Workplace Safety Quotes

Subject: Get back to work Missy, You're distracting me from the very important topic of workplace safety. How would you feel if I improperly climbed a ladder due to not learning the proper procedure and then fell to my death? Always, The Boy You Dream About P.S. I'm also a lost prince from a faraway land. Want to do me now?

Safety is really important in the workplace. And ensuring safety is the responsibility of both employers and employees.

Hierarchy (or, more specifically, the fear it creates when not handled well) reduces psychological safety.

Child Labor laws, the minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, and other protections we now take for granted, came about when we chose to place the wellbeing of people above money. There are losers and winners. There are losers because there are winners. 'Every condition exists,' Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote, 'simply because someone profits by its existence.

For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge! This means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas.

The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible.

Our own attitude is that we are charged with discovering the best way of doing everything.

Finding out that you are wrong is even more valuable than being right, because you are learning.

Reporting and dealing with workplace health and safety issues is the fastest route to unemployment.

Staying silent about workplace health and safety issues is the fastest route to sickness, disease and death.

Low levels of psychological safety can create a culture of silence. They can also create a Cassandra culture – an environment in which speaking up is belittled and warnings go unheeded.

What I hope is clear at this point is that you don't have to be the boss to be a leader. The leader's job is to create and nurture the culture we all need to do our best work. And so anytime you play a role in doing that, you are exercising leadership.

The first big step is to repair the safety net so that workers and families are no longer at perpetual risk of falling through and drowning, as millions have in the pandemic. This means essentially extending the New Deal to more Americans in more areas of their lives: universal health care, child care, paid family and sick leave, stronger workplace safety protections, unemployment insurance that doesn’t fail in a crisis, a living minimum wage. These are the basis for any decent life, for any American to do more than survive just below the misery line.

Cheating and covering up are natural by-products of a top-down culture that does not accept “no” or “it can't be done” for an answer. But combining this culture with a belief that a brilliant strategy formulated in the past will hold indefinitely into the future becomes a certain recipe for failure.

Psychological safety is the key to creating a workplace where people can be confident enough to act without undue fear of being ridiculed, punished, or fired – and be humble enough to openly doubt what is believed and done. As Amy Edmondson’s research shows, psychological safety emerges when those in power persistently praise, reward, and promote people who have the courage to act, talk about their doubts, successes, and failures, and work doggedly to do things better the next time.

I have been through the OSHA system twice and I can confirm that I did not have the right to a safe workplace or whistle-blower protection on either occasion.

High standards in a context where there is uncertainty or interdependence (or both) combined with a lack of psychological safety comprise a recipe for suboptimal performance.

Researching the workplace damage to my health has turned into a fascinating voyage of discovery.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) appears to have matured into a corporate government department that strips workers of their legal rights instead of protecting them.

Hydrogen sulfide is so swiftly lethal that farm- and workplace-safety organizations urge anyone who enters a manure pit or attempts to clear a blocked sewage pipe to wear a self-contained breathing apparatus.

It is clear that the protective functions of workplace health and safety have transferred to the workers through the process of corporate government deregulation and reduced funding of relevant government departments.

Lacking a sense of psychological safety, people shut down, often without realizing it. They are less likely to seek or accept feedback and also less likely to experiment, to discuss errors, and to speak up about potential or actual problems.

since the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, workplace fatalities in the UK have dropped by 85%. But there is a caveat to this good news story. While serious injuries at work have been decreasing for men, there is evidence that they have been increasing among women.7 The rise in serious injuries among female workers is linked to the gender data gap: with occupational research traditionally having been focused on male-dominated industries, our knowledge of how to prevent injuries in women is patchy to say the least.

Our obsession with scarcity makes us take for granted the very things that our survival depends on—air, water, climate, food, safety or even relationships. It’s only when something critically important becomes scarce and hence expensive that the human mind begins to acknowledge its value.

Don’t you dare forget this place, they said. I think you’ll eventually maybe make something of yourself out east. One reason why I’m letting you go. But don’t you ever, ever, ever become one of those people nose in the air, calling all this—Tig gestured around wildly—flyover country. Thinking we’re just about beer and cheese and serial killers and corn. Things happen here. Happened here. This place is part of why the rest of this stupid godforsaken nation has child labor laws and workplace safety and unemployment insurance. Why we have weekends and an eight-hour workday. We had forty years of actual socialist city government, democratically elected, here. Only city in the nation. FDR was inspired by what happened here. When he dreamed up his lil New Deal and shit. Milwaukee, baby. We have real history. Remember us right.

