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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Amy, thank you very much first of all for being on the Leadermorphosis podcast.
Amy: Thank you.
Lisa: I thought we could start with—because I think most listeners listening will perhaps know you from your book Teaming which came out in 2012 and your research and work around psychological safety and sort of bringing that into the mainstream, which I think we can largely credit to you. And so it’s been a number of years since you’ve been talking and sharing and working with different teams and organizations around this subject, so I’m curious to know what your journey has been with this topic and why is it important to you personally?
Amy: Oh my goodness, so I would say the journey is—it’s such a good word for it because it has been a journey, and it’s a journey that started with an accident. Or it started with an accidental finding. I didn’t set out to study psychological safety. In fact, I set out to study—and this sounds so over-arching, and it is—the learning organization. I wanted to know what you could do to make organizations better at learning from their own experiences.
I got the invitation to participate in a study of medical error, and I thought, well, errors are really important for learning. You know, we learn from mistakes—it’s one of the core mechanisms of learning for human beings anyway, and probably should be an important phenomenon for organizations as well.
So that’s how I came to study—I wanted to study learning. I realized intuitively that where the learning happens is in teams, because teams are doing the work. There’s some work of course that’s still done very much by individuals working alone, but an awful lot of it is done by people coordinating and collaborating and communicating with each other in very important, rich ways.
So I thought, okay, I’ll study how teams learn from mistakes. And what happened was I got data on mistakes, or at least experts in the medical setting had collected these data over a six-month period, and I had data I collected on team properties using a survey instrument. The relationship between these two data sources was kind of odd because it fundamentally was suggesting that the better teams, according to the survey, were making more mistakes, not fewer. And I had fervently believed it would be the other way around.
So then, after my surprise, I started thinking about the nature of the data on error, and I realized it could only be collected through human beings either willingly reporting them or at least not covering them up. Because in a lot of settings, a lot of work settings, mistakes that do get made can be covered up. Unless they lead to something awful, they can be covered up.
So I started thinking, gosh, maybe the better teams aren’t making more mistakes—maybe the better teams are those where people are more willing and able to talk about mistakes. And so I didn’t have a name for it at that point, but I thought this was at least a reasonable possibility. And it turned out to be something that, from a research point of view, took a little effort to show the plausibility of, but ultimately I was able to do that both in that study and in many other studies.
At first I was thinking of it as openness, as interpersonal climate, as error climate—I tried all sorts of terms. But ultimately, drawing on a bolder learner, I decided it was really this phenomenon called psychological safety at work. And the more I thought about learning and learning environments, the more I thought learning environments are those that are characterized by psychological safety.
So I wanted to study it in other contexts, in manufacturing and in service and in all sorts of other contexts, not just healthcare, although I’ve done quite a few studies in healthcare. And so the journey was one of stumbling into the phenomenon by accident and then developing a robust survey measure of psychological safety that has since been used in hundreds of studies, in healthcare and out of healthcare, and finding that it has all sorts of connections to learning behaviors but also to performance. And we can talk more about that.
And so it’s been that kind of meandering journey. And when you publish a paper that gets attention, other people pick up the measure. So many people have picked up the measure and found—thankfully—found lots of other things that I haven’t done. And that’s been part of the journey, that the concept and the measure have gotten a lot of attention, and that is good, I think, for the work world. So part of the journey has been sort of just stepping back and going, “Wow, this is great to see it take off a little bit.”
And then personally, you know, I do have a personal connection because I think I’m often—I’m interpersonally risk-averse. I don’t want to make a mistake. I want to be seen well in the eyes of others. I’m a little bit more fearful than I wish I were in terms of holding back. So I understood and empathized with this experience of being at work and not being sure. In some settings you’re not sure that you can be yourself, and in other settings you’re absolutely sure you can be yourself. And I thought, what is it? What’s the difference? Who’s doing what to make that possible? Because it’s so much better to be in a workplace where you can be your real self and contribute to the work in a meaningful way.
Lisa: Yeah, and I guess that’s a good lead-in to talking about leadership, because managers and leaders of course are really influential in creating that environment, that climate of psychological safety or not, right? And my sense is that especially today, psychological safety intellectually makes sense to most people. I think now it’s not kind of radical or anything like that, but in practice my feeling is it’s more challenging, right? Perhaps because we’re not used to doing it or we’re not practiced in doing it. So for those managers or leaders who are thinking “Great, psychological safety sounds good, but how do I do that?” what are you finding is most helpful in terms of supporting them in that shift?
