ANNA BAIRD: Hi, I'm Anna Baird, and I'm
one of our global leaders who speaks to our customers
on Google's culture and change management foundation.
Today we'll explore psychological safety.
Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor
of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School,
spearheaded research on how and why workplace silence happens,
and what effect it has on employees
who opt to manage their impressions internally
over speaking up.
When employees stay silent, Amy talks
about missed opportunities to realize
necessary change, innovation, and even to see
potential business issues.
Drawing on Amy Edmondson's work and the work
of her fellow professor, Jeff Polzer,
also at Harvard Business School, Google built its culture
on this idea of psychological safety.
If Googlers are hired for knowledge, innovation,
and ability to stretch to the edge of impossible,
then the culture to speak up has to be comfortable
so that people vocalize and contribute
their thoughts and ideas.
As Amy and Jeff have said in a blog post,
a lack of psychological safety can
be found at the root of many noteworthy organizational
errors and failures.
This blog post can be found on the Google re:Work website,
where we share and post open source materials.
Bringing us back to psychological safety,
for many executive teams, you will know this challenge
to be one of the biggest unknown threats to your business's
success, complacency and the status quo.
So you might be asking yourself, what
does Google do uniquely or differently
to enable a psychologically safe environment?
Well, a lot.
I have three specific examples for you.
First, Google's innovation principles
bake in the idea of a psychologically safe
environment through enablement programs.
One of these programs is the 20% project.
If you have an idea or how to solve any business
challenge, even one not related to your current role,
you can make a case to a committee to fund the project.
Once approved, any Googler can volunteer up
to 20% of their time towards that project.
The 20% project mechanism gives us limitless creativity
and gives it to our Googlers without fear that their manager
might not support them.
But a second example, much more different from the 20% project,
is a mechanism for speaking up called, go/saysomething.
This is an avenue for any Googler
to anonymously share things they have
heard other colleagues say.
This might be on one extreme, a comment that
made someone feel uncomfortable, and could be addressed more
broadly in our diversity, inclusion,
and belonging efforts as a company.
Or on the other extreme, should be
dealt with from a disciplinary perspective.
go/saysomething is just one more avenue
to speak up without the fear of being penalized or treated
differently.
Google drawing on Amy Edmondson's original work
on psychological safety enabled a risk taking culture
to flourish in the business.
Google wanted to enable employees
to feel safe to take risks, and be vulnerable in front
of each other.
These were all mantras iterated by the leadership,
down to each and every Googler.
Dream big, reach, experiment, and try.
In fact, a third example for you,
the gThanks program, a peer-to-peer award system,
was born from this concept of encouragement
of trying new things.
Succeeding or failing is not the measurement,
but rather, what was learned and what
was experienced in the process of the learning,
which was the key.
The gThanks program was built on a three pillar aim.
Pillar one was to encourage frequent appreciation
between Googlers.
Pillar two was to reward risk taking for those Googlers who
were pushing the boundaries.
And finally, pillar three, to foster psychological safety,
as so many gThanks notes sent and posted
are about experiments that perhaps
failed, but taught us a lot.
Amy Edmondson really summed up psychological safety best
in her quote, "psychological safety
is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated
for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns,
or mistakes."
And it is for this reason, that Google's executive team have
instilled in leaders and managers
all over the company to ensure two key things
are true for Googlers.
Number one, that public recognition
of people who take big risks, even if they fall short,
is key to encouraging more risk takers, more innovators,
and more 10xers, an innovation principle
to think big and have a moonshot goal.
And secondly, managers should continuously
stress the importance of trying new things in service
of ambitious goals, a direct quote often said by our leaders
at Google.
If you're wondering what you can do now,
here is a small idea you can try.
In your next team meeting, go around the room
and have everyone share one thing
that went well in their week and one challenge
or issue they faced.
If you start by sharing your personal examples as the team
leader, you set the tone that everyone can learn from one
another's successes, and also failures.
That's a great first step.
And so that's just a little bit of color
on psychological safety here at Google.
And certainly, there is much more to read about.
So please check out our re:Work website and search
psychological safety.
Thanks for listening, and I hope you can help
empower your teams in creating a psychologically safe space.