Musk had wrought one of the greatest shifts in corporate culture ever. Twitter had gone from being among the most nurturing workplaces, replete with free artisanal meals and yoga studios and paid rest days and concern for “psychological safety,” to the other extreme. He did it not only for cost reasons. He preferred a scrappy, hard-driven environment where rabid warriors felt psychological danger rather than comfort.

To understand why psychological safety promotes performance, we have to step back to reconsider the nature of so much of the work in today's organizations. With routine, predictable, modular work on the decline, more and more of the tasks that people do require judgment, coping with uncertainty, suggesting new ideas, and coordinating and communicating with others. This means that voice is mission critical. And so, for anything but the most independent or routine work, psychological safety is intimately tied to freeing people up to pursue excellence.

Psychological safety is broadly defined as a climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves. More specifically, when people have psychological safety at work, they feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution. They are confident that they can speak up and won't be humiliated, ignored, or blamed. They know they can ask questions when they are unsure about something. They tend to trust and respect their colleagues. When a work environment has reasonably high psychological safety, good things happen: mistakes are reported quickly so that prompt corrective action can be taken; seamless coordination across groups or departments is enabled, and potentially game-changing ideas for innovation are shared. In short, psychological safety is a crucial source of value creation in organizations operating in a complex, changing environment.

Qualities such as honesty, determination, and a cheerful acceptance of stress, which can all be identified through probing questionnaires and interviews, may be more important to the company in the long run than one's college grade-point average or years of "related experience." Every business is only as good as the people it brings into the organization. The corporate trainer should feel his job is the most important in the company, because it is. Exalt seniority-publicly, shamelessly, and with enough fanfare to raise goosebumps on the flesh of the most cynical spectator. And, after the ceremony, there should be some sort of permanent display so that employees passing by are continuously reminded of their own achievements and the achievements of others. The manager must freely share his expertise-not only about company procedures and products and services but also with regard to the supervisory skills he has worked so hard to acquire. If his attitude is, "Let them go out and get their own MBAs," the personnel under his authority will never have the full benefit of his experience. Without it, they will perform at a lower standard than is possible, jeopardizing the manager's own success. Should a CEO proclaim that there is no higher calling than being an employee of his organization? Perhaps not-for fear of being misunderstood-but it's certainly all right to think it. In fact, a CEO who does not feel this way should look for another company to manage-one that actually does contribute toward a better life for all. Every corporate leader should communicate to his workforce that its efforts are important and that employees should be very proud of what they do-for the company, for themselves, and, literally, for the world. If any employee is embarrassed to tell his friends what he does for a living, there has been a failure of leadership at his workplace. Loyalty is not demanded; it is created. Why can't a CEO put out his own suggested reading list to reinforce the corporate vision and core values? An attractive display at every employee lounge of books to be freely borrowed, or purchased, will generate interest and participation. Of course, the program has to be purely voluntary, but many employees will wish to be conversant with the material others are talking about. The books will be another point of contact between individuals, who might find themselves conversing on topics other than the weekend football games. By simply distributing the list and displaying the books prominently, the CEO will set into motion a chain of events that can greatly benefit the workplace. For a very cost-effective investment, management will have yet another way to strengthen the corporate message. The very existence of many companies hangs not on the decisions of their visionary CEOs and energetic managers but on the behavior of its receptionists, retail clerks, delivery drivers, and service personnel. The manager must put himself and his people through progressively challenging courage-building experiences. He must make these a mandatory group experience, and he must lead the way. People who have confronted the fear of public speaking, and have learned to master it, find that their new confidence manifests itself in every other facet of the professional and personal lives. Managers who hold weekly meetings in which everyone takes on progressively more difficult speaking or presentation assignments will see personalities revolutionized before their eyes. Command from a forward position, which means from the thick of it. No soldier will ever be inspired to advance into a hail of bullets by orders phoned in on the radio from the safety of a remote command post; he is inspired to follow the officer in front of him. It is much more effective to get your personnel to follow you than to push them forward from behind a desk. The more important the mission, the more important it is to be at the front.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has provided a preliminary estimation that between 16,400 and 18,800 civilians were in the WTC complex as of 8:46 am on September 11. At most 2,152 individual died in the WTC complex who were not 1) fire or police first responders, 2) security or fire safety personnel of the WTC or individual companies, 3) volunteer civilians who ran to the WTC after the planes' impact to help others or, 4) on the two planes that crashed into the Twin Towers. Out of this total number of fatalities, we can account for the workplace location of 2,052 individuals, or 95.35 percent. Of this number, 1,942 or 94.64 percent either worked or were supposed to attend a meeting at or above the respective impact zones of the Twin Towers; only 110, or 5.36 percent of those who died, worked below the impact zone. While a given person's office location at the WTC does not definitively indicate where that individual died that morning or whether he or she could have evacuated, these data strongly suggest that the evacuation was a success for civilians below the impact zone.