Amy: You know, many managers are not aware that they’re not good at that. They don’t have enough emotional intelligence to be aware that other people may be holding back or feeling afraid, or not asking for help when they need help, or not making an observation or offering an idea, even though they have something that could be quite relevant. So many managers are—in fact, maybe even most—at least initially sort of blind to that. It’s like the thought bubble you can’t see, and so you don’t know it’s there. And yet good managers realize there’s always a thought bubble, and I really would be better off if I knew what was in it. And so they go out of their way to try to figure it out.
And there are some things I think that anybody can do to create a more psychologically safe environment. Let me describe that in just a moment, but first I want to say—you started out by saying “managers or leaders,” and I think management, being a manager, is an official job. Someone says, “Here, you’re manager, you’re going to manage those people or that process,” and that’s what you do. But leaders—I think leadership is a function. Leadership is an activity that can be done by anybody, right? So we all—I mean, we often think of leadership as maybe even a higher-level form of management, but that’s leadership with a capital “L.” Maybe it’s the CEO or the business unit manager. But leadership with a small “l” are the small things you do to make a difference, to influence others. A peer, even a subordinate, can exercise leadership that makes your life at work better.
So what managers can do is exercise more leadership, and exercise leadership over the culture or the climate. And the most important thing they can do is start out by just being more open themselves—being more open about the challenge that lies ahead. “Wow, we’ve got this really challenging project. I’m excited about it, but I’m nervous also.” So when I say something like that as a manager, I just make it so much easier for other people to say that too.
And so I like to call this framing the work. “It’s challenging and it’s exciting, and by the way, no one’s ever done a project like this before.” So I’m framing the work, and by saying “No one’s ever done anything quite like this before,” I’m saying it’s gonna be natural and normal to get some things wrong and some things right along the way. In other words, I’m all ears—I want to hear about all of it. So you’re framing the work in such a way that it’s both clear how much uncertainty, how much possibility there is of things going wrong, but also how important everybody else’s input and engagement is.
Because if I can really let you know that I believe you matter—show up! It’s just—most of us are waiting for an invitation to make a difference. And so that’s framing the work. The second thing is being quite explicit about asking for input. I can frame the work and say, “It’s the kind of work for which we’re gonna need everybody’s help,” but if I actually say, “David, what’s on your mind?” that makes it very hard for David not to respond. If I say, “Lisa, I think you were on call last night. What did you see?” you’re gonna feel a sense of embarrassment if you have nothing to say, rather than the other way around.
And then of course the third thing is to respond in a productive way. When someone brings forward bad news or a question that you might first think is kind of a stupid question, you clearly don’t say that. You just say, “I’m so glad you asked, because you are right,” and then you say, “Here’s how I think about it,” or whatever. So you’re always responding, and a productive response is a response that takes into consideration the future impact of what you’re doing on other people’s experience.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s really helpful. I think, circling back to what you started talking about, your original interest in learning organizations, I think for me a really useful model that you have in your book Teaming that I share with people all the time is this four-box model about how to create what you call a “learning zone,” right? I think especially when I’m talking to people who are interested in exploring self-managing ways of working or agile ways of working, or more—you know, moving away from old traditional top-down leadership, sometimes the misconception is swing in the opposite direction—you know, abdication, free-for-all, laissez-faire, and that kind of thing. And so this model that you have, I find is a really useful way of distinguishing. It’s not just psychological safety, i.e., like taking care of people—it’s also about accountability and really relating to people as like adults, as capable, right?
Amy: So in fact, it’s the opposite of making things comfortable. I mean, I want people to be willing to take risks, but I don’t want people to be in the comfort zone, which is one of the boxes in that model. And so in order to—the learning zone, as you point out, is the zone where you feel both very motivated—motivated to do a good job. And that means you probably care. Maybe you care about the end result, the purpose of it. Maybe you care about just your own sense of mastery. But you really feel engaged and motivated by the work and by the goal, and you feel that—and you wouldn’t be willing to hold back because you’re—this is a safe place to take risks. And risk-taking, by definition, is going to involve some things going well but some things not going well. And that’s part of work in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world. Things will go well and not well at different times, and not always in an obviously not always in a predictable way.
So the learning zone—I mean, it’s a little bit like the research of a guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who talked about flow, where you have this sense of the challenge and your ability to meet the challenge being in a nice state of balance. But it’s not—this isn’t, you know, off on a hammock with a lemonade. This is really feeling you’re being put to good work, good use.
