Is it Safe to Speak Up at Work? (Transcript)

Ed Pierson:
I'd been retired two months when I heard the news and saw the TV news flash. It was a max airplane that crashed in the ocean. It was shocking. And then the second crash occurs.

Adam Grant:
In October 2018, a new Boeing 737 max plane flying out of Indonesia crashed and killed all passengers and crew on board...189 people. Five months later, another 737 max plane crashed in Ethiopia, killing 157 people.

Ed Pierson:
Um, it's just, just terrible. And could have all been prevented.

Adam Grant:
This is Ed Pierson. While Ed was shocked by the crashes, he wasn't entirely surprised. He'd been a senior manager at a Boeing 737 factory near Seattle, and he’d seen how bad things had gotten at Boeing in the year before he left. In his last few months on the job, he noticed troubling production issues. Equipment delays led to backlogs on the production line. Quality defects went up. Overtime surged.

Ed Pierson:
There was a lot of stress, fatigue and exhaustion from working four, five, six weeks straight, not a healthy environment by a long stretch and not an environment you want to build a plane in.

Adam Grant:
Despite these issues, Ed says the pressure on production teams to meet deadlines increased. Boeing moved away from small team meetings and replaced them with big gatherings in a theater-like conference room.

Ed Pierson:
Frontline manufacturing managers would be asked to stand up in front of an audience of a hundred people, and they would be asked, Adam, you just told me that you're going to be, you know, 300 jobs behind schedule today. And yesterday you told me you were going to be caught up. Why are you not able to meet these goals? You know? And it was a very personal, very, public humiliation. Publicly putting them on the spot like that, and kind of grilling them, it sends a very clear and, and chilling message to people.

Adam Grant:
Ed was convinced airplane safety was in jeopardy. So he ended up going to the top manager at the factory.

Ed Pierson:
I was dismissed and ignored, to put it bluntly. I thought, man, what a crappy way to end your military and civilian aviation career getting fired here before you retire. You know, that's what I was thinking...I was going to get fired.

Adam Grant:
Ed was worried speaking out would get him in trouble. But he still urged the factory manager to shut down production so they could fix the issues.

Ed Pierson:
He said, you know, I can't shut down. We can't shut down. And I said, what do you mean? I've, I've seen operations in the military shutdown for far less. And that's when he came back and said, well, the military is not a profit making organization.

Adam Grant:
Eventually, Ed went public about all the problems he saw at Boeing. He described a culture where people could not speak up or raise concerns without fear of retaliation or humiliation. A culture lacking psychological safety.

Whether or not you work in an industry where mistakes have disastrous consequences, psychological safety is a vital ingredient for healthy, effective, creative work.

I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I’m an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, I take you inside the minds of fascinating people to rethink how we work, lead, and live.
Today: Psychological safety -- what it is, why every culture needs it, and how to build it.

Thanks to LinkedIn for sponsoring this episode.

In four seasons of WorkLife, there’s one theme that comes up more than any other: psychological safety. It was a big deal in creative teams from Pixar to the Daily Show. It was key in high-pressure situations for astronauts and Olympic athletes. So I thought it was about time to call the expert who put psychological safety on the map.

Amy Edmondson:
I'm Amy Edmondson. I'm a professor at Harvard business school and I study teams and organizational learning and leadership.

Adam Grant:
So tell me what is psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson:
Psychological safety is a climate in which one feels one can be candid. It's a place where interpersonal risks feel doable, interpersonal risks, like speaking up with questions and concerns and half-baked ideas and even mistakes.

Adam Grant:
Amy started her career as an engineer working for Buckminster Fuller -- the architect and designer most famous for inventing the geodesic dome.

Amy Edmondson:
He was often called a Renaissance man. Probably more DaVinci than Edison, although we did have a couple dozen patents.

Adam Grant:
When Amy showed up at work, she was surprised by how Bucky treated the team.

Amy Edmondson:
He was 86 when I started working for him. And he was generous and always giving credit. He was, he was enormously appreciative of the hard work of, of the ideas, you know, he would, he would listen intently.