highly recommend a safety video called,

If a designated substance regulation  implement  to your workplace, Any workplace in respect of which the Minister of Labor has ordered the employer to establish a committee. Regular inspections of the workplace by the designated member of the joint health and safety committee help to recognize hazards and serious workplace injuries.

Our workplace addiction medicine products and services address this need, meeting the demands of employers in safety-critical industries and ultimately saving employers time and money.

Workplaces requiring to implement random drug testing, the question of what actually qualifies as a safety sensitive workplace has long been an issue. Vector medical specialists try to keep the workplace safe and healthy.

One of the biggest lies that is currently being told in the USA workplace is on the legally required OSHA poster: All workers have the right to a safe workplace.

At Vector’s Medical Marijuana Work program in Canada is designed to help employers and deal with the difficulties of workers in safety-sensitive jobs who have medical permission to use marijuana.

Unfortunately, the board of directors that the middle managers report to generally make them aggressive. Imagine being hired into a company and then being told that you have to ignore the emerging health and safety issues (This is illegal!) and not inform the workers that the system is known to be dangerous (This is illegal!). You have two options: To go to jail for illegal activities sometime in the future, or to lose your job now and have all your USA workplace rights removed for recognizing the illegal activities that your Directors want you to engage in. Welcome to the corporate America management team!

Thus, the safer we make the workplace, the more we can make combustible ideas. If we want our people to make stuff explode, we need to give them a safe place to do it. A lot of that safety has to do with time.

Gwendolyn Galsworth writes that the purpose of visual management is to reduce "information deficits" in the workplace. She writes that "In an information-scarce workplace, people ask lots of questions, and lots of the same questions, repeatedly- or they make stuff up.

If we acknowledge that housing is a basic right of all Americans, then we must think differently about another right: the right to make as much money as possible by providing families with housing- and especially to profit excessively from the less fortunate. Since the founding of this country, a long line of American visionaries have called for a more balanced relationship, one that protects people from the profit motive, "not to destroy individualism," in Franklin D. Roosevelt's words, "but to protect it." Child labor laws, the minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, and other protections we now take for granted came about when we chose to place the well-being of people above money. There are losers and winners. There are losers because there are winners. "Every condition exists," Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, "simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.

What they had discovered was that even the extremely smart, high-powered employees at Google needed a psychologically safe work environment to contribute the talents they had to offer. The team also found four other factors that helped explain team performance – clear goals, dependable colleagues, personally meaningful work, and a belief that the work has impact.

According to the 2003–2007 Workplace Safety Survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in health care and social services are five times more likely to be victims of a nonfatal assault than average workers in all other industries combined.

The only workplace that prevented a health and safety visit from occurring during my career was professional astronomy. They were adamant that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were not going to be allowed to visit the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, USA. They were successful in canceling the scheduled OSHA visit and the result was I became much sicker as time progressed while working there. Part of that sickness was suspected mercury poisoning.