Lisa: A kind of key piece and in what you shared in those two answers really for me is is about transparency and kind of facing things as they are, instead of what I think we’re conditioned to do often as managers, which is trying to pep talk or take care of people, or sort of set narratives that you know, things must go smoothly. And it’s really not that at all.
Amy: Yeah, it’s just not. That’s not the world we live in because the world we live in is one that’s gonna require us to keep striving, keep being ambitious about what we think we can get done, what problems we think we can solve, and in order to do that, recognize our profound interdependence with other people. There’s very little of any real importance that can be done all by oneself. Even writing a book isn’t done all by oneself. You need a publisher, you have an editor, you have readers, sometimes you have people helping with some research. It’s really anything that’s got any sort of neediness to it has multiple voices.
Lisa: One thing that I’m really excited to talk to you about is your research that you’ve done with Michael Wiley on self-managing organizations. And I’ve spoken to him as well, but I think it’s so interesting to talk to you and to see not only what your insights have been from the paper you wrote on self-managing organizations, but also how it fits with your work around psychological safety and teaming. So what can you share in terms of highlights and things that are most interesting to you?
Amy: I love that work with Mike, and Mike is continuing to do really interesting work in this domain. And I think both of us were quite inspired by—this wasn’t the first thing we read, but we were quite inspired by Frederick Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations. And there’s some very profound case studies in there.
But the self-managing organization to me as a construct is much like the learning organization in that it’s huge. But it’s huge, it’s important, it’s aspirational, it’s what I think so many of us want. We want to be working in an organization where we are treated as adults, where we recognize our continued responsibility to keep learning, to keep learning together with others, and to keep striving to get important things done. So those are huge aspirations.
And psychological safety—you ask how it fits together—that’s just one small, a small but important, I think, piece of these larger goals. So the idea of a self-managing organization is something that we can readily imagine, and there are examples of it existing as a fully fleshed out, real-world phenomenon. And psychological safety is just this sort of psychological interpersonal experience. I would argue it’s hard to have a genuinely self-managing organization or learning organization without some level of psychological safety, but they’re very different research targets.
Because one has got lots of moving parts, and you got to really think it through. You’ve got to describe it, you’ve got to understand it. And then the other is this very small construct. It can be measured, it can be used in normal science research, and you can show relationships with it. I’m more drawn toward the bigger picture. I really am excited by the work of Mike and other people who are trying to reinvent work or think, how can work be better? People spend a lot of their waking hours at work—how can it be better? And of course, there’s room for lots of different bits in answering that question.
Lisa: Yeah, and for me why that paper was so exciting when I read it was because I guess I come from a field where people are practicing organizational self-management in various different ways. So to see the academic world starting to grab a hold of it was was really interesting to me. And also in terms of starting to distinguish what is a self-managing organization and what is it not—you know, I think there are a lot of myths and misconceptions. And the organizations that you include in the paper are, you know, they’re on different scales on different aspects of self-management, which is so interesting, right?
And as you say, the psychological safety piece for me—something that’s being talked about less is, I guess, the less tangible stuff, the interpersonal stuff, the kind of the mindset shift or the skills, the human piece, as opposed to the practices, the structures, the processes, you know, your Holacracy’s and things like that, right? So I think that’s a really valuable dimension to talk about, right?
Amy: And that’s—I love how you just put that because to me that’s exactly right. It’s—there’s the structure, systems, tools, and then there’s the human. And they both are equally important. When you can’t just come in, however you might do it, and sort of alter the climate but then don’t have any tools or structures that help people rise to the occasion that they’ve been invited to participate in. But you also can’t do all those tools without worrying about and thinking about and massaging the climate.
Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And I’ve wanted to pounce on something because you mentioned a couple of times this term “climate,” and I know that it’s not that widely used often. And I think sometimes people confuse it with culture or kind of conflate it with culture. So what would you say, in your mind, what are the distinctions between culture and climate, and why is that important?
Amy: So culture—there’s not—you know, it’s not like one is a table and the other is a chair. I mean, they—there’s some overlap in the concepts. But culture is more enduring and more holistic. So it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “What’s the culture at Harvard Business School?” And we tend to think of culture as a set of taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions about what’s appropriate behavior around here, right? And you could answer the question “What’s the culture like at Harvard Business School?” and there’d be a lot of very useful information in that answer.