Adam Grant:
People were encouraged to share ideas, even if they weren’t perfect, and Bucky listened to them! This was a workplace with a lot of psychological safety. High candor, low fear. And Amy was so taken by the climate Bucky created that eventually, she changed careers to study it.

In psychologically safe workplaces, people don’t have to mask their concerns and ideas. They can speak up and share them.

The opposite of psychological safety might look something like what Ed Pierson described at Boeing — chilling meetings where people are grilled and reprimanded. Punishment if employees voice concerns.

Amy Edmondson:
That to me would be psychological danger.

Adam Grant:
Maybe you’ve felt that sense of danger in a job where a manager silenced dissent -- or a team where no one ever suggested a new idea because people lived in terror of making mistakes.

But a lack of psychological safety can also be more subtle… like in a Midwest manufacturing company that Amy studied. She spent months observing the top management team’s meetings.

Amy Edmondson:
And they were throughout that time trying to formulate a new strategy. And the tiptoeing, the reluctance to, to speak up, the reluctance to disagree was so palpable that what I observed was they were having the same conversation, you know, sort of vague conversation. It didn't seem to get anywhere.

Adam Grant:
Oof, you've probably sat through one of those circular meetings. They suck!

You know psychological safety is missing in your team if people say different things behind leaders’ backs than to their faces. And you know it’s missing in your organization if leaders have to run anonymous surveys to get people to tell the truth.

Amy Edmondson:
That's a red flag.

Adam Grant:
What are the telltale signs that you pick up that a team or a workplace might be lacking psychological safety?

Amy Edmondson:
A preponderance of, if not exclusively good news or happy talk as opposed to asking for help raising puzzles, raising concerns. That's a red flag because you expect lots of uncertainty and complexity and interactivity, meaning that there'll be many things going wrong or many things that don't make sense or many things that are not getting done as fast as they were hoped to and so on. So the question isn't, whether those things are happening, the question is how much are people eagerly speaking up to talk about them, to get help with them?

Adam Grant:
When you're in the thick of it, it isn't always easy to tell whether your team has psychological safety. It helps to ask yourself: are you afraid to share bad news, ask for help, or admit you were wrong?

Things will go wrong! That’s the nature of work. Making it unsafe to acknowledge that is a problem.

But feeling safe to speak up is only half the equation. Psychological safety isn’t about making people comfortable, being “nice,” or brushing aside mistakes — to work well, psychological safety has to be coupled with accountability. That combination creates a culture where people take intelligent risks.

Amy Edmondson:
So the problem with some of these misconceptions in particular like being agreeable and being nice, is that they're exactly the opposite of what I'm talking about. Right. Cause being nice in the workplace often means not telling you what I really think, because it wouldn't be nice. And this doesn't have to be for your next dinner party, but for the workplace, right. That we can be straight, that we can be candid. We might get it wrong. We will get it wrong, lots and lots of times, but we won't hold back and read the tea leaves before speaking up, let's say.

Adam Grant:
Yeah. I run into this all the time. You do not have to be nice to other people to be respectful of them or to be kind toward them.

Amy Edmondson:
Kind is not nice. At least colloquially the way we often use nice is often not very respectful because you're sort of saying something that you believe the other person will think is nice. Yeah. That was a great presentation. When inside you're thinking no, that was you know, it was a very weak presentation. That's neither kind nor respectful.

Adam Grant:
What you’re aiming for on a team is a commitment to high standards and the psychological safety to be candid with each other as you try to achieve them.

Amy’s research shows that psychological safety has three key advantages at work. The first benefit is preventing errors. She’s studied this for decades in hospitals, where the stakes are high and mistakes are inevitable. In healthcare, like in airplane manufacturing, psychological safety is critical to physical safety.

