western North Carolina or in Florida who have just been two horrible disasters and are going to be a long time recovering. And that includes my good friend and co-writer Mary Lynn Mans who's in Asheville, North Carolina. So fingers crossed, prayers, good thoughts. Brian (41:11) Absolutely. I wholeheartedly concur with you on that. So I agree. Well, thanks again, Linda.
Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1485: Christine Comaford highlights a critical leadership flaw that often undermines employee engagement: the lack of emotional safety. When employees don't feel safe expressing ideas or concerns, their engagement and creativity suffer. Discover how fostering trust and emotional security in the workplace can unlock innovation and boost overall team performance. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://smarttribesinstitute.com/one-mistake-leaders-make-kills-employee-engagement/ Quotes to ponder: "An emotionally safe environment fosters innovation, collaboration, and, ultimately, engagement." "Without emotional safety, the best employees are likely to disengage, leaving you with a team that's simply checking boxes." "Leaders must model openness, vulnerability, and a genuine desire to hear the voices of their team." Episode references: The Fearless Organization: https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Organization-Psychological-Safety-Workplace/dp/1119477247 The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Lencioni/dp/0787960756 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1485: Christine Comaford highlights a critical leadership flaw that often undermines employee engagement: the lack of emotional safety. When employees don't feel safe expressing ideas or concerns, their engagement and creativity suffer. Discover how fostering trust and emotional security in the workplace can unlock innovation and boost overall team performance. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://smarttribesinstitute.com/one-mistake-leaders-make-kills-employee-engagement/ Quotes to ponder: "An emotionally safe environment fosters innovation, collaboration, and, ultimately, engagement." "Without emotional safety, the best employees are likely to disengage, leaving you with a team that's simply checking boxes." "Leaders must model openness, vulnerability, and a genuine desire to hear the voices of their team." Episode references: The Fearless Organization: https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Organization-Psychological-Safety-Workplace/dp/1119477247 The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Lencioni/dp/0787960756 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1485: Christine Comaford highlights a critical leadership flaw that often undermines employee engagement: the lack of emotional safety. When employees don't feel safe expressing ideas or concerns, their engagement and creativity suffer. Discover how fostering trust and emotional security in the workplace can unlock innovation and boost overall team performance. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://smarttribesinstitute.com/one-mistake-leaders-make-kills-employee-engagement/ Quotes to ponder: "An emotionally safe environment fosters innovation, collaboration, and, ultimately, engagement." "Without emotional safety, the best employees are likely to disengage, leaving you with a team that's simply checking boxes." "Leaders must model openness, vulnerability, and a genuine desire to hear the voices of their team." Episode references: The Fearless Organization: https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Organization-Psychological-Safety-Workplace/dp/1119477247 The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Lencioni/dp/0787960756 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1485: Christine Comaford highlights a critical leadership flaw that often undermines employee engagement: the lack of emotional safety. When employees don't feel safe expressing ideas or concerns, their engagement and creativity suffer. Discover how fostering trust and emotional security in the workplace can unlock innovation and boost overall team performance. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://smarttribesinstitute.com/one-mistake-leaders-make-kills-employee-engagement/ Quotes to ponder: "An emotionally safe environment fosters innovation, collaboration, and, ultimately, engagement." "Without emotional safety, the best employees are likely to disengage, leaving you with a team that's simply checking boxes." "Leaders must model openness, vulnerability, and a genuine desire to hear the voices of their team." Episode references: The Fearless Organization: https://www.amazon.com/Fearless-Organization-Psychological-Safety-Workplace/dp/1119477247 The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Dysfunctions-Team-Leadership-Lencioni/dp/0787960756 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Does your workplace feel like a battleground at times? Have you been told to just toughen up and deal with it? The pain of workplace bullying can be isolating and damaging to your mental health, leaving you feeling trapped and powerless. If you're tired of feeling this way, it's time to find a better solution to address workplace bullying effectively. Let's explore how you can foster a culture of trust and openness in your teams to prevent workplace bullying and create a psychologically safe environment where everyone can thrive. In this episode, you will be able to: Understand how to prevent workplace bullying with psychological safety. Discover the effects of workplace bullying on mental health. Learn how to cultivate psychological safety in teams. Find out effective ways to address bullying in the workplace. Explore the crucial role of leadership in fostering workplace safety. "Teams with high psychological safety are not only more innovative and productive, but they also create a workplace where bullying is less likely to occur." - Lori Adams-Brown Lori Adams Brown, a seasoned professional with a wealth of experience in leadership development, has a personal connection to the issue of workplace bullying. Having been a target of workplace abuse herself, Lori knows firsthand the transformative power of psychological safety. Her journey through overcoming hard challenges and finding healing has fueled her passion for preventing and addressing workplace bullying. She has dived deep into research and personal stories of targets of workplace bullying to understand how psychological safety can play a pivotal role in creating a work environment that not only prevents bullying but also fosters trust and openness. Through her personal experiences and extensive insights, Lori is dedicated to sharing tools and knowledge, not only to help those who have been targets of workplace bullying but also to empower managers and leaders to cultivate psychologically safe teams. Her narrative-style approach evokes a sense of relatability, resonating with the emotions and experiences of her audience, making her an authentic and credible voice in fostering a culture of trust and openness in teams. She shares quick tips from the research and books she has studied as well as the patterns from the qualitative research from stories of targets themselves in order to help anyone wanting to prevent workplace bullying by recognizing the red flags and cultivating an work culture where bullying is prevented and quickly stopped. Learn how to: 1. Build a culture of trust 2. Enhance mental well-being 3. Foster psychological safety The key moments in this episode are: 00:05:21 - Understanding Workplace Bullying 00:09:47 - Psychological Safety and Bullying Prevention 00:12:27 - Creating a Psychologically Safe Environment 00:14:30 - Creating a Culture of Acceptance and Feedback 00:15:28 - Swiftly Addressing Bullying 00:17:31 - Promoting Inclusivity and Respect Resources: EPS on spiritual abuse EPS with grounding techniques with Dr. Debbie Pinkston 1. Google's Project Aristotle 2. Amy Edmondson's Work on Psychological Safety 3. The Bully at Work 4. Workplace Bullying Institute 5. The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson 6. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) 7. HBR 15 types of bullying Subscribe to the podcast to never miss an episode. Leave a rating for the podcast. Ratings help others discover the podcast and make a significant impact. Leave a review for the podcast. Reviews also help others find the podcast and contribute to its visibility. Share the podcast. Stay connected: https://www.aworldofdifferencepodcast.com https://www.linkedin.com/company/aworldofdifference/ https://www.twitter.com/@awodpod https://www.youtube.com/@aworldofdifference https://www.facebook.com/A-World-of-Difference-613933132591673/ https://www.instagram.com/aworldof.difference https://www.patreon.com/aworldofdifference Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this insightful episode, we sit down with Amy Edmondson, one of the world's leading management thinkers. As the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, she is an expert in psychological safety and organizational learning. In episode 14 of season 2, she discusses the importance of creating environments where team members feel safe to speak up and how this psychological safety is essential for learning and innovation. She also explores the balance between psychological safety and accountability, emphasizing that these concepts are not in opposition but rather complementary in high-performing teams. You'll gain valuable insights into how to foster a culture of inquiry, the role of clear goals in team performance, and practical steps for turning around fearful organizations. Amy's examples from companies like Pixar and Southwest Airlines offer concrete illustrations of how these principles can be applied in real-world settings. You'll find this episode valuable if you're looking for actionable advice for leaders looking to enhance their team's psychological safety, accountability, and overall performance. . . . Like this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and share the podcast with your colleagues. . . . TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [02:13] Leadership mistakes and psychological safety [05:26] The role of psychological safety in organizational learning [08:58] Balancing psychological safety and accountability [14:07] Characteristics of high-performing teams [18:09] The impact of clear goals on team performance [24:12] Turning around a fearful organization [30:22] Lessons from Pixar and Southwest Airlines [39:38] Tips for leaders on mastering the art of asking good questions
In this episode of Rural Health Leadership Radio, Dr. Bill Auxier reflects on his recent experience at the Coaching and Leadership in Healthcare event co-hosted by Harvard Medical School, the Institute of Coaching, and McLean Hospital. He discusses the concept of "intelligent failure" as presented by Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson, emphasizing the importance of distinguishing intelligent failures, which are well-considered and lead to valuable learnings, from mere sloppy mistakes. The discussion explores how embracing intelligent failures can foster innovation and growth within organizations and the pivotal role of leadership particularly in rural settings. “Intelligent failure happens all the time. It happens in science, in industry innovation projects, in sports, and even in ordinary life." -Dr. Bill Auxier "The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth" by Amy Edmondson is a pivotal guide for fostering an environment where innovation and engagement are forefront. This book argues that the traditional workplace culture of conformity and silence is detrimental in today's knowledge-driven economy. Instead, it champions a culture where it's safe to share ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes. Edmondson presents practical strategies for creating psychological safety, enhancing team performance, and encouraging the open exchange of ideas to fuel innovation and growth. The book offers a blueprint for leaders looking to nurture a climate of transparency and openness, ensuring that every team member feels valued and heard, thereby driving organizational success. You can purchase a copy of the book here: The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth: Edmondson, Amy C.: 9781119477242: Amazon.com: Books
Jörn Hendrik Ast: The Double-Edged Sword of Commitment, An Agile Team's Journey Through Innovation and Despair Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Jörn Hendrik recounts a sobering team story centered around the development and eventual discontinuation of a seemingly promising app. This episode sheds light on the dangers of commitment without flexibility, the value of listening to feedback, and the importance of recognizing when to pivot. It's a tale of commitment, disillusionment, and the hard-earned wisdom that sometimes, stopping is part of the journey to success. Featured Book of the Week: Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson Dive into Amy Edmondson's "Fearless Organization" with Jörn as he shares how this seminal work on psychological safety reshaped his approach to team management and workshop organization. This segment, explores the transformative power of psychological safety in the workplace, underpinned by practical insights from Jörn's experience. Discover how breaking the silence on issues can propel teams towards better collaboration, innovation, and success. A must-listen for anyone looking to foster an environment where every voice is heard and valued. [IMAGE HERE] Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM's that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome! About Jörn Hendrik Ask Jörn Hendrik Ast, founded of New Work Heroes in 2018. He is an entrepreneur, podcaster, and author dedicated to innovating work through team collaboration, leadership, and personal development. He is coaching teams, producing podcast episodes, and continues to create impactful learning formats and books. You can link with Jörn Hendrik Ask on LinkedIn and connect with Jörn Hendrik Ask on Threads.
