Amy Edmondson says in her book, that more and more of teamwork is nowadays moving into dynamic, and occurring in constantly shifting configurations of people rather than in formal, clearly bounded teams. This dynamic is called teaming. Teaming is an art of communicating and coordinating with people across all kinds of boundaries, for example expertise, status and distance. This connected to creating psychologically safe workplace and a fearless organization is a difficult task, because creating trust in shifting teams is a lot more difficult than if the team would be the same constantly. It requires adapting from the HR leader, and from the employees to make it work.

In psychologically safe workplaces, people know, that they might fail. Psychological safety isn’t immunity to consequences. The employees know, that they might get performance feedback, that say that their performance isn’t on a necessary level, or that they might lose their job on industrial cuts or negotiations. These traits won’t disappear anytime soon, but in psychologically safe workplace, they don’t fear it. This brings the book to it’s name, the fearless organization. The employees don’t fear the consequences they might get, as they trust their colleagues and in their shifting teams and believe that they are an important part of it. That’s what makes the organization fearless. Things don’t happen from fear that what the consequences might be, they happen on what the consequences can be. This Edmondson’s view goes all the way to Churchill and his vision on how to save 300000 men from Dunkirk during operation Dynamo, and this vision can be adapted on today’s society effectively as well.

How can this fearless organization and psychologically safe workplace be achieved in a constantly changing teams in a workplace? The key here is that everyone are familiar with everyone, and accept others the way they are. This sounds obvious, but unfortunately it isn’t. Edmondson says in her book, that everyone doesn’t need to be friends, but they need to now that others exist. Psychological safety is often described as an environment, where everyone can be themselves. This environment can not exist, if the workplace employees are complete strangers to one another. As a HR specialist, you have to make the employees understand that even when you don’t have to like everyone, you need to get along with everyone. And when the employees learn to accept others the way they are, everyone starts feeling comfortable about themselves. Obviously, this isn’t as easy as it is just to write, and there is massive effort required to make this happen in reality, but it is a possibility when each employee has a right mindset described above.

The right mindset. Now we get to the bottom of the ladder. How to create a right mindset to employees individually, so the fearless organization can work? Edmondson says, that the mindset need to be created without forcing, and I do agree with her. No one can be forced to think certain way, it isn’t real., It needs to be created. First starting with the most potential employees. As HR, you need to select a few people, who most likely agree with the mindset vision, and discussing with them to embrace it. Slowly instructing them to start talking about it in coffee tables, and during work days, infecting others with it and ideally, it spreads like a disease through the workplace community and with affective teaming, through different cells of the company. If it doesn’t happen ideally which can be the case, then it needs a kick to it, and discussing the breaking employees. But usually social pressure is effective pressure when applied the right way.

After all, the fearless organization doesn’t mean ineffectiveness, even when it isn’t controlled by fear but rather with unity. I know this sounds cliché, but unity does bring more effective results when it works than fear, fear is just a lot easier to use. In fearless organization people feel psychologically safe and believe that their coworkers got their backs. And when things go south, the performance feedbacks are easier to give as the first thing coming isn’t a threat, but rather a solution. It also needs to be made clear, that workplace can also punish if necessary, but in fearless organization it doesn’t come to that before everything else has been tried before. It’s a bit like a house with many molded floors, you aren’t as scared to fall through 6 molded floors than one. It reduces fear, when there are more steps than just one, which inspires the workplace to fear.

This Edmondson’s book is definitely one of the best I have ever read, and as I love social psychology and consider myself maybe a future HR specialist, this definitely gave me a lot even when we slightly went through these same things in our bachelor’s thesis before. The point of view there was a bit different, but the message was the same. Inspiring rather with chances than fear. That’s what Churchill did and won the battle for Britain in 1940.