Amy Edmondson:
What we see again and again is especially, non-physicians, you know, nurses and physician assistants and others failing to speak up when they have a doubt, right? When they think a dose of a medication might not be right or when they see a surgeon about to operate on what they're pretty sure, but not a hundred percent sure is the wrong location, the wrong site. The most important problematic outcome is that patients get harmed in ways that were preventable.

Adam Grant:
Amy has*found* that in the absence of psychological safety, people hide their mistakes to protect themselves. When errors aren’t detected, they get repeated. In the presence of psychological safety, people admit their mistakes to protect the group.

Amy’s research has even shown that BETTER teams report more mistakes. They’re able to learn what caused the errors and prevent them moving forward.

Amy Edmondson:
They say I made a mistake or I think you're making a mistake. And, it's not a big deal. It's not a kind of, stop the line kind of moment. It's just oh, okay. Thanks. Thanks for, thanks for pointing that out and let's keep going. Right? We sort it out.

Adam Grant:
Effective teams are also more likely to report NEAR-misses -- things that almost go wrong.

Amy Edmondson:
We looked very carefully at how, how near misses were framed and are they framed as, oh my gosh, we almost, you know, really screwed up here or are they framed as thank goodness we caught it. Right. So if they're framed as a success versus framed as a failure, there's more willingness just in, in general for people to, to report them and speak up about them.

Adam Grant:
The second benefit of psychological safety is fueling creativity and innovation. When psychological safety is missing, people bite their tongues. When they feel safe, they let their ideas fly.

Amy Edmondson:
Innovation thrives when we can, we can share out of the box ideas, right? So creativity, creativity is not something, um, that you see a lot of in a fearful setting, you know, in a setting where you've got to tow the line or look good or fit in. Psychological safety is about lowering that felt need to fit in. Innovation depends on deep expertise and varied expertise. And by definition, none of us have all the expertise. And so it's a kind of reminder that you need these other people, not because you're inadequate but because they're different.

Adam Grant:
Psychological safety can help teams innovate to solve seemingly impossible problems. Amy studied a fascinating example of this -- the Chilean mining rescue in 2010, when a gold mine in the desert caved in and trapped 33 people underground.

Amy Edmondson:
Can you, and if so, how do you get these 33 men who are trapped 700 meters below some of the hardest rock in the world with not nearly enough food, in a setting where no known drilling technology in the industry, is, is really able to penetrate that rock fast enough. You know, what do you do now? Well, you've got to innovate.

Adam Grant:
The leader of the rescue, Andre Sougarret, made it clear they needed lots of ideas, and that many of them would fail. He let them run multiple experiments at the same time … And a young field engineer proposed an idea that ended up saving the day.

Amy Edmondson:
But he in a normal organization would never have spoken up to essentially the, let's call Andre the chief operating officer in this setting, but in this setting the climate had been created where he felt he could and he did.

Adam Grant:
This speaks to the third benefit of psychological safety*: inclusion.* People who lack power and status, who might normally get excluded, don’t just have a seat at the table. They have a voice.

Amy Edmondson:
As we go from diversity to inclusion, to belonging, psychological safety is needed more and more at each level for this to be the case. Right? I, I, it's hard for me to imagine feeling a sense of belonging in a place where I didn't feel I could bring my full self to that place, where I could, where I could speak up with things that were on my mind that were relevant to the task at hand or the topic at hand.

Adam Grant:
But here’s the catch. Psychological safety doesn’t just bubble up naturally. LEADERS have to create it. And it often takes more effort than we realize.

Amy Edmondson:
There was one interview we did with a guy in a production setting. And he talked about this idea to basically improve output and, um, and we said, well, what led you to hold back? And he said, well, I got kids in college, which is, you know, at first glance, a nonsensical response, but we understand what he means, right. He's basically saying I can't afford to lose this job, but he was talking about something that according to him could have had a 5% improvement in output.

Adam Grant:
So what exactly was he afraid of? That the boss would take an idea for improvement as a personal insult.Amy Edmondson: So when we dig a little further, we basically get to things there along the following lines, you're saying the boss's baby is ugly. Now it's not that they think it through in this level of detail, it's just instinctive. Like you don't want to call the boss’ baby ugly. So you just hold back, make do, you got kids in college? Right. But think of the loss, right? Think of the waste.