Bio Fabiola is a pioneer and thought leader in Agile HR and Co-Founder of Just Leading Solutions, a global transformation consultancy for HR and Business Agility. As a seasoned Management Consultant and Executive Advisor, she works with key players around the globe and across the private, corporate, and social sectors. She helps them become more adaptive and innovative by maximizing the potential of their people function. Fabiola is a Switzerland native living in New York. She is an avid New York Rangers fan. Interview Highlights 03:20 Business Agility 04:35 The Impact of Technology 07:45 How HR Fits into Business Agility 10:35 Making the Change 13:50 Sustainable Initiatives 16:25 Agile HR vs Agility in HR 18:35 Workforce Planning Sessions 30:15 The Agile HR Course Links · JLS Website: www.justleadingsolutions.com · Training Overview: Agile HR Training · Agile HR Explorer: Agile HR Explorer Training · LinkedIn Fabiola Eyholzer Books & Resources · The Connected Company, Dave Gray · Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows · The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth, Amy Edmondson · The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, Daniel Coyle Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku So I have with me here Fabiola Eyholzer, she is the Co-Founder and CEO of Just Leading Solutions, a New York based consultancy for Lean Agile People Operations. Fabiola, it's a massive honour and pleasure to have you on this show. Thank you for being my guest on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. Fabiola Eyholzer Thank you, Ula, the pleasure is all mine. Ula Ojiaku So how did you get into this, you know, Lean Agile space? Fabiola Eyholzer So it's actually quite an interesting story. It's now 13 years ago when I was running the Swiss market for a European HR consultancy, and we were looking for a new leadership model for our career starters. And I met some Agile coaches and they're like, oh, you have to do Scrum, and I'm like, well, did you hear me say that we are an HR consultancy, we're not a software developer. She's like, trust me, it's the right thing to do, so we did a test run. So we introduced Scrum, which is the predominant Agile practice with our career starters, and it was such an eye opener to see what actually happens when we work in this new way that I knew this is the future, and I decided there and then to quit my job and dedicate the next phase of my career to Agile HR. Ula Ojiaku Wow. And since then, what sorts of organisations or projects or initiatives have you worked on? Fabiola Eyholzer So we've worked on so many different initiatives and with so many different companies and I actually had to look it up, I was in over 21 countries with the topic of HR Agility, and in that time I worked with companies across all industries, across all sectors, from profit, to non-profit, to education. And something that is really interesting is that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter that much what your corporate culture is, what your social culture is, when it comes to the people function, we want to make sure how do we maximise the people function, how do we leverage what we are doing in HR in a way that is highly beneficial for our employees, and with that, highly beneficial for our organisations. And of course, right now we are in that situation that the world of work around us is changing massively, you know, it's just being turned upside down. And this is, on the one hand, really scary, on the other hand, it's a massive chance to really reinvent HR, and really do things differently. Ula Ojiaku Something that stands out to me is you're saying it's an opportunity to reinvent HR and we will get back to that, but before we do, what does business agility mean to you? Fabiola Eyholzer So for me, business agility is really ensuring that our companies are engaging and adaptive and innovative so that they can thrive in that fast paced and constantly changing, highly dynamic environment. And at the core, what it means is that organisations and institutions are shifting away from being well oiled machines to being thriving ecosystems, because adaptability means exploring change, enabling change and being able to be change ready and to manage change to flex their muscles, to explore opportunities very quickly, to act on opportunities and not be scared, not be afraid to pivot and to course correct. And that's what we are seeing right now, that companies have to shift away from a model that served us really well for 150 years to a new system that is always at the edge of chaos, but that's the only way to continue to thrive and be adaptive in that fast paced, highly dynamic environment. Ula Ojiaku And would you say, I've, this is the first time I'm hearing that phrase, edge of chaos, but I do agree, and would you say that in this day and age, because the nature of the work we do, compared to 150 years ago, or even some years ago, it's for the most part getting to be knowledge-based, especially in technology. Is that one of the considerations for the change we need in the way we organise and run our companies or groups or teams? Fabiola Eyholzer Yes, technology is definitely a massive game changer for us, but it's not just about changing the way we work or changing the way our processes work. And quite often when we talk about technology in the HR space, people think about, you know, putting our HR process onto new, fancier digital process, but that's not just what it's about. It's more about understanding how much is technology and everything else that goes hand in hand with that, how is it changing the way that we work, and it leaves us with that very fundamental question, what type of work is left for us humans? If everything around us is being automated, and you know when we think about automation, a lot of people think about assembly line work going away, you know, routine work going away. And that was true 20 years ago. But today, work is being automated in every single field imaginable. And it's not just routine work that is being automated, and that leaves us with that question, what type of work is left for us? The answer is, it's the type of work that requires our passion and our potential for collaboration, ideation, our social and emotional intelligence. And of course, we are solving problems we never had to solve before, so there is no script, and that means we need to organise our companies in a different way. We need to organise work in a different way so that we can manage that ongoing fast paced change and that we can continue to solve problems we haven't solved before. And that's why we need to shift away from being a well oiled machine that has everything already figured out and written into job descriptions and competency models and objectives and KPIs to a company that can create and respond to change very quickly. Ula Ojiaku So given your definition of what business agility means to you and the case you've made for change, in the sense that we're at the edge of chaos and the sorts of work we need to do right now because technology, almost everything can be and will be automated in one way or the other, so where does HR fit in into this, in the light of business agility? Fabiola Eyholzer I can give you a very straightforward, simple answer. The role of HR in business agility is that HR is the secret to business agility, because if we don't align our people approach, and if we don't align our HR practices to the new realities and new demands, we're not going to be successful. So if we don't engage in talent scouting and talent enablement and performance acceleration in a way that is aligned with the new way of working, we cannot achieve business agility. Ula Ojiaku And how ready would you say the HR function is for this sort of transformation? Fabiola Eyholzer So the companies that we work with, or that I have the pleasure of working with, they are ready, or at least they're not scared to try. So they're courageous enough to try. As an industry in human resources, I think we have a long way to go. On the one hand, we see that things are changing and we're trying super hard to change with the times, but quite often we don't have that fundamental understanding that the entire mindset, the entire DNA of the organisation is going to change, and unless we understand that new mindset, that new DNA, we will not be able to change or maximise the people function in a way that is most beneficial for Agile enterprise. So we have a long way to go. Ula Ojiaku How would you know if an organisation's HR function is ready? Are there some indicators that they're ready to go on this journey if they haven't started already? Fabiola Eyholzer One of the indicators is if they have more questions than answers, they're probably there. So, because the companies are just saying, oh, we've done this, we've done that, tick, tick, tick. They're probably not the ones with that growth mindset that Agile organisations need. Okay, so that's one indicator. The other indicator is that they're not satisfied with the status quo and at the same time they are willing to do something about it. So I sometimes say, we have a gut feeling that tells us there must be a better way out there to engage with people, to create a learning organisation, to inspire people. And if we listen to that gut feeling, then we need to be gutsy about it, to change it, to do something about it. And these are some of the things that we see in organisations that we work with, they are not afraid to challenge the status quo. They realise we need to change and we need to change now. Ula Ojiaku And okay, when they have identified, yes, we need to change, we need to change now, what's your typical direction or steer or guidance to these organisations and their leaders in terms of where to start? Would you say, let's take a big bang approach and overhaul everything? Or would it be small iterative steps towards the change? What's your typical approach? How would you advise them? Fabiola Eyholzer So I'm going to give you the consultant answer, it depends. So it depends on the change readiness and change willingness of the company. We have a lot of companies where we have amazing success, when we took one part of the organisation, typically around 500 to 2500 people, where we changed the entire HR approach. We had some companies where we have had amazing success with a big bang where we really transformed the entire HR organisation, but it really depends on how ready are you to explore and also how willing are you, how much do you want to put in, how much energy and passion and resources are you willing to put into that transformation? But one thing that we always do is, we start with training and inspiring people, because we talk about a new world of work. And while this is easy to say, you know, people initially envisioned this is about virtual work, or working from home. Well that's a tiny part of what we're talking about when it comes to this new world of work, and because this new world of work is rooted in such a fundamentally different mindset, we first need to understand that mindset, and we need to speak the same language, because quite often we're using words that have a very different meaning in the Agile space versus the traditional corporate environment. And I can give you an example, for instance, if we talk about hiring for potential, you know, what are we looking for? In the traditional way of looking at potential, it's, does someone have the potential to thrive in that particular role, and does someone have the potential to take the next step in a predefined career trajectory? But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about hiring for potential in the agile space. We are talking about hiring for potential to thrive in an uncertain, complex, ambiguous, volatile world. Does someone feel comfortable with uncertainty, not knowing what their job is going to look like 12 months from now? Does someone feel comfortable with flexing their muscles, with learning and unlearning new things? So it's a very different understanding of a simple work word ‘hiring for potential'. So that's what we're doing, is speaking that new language, understanding why and how this new world is so fundamentally different. Ula Ojiaku Well, that's very, very thought provoking and some of the things in my little experience that I would expect leaders of such organisations to say like, yes, well and good, you know, you inspire us, there's a case for change, but how can we make sure this isn't one of those multiple failed large change initiatives with engagement? How would we know we will make this sustainable? Fabiola Eyholzer So you will never have a guarantee, but what is a massive game changer, and what's crucial to the success of any transformation is your commitment, okay? So you have to stick with it, even, or especially, when the going gets tough. And since we are working in such a different way, it's super easy to fall back into old patterns of behaviour when there are problems that come up, when we need to reprioritise, when something unforeseen happens, it's super easy to fall back, and that's when you have to keep going. And I think that dedication is one of the key aspects. And also what's interesting about agility is when you learn about Agile and how it works, and what the values are, it resonates with us. Of course it does, because it was created for the human economy, so it taps into what we bring to the table. So it sounds super easy and straightforward, let's talk about empowering people, who doesn't want to feel empowered, but then it's, we have to figure out what does that mean for us in an organisation, what does empowerment mean? How do we share that empowerment? How do we allow the teams to explore, to learn, to stumble, to fail, to course correct? It's not always that easy to then actually follow through. And I always say the devil is in the detail when it comes to Agile. You know, it sounds super easy on the surface, but when you dig in deeper, it gets more challenging. Ula Ojiaku It's almost like learning to play a game of chess. Yes, you might know how the different pieces move on the board, but actually the getting into it, it's a lifelong pursuit to become a grandmaster, almost anyway. I really enjoyed going through your course, the Agile HR Explorer course that's on the Scaled Agile platform open to SBCs, but there was something that you mentioned in that course, Agile HR versus Agility in HR. Can you explain for the benefit of the audience, you know, what these two terms mean and how they differ? Fabiola Eyholzer Yes, so the word HR has two meanings. So when people talk about HR, they can either mean the HR department, your compensation specialist, your learning expert, your grading instructor. So all these HR professions, so the entire HR department and that. Or they can mean HR as a discipline, as a function, where we talk about talent acquisition and performance management and learning and development, workforce planning and so on. And because there is that duality to it, we also have a different approach to agility. And that's when you hear those words, Agile for HR, so meaning what can Agile do for the HR department or HR for Agile, meaning what does HR do for the Agile teams, for the Agile organisation, and the approach is slightly different. So when we bring Agile to the HR department, it's all about how do we work in a different way? How do we organise around value? How do we deliver value faster, in a better way? So it's implementing all these Agile practices, the natural practices and ceremonies and artifacts within the HR department. Whereas the other side is really, how do we align all our HR practices to this new way of working, and that's really where the magic happens. So if we shift from recruiting to talent scouting, if we shift from learning and development to talent enablement, if we shift from performance management to performance acceleration, that's when we help the organisation become and stay Agile, that's when we bring business, or enable business agility across the organisation. Ula Ojiaku And there's something you said about workforce planning, you know, so in terms of