Stress costs British business over £400 million a year, and the Health and Safety Executive predict that the bill will continue to rise. The World Health Organisation estimates that stress will account for half of the ten most common medical problems in the world by 2020. The economic costs, and the threat of legal action, have alarmed employers and governments alike; it is these, rather than the human cost, which are driving government policy - it is the Secretary of Trade and Industry who comments on stress, not the Health Secretary. Over the last decade there has been a huge amount of research into the causes of stress, yet its incidence has continued to soar. Little has come out of the research except a burgeoning industry which offers stress consultants, stress programmes, stress counsellors, therapists and, when all that fails, lawyers to fight stress claims. This amounts to a dramatic failure of collective will either to recognise the extent of the problem or to do anything effective about it. All that is offered are sticking plasters to cover the symptoms, rather than the kind of reform of the workplace which is required to tackle the causes. According to one major study into the causes of stress, 68 per cent of the highly stressed report work intensification as a major factor.

Backlash theorists, as we shall see, imagine countless conspiracies in which the wealthy, powerful, and well connected—the liberal media, the atheistic scientists, the obnoxious eastern elite—pull the strings and make the puppets dance. And yet the backlash itself has been a political trap so devastating to the interests of Middle America that even the most diabolical of stringpullers would have had trouble dreaming it up. Here, after all, is a rebellion against “the establishment” that has wound up cutting the tax on inherited estates. Here is a movement whose response to the power structure is to make the rich even richer; whose answer to the inexorable degradation of working-class life is to lash out angrily at labor unions and liberal workplace-safety programs; whose solution to the rise of ignorance in America is to pull the rug out from under public education.

Some things that immigrants learn not to do: 1. Do not call 911. 2. Do not report workplace health and safety violations to management. 3. Do not interact with OSHA. 4. Ignore mental health issues in the workplace. 5. Leave toxic jobs at the earliest opportunity.

Fowler, like other new Uber hires, had been advised of the company's core values.47 Several of those values were likely to have contributed to a psychologically unsafe environment. For example, “super-pumpedness,” especially central to the company, involved a can-do attitude and doing whatever it took to move the company forward. This often meant working long hours, not in itself a hallmark of a psychologically unsafe environment; Fowler seems to have relished the intellectual challenges and makes a point to say that she is “proud” of the engineering work she and her team did. But super-pumpedness, with its allusions to the sports arena and male hormones, seems to have been a harbinger of the bad times to come. Another core value was to “make bold bets,” which was interpreted as asking for forgiveness rather than permission. In other words, it was better to cross a line, be found out wrong, and ask for forgiveness than it was to ask permission to transgress in the first place. Another value, “meritocracy and toe-stepping,” meant that employees were incented to work autonomously, rather than in teams, and cause pain to others to get things done and move forward, even if it meant damaging some relationships along the way.48

During the early stages of the Covid-19 lockdown, prominent newspaper columnists defended their right to have someone clean their homes, even at significant risk to their health, on dubiously feminist grounds. Their argument was that without outsourcing domestic work it would be women who had to do the bulk of it. We might wonder if their cleaners were not also women. When the journalist Owen Jones criticised the cavalier attitude that employers of cleaners were taking to workplace safety, he was accused of sexism. His accusers claimed to be fighting the idea that women have some natural duty or propensity to cleaning but the upshot of their argument was that it is fine for some other – i.e. poorer, usually migrant – women to pick up after them. Escaping the confines of the domestic feminine was their individual prerogative, not a shared horizon for all women.

We now know that psychological safety emerges as a property of a group, and that groups in organizations tend to have very interpersonal climates. Even in a company with a strong corporate culture, you will find pockets of both high and low psychological safety.

Working in a psychologically safe environment does not mean that people always agree with one another for the sake of being nice. It also does not mean that people offer unequivocal praise or unconditional support for everything you have to say. In fact, you could say it's the opposite. Psychological safety is about candor, about making it possible for productive disagreement and free exchange of ideas. It goes without saying that these are vital to learning and innovation. Conflict inevitably arises in any workplace. Psychological safety enables people on different sides of a conflict to speak candidly about what's bothering them.

Although trust and psychological safety have much in common, they are not interchangeable concepts. A key difference is that psychological safety is experienced at a group level. People working together tend to have similar perceptions of whether or not the climate is psychologically safe. Trust, on the other hand, refers to interactions between two individuals or parties; trust exists in the mind of an individual and pertains to a specific target individual or organization. For instance, you might trust one colleague but not another. Or, to illustrate trust in an organization, you might trust a particular company to uphold high standards.

