Psychological Safety is one of the most important factors for better learning and performance within teams.

Amy Edmondson is one of the world's leading researchers of psychological safety. She joins Trevor Ragan to explain what it is, why it matters, and how to build it.

Quick Links:
The Learner Lab: https://thelearnerlab.com/
Amy Edmondson: https://amycedmondson.com/
Trevor's TEDx Talk on Fear:    • How to 'overcome' fear | Trevor Ragan...  

Video Credits:
Amy Edmondson - research: https://amycedmondson.com/
Daniel Coyle - interview: https://danielcoyle.com/
Matthew Dicks - script & storytelling consultant: https://matthewdicks.com/
Alex Belser - animation: https://bels.works/
Gergo Varga - animation: https://varrgo.com/
Kevin Shen - studio design: https://kevinshen.co/
Zsolt Kiss - sound design: https://monkeyislandstudio.com/
Trevor Ragan - production: https://thelearnerlab.com/trevor-ragan/

--

We’ve all seen or been a part of both good and bad teams. But what creates this gap? What separates bad from good and good from great? How can we build better teams on purpose?

In 2012, Google set out to answer these questions. They rounded up the best researchers, statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists, and engineers and launched an internal study called Project Aristotle to figure out the key to great teams. For five years they pored over the literature and analyzed the performance and makeup of nearly 200 groups within the company.

They looked at every variable you could imagine. Personality types, educational background, whether the teams socialized in their off-time, gender balance, and age.

They measured team effectiveness in four different ways:

1. Executive evaluation of the team
2. Team leader evaluation of the team
3. Team member evaluation of the team
4. Sales performance against quarterly quota

And found…nothing.

No matter how they arranged the data, there were no clear patterns.

Some of the best groups they found were composed of members that socialized together, and other top performing groups were made up of members who were virtually strangers. There were seemingly identical groups with huge gaps between their performance and output.

“We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘‘who’’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.”

After years of dead ends the team stumbled into the concept of psychological safety, and everything fell into place.

The researchers realized that it wasn’t about who was on the team, it was about how they worked together. Psychological safety was the most important factor in this process.

Psychological safety is the key to group learning and performance. Amy Edmondson is the one to talk to if you want to understand what it is and how to build it.

A few years ago I had the honor of doing just that.

Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Her field of study is how human interactions influence success. Specifically, she studies psychological safety and in our interview, she clarified what psychological safety is, why it matters, and how to build psychologically safe workplaces.