the function, if I may just go slightly off tangent, it's a question that's been on my mind in the sense that, is there a way that one could approach workforce planning that would undermine the agility of the organisation? So I'm going to give a hypothetical example. So there are some organisations who might be saying, do you know what, in this economy, we need to balance out our talent mix, and we want new, fresh talent who, maybe fresh graduates who are, they will cost cheaper, they probably are up to date with new technologies versus, you know, existing talent who might be more expensive. So is there a way that one might approach workforce planning that could be detrimental, because there are pros and cons to every approach potentially, but in your experience, in the multiple organisations you've supported and continue to support, could there be things we could watch out for that might undermine our agility in that space? Fabiola Eyholzer Yes, so the way that we look at it is when we look at talent and what talent brings to the table, we don't look at it from, is this talent expensive or cheap? It's about how much value does this talent add to the organisation? Okay, so it's a value based way of looking at it, rather than a cost based, right. So that's the first part. The other part is that we, what we want to do with adaptive workforce planning is that we can explore opportunities very quickly, so it has to be a way where it's easy for us to say, hey, we have new initiatives come up that require new skills that we are very proactive about it, that, let's say we need more AI experience or Blockchain experience or whatever it is in the future, if we know that today that there is a high chance that we need it, let's look at the organisation. Do we already have people who have experience or skills in that particular field? Can they train others? Do we have to start building, putting up a training program ourselves? Do we have to get external talent in that can give us a leg up? Can we work with exploratory assignments to get people that experience? So there's so many things that we can do, and the focus with anything that we do in agility is always about now and the future, whereas in the traditional workforce planning, it's more about the past and today. And if you think about it, workforce planners, they don't have a full overview of what are the initiatives the teams are going to be working on six months from now, but we think it's going to be 12 months from now. And that's what we do with the active workforce planning in the Agile space. We have that forward looking approach. We look at our talent pool and say, what's the strength of our talent pool, not just compared to the initiatives that we're doing today, but to the initiatives that we think are coming up. And the beauty about this is, and here you see that we're really applying systems thinking, is that this is then opening up growth opportunities for our employees, because if we want to be an Agile organisation, we need to be a learning organisation first. Ula Ojiaku I do like what you're saying about the adaptive workforce planning and it does align with that, you know, responding to change over just sticking to a plan. How often would you recommend or how often in your view would it be practical to be having these sorts of workforce planning sessions? Fabiola Eyholzer We do it once a quarter with our clients, because that allows you to then also collaborate, because this is about talent management, you know, where do we see things that people need to learn, what they want to focus on, do we need to open up exploratory assignments, do we need to assign people to different teams, all of these things we need to know before we go into our quarterly planning. So if we talk in SAFe terminologies, you want that to happen before your PI planning so that you can make sure that those people topics are part of the backlog. So we work with capacity allocation, all of that, to make sure that we have people topics on that, so that's why we do it once a quarter. Ula Ojiaku Okay. And I would assume, you know, once a quarter, those people topics, because there's also the respect for the individual or the people involved, there would be some factoring in that there will be conversations with the individuals to say, hey, this is what we think is going to happen, what's your opinion? Do you want to go instead of just shifting them into positions and maybe them learning on the day of the PI Planning your team has changed. Fabiola Eyholzer Yes, and, you know, in the Agile space, we talk a good game about empowerment and we know how it works when it comes to work, but of course, empowerment also means empowering people when it comes to their learning and growth journey. So, hey, the people manager, people developer and HR are there to open up opportunities for them, but at the end of the day, they have to be on that journey by themselves, they have to make those steps, they have to go through that door, they have to go out and learn and explore and bring themselves into play. So it's, what's empowerment when it comes to their own growth and learning. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that Fabiola. Would you say that when you do this adaptive workforce planning, does it make sense for one area or team or division or department to be compared with another? And I'll tie it back, I'll just give you some context, because I've heard of organisations, you know, doing it based on, oh, we want to make sure our cost base is, you know, our overheads, we're cutting it, I know everyone is doing a good job but we want to cut it, can we start measuring this department with that department in terms of workforce planning. I do resonate with that value base, instead of looking at how much they cost, what's the value these people, these talents are bringing? What's your view on, in the process of doing this, comparing one unit or department with another in their workforce planning approach? Fabiola Eyholzer So there are two aspects to it. One is, what data do we measure? And the second part is what do we do with the data? So for instance, when it comes to adaptive workforce planning, for instance, one of the important KPIs that we have is looking at the talent pool strength. So how strong is the talent pool compared to what we're working on right now? What we're going to work on in the next one or two quarters and three to four quarters out. But we're measuring that just so that we have a data point to get us talking. So this is not about comparing my team to your team and my team is better than your team, that's not what this is about. It's more about having a data point that allows us to have a conversation, that allows us to see, are we moving into the right direction? So, and I think that's important to all the KPIs. Why are we measuring them? And what are we doing with the data? And also the question, are we measuring the right things? And something that we often see is that people don't differentiate between leading and lagging indicators. So, for instance, a simple example in HR, we often look at retention rates, which is a great measure to have. But here's the thing, a retention rate is a lagging indicator, a lot of stuff has already happened, you know, and people did that quiet quitting probably long before they actually handed in their notice. So while we want to have that data point, there are other data points that are probably going to be better for us to be proactive, to do things about it. So always think about why are we measuring something? Are we measuring the right things? Are we measuring the things that are easy to measure? And for instance, cost is a data point that is easy to measure, but it doesn't say anything about the value. If someone used a hundred percent of their budget, well, did they do well? We don't know. Maybe they could have done the same thing with 70% of the budget, or maybe they should have gone to 120 and created something amazing for the future. So, really think about why are we measuring things and what are we doing with the data? Ula Ojiaku It just reminds me of a conversation I had and I said, what if we don't look at the cost and what if we also asked, are they meeting the targets that you set for them, the objectives that you set for them, and could they be setting up your organisation to make, you know, quantum leaps of progress by the work they're doing right now. So, and some of these things we can't see into the future, it's only retrospective, and that's where the leading indicators you talked about, although you talked about it differently from, you know, measuring attrition and people leaving and retention and all that, but there are ways of knowing in advance whether our guess is most likely to be correct, and sometimes measuring money or the cost isn't always the best metric, so I really like what you said about that. Thank you. Fabiola Eyholzer And also when you think about it, so many organisations, they want to be innovative and adaptive. At the same time, they focus so much on efficiency and, you know, following a script, following a plan, you know, hitting certain numbers that are set in stone, that they actually lose agility and adaptability and innovation, but they don't see the connection between the two, they don't see the connection between their leadership approach and their HR and finance and legal processes and how that is impacting one way or another how innovative they are, how creative they are. Ula Ojiaku I do recognise we're kind of teetering whenever we talk about the cost, we're teetering between, you know, finance, but they are all intertwined, like you just pointed out, it's all intertwined and it's a delicate ecosystem where you're always going to have to be doing something to stay in balance. What you did yesterday might not necessarily work today, so it's all about sensing and responding and I do appreciate what you've said so far. So what led to your developing the Agile HR course, which is now on the Scaled Agile platform? Fabiola Eyholzer Yes, I co-created or co-founded JLS, I think, nine years ago, and we very early on realised that we need to have a training to sort of do that level setting, get people that foundation, foundational knowledge to succeed in their transformation efforts. And that's when we created a series of different courses, and one of them is the Explore course that you mentioned. It's a one day course, it's great for anyone who's new or fairly new to Agile, Agile HR, you know, someone who wants to know more about it, and this is really an important first step to a longer learning and growth journey. But if you're new to Agile and you're in HR, this is definitely a great training. It's a one day training that gives you, starts out with the new world of work, you know, why is it so different? Why do we have so much pressure on performance management and career models and so on and so forth? Then what is Agile? And we explain Agile, not using technology based examples, but HR examples, you know, what does good design mean in the HR space? So we really explain the Agile manifesto and Agile values and principles from a HR perspective, and then we bring these worlds together and we talk about what is Agile HR and how do we apply that to different HR practices? So it's going to give you a well-rounded introduction to the field of HR Agility. Ula Ojiaku And is this available on the JLS website? Fabiola Eyholzer Yes, so all our trainings are available on our website and also our partner companies offer Agile HR training, you can go to an open enrolment class or you can bring it to your own organisation to train either an entire department or a team. And it's especially valuable when you start out on a new initiative, you know, it doesn't matter whether your company is already Agile or planning to become more Agile, if you're tasked with reinventing performance management or, you know, doing a new initiative, a new project, this is always a good way to get into it and say, okay, how can we make Agile work for us before we then help the organisation be more Agile? Ula Ojiaku We'll definitely have the link to your website in the show notes with your episode. So what I'm hearing is it's available, there are some partners as well that offer this training, which you and your team have curated. But if someone says, no, I want you, Fabiola, to come to do this for us, is that possible as well? Fabiola Eyholzer Absolutely. You can go to our website and contact me or you can hunt me down on LinkedIn, I'm the only one with my name, so you should be able to find me and just send me a message and we can definitely collaborate. Ula Ojiaku Okay. Well, what excites you about what you do currently? Fabiola Eyholzer Oh, I tell people I have the best job in the world because I get to work with amazing people, amazing companies, you know, people and companies who are not afraid to push the status quo, you know, who are courageous to do things differently and who are not afraid to push boundaries, because we're getting into uncharted territory. When you think about human resources, the term HR was first used in 1893 by J. R. Commons. So HR is this year, 120 years old, and of course we've evolved, you know, we changed from personnel management to modern HR and everything, but we're at the cusp of a new era that is going to be fundamentally different from anything else that we've done in the past. And if you think about it, it's never been this exciting to be in HR. We get to reinvent and shape the future of HR, or the people function, whether you call it talent and culture, or employee success or people and culture, whatever term you're using, we are reinventing it, and I'm in the middle of it, so I get to help organisations do this. Ula Ojiaku That's exciting. I can sense the passion and the enthusiasm there. Would you be writing a book on this topic anytime soon? Fabiola Eyholzer Maybe one day. Ula Ojiaku Maybe, okay. Whilst we will be eagerly waiting for your book, what books would you recommend to people who might be wondering, okay, what else could I read to, to get abreast on this, or generally any books that you would recommend that have made an impact or impression on you? Fabiola Eyholzer So one book that had a really big impact on me was The Connected Company. So it talks about the company being more like a city, rather than an engine, and even though it doesn't talk about agility, it doesn't talk about human resources, there is so much food for thought in there, you just have to put that thought in to make that translation into HR, but I thought that was a fantastic book. Then obviously Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. I'm a systems thinker myself, so that definitely resonated a lot. And of course there are other books like The Culture Code, Fearless Organization, books like that, that can, you know, really give you a lot of food for thought. Ula Ojiaku Thank you very much. These would be in the show notes. And would there be any ask before we round up that you would have for the audience? Fabiola Eyholzer So don't be afraid to push boundaries and to challenge the status quo. As I said earlier, every time you have that gut feeling there is a better way out there, well, chance is that there actually is. So don't be afraid to push boundaries. Don't be afraid to try. And I know everyone sometimes feels that they're in that hamster wheel, that they have so many things to do already that they can't take on something else, but I tell you from personal experience and from my experience working in that field for, for 10 years, it is a game changer. And if you're willing to put in the work, the results are going to be amazing. Yes, actually it's hard work, but it really delivers what it promises. Don't be scared, be courageous, do it. Ula Ojiaku Thank you very much Fabiola for those words of wisdom. It's been a pleasure. I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and I hope, you know, we would have some follow up sometime in future. Many thanks Fabiola. Fabiola Eyholzer Anytime. Thank you so much. Pleasure was all mine. Ula Ojiaku That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!