Psychological safety enables candor and openness and, as such, thrives in an environment of mutual respect. It means that people believe they can – and must – be forthcoming at work. In fact, psychological safety is conducive to setting ambitious goals and working toward them together. Psychological safety sets the stage for a more honest, more challenging, more collaborative, and thus also more effective work environment.

I do not mean to imply that psychological safety is all you need for high performance. Not even close. I like to say that psychological safety takes off the brakes that keep people from achieving what's possible. But it's not the fuel that powers the car. In any challenging industry setting, leaders have two vital tasks. One, they must build psychological safety to spur learning and avoid preventable failures; two, they must set high standards and inspire and enable people to reach them. Setting high standards remains a crucial management task. So does sharing, sharpening, and continually emphasizing a worthy purpose.

But the two most frequently mentioned reasons for remaining silent were one, fear of being viewed or labeled negatively, and two, fear of damaging work relationships.

he was admitting that his reticence to rock the boat with what he believed was a good idea was irrational, and deep down he understood that. Yet the gravitational pull of silence – even when bosses are well-meaning and don't think of themselves as intimidating – can be overwhelming. People at work are vulnerable to a kind of implicit logic in which safe is simply better than sorry. Many have simply inherited beliefs from their earliest years of schooling or training. If they stop to think more deeply, they may realize they've erred too far on the side of caution. But that kind of reflection is rarely prompted.

Another way to think about the voice-silence asymmetry is captured in the phrase “no one was ever fired for silence.” The instinct to play it safe is powerful. People in organizations don't spontaneously take interpersonal risks. We don't want to stumble into a sacred cow. We can be completely confident that we'll be safe if we are silent, and we lack confidence that our voices will really make a difference – a voice inhibiting combination.

What I have found in similar settings is that good leadership (for instance, on the part of head nurses who demonstrate a commitment to safety and to openness), together with a clear, shared understanding that the work is complex and interdependent, can help groups build psychological safety, which in turn enables the candor that is so essential to ensuring the quality of patient care in modern hospitals.

workarounds delay or prevent process improvement. The problems that trigger workarounds can be seen as small signals of a need for change in a system or process. The workaround bypasses the problem, thereby silencing the signal by getting the immediate job done – but getting it done in a way that is inefficient over the longer term.

Workarounds can occur when workers do not feel safe enough to speak up and make suggestions to improve the system.

Communication frequency among coworkers also led to psychological safety. In other words, the more we talk to each other, the more comfortable we become doing so.

What they had discovered was that even the extremely smart, high-powered employees at Google needed a psychologically safe work environment to contribute the talents they had to offer. The team also found four other factors that helped explain team performance – clear goals, dependable colleagues, personally meaningful work, and a belief that the work has impact. As Rozovsky put it, however, reiterating the quote at the start of Chapter 1, “psychological safety was by far the most important…it was the underpinning of the other four.”30

With survey data from 170 research scientists working in six Irish research centers, the authors showed that trust in top management led to psychological safety, which in turn promoted work engagement.

The good teams, I suddenly thought, don't make more mistakes; they report more.

I learned that psychological safety varies across groups within hospitals. Since that time, I have replicated this finding in many industry settings. The data are consistent in this simple but interesting finding: psychological safety seems to “live” at the level of the group. In other words, in the organization where you work, it's likely that different groups have different interpersonal experiences; in some, it may be easy to speak up and bring your full self to work. In others, speaking up might be experienced as a last resort – as it did in some of the patient-care teams I studied. That's because psychological safety is very much shaped by local leaders.

people are more likely to believe they'll be given the benefit of the doubt – a wonderful way to think about psychological safety – when they experience trust and respect at work.

A key insight from this work was that psychological safety is not a personality difference but rather a feature of the workplace that leaders can and must help create.

psychological safety has been found to differ substantially across groups. Nor was psychological safety the result of a random or elusive group chemistry. What was clear was that leaders in some groups had been able to effectively create the conditions for psychological safety while other leaders had not.

In a formal sense, someone higher up in the hierarchy is probably tasked with assessing your performance. But informally, peers and subordinates are sizing you up all the time. Our image is perpetually at risk. At any moment, we might come across as ignorant, incompetent, or intrusive, if we do such things as ask questions, admit mistakes, offer ideas, or criticize a plan. Unwillingness to take these small, insubstantial risks can destroy value (and often does, as you will see in Chapters 3 and 4). But they can also be overcome. People at work do not need to be crippled by interpersonal fear.

neuroscientists have discovered that fear activates the amygdala, the section of the brain that is responsible for detecting threats.

when not handled well) reduces psychological safety. Research shows that lower-status team members generally feel less safe than higher-status members. Research also shows that we are constantly assessing our relative status, monitoring how we stack up against others, again mostly subconsciously. Further, those lower in the status hierarchy experience stress in the presence of those with higher status.