But if you said, “What’s the, say, psychological safety climate at Harvard Business School?” you couldn’t get a sensible answer because it is so local. This department and that team and this location over there all have different levels of psychological safety, in part because it’s so greatly influenced by leaders—upper leaders, middle leaders. And so the climate is something that’s a bit more ephemeral. It’s, you know, like the weather. It’s what I feel I can do right here. And it’s gonna be consistent with our culture—like, if there are things our culture absolutely says are just never done, there’s—it’s not gonna be done in this little group here either. But the climate can be changed overnight sometimes. Let’s say you have a new team leader—we’ve all been in an experience like that—or you join a new team. Boom, totally different climate. You absolutely feel you can roll up your sleeves and be yourself. The culture is more enduring and more—we’re just more general.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s helpful. I’m wondering—you mentioned before about—you made this distinction between management and leadership, and that anyone, regardless of their role, can step into leadership of some kind. And I’m thinking about in a self-managing team or organization, it’s kind of essential that people will step into leadership, that it becomes leader-full. So what would you say are some things that, you know, if I’m a team member and I’m perhaps used to being a bit passive or waiting for instructions or kind of relying on someone else to solve things for me, what things could I do to start to become more leader-full, to start to take responsibility for the climate in my team, for example?
Amy: It’s a great question, and I suspect—I think the answer has to start with deciding that you want to do that. Because if you are at some level committed to being passive or committed to kind of skating through, making—you know, waiting to be told what to do and making sure you do it adequately, probably nothing I and others could say will be helpful, right?
So I think you have to—you have to kind of recognize that there’s a better game to play. There’s a—and by game, I mean—what we’re just describing just then is the game of playing not to lose. “Tell me what I need to do. I’ll put in my hours. I’ll go home. And that’s when I have my real fun or my real life.” And I’m just—I’m playing not to lose. I don’t want to fall on my face, I don’t want to have, you know—but but I’m also not really striving to do anything all that great either.
But if I decide instead that I’m willing to play to win—and I don’t mean win like vanquish the other people. I mean win like go for it, right? And have a more meaningful and fuller existence and contribution here. Then I can recognize there are things I can do. And if I look to my right and look to my left and see colleagues, it does not take long for me to recognize the needs and opportunities—needs that others might have. Like somebody’s a little quiet, and I see it, so it’s just unrecognized. Suddenly it’s possible for me to say, “Hey, what’s on your mind?” And so that’s leadership, right? Because I am doing something that was voluntary to influence someone else in a positive way.
So I mean, I think it’s—I was a little long-winded, but the point is, decide you want to play a bigger game, and then look around and diagnose what seems to need doing, particularly in the interpersonal but also in the task realm. Now, you might diagnose poorly sometimes. You might look around and think something needs to be doing and step right in and do it, and be prepared for feedback because maybe someone else will find it unhelpful. That’s okay. You know, each and every one of us must be willing to learn from our missteps as well as from our successes. So this is gonna be a learning process.
If someone decides, “Okay, I’d like to exercise a little more leadership at work, make a bigger difference for others and for the task at work”—do not expect to get it right every time. Expect to get some of it wrong, and that’s part of this journey. It has to be.
Lisa: Yeah, it strikes me that in the same way we were talking about how the sort of systems piece and the human piece are both important, it’s also the case that it’s not just leaders that are responsible for creating this climate of psychological safety. Sure, they have a large proportion of the influence on that, but it’s also about the non-leaders, if I can use that term, or subordinates or employees, whatever, to also sort of step up and a way to see themselves—it’s like a mindset shift to see themselves as also active players in that game.
Amy: As you say, to be the change you want to see. And realize always—I’m often reminding my sons of this—they’re 18 and 20—that you don’t have to be just a victim of both the bad and the good that comes your way. You can choose how you want to respond. And the most important choice is how you want to respond emotionally.
To illustrate, you can sprain your ankle. That is really a drag, especially if you’re an athlete and you love to be active. And you can you can respond by saying, “This is the end of the world” or “I’m miserable” or “This is not how I wanted this semester to go.” Or you can respond by saying, “Mom, this is really inconvenient. I wish this hadn’t happened, and it did. So now what? Hey, maybe I’ll read that really long book that I never seem to get around to reading that I’ve wanted to read.” Because it wasn’t my first choice, but you might as well have as healthy a response as you can to the bad things that happen.
And that’s—you know, that’s easy to say and not easy to do, and I think all adults and children struggle with this. But when you once you recognize and then enact the fact that you really do have choice over your reaction, it’s incredibly liberating, I think, and powerful.