In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Amy Edmondson, the Novartis professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. Renowned for her research on psychological safety and author of several acclaimed books, including The Fearless Organization, and the Science of Failing Well - winner of the 2023 Financial Times Business Book of the Year. Amy shares her insights on the science of failing well in entrepreneurship. Key Takeaways Amy Edmondson challenges the conventional view of failure, advocating for a shift towards intelligent risk-taking in entrepreneurship. By emphasizing the importance of clear goals, informed hypotheses, and systematic risk assessment, she guides listeners towards embracing failure as a catalyst for growth and innovation. Amy underscores the role of organizational leaders in cultivating a culture where intelligent risk-taking is encouraged and celebrated, empowering teams to experiment, learn, and adapt. Through reframing failure as a natural part of the entrepreneurial journey, Amy inspires aspiring entrepreneurs to navigate challenges with resilience and optimism, unlocking their full potential in today's dynamic business landscape. Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts If you liked this episode please consider rating and reviewing the show. Click here - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-duct-tape-marketing-podcast/id78797836 scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then be sure to let me know what you loved most about the episode. Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/ducttapemarketing/ Stuck trying to figure out your marketing strategy? Get Your Free AI Prompts To Build A Marketing Strategy HERE - dtm.world/freeprompts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Failure is a powerful teacher, and nobody knows this better than Dr. Amy Edmondson, our guest in today's discussion. A Harvard Professor and the author behind influential works like “The Fearless Organization” and “Right Kind of Wrong” Dr. Edmondson discusses how to create a culture that not only tolerates failure but learns from it. She outlines the critical distinctions between basic, complex, and intelligent failures, stressing that the real learning comes from the latter. This episode offers leaders a roadmap to build trust among their teams, encourage the sharing of missteps, and adopt a mindset of psychological safety and intelligent risk-taking. ________________ Start your day with the world's top leaders by joining thousands of others at Great Leadership on Substack. Just enter your email: https://greatleadership.substack.com/
Amy Edmondson: Right Kind of Wrong Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, where she studies people and organizations seeking to make a positive difference in the world through the work they do. She has pioneered the concept of psychological safety for over twenty years and is recognized as number one on the Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers. She also received that organization's Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019 and Talent Award in 2017. In 2019 she was first on HR Magazine's list of the 20 Most Influential International Thinkers in Human Resources. Her prior book, The Fearless Organization, explains psychological safety and has been translated into fifteen languages. In addition to publishing several books and numerous articles in top academic outlets, Amy has written for, or her work has been covered by, media such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and many others. Her TED Talk on teaming has been viewed more than 3 million times. She is the author of Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well*. Many leaders espouse the value of talking about our failures. Yet, failure is a threat to our ego, so it turns out we're better at learning from the failures of others than we are from our own. In this conversation, Amy and I explore how to do a better job of growing where we're in the wrong. Key Points Failure is a threat to our ego. As a result, we're more likely to learn from the failures of others than from our own failures. It's hard to learn if you already know. If you came frame situations more helpfully, it can substantially influence your ability to grow from being wrong. Disrupt the inevitable emotional response to being wrong by asking this: how was I feeling before this happened? Challenge yourself by considering if the content of your thoughts are useful for your goal. A key question: what other interpretation of the situation is possible? Choose to say or do something that moves you closer to your goals. This question will help: what is going to best help me achieve my goals? Resources Mentioned Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well* by Amy Edmondson Interview Notes Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required). Related Episodes How to Build Psychological Safety, with Amy Edmondson (episode 404) The Value of Being Uncomfortable, with Neil Pasricha (episode 448) How to Quit Bad Stuff Faster, with Annie Duke (episode 607) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.
This week’s guest is Equal Experts Psychological Safety Lead, Julia Bellis. We talk about the misconceptions associated with psych safety, building safety in client-facing teams, and the challenges of hybrid and global working, amongst many other things. A couple of books were mentioned: The Culture Map by Erin Meyer and The Fearless Organization by Amy […]
Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, which is a Chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society. And in today's conversation we certainly talk about Harvard, what it's like to work on a college campus, and what it's like to be specifically at that college campus during this time in 2023 as we record today's conversation. Amy has been recognized by the Biannual Thinkers50 Global Ranking of Management Thinkers since 2011, and recently was ranked #1 in 2021. She's received that organization's Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019 and Talent Award in 2017. She studies teaming, psychological safety (which is going to be a core concept and competency that you've probably heard about at some point if you study environments and teams and groups), and we're going to talk about the famous Aristotle study that Google did that found that psychological safety was the #1 factor in determining team success, so this is definitely a deep dive into that concept and something that hopefully you can take with your teams and organizations. She also studies organizational learning and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, and California Management Review. She's written many books, so we're going to talk about The Fearless Organization, which she wrote in 2019, we're going to talk about her latest book, The Right Kind of Wrong, so a lot of this conversation is about mistakes and failures, and I highly recommend you check out that book. She's also written books around this concept of teaming, including Teaming to Innovate and Extreme Teaming. At her core, you're going to find Amy to be humble but brilliant, you're going to find her to be nuanced and thoughtful when it comes to psychology and the science of humans, and she is someone that I feel as though, even though she's got all these accolades, I feel like I could've talked to forever. Amy had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include: “A mindset is something that happens inside your head. It's an approach. It's an orientation” (6:35). “A psychologically safe environment in the classroom is mission-critical for learning and learners” (9:30). “Safe spaces and psychological safety are almost at odds, almost two opposing ideas rather than compatible ideas [in an educational space]” (12:20). “Classrooms can be environments where people can take risks and occasionally failures will happen… and through those we will learn and grow and get to be better versions of ourselves” (14:40). “Psychological safety for me has always been about helping people take their foot off the brakes” (15:05). “The day you decide you don't need to learn anymore, and your mind is made up and your opinions about various people and groups is made up, is the day you cease to grow (16:35). “It starts with a recognition that other human beings are just as important as you are” (21:10). “We all want to feel that we matter” (23:15). “The meaningful memories [on our death beds] have to do with other humans” (29:10). “There's an asymmetry [to psychological safety]” (30:35). “Vulnerability is a fact” (33:00). “If I'm unwilling to confront my vulnerability, then I'm at risk for unhappy surprises” (33:30). “Neuroscience research suggests that some of the same neurons are firing when we get a psychological assault or harm, like being rejected by a group of friends…, as for a physical harm” (36:20). “Emotions are incredibly important, incredibly powerful in shaping our human experiences (45:20). “Probably the most important capacity people can learn, in sports and in life, is how to tame their emotions” (45:55). “Your emotions can simply be data” (46:40). “The more expert we get in any given field or domain, the more we can effortlessly process context and take it into consideration” (56:25). “The best students, the unusually good students, are curious” (59:40). “To cultivate curiosity and collaboration, you have to truly believe that it's in your interest to do so” (1:00:35). “A mistake is an unintended deviation from a known process… A failure is an undesired outcome” (1:03:15). “There's no such thing as a mistake in new territory” (1:03:55). “It's about creating the safe conditions in which [your kids] can fail” (1:14:30). Additionally, you can find all of Amy's information on her website, and also follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thank you so much to Amy for coming on the podcast! I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers. Thanks for listening.
Episode page with video, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #234 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Amy C. Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, renowned for her research on psychological safety over twenty years. Named by Thinkers50 in 2021 (And again here in 2023) as the #1 Management Thinker in the world, Edmondson's Ted Talk “How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team” has been viewed over three million times. She received her PhD, AM, and AB from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the author of books including The Fearless Organization, Teaming, and her latest, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well is available now. Edmondson talks about the duality of mistakes – some that lead to massive successes and some that warrant a more mindful approach to growth and learning. Listen in as she recounts an endearing mistake from her personal life in the spectrum of Growth Mindset, discusses different types of failures and insights into how they can be reframed as opportunities for growth, exploration, and innovation. Edmondson emphasizes the importance of Psychological Safety and the transformation from a ‘speak up' culture into a ‘listen up' culture within organizations. Tune in today for an enlightening discussion on the fine line between reflecting and ruminating, along with Edmondson's personal anecdotes from her writing journey. Questions and Topics: How do you see the connection between mistakes and failures? Sometimes failure is caused by outside factors? As much as I try to be positive about mistakes and failure, I don't love the phrase “fail early, fail often” — where do you think that phrase or concept misses the mark? Psychological safety comes up A LOT in this podcast series when we talk about a culture of learning from mistakes… how do you define it? Different types of failures — they're not all created equally? “Blameworthy” vs. “Praiseworthy” failures? Why do organizations collectively blame people more than individuals blame others? When leaders are super negative about mistakes… how is demanding perfection or say they must punish (or saying failure is NOT an option) counterproductive? Learning from failure is not as easy as it sounds? Reflecting without ruminating? Mistakes in the book writing process? Proofreading mistakes that slipped through? Renowned Leadership Expert Amy E. Edmondson and Her Views on Psychological Safety and Failure The Duality of Mistakes Edmondson separates mistakes into three categories, drawing from her extensive research into the topic of failures and mistakes. These categories include examples from both her research and her personal life. Her favorite mistake to discuss lies within her research fields, and it features in her book “Right Kind of Wrong”. This mistake recounts the story of a 26-year-old chef from Guangdong, China, named Lee Kum Sheung, who accidentally left his oysters to overcook. The result was a sticky, unexpectedly delicious sauce, which eventually resulted in the creation of the globally renowned oyster sauce. This accidental creation, stemming from a simple mistake, led his family to accumulate a fortune of over 17 billion. This example serves to underline how seemingly negative mistakes can pave the way for groundbreaking innovations and successes. Edmondson argues this is contingent the individual's curiosity and openness to turning these mishaps into new possibilities. Growth Mindset in Mistake Processing Edmondson is a firm advocate of Carol Dweck's work on the concept of a growth mindset which she integrates into her own personal parenting approach. She shares a personal mistake in applying the growth mindset that prompted her to be more mindful in her interactions and praise. Based on the recommendation in Dweck's work, one should focus on the process of learning and effort rather than praising the outcome. Edmondson experienced this first-hand when her son sought constructive feedback, revealing his understanding and demand for a growth mindset. This interaction highlighted unchecked mistakes and further enhanced Edmondson's practice of the growth mindset. Mistake and Failure: Understanding Their Connections Regardless of their causes, many failures can be traced back to some form of mistake. However, not all failures are incidental to mistakes. In many cases, failures are the unfortunate and unexpected results of well-thought-out hypotheses or conscientiously set actions, particularly in new or unfamiliar territories. Shaping Our Attitudes towards Failure The view and treatment of failure in organizations often differ greatly from personal reactions. While individually, people recognize failure as a potent teacher, organizations frequently fail to translate this realization into practice. This gap is arguably a remanence of industrial-era mindsets, where expectations for results were rigidly predefined assuming minimal deviations. Today, this mindset is not compatible with the realities and demands of modern work environments. The culture within organizations regarding failure should be more accepting, even encouraging, as it often leads to crucial learning experiences and innovations. Edmondson proposes three distinct classifications for different types of failure which are basic failure, complex failure, and intelligent failure. While basic and complex failures epitomize blunders that can be potentially avoided, intelligent failures represent the unavoidable consequences of ventures into uncharted territories. To approach failure constructively, Edmondson suggests assessing causes individually and categorizing them across a spectrum of blameworthiness to praiseworthiness. This objective evaluation reframes failures as potential opportunities for growth and discovery rather than undisputable mistakes. The Importance of Psychological Safety Psychological safety has been a consistent topic in many discussions around failure. Seen as a belief that one's environment is safe for taking interpersonal risks such as admitting mistakes or sharing constructive feedback, psychological safety plays a vital role in creating a culture that is conducive to lesson-learning from mistakes. It is important to note that promoting a psychologically safe environment does not necessarily make dealing with these situations easier, but instead makes it more expected and acceptable. Edmondson advocates for psychological safety in organizations, arguing that it is largely influenced by the leadership at various levels in the organization. She asserts that managers should promote open communication about failures and provide necessary reassurances to stimulate learning and improvements from these experiences. The Emergence of a ‘Listen Up' Culture Edmondson makes a compelling argument for transforming a ‘speak up' culture into a ‘listen up' culture. The concept reframes the responsibility carelessly placed on the employees and champions the idea of creating a learning culture instead. In Edmondson's view, such a culture encourages members of an organization to approach every interaction and experience as an opportunity to learn something new, not just from each other, but also from clients and the world at large. By fostering a ‘listen up' culture, organizations inspire their staff to engage more proactively, ultimately nourishing an environment where speaking up is not an obligation but a hallmark of positive engagement. Balancing Between Reflecting and Ruminating Edmondson sheds light on the fine line between productive reflecting and destructive rumination, particularly after a misstep. Reflecting facilitates learning and growth, whereas rumination can deepen feelings of shame and loneliness. This might lead individuals into a vicious cycle of unproductive and recurring thoughts. She suggests adopting an objective cognitive process which starts with a simple inquiry, “What happened?”. This question encourages the individual to assess the situation without assigning blame. It allows them to consider the events dispassionately and extract valuable lessons, thereby directing focus to future improvement rather than past missteps. Reflecting is hence seen as a necessary mechanism for learning, allowing not just understanding but also creating meaningful change after a failure. The Art and Errors of Writing As a prolific author, Edmondson provides insights into the inevitable mistakes involved in the book writing process. She acknowledges how minor errors can slip through even after careful editing and proofreading. These small errors allow for reminders that even skilled authors and editors can make mistakes due to several factors such as fatigue and other biases. She emphasizes the importance of continuous iteration when writing, pointing out that improvement is always possible. Each day spent on a manuscript can uncover not just grammatical errors, but instances of unclear or convoluted sentences that can be rewritten or simplified. The potential to continually refine is what makes writing both a challenging and rewarding process. The Unavoidable Nature of Mistakes Undoubtedly, slip-ups, both small and large, are a commonplace inevitable aspect of our personal and professional lives. They are subject to a multitude of variables, irrespective of the meticulous preventative measures we employ. A mistake can creep in due to oversight, assumptions, fatigue, or simply because of our inherent fallibility as humans. Nurturing an Iterative Culture In line with her teachings on the importance of learning, Edmondson highlights the benefits of fostering an iterative culture. Within this model, organizations are encouraged to continuously learn and adapt their practices based on insights from mistakes and successes alike. The Decisiveness of Title Selection Book titles hold an integral role in attracting potential readers, and, as revealed by Edmondson, the process of naming a book can also be prone to errors. She discloses the careful consideration behind her book title, “Right Kind of Wrong” and the decision to exclude the article ‘the' for stylistic reasons. Despite noticing occasional erroneous inclusions, she garners a positive outlook from it, simply indicating that her work is being discussed and appreciated. Embracing this spirit of learning and adaptation even for individuals in positions of authority can serve as a powerful example for others and help cultivate a culture that wider society can emulate. Essentially, mistakes aren't necessarily a pitfall; they transform into stepping stones when approached with a psychologically safe, learning, and iterative mindset.