Psychological safety describes a belief that neither the formal nor informal consequences of interpersonal risks, like asking for help or admitting a failure, will be punitive. In psychologically safe environments, people believe that if they make a mistake or ask for help, others will not react badly. Instead, candor is both allowed and expected. Psychological safety exists when people feel their workplace is an environment where they can speak up, offer ideas, and ask questions without fear of being punished or embarrassed.

But for jobs where learning or collaboration is required for success, fear is not an effective motivator. Brain science has amply demonstrated that fear inhibits learning and cooperation.

Fear inhibits learning. Research in neuroscience shows that fear consumes physiologic resources, diverting them from parts of the brain that manage working memory and process new information. This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving.15 This is why it's hard for people to do their best work when they are afraid.

The Australian union movement called an 'illegal' general strike in 1976, when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser's government was trying to destroy our embryonic universal healthcare system. That strike brought the country to a standstill. Fraser backed down, and what became Medicare remains. The same people who disagree [with strike action] may also want to reflect on this the next time they enjoy a leisurely weekend, or are saved from an accident by workplace safety standards, or knock off work after an eight-hour shift. Union members won all these conditions in campaigns that were deemed 'illegal' industrial actiona at the time. These union members built the living standards we all enjoy. They should be celebrated and thanked for their bravery and sacrifices, not condemned and renounced.

Northern evangelical Protestantism provided authoritative justification for social causes. It influenced labor safety, workplace reforms, and the establishment of women’s rights organizations; alleviated suffering through voluntary medical societies; and protected exploited women who worked as prostitutes. However, there was a dark side to parts of evangelicalism in the North and South: its religious justifications for slavery, the Mexican- American War, the wars against America’s First Nations, and the conviction that manifest destiny “meant removing (or eliminating) those who stood in the way.

Do not expect health and safety in the Florida workplace.

Is OSHA still upholding hardly any complaints?

You have the legal right to a safe workplace.

The Braintrust's recipe is fairly simple: a group of directors and storytellers watches an early run of the movie together, eats lunch together, and then provides feedback to the director about what they think worked and what did not. But the recipe's key ingredient is candor. And candor, though simple, is never easy.

He points out that it's not enough to simply accept failure when it happens and move on, more or less hoping to avoid it going forward. We need to understand failure not as something to fear or try to avoid, but as a natural part of learning and exploration. Just as learning to ride a bike entails the physical discomfort of skinned knees or bruised elbows, creating a stunningly original movie requires the psychological pain of failure. Moreover, trying to avoid the pain of failure in learning will lead to far worse pain. Catmull: “for leaders especially, this strategy – trying to avoid failure by outthinking it – dooms you to fail.

In framing silence as an unethical choice, Dalio is taking a more extreme stance than I have adopted. But it's worth reflecting on this idea, which to me implies that you owe your colleagues the expression of your opinion or ideas; in a sense, those ideas belong to the collective enterprise, and you therefore don't have the right to hoard them.

We work hard at X to make it safe to fail. Teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they're rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager, me in particular. They get promoted for it. We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than 30.48

To make sure that X only works on the most promising ideas, the company has a “Rapid Evaluation” team that processes proposals, vets ideas, and promotes only those that seem achievable. This team, which consists of a combination of senior managers and inventors, first runs a pre-mortem, trying to come up with as many reasons as possible why the idea could fail.50 “Rapid Eval,” as the team is known, considers the problem's scale, feasibility, and technological risks.

