Amy Edmondson: ‘High psychological safety means a high learning quotient’ – what HR leaders need to know

How many high-quality conversations take place in your organization? 

This may be tricky to answer, as everyone is likely to have a different definition of what makes a conversation “high quality.”

Amy Edmondson, Author and Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School has shaped her career around researching this topic, while also seeking to discover how they promote psychological safety within the workplace.

At the Workhuman Forum held at UNLEASH World 2025, UNLEASH’s Editorial team set out to understand more about what this means for businesses, leaders, and individual employees alike.

To begin our conversation, Edmondson explains that a fearless organization is “more an aspiration than a lived reality.” 

She expressed that the aspiration it describes is of “fearless candor,” and to allow for people to be honest and direct in sharing their thoughts, concerns, questions, and even mistakes in service of better performance.

At UNLEASH World 2025, we spoke exclusively to Edmondson to discover more about why HR leaders should promote psychological safety, as well as how they can go about achieving this.

Factors prohibiting psychological safety

When beginning her research, Edmondson shares that she discovered a key finding: individual learning doesn’t translate automatically into organizational learning. 

By this, she means that everyone is capable of learning, but the individual learning of employees doesn’t necessarily make organizations better. Instead, organizational learning happens when processes are changed, new innovations are created, new markets are identified, and so forth. Therefore, organization will not have gained knowledge or skills unless individual learning is channeled into these kinds of changes.

“It occurred to me that teams were the missing link to help us understand what really allows organizations to learn,” Edmondson says. “Suddenly, it becomes more granular, more accessible and changeable. 

So, I began to think that an organization is learning when its teams are learning. From this, I decided that it made sense to study teams – to understand both how they learn and what gets in the way.”

From here, Edmondson explains that there are many things that limit a team’s ability to learn: lack of clarity about the goal, lack of expertise, lack of effort, and so forth.  

However, she discovered that a lack of candor in speaking up – which is quite normal and prevalent – can inhibit a team’s ability to learn.

“Employees can be smart, capable, and well trained,” she adds, “but if they’re not speaking up about what they see or know, they’re not helping the team learn. This means that leaders have to do things to help people feel able to speak up.”

How leaders can encourage fearless candor

To encourage employees to speak up, Edmondson expresses that there are three measures leaders can implement to create a better environment: stage setting, proactive inviting, and productive responding. 

Stage setting includes calling attention to the goal and its importance – this could be the team’s goal, or the purpose of the company. 

“When leaders remind people of why what they’re doing matters, it makes us sit up straighter and exert more effort to help make things happen,” Edmondson says. “Leaders who remind people of why the work matters contribute to creating a learning environment.” 

Secondly, Edmondson shared that inviting engagement is about “getting in the habit of asking good questions,” and finally, leaders must respond in a productive way to what people say. For example, when bad news is given, leaders must be able to respond productively, not destructively.  

These three categories of behavior are therefore essentially about a leader demonstrating a growth mindset, a learning mindset.

On the other hand, Edmondson highlights what leaders should not do – such as just assuming employees know how to correctly complete the task at hand. 

“Don’t assume people will speak up if they have something to say,” she warns, “but ask good questions. And if you respond poorly to bad news, expect people not to be honest with you next time.”

Yet responding well to bad news is often easier said than done, which is why Edmondson offers a self-management practice: stop, challenge, choose. This encourages leaders to stop to pause and breathe, and to avoid responding straight away to something you don’t like. 

“Just breathe, take a second to remind yourself that our human tendency to look backward – to be in the moment looking at the past that you don’t like – is unhelpful,” she expresses. “You can choose to look forward: to care more about the future than the past, in that moment.

“I therefore think we should spend more time thinking about what works rather than what’s natural.

What works in a situation like this is to appreciate that a person has just taken a risk or done something hard, and to be appreciative and look forward together.

“Then, choose the most productive response you can, because as a leader, your job is to make things better – to lead, not just react or be “natural” in that sense. 

Psychological safety in practice

Before leaders can put these aspects into practice, they need to be aware that levels of psychological safety is likely to vary across organizations – especially those with 100 employees or more. 

“High psychological safety means a high learning quotient – these are teams that are engaged, leaning in, honest, and working hard to create value for the company,” Edmondson says. 

“Get interested in the issue of variance. Through surveys or other means, you can help leaders in the middle get support when they need it for their teams. Be curious about how teams are doing and what can help them do better.”

As a result, Edmondson explains that more often than not, the answer is a combination of formal training and access to coaching or resources needed to help employees complete their jobs well.

Reiterating the importance of high-quality, honest and learning-oriented conversations, Edmondson explains leaders need to ensure they’re making good decisions in the face of uncertainty. She therefore describes high quality conversations as “not long or slow, but thoughtful, data-driven, open, honest, and goal-directed.

“In my data and experience, I’ve seen teams be incredibly efficient and have no psychological safety whatsoever – they efficiently come to the wrong decision because some people didn’t speak up,” she notes. 

“I’ve also seen senior management teams talk for six months about a strategic shift and get nowhere because everyone is tiptoeing around the truth. Candor and efficiency can go together.”

But of course, AI and technology adds another layer that leaders need to take heed of when considering psychological safety. This, Edmondson explains, has two key facets.

Firstly, she explains that AI is creating “far greater uncertainty” than has ever been seen before, causing a spike in challenges and anxiety, while also increasing the need for high-quality conversations. 

“Nobody can think business-as-usual will be fine,” she adds. “This means that psychological safety and trying to build fearless organizations are more important than ever; we’ll need them to navigate the uncertain terrain ahead.”

The second element centers around employees’ anxiety about AI taking jobs. Again, she highlights that the solution must be open, candid, high-quality conversations about what works.

“I’ve found that people mix up aspiration and failure,” Edmondson concludes.

A fearless organization is an aspiration – imagine a place where you can be open and honest, driven by curiosity, excited about meaningful work. This is the goal, but it’s not the norm.

“If you’re not there yet, it doesn’t mean you’re bad – it means you’re normal, and you have an opportunity to do better. It means admitting you’re ambitious about doing better than what’s normal and natural.

“So ask more questions. Good, open-ended, thoughtful questions that probe others’ thinking and invite them into the conversation.”