Ever felt the gnawing emptiness of burnout creeping in? Ever wished you had the tools to help you navigate through this daunting experience, especially in the realm of ministry? Well, I was fortunate to sit down with Jason, who has walked this road, fought the fight and come out stronger on the other side. With more than two decades of local church leadership under his belt, Jason candidly shared his journey of highs, lows, recovery and his newly penned book that seeks to help others in the same predicament.We delved into the nitty-gritty of burnout, identifying its signs, unmasking the hidden culprits, and stressing on the absolute necessity of self-reflection for reclaiming hope. With Jason's wisdom, we broke down the concept of boundaries as gates, not walls, and how these can serve as our protective barriers to keep our wellbeing intact. You'll hear from Jason on the power of saying 'No', setting healthy boundaries and how to keep the right people close.As we drew towards the end, we tackled the often difficult process of relinquishing control, especially when scaling a business or ministry, and the integral part trust plays in this. Jason also drove home the importance of health within ministry leadership, even recommending a resource, 'Fearless Organization' by Amy Edmondson, that underpins this. So, why not give this enlightening discussion with Jason a listen? Learn how you can not only stave off burnout, but how to thrive and burn brightly in all avenues of your life.
If you're human, then you've felt the disappointment of failure. Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, helps us reframe the concept of failure, both in our personal and professional lives by sharing her research backed insights. Whoever you are in the world, this episode will help you discover intelligent failure so that you can limit preventable failures, stress and thrive. Amy Edmondson's Website: https://amycedmondson.com/ “Amy Edmondson, one of our finest business minds, offers a bold new perspective on human fallibility. With a graceful mix of scientific research and practical advice, she shows how to transform failure from an obstacle to a stepping stone — from a weight that holds us back to a wind that propels us forward. RIGHT KIND OF WRONG is a guidebook for our times.” —Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of THE POWER OF REGRET and DRIVE Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, renowned for her research on psychological safety over twenty years. Her award-winning work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Psychology Today, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and more. Named by Thinkers50 in 2021 as the #1 Management Thinker in the world, Edmondson's TED Talk “How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team” has been viewed over three million times. She received her PhD, AM, and AB from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the author of Right Kind of Wrong, The Fearless Organization, and Teaming. https://www.linkedin.com/in/amycedmondson/ https://twitter.com/AmyCEdmondson https://www.instagram.com/amycedmondson/ https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Right-Kind-of-Wrong/Amy-C-Edmondson/9781982195069 Watch Amy's TED talk: HERE --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mindbodyspace/support
In her forthcoming book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, Amy Edmondson offers a new framework to think about, discuss, and practice failure wisely, using human fallibility as a tool for making ourselves and our organizations smarter.Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School and the author of seven books, including The Fearless Organization, which has been translated into more than 15 languages. She was ranked number one on the 2021 Thinkers50 list, a ranking of the world's most influential management thinkers.Together with Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, Edmondson discusses the distinctions that can help us separate good failure from bad, strategies to decrease the cost of learning, as well as practical actions for leaders to establish a culture where intelligent failure is predominant.Key topics discussed: 1:13 | The distinction between failing well and failing badly9:36 | How to avoid the "illusion of knowing" and mistaking a mental model for a fact12:02 | Institutional and leadership-level moves to create an environment where intelligent failure is predominant18:27 | How to decrease the cost of learning19:42 | Can AI help to analyze the potential for failure or identify learnable lessons and failure patterns?This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy
Steph Tuss is the CEO of multimillion-dollar global consulting company Life Is Now, Inc., and frequent stand-in cohost of Business Daily News' top-ranked podcast - The Successful Mind. Steph discovered her love for teaching at a young age, beginning her career as an educator. It was during this time that her firstborn child was facing health difficulties, and she decided to completely overhaul their diets to figure out the root cause. She went back to school to pursue a Master's Degree in Holistic Nutrition and went on to open a practice to help families who faced similar challenges. Fast forward a few years, Steph hired David Neagle and his team at Life Is Now, Inc., as her health practice's business coach. As she continued to scale her business, her love for entrepreneurship and growing businesses shined through. She sold her business at the age of 33 and joined Life Is Now, Inc. as the Director of Sales in 2009 before taking on the CEO role less than a decade later in 2016. In her six years at the helm of the company, Steph has become the primary driver behind all of Life Is Now's marketing, business development and brilliant team culture. As a recent empty-nester, she lives in Charlotte, NC with her husband and cattle dog, Jack. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling the country in her Airstream. Here's what we covered on the episode: How Steph Became a Leader As a child, Steph was always told to quit being bossy, which caused her to fly under the radar in grade school, but when she went to college, she became a teacher because it was an acceptable way to be a leader In 2001, Steph had her first child, who had a lot of health issues - after extensive research, Steph discovered she was suffering from food sensitivities and wanted to teach and share what she discovered with other people Steph went back to school and got her master's degree in holistic nutrition, and began to build her business which grew very quickly The business started to plateau, so Steph hired David as a business coach, who is now her business partner - though his coaching Steph fell more in love with business building and mindset work than with nutrition After 3 years, Steph sold her business to work with David at Life is Now, where she started in sales and is now the CEO Steph talks about what led her to seek out a business coach to help her see what she needed to change to grow her business How Steph said yes to every opportunity within Life is Now so she could learn all parts of the business and become a part of the leadership After the current CEO left, Steph took on the responsibilities of the CEO without her role changing - one day, she walked into David's office and told him he needed to make her the CEO, and he did Now, Steph isn't just the CEO; she is also a partner in Life is Now Establishing Good Culture + Team Synergy One of the first big changes Steph made as CEO was establishing psychological safety because of the previous CEO, people were scared to share their opinions As a CEO, you have to model what you want to see other people do; that means being transparent about what you're learning, telling them when you don't feel confident, sharing when you make mistakes, and celebrating the good Steph would host workshops on how to give to receive feedback to get people comfortable with conflict because businesses are here to solve problems, and you need people to share their ideas to come up with solutions If you want to know more about psychological safety, which is the most important when it comes to developing culture, Steph recommends the book, The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson Next, Steph shares that they established a clear vision by taking the team through a vision process that's outlined in Cameron Herold's book, Vivid Vision When you follow this vision process, Steph says you'll usually hit your vision goals within one or two years because it creates focus synergy for your team Big lessons Steph has learned are that mistakes are required and to not take results personally By creating a visionary leadership assessment, Steph was able to see that there are 4 different types of leaders: Catalyst, Charismatic, Limitless, and Legacy Leaders Go to lifeisnowinc.com, and you can find their visionary leadership assessment Steph talks about the rebrand they recently went through that switched the company from being about a person to being about their ideal client How a lot of business owners get stuck doing tasks that shouldn't be on their plate because they aren't good at delegating Check out the Life is Now Website and connect with Steph on Instagram for lots of free industry and business resources Links mentioned: Life Is Now Inc. Website The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson Vivid Vision by Cameron Herold Visionary Leadership Assessment Connect with Steph on Instagram Like what you heard? Click here to subscribe + leave a review on iTunes. Click here to download my Sales Page Trello Board Let's connect on Instagram!