Adam Grant:
You can probably think of times when you've held back a thought for similar reasons. It just didn't FEEL safe to disagree with the boss. But did you test that assumption? Amy has discovered that many people misjudge the psychological safety in their current teams based on their past experiences.

Amy Edmondson:
People are bringing this programming with them, from their childhoods, from their other jobs, you know, from maybe their first job, but they bring this programming. And then they come into a new setting and it might be a very psychologically safe environment, but they're still holding back because of that programming. What this then implies is that we've got to do better than just not be abusive. We've got to help people be incredibly encouraging and inviting of ideas, of observations, of questions. You've got to override the taken for granted norms.

Adam Grant:
It seems to me that when psychological safety is lacking, instead of speaking up internally, people end up just blowing the whistle externally.

Amy Edmondson:
Well, you know, that's exactly right.

Adam Grant:
After leaving Boeing, Ed Pierson blew the whistle. He testified to Congress about the distressing conditions, the culture of fear there, and how he had tried to speak truth to power while he was still working at the company. As part of his written testimony, Ed explained that during his time at Boeing before the crashes, he wrote an email to the general manager of the 737 factory:

Ed Pierson:
"Frankly right now all my internal warning bells are going off. And for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane."

Adam Grant:
After the manager refused to shut down the factory to investigate and fix the production problems, Ed set up a meeting to make his case in person.

Ed Pierson:
And I failed, I couldn't convince him to do it. Um, and I'm mad at myself cause I felt like I needed to be, I should have been somehow more persuasive or, or done something more.

Adam Grant:
Ed says that after becoming increasingly frustrated and disillusioned, he felt he had to leave Boeing. So he retired. And then the two 737 max airplanes crashed.A Congressional investigation attributed the crashes to technical design flaws, faulty assumptions about pilot responses, production pressures, and management failures-- both by Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration. In response to the investigation, Boeing said it has taken steps to “bolster safety across our company” and “give engineers a stronger voice and a more direct line to share concerns with top management. ”For Ed, it was those production pressures and management failures that really stood out. There’s one conversation with a colleague that continues to haunt him.

Ed Pierson:
She said, Ed, I'm sick to my stomach every day I come to this meeting and I'm sick to my stomach and I, I didn't have anything I'd say other than, you know, I'm sick too. When you factor in that fear. And all of a sudden now what happens is people stop talking and you can't have that. Right. You can't have that, when people are unwilling to speak up.

Adam Grant:
As a leader, how do you create psychological safety for people to speak up-- even people who are hesitant to speak up in the first place? More on that, after the break.

Bill Wilson:
I spent 28 years, five months and three days in the U S Navy. I know that because that's what the retirement clerk told me when I was checking out of the Navy.

Adam Grant:
Meet Navy SEAL Captain Bill Wilson. When he was stationed in Afghanistan on the Joint Special Operations Command, Bill had a commander who stood out.

Bill Wilson:
He was just so approachable. His wife would send him M&M's, peanut M&M's. And he had this big jar M&M's, you know, in his office. And normally you'd never go into the old man's office by yourself, but I'd go in there to drop things off, you know, and I noticed that the M&M jar is going down. I'm like, ah, I got to talk to the guy, he’s eating way too much candy here. You know, he got, well, turns out everyone was going in. They felt so comfortable. They would go in and and nip his candy.

Adam Grant:
The commander was Admiral William McRaven, one of America’s most decorated military leaders. He led the missions that captured Saddam Hussein and killed Osama bin Laden.

Admiral McRaven went to great lengths to build psychological safety in his teams. Not just by letting people steal his M&M’s. It was clear to Bill that the Admiral WANTED to be challenged and corrected.