Lisa: Yeah. I’m curious, you know, as someone that teaches leadership at Harvard, so you’re really with, I guess, the next generation of leaders, what are you finding is increasingly important in terms of building leadership capacities for the teams and organizations of the future?
Amy: You know, I think it’s this—I don’t know what the right word is, but the muscle, the kind of emotional muscle to deal with adversity. Psychological safety fundamentally is all about candor, about creating conditions whereby people can be far more candid than is normal or natural. But if we’re gonna be candid, then we’re gonna find some things hurtful. Because a lot of times at work, it’s all happy talk, it’s all nice talk. And the things that we—“We don’t think you did well”—we don’t tell you. We tell someone else instead. That’s not nice.
So it’s this emotional resilience, the muscle of being able to bounce back quickly when things don’t go exactly the way you wanted them to, is much more important than ever. And I am not sure—I mean, I think more and more people recognize this. There’s clearly a lot of attention to emotional intelligence and all of that. But I’m not sure that the next generation—whether they are even as well equipped as the people in my generation were. Because I think a lot of them have grown up in the era of “everybody gets a trophy” and the helicoptering parents and this sort of being praised all the time in ways that didn’t used to be as fashionable. So I worry sometimes.
But I think the new generation, the coming generation of leaders, do recognize also that the challenges that lay ahead are huge. And so as long as you can get beyond the “it’s all about me” mindset, the writing is on the wall that this is gonna take everything you’ve got. But it is all about others. I mean, I think that’s fundamentally—the job of leaders is to be other-oriented and other-focused. And not just because I need—I want to care for you and develop you—but because in fact, the only way great things are gonna happen is if others follow, right? So leadership is about harnessing the efforts of others to accomplish great things, and you can’t harness the efforts of others if you don’t know what makes them tick.
Lisa: Yeah, I think that’s interesting, like what you reflect on. And I guess that’s why your work is so useful, and I really hope that business schools and people who are doing leadership trainings are practicing it. Because I think those two kind of polarities, I guess you could call them—the kind of psychological safety and motivation and accountability—but that piece that it’s both those things, not one or the other, that really creates an environment of learning, an environment of high-performing teams. And that starts with, yeah, thinking more than just myself and seeing myself as responsible for what shows up.
Amy: Absolutely.
Lisa: So some people listening to this podcast will will be on journeys of their own. Many listeners, I know, exploring being a self-managing organization, or they’re on some stage of that journey. So it would be great if you could share some advice, perhaps, or some wisdom that you’ve gleaned along the way in terms of maybe what are some pitfalls for people to avoid, or what are some really key principles that might help them on their way?
Amy: I think the biggest pitfall—and I’ve alluded to it already—but the biggest pitfall is thinking you’re supposed to be perfect. No one thinks that consciously, but just kind of right below the surface, it’s like, “Well, yeah, I mean, I understand this ‘learn from mistakes’ thinking, but not for me.” I mean, we have this very strong desire to look good and be good. And so the biggest pitfall is not allowing yourself the permission to learn and grow. And you can’t learn and grow if you’re already there.
So I think it’s just—you know, forgive yourself, be good to yourself, be good to others, but be good to yourself as well. And so that’s sort of the pitfall.
And then I think the most important advice is to be willing to go for it, right? To be willing to just care enough about something to sort of just keep reminding yourself that this is a journey. And you’ve got some aspirational goal or direction anyway, and then remind yourself that the only way to get there is gonna be to try things, then learn from them, and then try something else.
I like to think of it as tacking upwind. In a sailboat, you can’t go—you want to go to that mark, but it’s directly into the wind, and sailboats can’t sail directly into the wind. So you just—you go this way for a while, and then you go that way for a while. And that’s literally how it’s supposed to be. But we don’t often let ourselves—we don’t think it’s right. “That was in the wrong direction.” And I say, “No, no, no, that was the tack that allowed you to learn those next few things that allowed you to then tack over this way.” So recognize that the kind of messiness is in fact part of the journey we’re all on in today’s complex world.
Lisa: Yeah, I think that’s good advice. And I think it’s counter to the way that change has been implemented in the past, which was like a large change initiatives or reorganizations. And it’s much more like incremental, experimental. It’s not a big roadmap or a master plan. It’s much more iterative because our lines of sight are not that long.