In this episode of Let Go & Lead, Maril talks with lauded author, scholar and Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, whose pioneering research into psychological safety has massively impacted the world of work. Amy breaks down what psychological safety is, what it isn't and three key things leaders need to do to foster it. Over a ranging conversation, she and Maril discuss the immense importance of leaders in the middle; why leaders need to maintain a beginner's mind; and why psychological safety — or, as Amy defines it, “permission for candor” — must be balanced with a commitment to excellence for an organization to succeed. Learn about: 3:30 How to build a learning organization 7:03 Creating an environment of psychological safety 12:56 The changing dynamics of modern teams 20:23 Key misconceptions about psychological safety 22:51 Fostering psychological safety in uncertain times 32:32 The science of “Failing Well” 37:55 What leaders need to let go of — Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to successful enterprises contributing to societal betterment. Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011 and most recently ranked #1 in 2021. She also received the Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019 and the Talent Award in 2017 from the organization. She focuses her research on teaming, psychological safety and organizational learning, and her articles have been published in various academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review. Her book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Wiley), published in 2019, has been translated into 15 languages. Edmondson's upcoming book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well (Atria), offers a framework for wise thinking, discussion and practice of failure, utilizing human fallibility as a tool for personal and organizational growth. The release date is set for September 5, 2023. ABOUT LET GO & LEAD Let Go & Lead is a leadership community created by Maril MacDonald, founder and CEO of Gagen MacDonald. Maril brings together provocateurs, pioneers, thought leaders and those leading the conversation around culture, transformation and change. Over the course of the past 12 years, Let Go & Lead has existed in many forms, from video interviews to resource guides to its current iteration as a podcast. At its core, it remains a place where people can access a diversity of perspectives on interdisciplinary approaches to leadership. Maril is also working on a book incorporating these insights gathered over the past several years from global leaders and change makers. Maril has interviewed over 120 leaders — from business to academia and nonprofits to the arts — through the years. In each conversation, from personal anecdotes to ground-breaking scientific analysis, she has probed the lessons learned in leadership. From these conversations, the Let Go & Lead framework has emerged. It is both a personal and organizational resource that aims to serve the individual leader or leadership at scale. ABOUT GAGEN MACDONALD At Gagen MacDonald, we are dedicated to helping organizations navigate the human struggle of change. We are a people-focused consulting firm and our passion is improving the employee experience — for everyone. For almost 25 years, we have been working with companies to create clarity from chaos by uniting employees across all levels around a single vision so they can achieve results and realize their future. We have been a pioneer in bringing humanity to strategy execution, leading in areas such as organizational communication, culture, leadership, and employee engagement. Our Vision is to lift all humanity by transforming the companies that transform the world. Full episodes also available on: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/let-go-lead-with-maril-macdonald/id1454869525 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Gaf7JXOckZMtkpsMtnjAj?si=WZjZkvfLTX2T4eaeB1PO2A Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9sZXRnb2xlYWQubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M — Gagen MacDonald is a strategy execution consulting firm that specializes in employee engagement, culture change and leadership development. Learn more at http://www.gagenmacdonald.com.
Today's guest is Dr. John Austin, who has been in the OBM trenches as a student, professor, and frontline consultant for over 20 years. Before continuing with the usual opening remarks, I'm going to make a rare ask of you. Two asks actually. This is perhaps one of the most actionable podcasts I've published. If you listen to this show and act on some of the suggestions, you can improve your practice right away. And that's not hyperbole. So the first ask is to make sure you listen to the show in its entirety, and go to reachingresults.com/results-toolkit for additional support. The second ask is that you take a few minutes and share this episode with friends and colleagues. In your workplace, you might even consider discussing this episode, and more importantly, John's book Results: The Science-Based Approach to Better Productivity, Profitability, and Safety, in your staff meetings. In this episode, we cover: The evolution of OBM practice over the last few decades. Why OBM consulting in ABA organizations can be more difficult than other settings. How to form better relationships with the people you work with. Ways to pinpoint and measure your interactions with colleagues and supervisees. The importance of asking questions. Agreeing on, instead of setting expectations. Why the book Atomic Habits irks me. John's conceptualization of Burnout and Psychological Safety. What is a Mastermind, and why might you consider joining one. Other resources mentioned include: The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmonson. Building a Psychologically Safe Workplace, a TedTalk by Amy Edmonson. Teaching Employees How to Receive Feedback: A Preliminary Investigation (Ehrlich et al., 2020). ABA on Reddit here and here. Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott. HBR article: Good Leadership Is About Asking Good Questions. John's interview with Dr. Paulie Gavoni. My interview with Dr. Aubrey Daniels. Rapid Change: Immediate Action for the Impatient Leader, by Joe Laipple. This podcast is brought to you by: Behavior University. Their mission is to provide university quality professional development for the busy Behavior Analyst. Learn about their CEU offerings, including their 8-hour Supervision Course, as well as their RBT offerings over at behavioruniversity.com/observations. And check out the Leadership CEU I mentioned here. ACE Approved CEUs from .... Behavioral Observations. That's right, get your CEUs while driving, walking your dog, doing the dishes, or whatever else you might have going on, all while learning from your favorite podcast guests!
“It takes time to build that psychological safety, but I think it's a more important area than ever before in the modern workplace,” explains Dennis Garcia, Assistant General Counsel of Microsoft. Today, Dennis and Kim Yapchai, former SVP, Chief Environmental, Social, and Governance Officer at Tenneco Inc., discuss their career advice for developing in-house talent. Trust is something that needs to be earned over time, and creating a psychologically safe work environment is no different. With job turnover particularly high, it is especially important to find innovative ways to retain and nurture top talent within your organization. To develop your in-house talent, as a leader, it is important to be up front and open with your employees. This authenticity will help develop trust between leaders and teammates alike. Mentor the talent you have and give people opportunities to grow their skills. When employees feel understood, appreciated, and supported, they are less likely to look for outside career advancement. Nowadays, employees, particularly those of the Gen Z and Millennial generations, are more likely to be attracted to jobs where they feel aligned with the company's values. By being authentic and up front from the very start, leaders can foster relationships with those employees who are the right fit for the work culture they are looking to create. Instead of trying to fight over the top talent in the pool, look in-house and put time into helping your current employees flourish. Quotes “If people don't feel safe enough to speak up and be heard, the company loses out. You lose out on new ideas, on diversity of thought, and people letting you know when things are going wrong.” (9:25-9:43 Kim) “It takes time to build that psychological safety, but I think it's a more important area than ever before in the modern workplace.” (10:47-10:57 | Dennis) “It is harder when you don't see people face to face in the office, you have to find other ways to connect.” (16:02-16:08 | Kim) “Build the network and your brand before you need it.” (25:39-25:42 | Kim) “When you reach out to people and you try to build those relationships, it's not all about how they can help you. It's how can you help them.” (29:10-29:18 | Kim) Links Connect with Kim Yapchai: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-yapchai/ Connect with Dennis Garcia: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denniscgarcia/ Buy a copy of Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson: https://a.co/d/fP9z92s Connect with Chris Batz: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbatz/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theliongroupkc Instagram: @theliongroupllc Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stephen Taylor, Chief Innovation Officer at Untold Content. Stephen and I talk about the importance of storytelling, failure narratives, and its impact on the innovation culture of companies. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Stephen Taylor, Chief Innovation Officer at Untold ContentBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Stephen Taylor. He is the Chief Innovation and Chief Financial Officer at Untold Content, where he focuses on helping organizations accelerate innovation through the power of storytelling. Welcome to the show. Stephen Taylor: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here.Brian Ardinger: This whole concept of innovation storytelling, it's becoming more and more popular as people are trying to understand like, how do I actually get movement on my innovation initiatives? And a lot of it comes down to, you know, the stories that you tell. So, I wanted to have you on the show, because you have a company that focuses on this. Why don't we talk about the definition? What is innovation storytelling? Stephen Taylor: Yes. Innovation storytelling is something that is near and dear to my heart. So, I am a chemist by training. I did my PhD in chemistry, did a postdoc. Went out into industry and was there for about a decade. And I felt the pains of how you actually get buy-in, even within a smaller organization. I think we had 250 people. But how do you actually get buy-in on ideas. Or how do you kill ideas that don't fit? You know, how do you find out what is the right decision. And so that was something that I became very passionate about. And so, when I left industry and joined Untold, I really wanted to spend a lot of time focusing on how do innovators communicate, even as a scientist. How do scientists communicate?So, what we found through our research is that innovation storytelling is the art and science of communicating strategic narratives and personal stories around innovation objectives in order to drive them forward. It really works on trying to make things that are very strategic, but also bring those personal experiences in.Because what we found is that organizations have overall these strategic narratives that, that they're trying to force. When you have an idea or something that you're trying to bring forward, you have to ensure that there's good alignment between those stories and that narrative. And so, they really play in concert together. So that's why we include both those as a part of the definition. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, part of it's like that translation service almost. Sometimes it's a technical translation of, what the heck are you talking about? It's more about how do you align that with the other stories that are being told in the organization so that you can make sure that people understand what you mean.I think, you know, when I go out and talk to companies, you know, one of the first things I like to do is how do you define innovation? Because I think that alone, causes problems with a lot of organizations. It's like, well, for me it means, you know, creating the next flying car. Where another person in the organization may mean that innovation is creating something new with our existing customers. And so, right. You know, if you don't have alignment from that perspective, you can go sideways really quickly. Stephen Taylor: We spend time talking about story led innovations versus innovation led stories. So, story led innovation is essentially a project that you may get from your advisor. Or from your boss. And so, a project comes in, the story's already aligned, so it's easy to prioritize that work.And so, you're just working on communication at that point, a strategic communication. But if you're working on a innovation led story, that's where you come and you find something. Well, now how do you get it in line? How do you make something that's new, that has potential that's maybe adjacent? How do you decide, how do you try to create that alignment narrative? And so those are, those are things that we teach as a part of our curriculum. Brian Ardinger: That brings up a couple of interesting questions I have around this idea of innovation usually is in this uncertain area. You know, it's, it's a new idea that you want to create in the world that doesn't always align to the execution side of the business. But yet you have to try these things and do a lot of things to move that idea forward, and a lot of times you're going to fail at that. So, can you talk a little bit about power of failure and, and how do you translate that from a story perspective to let people understand that that's part of the process? Stephen Taylor: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, there's a lot of ways that you can go with this. One way that we think about failure is actually relates back to the Hero's Journey. So, when it comes to the Hero's Journey, you know, you can take the whole 17 step process from Joseph Campbell and his original work on the Hero's Journey, or you can really try to simplify it.And the way that I like to think about it is you receive the call for a journey. You go out through a transition called the transition from the known to the unknown. You then go on your journey, you do your discoveries, whatever. You collect the boons from the journey, which are the gifts to be given back. You then bring those back through that transition point back to your community.And then the hero is recognized with monuments and statues and everything. Joseph Campbell's work was really based around tribal behavior. And when you think about tribal behavior, there's a lot of analogies to the innovation groups that are out there in the unknown trying to find what's next.For the heroes they get these large statues and monuments, but for the failures, they put together rituals. And because the rituals are points where we come back together and actually share best practices, share things that we've learned, to take those learnings from failure and use those to bless back to the community. And so, what we've seen through our research is that there are many points where people are starting to implement these failure rituals.And so, there's several different examples. There's a classic one, Ben and Jerry's. Ben and Jerry's Failure Graveyard is a classic failure ritual. There's Miter. Miter does Failure Cake. So, within Failure Cake, what happens is that they