Bill Wilson:
He would say something that was so outlandish, we'd look at each other and he's like, okay, I just said something absolutely idiotic who here has the, you know, fill in the blank to tell me I'm an idiot. You guys are ridiculous. You're ridiculous. He goes, you failed. All of you fail you're fired. And he did that. He goes, I did that just to early on to create the opportunity for you guys to go, no, we're not doing that, sir. That's crazy. Crazy talk. And he said, that's the, the environment that I want to cultivate is that you guys are fearless in telling me when I’ve got something wrong. He goes, the stakes are too high.

Adam Grant:
Bill even had a shorthand for telling Admiral McRaven he was wrong-- or he was about to make a bad call.

Bill Wilson:
My code sort of expression with the Admiral was, sir, I don't believe that the staff has given you, you know, a fully informed option. If you could just give us 24 hours, we'll come back to you with some more information and that meant, sir, stop just please stop talking. He was also receptive in a way that, okay. I'll stop talking, obviously there's something here that we're going to sort out later which very few leaders will do that.

Adam Grant:
Bill also knew he could bring the Admiral bad news — and mistakes. He remembers a time when one of his colleagues told the Admiral about a mission they went on without the proper permissions. Here’s what the Admiral didn’t do. He didn’t turn red and start screaming or humiliating him.

Bill Wilson:
McRaven owned it. And he just like, I'll take care of that. What did you learn from it? Okay. Uh, what are we going to do differently next time? Okay, thanks. And then change the subject. Rather than sitting there and kind of picking apart the scab of what we've just done.

Adam Grant:
But Bill says Admiral McRaven did have a clear weakness...

Bill Wilson:
He honestly will collect strays. So he'll take people who have struggled at something. And gosh, well, to give, you know, let's give Bill a chance, you know, He's going to kill me that I divulged that.

Adam Grant:
Hey Admiral, this might be a good time to introduce yourself...

Admiral Bill McRaven:
I'm Bill McRaven. I'm a retired Navy SEAL flag officer and I spent 37 years as a Navy SEAL.

Bill Wilson:
Sir, I've told them that, you know, one of your blind spots as you collect strays, you just, you always see the good in somebody. I remember refusing to do it, sir. I said, sir, we're not going to do that. We are not going to put that person—lovely human being—we're not going to put that person there. They will not be successful. And I will not allow that to damage your credibility. You chuckled it off and go, “Yeah, I know I do that.” And “Thanks, Bill. I appreciate it.” And I just remember thinking. Thanks sir. Thanks just for listening.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
The folks that work for you, you have to listen to their advice and counsel. And again part of Bill's responsibility to me, as he said, was to protect me from myself. And, uh, Bill always made sure when the emperor had no clothes, Bill was never concerned about telling me point blank, we ain't going to do this. Or this is really a bad idea.

Adam Grant:
After finishing his extraordinary military career, Admiral McRaven served as chancellor of the University of Texas system. I got to know him when we were on a board together at the Pentagon. And yes, I’m still trying to convince him to run for president.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
Still resisting.

Adam Grant:
I’ve seen the Admiral in action, and his leadership behaviors exemplify the principles of building psychological safety.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
I've never heard the term psychological safety. I understand it. A good leader knows you have got to listen to the rank and file because if you don't, then you're going to be on the bus to Abilene.
You're heading in a direction that is not good for the organization. And if you don't empower the people below you to speak their mind, then you're going to find yourself in a lot more trouble, uh, and be embarrassed a lot more than if you decided that you did want them to speak up.

Adam Grant:
Is this something that you thought about often as you moved into leadership roles?

Admiral Bill McRaven:
Every single time. You bet. So the first thing a leader has to do is set the tone for the organization and you have to do that on day one.

Adam Grant:
Research by Amy Edmondson and others has identified several key steps to establish psychological safety. First, set the tone by acknowledging your own fallibility -- and appreciating people who point it out.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
Hey boss, I don't think that's a good idea. But then you also, when people come to you and say that you've got to say, Hey, I appreciate that.

Adam Grant:
Was there a critical moment when somebody challenged one of your decisions?

