Last week, I got to meet one of my heroes at a sit-down coffee run by IQS, Prof. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School.
Some background: The first paper I ever read of Prof. Edmondson was Three Faces of Eden: The persistence of competing theories and multiple diagnoses in organizational intervention research, which I read during my PhD while trying to get ideas about how to run culture-change workshops.
Likely will know her through her writing on psychological safety and her fabulous books on the topic (the most recent being The Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams Use Failure to Succeed). If you don’t, stop reading this post and go read one of her books. You won’t regret it. Her writing is so influential that I say with some confidence that the entire field of Leadership / Organizational Behavior has been impacted by her research.
Now, if that were not enough to get her into my “List of people I admire very much,” she also agreed to sit down with about a dozen strangers in an intimate setting, in a foreign country, jet-lagged, busy, and probably hungry (the Spanish schedule takes some adjustment as we eat lunch late). Plus, the previous day, she had given a talk at IQS on the right kind of wrong. So it was beyond nice of her to take time that could have been otherwise spent looking at pretty things in Barcelona.
I will not harp on all the cool things that came up in this chat, her genuine badass vibes, nor her enviable communication abilities. Here are some takeaways from that conversation that stuck with me:
First, Prof. Edmondson explained that she didn’t set out to study psychological safety or culture. Rather, she was curious about why work was generally so dysfunctional: people were not happy, things did not get done, grievous and seemingly avoidable errors kept happening. She was driven by a key question: Why doesn’t work work? (And, what can we do about it?)
Second, psychological safety is not the same as being nice. To understand why, it helps to define it: psychological safety is the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — speaking up, disagreeing, admitting mistakes. Research has shown it to be one of the most powerful predictors of team effectiveness. But here’s the thing: psychological safety is not a goal in itself. It is the outcome of specific behaviors, and being nice is not necessarily one of them. In fact, the most important conversations — the ones that actually build trust and learning — are rarely comfortable ones. This resonates deeply with my own work. In training sessions, I see it constantly: people conflate emotion validation with niceness. They are not the same thing. Genuine validation often means engaging seriously with someone’s idea, pushing back, asking hard questions. That is what makes people feel truly heard.
What did I personally take away? I have been fortunate to share a room with some remarkable scholars over the years, but Prof. Edmondson stood out. She radiated what I can only call radical genuineness — and embodied every quality of leadership she writes about: she listened carefully, asked real questions, and was candid about the limits of her own knowledge. I was already a fan. I left a super fan. And with a simple reminder: building a learning culture isn’t a mystery. Speak up. Celebrate the right mistakes. Have a failure party. (Read Prof. Edmondson’s books). The will is the hard part.
(PS — thanks for indulging me with a selfie!)