basically bring out a sheet cake into a cafeteria and they say, If you want a piece of cake, you need to share a failure story. And it's really to get those stories of failure being shared in those best practices and lessons learned.Then there's also DuPont. DuPont's doing an Annual Dead Project's Day around Halloween. And so, the whole point is to get lots of their innovators and their scientists together to share their experiences. But you have to have those points of sharing. And what we found in parts of our research is that 83% of large organizations share innovation stories, but only 26% share stories of failure.But because a lot of innovations fail, you lose so much. And so, implementing these, these rituals into their yearly practices can go a long way to capturing those insights, but also unifying their community. Brian Ardinger: So, do you have any tactics of, let's say I'm working in an organization, and I buy into the fact that I need to celebrate these failures and at least tell these stories so that you know that not everything's going to be a success when you go through something new. How do you get buy-in to even have a ritual, like a failure cake, or things along those lines? Stephen Taylor: A lot of times getting buy-in for that is showing the value that's created. So being an innovator, trying something first. And so, a lot of times what we've found is that people are really actually excited to share these failure stories. Because it's things that they hold onto that really drive them.And so, them being able to share those with the group is really strong. But one of the biggest values is actually hearing someone who is, let's say for instance, you have a hero because within the Hero's Journey, you have people that basically go out onto their journey, they come back and then they may never go out on a journey again.But that's not the life of an innovator, of a scientist. They constantly have to go back to the bench or go out and do stuff again. So, to hear someone who maybe is a hero from one project, and they have war that's existing for them. For them to say, hey, you know, here's a failure story of mine. Think of how that sounds to someone who's a new scientist or a new innovator that's really gung-ho on their first project.You know, to be able to hear that, you know, this may not work out and that's okay. I've had a whole slew of failures throughout my career. I'm still here and still doing great stuff. You know, that's really helpful and it helps people be able to realize like this is not my baby. You know, this is a project that I'm working on. We're going to push it as far as we can. We're going to try to achieve the goal, and if it doesn't work out, there's going to be the next thing. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about the process that a company can go through to tell better stories and to put this actually into practice. Are there particular methodologies or tactics that companies should be looking at or walk me through the process.Stephen Taylor: We had a podcast called Untold Stories of Innovation. And in that podcast, there was a qualitative research study. And one thing we wanted to hear is like how people utilize stories in their innovation cultures, but then also listen to the stories and dissect them. And we heard several different story frameworks used time and time again. And the two that are most prevalent are ABT and CAR.CAR is very well known. It has a lot of different names to it, but it's Challenge Action Results. And the importance of Challenge Action Results from a natural language processing standpoint is that it alleviates cognitive tension. Basically, says like, here is the challenge. Here's the action we took. Here are the results that we got.But in order to alleviate cognitive tension, we had to create cognitive tension. And that cognitive tension is actually created through a framework called ABT. That ABT (And, But, Therefore) is popularized by Randy Olson. The framework for ABT is ordinary world and something at stake, but there's some type of tension, there's some problem, there's something that's preventing us to realize the value that's there.Therefore, here's our proposed solution. And when those two get paired together, you basically have a framework to present and solve a problem. But then you can interlace into that lots of different story patterns. To make storytelling one very strategic and very mission focused, but also very purposeful and concise.Brian Ardinger: So, is this something that product teams and that at the beginning of the project start literally mapping out what story they think the new idea is going to go on? Or how does this actually work in practice? Stephen Taylor: It really works in practice by understanding who your audience is and what you're trying to get out of what information that you're needing, what buy-in you're needing. I'm really trying to map the story that you're sharing with that audience. Because there is no one story framework that rules 'em all. You know, you can talk about brand story, you can talk about Hero's Journey. There's a variety. And so, the more that you practice and practice from a standpoint of trying to understand your audience and what it is that they need in order to make a decision that you're hoping for them to make, that really helps you with crafting something that really gets at that goal. Brian Ardinger: So, I would imagine that the teams need to develop different types of stories. So, for example, inside stories where they're trying to communicate to management or other collaborators within the organization and that story of what they're building and why. May be different than an outside story, which would be maybe to the marketplace or to the consumers. Am I reading that correctly? Stephen Taylor: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. So prime example, we had an interview with Jim Murkowski from Ecolab. And they told a story about this new technology that they had developed for detecting Legionella, for Legionnaire's disease.And it was, you know, we do this whole breakdown of the story in our courses. He uses a framework, he uses CAR because it was in the past, we're informing people. So, it's challenge, action, results, and just it is the most clean, obvious innovation to do. They basically took a process that took two weeks to get results and now people can actually get that result in minutes. And make you know, really good decisions based on the information.But that story that you tell external is nowhere near what happened actually internal to that organization. Because Eco Lab was the group who actually did all the water testing. And so internally it was a story of self-disruption. Because you can imagine the feedback they got when they came out with this new technology and say, hey, we don't need to do testing in the lab anymore. You know, we don't need water samples. They can do it on their site. Everything was fear pushback. Like, oh, you know, the quality. Oh, you know, can you really trust them to do it right. You know, all these things. Because it was going to disrupt a lot of systems that they already had in their organization. So, the storytelling can't be the same because the challenge that you're trying to solve is fundamentally different.Brian Ardinger: How would you go about testing your stories to know if you have the right story to the right audience? Are there particular ways that you should be testing your stories or talk a little bit about that. Stephen Taylor: Having those ritual opportunities, there's a lot of these already built in. You know, groups have group meeting pretty often. You know, you get feedbacks through your emails when you're sharing information. There's lots of these points, but you had to look at them as being strategic. Innovators spend 30% of their work week in some form of storytelling. We put out a survey. We had a hundred people fill out the survey. It was 12 hours a week. We've worked with probably 300 to 500 innovators so far in the last year. They've completed the same survey. Theirs was like 12 to 15 hours a week. So, you're spending a lot of time either crafting stories, sharing stories, or listening to stories. And if you take that time very seriously and start thinking about it very strategically, you can start using those opportunities as a way to get feedback on the stories that you're sharing and seeing what is resonating, what is not resonating. So, these meetings, the emails, the water cooler conversations, those are all strategic points that you have where you can actually build up these skills. Brian Ardinger: One of the biggest challenges that I've seen working with companies is oftentimes you have different business units that value innovation differently. And so, telling that initial story that innovation is important, often sometimes falls on different audiences. So, do you have any advice or thoughts on how do you get alignment on just the concept of why innovation is important and the stories you need to tell around that? Stephen Taylor: Yeah, so, so that's a really good point. Always within any project, you know, project teams do this naturally is identify who are the stakeholders. But then are you actually going out and spending time with the stakeholders?Do you take a day? How much time could we save in our storytelling, if we took a very slow step, first, went and spent a day with our consumers or with our stakeholders and just heard the things that they talk about, you're not there to make decisions. You're just there to observe. What do they do? What are the major discussion points?Am I actually presenting information to them that they really care about. Or am I just throwing information out there that is not aligned with the conversations that they're having? If we can use storytelling to create those points of alignment between those business units that have different priorities, which most of them will, you can make the time that you're spending communicating more effective and more efficient. Brian Ardinger: How can someone learn to be a better storyteller? Are there particular things they should be reading or looking at, or resources they should be delving into? What's a good way to become a better storyteller? Stephen Taylor: Obviously at Untold, we have a course that's entirely built upon innovation storytelling. We really are the first group to really look at storytelling from an innovation perspective. We bring in a lot of peer review literature and really try to paint this cohesive, basically try to pull a lot of the information together on what is the best practices to date. And then how do we use these strategic frameworks and these patterns? So that's the first thing is that I'm going to plug in ourselves because I think that the experience that we create and the outcomes from the experience are really, really impactful.And what I'm going to say is that, again, storytelling is something that is evolutionary. You become a better storyteller. So you go through the trainings, but you don't stop there. You constantly look for new resources. And so one of the things that we give out as a part of our course once you complete it, is that you get a book on storytelling. But it could be something like the Fearless Organization because psychological safety has big impacts on people feeling like they can share stories.So, there's lots of books and there's lots of literature out there that you can continue to dive into. There are things like pep decks that have little introductory parts for storytelling. But it's one of those things that us as innovators who are not afraid to go out into the wilderness, into the unknown and take the first step is that we have to be able to do that with our education and realize that this is a journey as well.And the more that we learn about storytelling, the more that we see ourselves as innovators within these larger organizational narratives and also within our own personal story. Continue learning. Don't stop at one. Lots of perspectives out there on storytelling that are fantastic. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Well, that's a great way to end because one of the last questions I always ask is, how can people, if they want to learn more, reach out to you and your company? Stephen Taylor: www.untoldcontent.com. You can also reach out to me. My name's Stephen Taylor. My email is stephen@untoldcontent.com. So, you can reach out to us in those ways. The other thing that I would recommend everyone look at is a new venture that we are starting up called Narratize.So, you can go to Naratize.com and at Narratize we are working on developing a storytelling platform for busy professionals. A communication platform for busy professionals. The idea is can you create a white paper in a day or in a couple hours. It's an AI-based tool that really helps you share the insights that you know to create these deliverables that you have to work on. So, it is currently a pitch builder. But it is quickly evolving into lots of other points of content. You can check us out at naratize.com as well. Brian Ardinger: Obviously the world is changing quite a bit with AI and Chat GPT and all these kinds of things and makes it easier and harder at the same time to tell your story. So yes, Stephen, I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your insights on that. I look forward to continuing the conversation and hearing more stories in the future. So, thanks very much. Stephen Taylor: Awesome. Thanks Brian. I really appreciate it.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company. For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.
What a great way to kick off the New Year! We are so pleased to have had time with the remarkable Dr. Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School. Amy shares more of her groundbreaking insights on Psychological Safety and how it must be a central theme for managers if they are to truly tap into the performance capabilities of their teams. This is one for the ages in the world of Bosshole® Transformation!Click HERE for Amy's LinkedIn profileClick HERE to purchase The Fearless OrganizationClick HERE to purchase TeamingClick HERE to download "What is a Fearless Organization"Check out these other episodes on Psychological Safety:Aaron Dignan - Brave New WorkJohn and Sara - Psychological SafetyJohn and Sara - Above the Line, Below the LineHave a BOSSHOLE STORY of your own? Click HERE to inquire about being on the podcast!HERE ARE MORE RESOURCES FROM REAL GOOD VENTURES:Never miss a good opportunity to learn from a bad boss...Click HERE to get your very own Reference Profile. We use The Predictive Index as our analytics platform so you know it's validated and reliable. Your Reference Profile informs you of your needs, behaviors, and the nuances of what we call your Behavioral DNA. It also explains your work style, your strengths, and even the common traps in which you may find yourself. It's a great tool to share with friends, family, and co-workers.Follow us on Twitter HERE and make sure to share with your network!Provide your feedback HERE, please! We love to hear from our listeners and welcome your thoughts and ideas about how to improve the podcast and even suggest topics and ideas for future episodes.Visit us at www.realgoodventures.com. We are a Talent Optimization consultancy specializing in people and business execution analytics. Real Good Ventures was founded by Sara Best and John Broer who are both Certified Talent Optimization Consultants with over 50 years of combined consulting and organizational performance experience. Sara is also certified in EQi 2.0. RGV is also a Certified Partner of Line-of-Sight, a powerful organizational health and execution platform. RGV is known for its work in leadership development, executive coaching, and what we call organizational rebuild where we bring all our tools together to diagnose an organization's present state and how to grow toward a stronger future state.