Admiral Bill McRaven:
Oh, just about every day.

Adam Grant:
It happened during one of the most consequential missions of the Admiral’s career...the raid on the Bin Laden compound...

Admiral Bill McRaven:
I told the President early on that we weren't going to have to refuel on our way into the target. And, uh, we thought we could get the helicopters there, get on target, you know, get bin Laden and get back on the helicopters, come back because refueling was going to take another 20 minutes. Well, kind of late in the game, one of my senior guys came to me and said, Hey, sir, we've run the numbers a hundred times, but on the hundred and first time, we're really concerned. We think we're going to have to refuel and I'm like, man, I mean, this was, it seemed like a major change to the operation. I went to the president and said, sir, I'm sorry, but this is a change in the plan. And he said, okay, Bill, uh, if you're good with it, I’m good with it.

Adam Grant:
The second step to creating psychological safety: After you’ve set the tone, don’t just assume your team will offer input. Create regular touchpoints for people to give feedback, and explicitly, repeatedly ask them to raise concerns.

That might mean building a time for feedback into your weekly meetings, appointing a group of people to serve as canaries in the coal mine, or taking the old idea of a suggestion box and adding a “problem box” where people can flag what’s broken. All with a clear message...

Admiral Bill McRaven:
If we're screwed up here, you need to come tell me. If I'm making a bad decision, you need to come tell me, don't be afraid to bring me bad news. Bad news does not get better with time. So if you got bad news, bring it forward. If you fail to bring the bad news forward until the 11th hour and 59th minute, then you haven't done your job because I can probably fix the problem if you bring me the bad news soon enough.

Adam Grant:
Isn't that the opposite of what so many leaders love to say, don't bring me problems, bring me solutions.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
Yeah. Yeah. But, but, but here's the thing is I think the responsibility of a leader is to solve problems.

Third, don’t put yourself on a pedestal. Show respect and earn trust by going into the trenches.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
I would at one or two o'clock in the morning I would come into the command and I talked to the young petty officer on duty at two o'clock in the morning, just to let him know that, Hey, you know, I know it's two o'clock in the morning. I know you're having to stand duty. Uh, you need to know, I appreciate that.

Adam Grant:
My colleague Sigal Barsade calls it leading by doing. And she recommends that every leader should spend at least 10% of their time doing the work of the people who report to them.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
You bet. I always tell aspiring officers or officers that are new to a command look, the first thing you have to do to earn the respect of the non-commissioned officers and the troops that work for you is you have to share the hardships and you have to share the dangers.

And I don't care whether you're new or whether you're old. I used to go out on operations, on missions with the guys all the time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and part of this, uh, was to find out whether or not, you know, from my perch, what I believed was happening was in fact happening on the ground.

But the other part of this was so they could see the Admiral putting himself in harm's way, getting dirty, getting shot at, because if the troops feel like you understand what they're going through, then they're more ready to accept your decisions because they know you've thought through them.

Adam Grant:
Fourth, I’ve found in my research that you can enhance psychological safety by making it clear that accountability travels both ways. Admiral McRaven made sure his teams knew he would hold them accountable for their work — by demanding they hold him accountable too.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
So what I would tell folks is, look, we want to be the very best we can be. And the only way that we can be the very best is to set high standards. We're going to ensure that we set high standards by holding people accountable when they fail to meet those standards. So let's start with me,here are the standards we're going to set. You will ensure that I am held accountable to those standards. When I fail to meet those standards my expectation is you will tell me what my shortfalls look like and we will move forward.

Adam Grant:
When people failed to meet standards, Admiral McRaven didn’t criticize them in public. He gave them feedback in private and tried to help them change their behavior.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
Accountability doesn't always mean that somebody has done something egregious and you hold them accountable. Yes. You're going to do that. But it's also, you know, somebody just not able to, to meet the standards. And so you try to help them achieve the standards. But at some point in time, if they don't achieve the standards, you've got to move and let them go, or you've got to find another place for them.