When Uber's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, first came on board in August 2017, one of his priorities was to meet with women engineers. Alert to the damage done to the company's culture, he began by laying the groundwork for a psychologically safe workplace. As Jessica Bryndza, Uber's Global Director of People Experience, commented, “He [Khosrowshahi] didn't come in guns blazing. He came in listening.”58 The operative word here is “listening.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. —Naguib Mahfouz

She asked a question. “Was everything as safe as you would like it to have been this week with your patients?”5 The question – genuine, curious, direct – was respectful and concrete: “this week,” “your patients.” Its very wording conveys genuine interest. Curiosity. It makes you think. Interestingly, she did not ask, “did you see lots of mistakes or harm?” Rather, she invited people to think in aspirational terms: “Was everything as safe as you would like it to be?

unless a leader expressly and actively makes it psychologically safe to do so, people will automatically seek to avoid failure. So how did Teller reframe failure to make it okay? By saying, believing, and convincing others that “I'm not pro failure, I'm pro learning.

OpenTable CEO Christa Quarles tells employees, “early, often, ugly. It's O.K. It doesn't have to be perfect because then I can course-correct much, much faster.

Reframing failure starts with understanding a basic typology of failure types. As I have written in more detail elsewhere, failure archetypes include preventable failures (never good news), complex failures (still not good news), and intelligent failures (not fun, but must be considered good news because of the value they bring).15 Preventable failures are deviations from recommended procedures that produce bad outcomes. If someone fails to don safety glasses in a factory and suffers an eye injury, this is a preventable failure. Complex failures occur in familiar contexts when a confluence of factors come together in a way that may never have occurred before; consider the severe flooding of the Wall Street subway station in New York City during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. With vigilance, complex failures can sometimes, but not always, be avoided. Neither preventable nor complex failures are worthy of celebration.

In contrast, intelligent failures, as the term implies, must be celebrated so as to encourage more of them. Intelligent failures, like the preventable and complex, are still results no one wanted. But, unlike the other two categories, they are the result of a thoughtful foray into new territory. Table 7.2 presents definitions and contexts to clarify these distinctions. An important part of framing is making sure people understand that failures will happen. Some failures are genuinely good news; some are not, but no matter what type they are, our primary goal is to learn from them.

Emphasizing interdependence lets people know that they're responsible for understanding how their tasks interact with other people's tasks. Interdependence encourages frequent conversations to figure out the impact their work is having on others and to convey in turn the impact others' work has on them. Interdependent work requires communication. In other words, when leaders frame the work they are emphasizing the need for taking interpersonal risks like sharing ideas and concerns.

Framing the work is not something that leaders do once, and then it's done. Framing is ongoing. Frequently calling attention to levels of uncertainty or interdependence helps people remember that they must be alert and candid to perform well.

Two essential behaviors that signal an invitation is genuine are adopting a mindset of situational humility and engaging in proactive inquiry. Designing structures for input, another powerful tool I discuss in this section, also serves as an invitation for voice.

no one wants to take the interpersonal risk of imposing ideas when the boss appears to think he or she knows everything. A learning mindset, which blends humility and curiosity, mitigates this risk. A learning mindset recognizes that there is always more to learn.

Frankly, adopting a humble mindset when faced with the complex, dynamic, uncertain world in which we all work today is simply realism.

Confidence in one's abilities and knowledge, when warranted, is far preferable to false modesty. But humility is not modesty, false or otherwise. Humility is the simple recognition that you don't have all the answers, and you certainly don't have a crystal ball. Research shows that when leaders express humility, teams engage in more learning behavior.

London Business School Professor Dan Cable sheds light on why. In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, he writes, “Power…can cause leaders to become overly obsessed with outcomes and control,” inadvertently ramping up “people's fear – fear of not hitting targets, fear of losing bonuses, fear of failing – and as a consequence…their drive to experiment and learn is stifled.”22 Being overly certain or just plain arrogant can have similar effects – increasing fear, reducing motivation, and inhibiting interpersonal risk taking.

Our survey measure rated three behavioral attributes of leadership inclusiveness: one, leaders were approachable and accessible; two, leaders acknowledged their fallibility; and three, leaders proactively invited input from other staff, physicians, and nurses. The concept of leadership inclusiveness thus captures situational humility coupled with proactive inquiry (discussed in the next section).

Leadership at its core is about harnessing others' efforts to achieve something no one can achieve alone.

My short answer? No. I don't think you can have too much psychological safety. I do think, however, that you can have not enough discipline. Psychological safety is about reducing interpersonal fear. Making it less heroic to ask a question or admit an error. It doesn't mean you automatically have a good strategy for getting the work done. It also doesn't mean