You need to fail... Yes, I said it. Because failure is the fastest way to success when you're innovating. But it's surprisingly hard to fail. And this is a major problem. Why, you ask? Well, in our service design practice, failure is part of prototyping. You have an idea, you create something, you try it in the real world, learn from what happened, and based on that, improve your solution to repeat this process. See what I did there? You try and learn, that's the key. Trying something, you actually hope that it's going to work out differently than you planned so that you can learn. But when things don't work out as planned, this is often perceived as... failure. And failure isn't what most organizations embrace or celebrate. The truth is that they fail at, well yeah, failing. There are many reasons for this, but maybe the biggest one is a lack of psychological safety. Here's the kicker... Scientific research has proven that the best-performing teams have the highest degree of psychological safety. So how do you grow the appetite for failure in a risk-averse organization that is focused on maintaining the status quo? We explore that question in this week's episode with Stephan Wiedner. Stephan has done a lot of research on this topic and seen many examples of what works and what doesn't. So if you're interested in building a "fail-safe" environment in your organization, then you don't want to miss out on this conversation. One thing that surprised me in this episode was that you can objectively measure the levels of psychological safety. Of course, this is a great tool to show you and your CEO if you're heading in the right direction. Enjoy the conversation, and keep making a positive impact :) - Marc --- [ 1. GUIDE ] --- 00:00 Welcome to episode 164 05:30 Who is Stephan 08:30 lightning round 12:45 What is psychological safety 14:30 Why does it matter 15:15 Where is the lack coming from 21:30 The internal voices 23:30 A fail-safe environment 27:00 Strategy and tactics 31:30 Barriers to adoption 34:15 Awareness within organizations 38:00 Top-level management 42:30 What are you committed to 44:30 Measuring psychological safety 50:00 Myths and misconceptions 53:30 The results don't lie 56:45 What's next 58:30 Closing thoughts --- [ 2. LINKS ] --- https://www.linkedin.com/in/swiedner/ The Fearless Organization (book) - https://amzn.to/3hdAuZE The Culture Code (book) - https://amzn.to/3h7RH6M The Whisper on the Night Wind (book) - https://amzn.to/3iHa5UB Psychological Safety assessment - https://zarango.com/freepsi/ --- [ 3. CIRCLE ] --- Join our private community for in-house service design professionals. https://servicedesignshow.com/circle
Creative, innovative, high-performing teams with positive well-being that are engaged and committed to your business - every leader's dream, right? How to engage and motivate teams can seem complicated, but research shows us there is one factor more important than any other: Psychological Safety. Join us as we explore how to build teams that contribute positively to your workplace culture and performance, every day, with our guest expert Stephan Wiedner. Stephan is CEO of Zarango.com and Noomii.com, which are consultancy firms that train and coach business people on how to create and sustain a high-performance work environment through psychological safety. With a vision to help build a world in which everyone has the courage to speak up and be heard, Stephan explains how employee voice is the driving force of competitive advantage and sustainable success. Links: You can find Stephan on LinkedIn and Twitter Claim Your Free Psychological Safety Assessment at zarango.com Hear more from Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson including her book The Fearless Organization, TedX Talk and latest academic research Learn more about Google's Project Aristotle For bonus content, full interviews and sneak peeks of future episodes, follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube
This week Sara and John address one of THE most critical topics of our time - Psychological Safety. This is not some esoteric field of study - it is a measurable attribute that will make or break the success of a team. Psychological Safety is about performance, and we dive into its elements and invite our listeners to reach out if you need to assess your team's Psychological Safety.Click HERE for our handout "What is a Fearless Organization?"Click HERE for our handout "Becoming a Fearless Organization?"Have a BOSSHOLE STORY of your own? Click HERE to inquire about being on the podcast!HERE ARE MORE RESOURCES FROM REAL GOOD VENTURES:Never miss a good opportunity to learn from a bad boss...Click HERE to get your very own Reference Profile. We use The Predictive Index as our analytics platform so you know it's validated and reliable. Your Reference Profile informs you of your needs, behaviors, and the nuances of what we call your Behavioral DNA. It also explains your work style, your strengths, and even the common traps in which you may find yourself. It's a great tool to share with friends, family, and co-workers.Follow us on Twitter HERE and make sure to share with your network!Provide your feedback HERE, please! We love to hear from our listeners and welcome your thoughts and ideas about how to improve the podcast and even suggest topics and ideas for future episodes.Visit us at www.realgoodventures.com. We are a Talent Optimization consultancy specializing in people and business execution analytics. Real Good Ventures was founded by Sara Best and John Broer who are both Certified Talent Optimization Consultants with over 50 years of combined consulting and organizational performance experience. Sara is also certified in EQi 2.0. RGV is also a Certified Partner of Line-of-Sight, a powerful organizational health and execution platform. RGV is known for its work in leadership development, executive coaching, and what we call organizational rebuild where we bring all our tools together to diagnose an organization's present state and how to grow toward a stronger future state.
In this episode Sal Silvester and Amy Edmonson dive deep into the topic of psychological safety - what it means, the impacts of a hierarchical organization, how it applies to physical safety, the connection and potential of diverse teams and so much more. Amy Edmondson is the world renown expert on psychological safety and creating fearless organizations. She is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Amy has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 as the #1 management thinker in 2021. Her most recent book, The Fearless Organization offers a practical guide for organizations serious about success in the modern economy and has been translated into 15 languages. You don't want to miss this important interview with Sal and Amy.
Welcome back to the Robin Zander Show! For today's episode I sit down with Eddie Hudson & Tullio Siragusa on the Tech Backstage podcast. The podcast goes behind the scenes with today's leaders who discuss the intersection of technology and problem solving, and applying Design Thinking to business. In this episode, we discuss how connection is essential for a courageous organization and drives innovation in business. I tell the stories of my first adult gymnastic class and opening Robins Cafe with no prior restaurant experiences - both of which involved growing comfortable with my fear. We also discuss supporting people within your organization on their own self awareness journeys and leading by "Love, Guide, Let go." I am thrilled to share this episode with you!
Carley Hauck is an acclaimed author, organizational and leadership development consultant, Stanford Instructor, sought-after speaker and executive team coach, who ignites conscious leadership in individuals, teams, and executives to activate business to be a force for good.She partners with some of the top organizations in the world supporting psychological safety, trust, inclusive leadership, innovation, and human centered cultures where everyone feels they belong.Carley is the founder of Leading from Wholeness, a leadership and organizational development consulting firm. Her highest values are harmony, service through joy, learning and growth to create positive change in the world. For almost 15 years she has partnered with business stakeholders at leading Fortune 100 companies and high-growth startups to understand their organizational, leadership development, and culture needs including: Capital One, Pixar, Intuit, Bank of the West, Asana, Advent Health, LinkedIn, Clif Bar, HP, Gilead and many others.She has strong expertise in designing and delivering highly effective engaging blended learning programs for high potential senior leaders/teams or specialized business needs. These programs have reached thousands of employees. She has directly coached and mentored several hundred senior executives and mid-level managers across 10 leading organizations to radically improve engagement, inclusion, leadership competencies, and employee resiliency skills. Carley brings a rigorous research approach to her work and all programs delivered, the measures and assessments used have been validated from her early days of consulting on NIH (National Institutes of Health) clinical trials and her work at Stanford University and UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Since 2013, Carley has served as an adjunct instructor at Stanford University and UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. and facilitates powerful courses on leadership and management.Carley's book SHINE-Ignite Your Inner Game to Lead Consciously at Work and in the World debuted February 2021 with Sounds True and was named one of the best books to read in 2022 by Mindful magazine.She holds an MA in Organizational Psychology. She is certified in the IEQ-9 Enneagram Leadership Assessment, a Psychological Safety Practitioner with the Fearless Organization, and a certified collective trauma facilitator with Thomas Hubl.Carley loves being outside on the trails in nature, practices yoga and meditation everyday, enjoys cooking healthy plant based meals, singing, SUP and swimming, and engages in ocean and nature conservancy.Show Notes: Carley shares the benefits she's gotten from going on silent retreats [6:05]Clarity of mind and shifting incessant recurring thoughts. [11:47]Carley explains what “Inner game” is from her book “Shine: Ignite Your Inner Game to Lead Consciously at Work and in the World” [15:45]She shares how her childhood influenced her career aspiration [18:17]Carley shares the routine she uses to create a strong conscious mindset every morning [24:30]Where she often sees leaders fall “out of balance” and what the true “power skills” are [35:42]How to confront and work through emotions instead of avoiding them [49:26]An example of a leader with excellent inner and outer game from her book and life [57:45]www.carleyhauck.comCarley's Book: ShineLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carley-hauck/Shine Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podca
In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Jim Detert, John L. Colley Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business and author of Choosing Courage: The Everyday Guide to Being Brave at Work. In this conversation, Jim Detert shares how we can become more courageous by developing our courage capabilities. Jim Detert also shares how leaders can nurture a psychologically safe organizational culture, enabling and encouraging more courageous interactions and decisions at work. Some highlights:-Why attributing courage just to historical figures can be counterproductive -The importance of being more courageous and how to develop our courage muscle-Jim Detert on the benefits of courage at work-How leaders can create a psychologically safe environment that encourages team members to speak up and contribute their best at workMentioned:-Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School and author of Fearless Organization and Creating Psychological Safety-Vanessa Bohns (Listen to Partnering Leadership conversation with Vanessa Bohns)-Gary Bolles (Listen to Partnering Leadership conversation with Gary Bolles)-Difficult Conversations by Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone, and Sheila Heen-Radical Candor by Kim Scott-Giving Voice to Values by Mary C. Gentile -The Silent Language Of Leaders by Carol GoldmanConnect with Jim Detert:Jim Detert WebsiteChoosing Courage on AmazonJim Detert on FacebookJim Detert on LinkedInConnect with Mahan Tavakoli:https://mahantavakoli.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahan/ More information and resources available at the Partnering Leadership Podcast website: https://www.partneringleadership.com/
Welcome to another episode of the Rational Reminder Podcast! We start by reviewing The Fearless Organization, and learn some important concepts such as psychological safety in the workplace, allowing people to voice their concerns, and the value of continuously learning. We also discuss a paper on index investing followed by a quick discussion on gender equality in finance. We then take a deep dive into today's main topic, ‘Stocks for the Long Run…?', by unpacking research to see if stocks are still a valuable long-term investment. Finally, we end the show with a conversation about our 22 and 22 book challenge with Mark Sutcliffe, and find out about his reading habits and the books that have had the biggest impact on him. Key Points From This Episode: An update about the podcast and feedback received about the crypto series. [0:03:55] A rundown of the guests we have planned for future episodes. [0:07:43] Outline of the ‘mixed-bag' reviews received about the show. [0:08:28] News and updates regarding the Rational Reminder reading challenge. [0:13:07] This week's book review of The Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmondson. [0:14:45] We talk about an interesting paper ‘On Index Investing' [0:24:42] Follow-up on and discussion concerning gender equality in finance from previous episodes. [0:28:34] We dig into today's main topic, ‘Stocks for the Long Run.' [0:33:38] Issues surrounding using Stocks for the Long Run data to draw insights. [0:35:22] What has been achieved to solve issues regarding a lack of data on stock returns. [0:41:45] An important insight from research on the value of stocks and bonds in the long term. [0:47:17] A breakdown of some interesting findings from the paper, ‘Global factor premiums'. [0:48:00] Overview of the research discussed and whether stocks are still valuable long-term investments. [0:53:54] The Rational Reminder 22 and 22 book challenge conversation with Mark Sutcliffe. [0:55:09] What Mark has discovered about the world of social media while working remotely. [0:56:58] Mark shares details about his reading habit and his favourite books growing up. [0:57:53] Whether he has a favourite genre of book. [01:00:11] How Mark sources books to read and how he captures interesting information. [01:00:44] The books that Mark commonly recommends to family and friends. [01:03:05] Find out if Mark thinks being an author changes how you read books. [01:05:12] Advice that he has for people who want to read more. [01:06:33]
Use of the term “Psychological Safety” has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. Find out why all of us may have got Psychological Safety all wrong ——————– Here's some key messages from this episode: – Why Psychological Safety is a group based phenomenon – What the Psychological Safety Triad is – How Psychological Safety on it's own is not enough ——————– Here's … The Fearless Organization [Book Review ] Read More » The post The Fearless Organization [Book Review ] appeared first on Element of Inclusion.
Do your employees feel safe asking questions or admitting their mistakes in the workplace? Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School Professor and author of The Fearless Organization, shares why psychological safety in the workplace is critical to foster employee performance and innovation. She details how a psychologically safe environment creates a culture where talent can feel safe to express their left-field ideas, correct their mistakes, and turn half-finished thoughts into the next big thing. This interview originally aired in 2019.
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