Adam Grant:
One of the standards that you prize, which I often violate as you know, is being on time. Can you hold me accountable for being on time?

Admiral Bill McRaven:
Well, so you were late today by the way. So we were supposed to start at 10 o'clock and it wasn't until 10:03 that you showed up. Now, look, I got it. You're on your own time, but the fact, the matter is you're all my time too. You asked me to be here. I expect you to be here on time, and I will tell you in the military, if you're not here, 15 minutes early, you're late because it's not just your time.

It's all of our time. And so you're being selfish if you've decided that you're going to show up on your time and not be considerate of others and oh by the way, it's a standard that we have set. 10 o'clock is 10 o'clock.

Adam Grant:
Well, Admiral, I, I have to tell you that every time you tell me that I've let you down, uh, I don't feel discouraged. I feel motivated. Why is that? Can you explain this to me? Because most of the time, when somebody tells me that I disappointed them, I want to crawl under a rock.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
Because you want to be part of a great organization, because you want to be the best you can be.

Adam Grant:
I imagine you sometimes saw leaders who were not creating that kind of climate, where people could speak up. What did you do in those situations?

Admiral Bill McRaven:
Yeah. You've got to address it, uh, you know, right up front you call them in your office and you say, look, let me try and give you a little advice here maybe you should approach it this way, or maybe you should approach it that way. I mean, obviously if they are a toxic leader, then you know, you've got to jump in with both feet and it's more than a tune-up, it's major repair time. I always tried to help fix those people that I thought were toxic leaders, but then, you generally only give one more chance and if they don't fix that toxic leadership fast, you move ‘em on. And the times that I have found toxic leaders, it tended to be about their ego. Their ego got in the way of them saying, Hey, I make mistakes. Every once in a while, when I make mistakes, somebody come talk to me.

Adam Grant:
As a leader, it’s worth remembering: it’s not about you.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
You're trying to earn the respect of the men and women that work for you. And if you're going to be part of a great organization, you are going to have to set high standards and you're going to have to hold people accountable when they fail to achieve those standards. That's how you build morale. Morale isn't about everybody being happy. Morale is about having an organization that hums, because everybody is achieving the best they can achieve and the organization's moving along and oh, by the way, yes, they will be happy as a result of the fact that they are part of a great organization.

Adam Grant:
A great organization maintains high standards by inviting voice rather than imposing silence. By encouraging people to learn from mistakes instead of covering them up. By creating psychological safety instead of psychological danger.

Next time on WorkLife…

DEMAR:
Every ounce of emotion in a negative way you could, you could feel, I think I felt it in, in that moment. I hit a wall. I just felt like I needed to get something off my chest.

Adam Grant:
What if people could talk openly about mental health at work?

WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Dan O’Donnell, Constanza Gallardo, JoAnn DeLuna, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, and Anna Phelan. This episode was produced by Camille Petersen. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown. Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios.

Special thanks to our sponsors: LinkedIn, Logitech, Morgan Stanley, SAP and Verizon.

Appreciation to the following researchers: Bill Kahn for his early work on psychological safety, Lance Frazier and Mike Christian and their colleagues for meta-analyses, Amy Edmondson’s collaborators -- especially Jim Detert and Ingrid Nembhard -- and my colleague Constantinos Coutifaris.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
You know, the thing about being on time, it's like anything else it's about the little things alive, as corny as it sounds it's about the make your bed philosophy. It really is about you'll do the little things, right. And you'll be able to do the big things. Right.

Adam Grant:
I'm never late for anything that's important, but I do live in a world where I like to maintain…

Admiral Bill McRaven:
You're telling me I'm not important.

Adam Grant:
No, of course not. I'm telling you that I knew you wouldn't mind the two or three minutes that I was prepping Bill Wilson to make this an even more delightful conversation than it otherwise would have been. But sir, I do need to tell you though, I did not make my bed this morning.

Admiral Bill McRaven:
Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Well, we'll, we'll work on that one. And your timeliness, Adam.