90 Days to Level Up Your Teamwork

Amy Edmondson has spent more than 20 years studying why some teams learn, innovate and outperform while others stay silent. A Harvard Business School professor, she is the researcher behind psychological safety: the condition in which people feel safe to speak up about problems and offer suggestions for doing things better, without fear of reprisal.

Her studies, published in outlets including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review, confirm that organizations that create paths for speaking up deal more effectively with challenges of every kind and markedly improve performance, including the bottom line. She finds hospitals particularly revealing cases: one documents a new COO who shifted a culture of finger-pointing by reframing "error" as "accident" and "investigation" as "study," turning failure analysis from "who did it?" into a neutral "what happened?" When a leading pharmaceutical company put Edmondson in front of its 150 senior-most vice presidents, they rated her session the most valuable of the meeting.