Amy: And the pace of changed picks up. You just can’t see quite as far into the future, so you have to be more—and that’s agile, right? That’s what we’re talking about—agile. And I love the notion of agile, and I think everybody sort of recognizes that we need to be agile. But we need to be vigilant, we need to be quick, we need to be willing to change. But then they don’t realize the reality of that means it’s gonna be messier, and there’s gonna be wrong and right. There’s gonna be, you know, stumble and fall parts to it.
So the opposite of agile is, you know, is like non-agile, should be sort of stuck or phlegmatic. And everybody recognizes that that’s bad, but they fail to recognize that the opposite of agile is also planned out. And planned out and scripted have no place in agile.
Lisa: Yeah, and also I think if you were, you know, experimenting with self-managing ways of working, for example, it’s very easy to try something, have it not work, and be like, “Oh, okay, self-management is wrong or bad or dangerous—it didn’t work for us,” right? Rather than, “Okay, that’s interesting, so that didn’t work. What do I learn from that? What else could we try? And what contributed to that not working?” And people don’t realize is that often plain old top-down management isn’t working, but we don’t know it, because no one’s speaking up about parts not working.
Amy: Yeah, exactly. I think Gary Hamel is really good at highlighting the cost of bureaucracy. And if someone brought out the model of—the tried and tested model of hierarchical pyramid organizations today, with all the data on how costly and slow they are, we’d say, “We’re never gonna implement that.” But it’s funny that anything new is like, “Oh no, no, no, that doesn’t work.” But the way we’re working now doesn’t work.
Lisa: This is it, exactly. Yeah, we underestimate the degree to which the old model really doesn’t work. And we think something new is the goal. “Let’s try it. Let’s try self-managing teams, let’s try agile. Oh, didn’t work.” So we go back to the old way. But the old way wasn’t working. We just didn’t know it wasn’t working.
So I guess in starting to wrap up our conversation, what is next for you on the horizon? And what are you most excited or curious about in the future?
Amy: You know, I’m most curious about—and so this is next—sort of how do we take these ideas and, you know, research-based ideas? And that includes psychological safety and teaming and self-managing organizations. But what I really—and maybe this will sound contradictory—but I really would like to develop more of a playbook. And of course, we’ve been talking long enough that you know I don’t mean a playbook like a recipe for a cake. It won’t be that kind of playbook.
But if an organization or leaders have decided “Let’s go on a journey,” then what’s the best advice we can give them? And what does it look like? What is the journey look like? What are the tools that are absolutely critical to implement?
Now, the problem with this—so this is what I’m excited about, this is what I’m working on next. I want to find one or more organizational partners to kind of experiment together. The problem with this is it doesn’t submit very well to normal science research. You can’t just say, “Okay, we’re gonna test, make sure A causes B.” It’s gonna be much more—we’ll try things, but we’ll never be able to know whether the path not taken was better. But we will be able to reflect together on what seemed to be more effective than other things.
Lisa: That sounds really interesting. I know that there’s so many people dying for such a playbook. And as you say, not as a recipe, but just almost like encouragement or to sort of embolden them. Like, “Here are some things that have been tried and could be useful,” right? Because I think one thing we know is it won’t be the same. Two organizations’ journeys will never be exactly the same. And yet I think there are some principles that will be the same.
Amy: And so, for example, a principle might be: it has got to be focused on a work, or another way to say it is on the customers’ needs and what we are trying to produce to meet those needs. It can’t be focused on, you know, just change for change’s sake, or on culture change for culture change’s sake. Or even, as important as this is, it can’t be just focused on employee experience. Because I think we are all inherently more excited about doing something, about getting something done.
So you’ve got to be work-focused. It’s gonna be driven by the work, the opportunities, and the gaps that the work presents. So they’ll be an example of—I think a journey that will fail is one that says, “We’re just—we’re gonna do culture change” without saying why and for what, and letting the “for what” guide it.
I think another example of a principle would be that it will be iterative. It will not be a kind of beautiful blueprint that we then stick to. It will be iterative. It will need input from above, below, beside, and the data. So it will be data-driven.
Lisa: Yeah, definitely. So in closing, are there any final words or a kind of lasting principle or piece that you’d like to leave listeners with?
Amy: I think the most important one that comes to mind is: bring your full self forward. You can make a difference. And it’s—I think so many people—my heart goes out to them, and I understand it—but people think, “Okay, I’ve got to wait for some boss to fix it,” or “for the CEO to change hands.” It’s in fact—most of us underestimate the impact we could have if we just decided to be brave and to be committed to making a difference. We can really—everybody can have an impact.
Lisa: Thank you, Amy.
