Getting Candid: A Learning Culture for Thriving Organizations

This week I listened to a great podcast recommended to me by Dr. Stephany Anderson, who teaches my Leading Digital Learning and Innovation course at Monmouth University School of Education. It's official — I'm a total convert!

The podcast is called The Learner Lab; the podcasters are Trevor Ragan and his fellow Train Ugly team or "tribe." Their speciality is training individuals, teams and organizations for continued success by enlisting a wide array of research-based strategies oriented toward a culture and a philosophy of lifelong learning — or growth mindset. These strategies work because they focus on building productive, personalized relationships with individuals and groups.

I'd like to take a moment to talk about The Learner Lab Season 1 final episode, "The Key to a Better Learning Culture with Daniel Coyle and Amy Edmondson."

After having played this episode twice, with copious notes on the second listen, my next pursuit will be to read Coyle's The Culture Code and Edmondson's The Fearless Organization. Both books offer valuable insights into answering the question: What allows teams to work better together?

In this episode, this question is introduced by podcasters Trevor and Alex, beginning from the well-known Aristotelian premise that a team is greater (or sadly, sometimes lesser) than the sum of its individual members.

It's not really so much the dynamism of the individual members. Rather, it's the interaction of the group that's key. As they put it, the podcasters want to know what's in the "secret sauce" of productive interaction that leads to high-performing teams.

They discuss a five-year investigation by Google on the inner workings of group performance. Quite shockingly, after mining the data for correlations, Google learned that the following variables — variables that many of us tend to consider important — actually DO NOT predict team success:

• location of teammates
• consensus-driven decision-making
• extroversion of team members
• individual performance of the team members
• workload size
• seniority
• team size
• tenure

Instead, it was the ways the teams interacted that mattered. The podcasters then compare this outcome to a completely separate and different study, by Daniel Coyle, which led to the findings presented in The Culture Code. The author spent four years on the road studying groups from sports teams to high-profile heists, and what he found among the strongest groups was the same discovery as Google's: a high energy "electric vibe" among the members.

Amy Edmondson's concept of psychological safety has answered both Google and Coyle's search for an explanation of the link between group interaction and high performance. With two decades of research to back it up, Edmondson gives us the idea in a nutshell: Have we created a work environment where we're candid, where we speak up?

As Edmondson clarifies, psychological safety does not mean being happy or nice or polite or avoiding upsetting or disagreeing with people. It's something deeper than that. Being candid means stumbling and falling and picking each other up. Moreover, psychological safety "is needed for meeting standards" because to meet these, you need to speak up and take risks.

Needless to say, it is gratifying to have this very feeling — something many of us risk-takers have reflected on through our passions and our endeavors — validated as fact by the research. One sacrifices job security with risk, as Edmondson herself points out. But if you DON'T put yourself out there, you'll go unnoticed, and that's no way to keep your job either.

The podcast episode builds on these great observations by presenting the phenomenal success story of the Grinnell College Women's Volleyball team. Four seasons ago, they had won only two games. This last season, however, the team improved by leaps and bounds, finishing second in the conference and winning more games than any other athletic program in the College's history. The focus of the team this season was on building psychological safety, using Coyle's book The Culture Code.

In this context, the Volleyball team and podcasters outline the three stages or "buckets," as Edmondson calls them, of creating a better learning culture through psychological safety:

1. Stage-setting: Let's be real about the work we’re going to do. This means managing expectations, owning the fear of failure and the potential struggles, answering the why questions and the underlying motivations and science behind them, and creating group buy-in. A lot of “up front” energy is required to set the stage for building a growth mindset.
2. Proactive inquiry:  Inviting feedback encourages a feeling of safety and invites engagement and action. If I pose a thoughtful question, I'm not getting "a mute response." For example: Am I right? Will this work, boss? However, in order to invite engagement, you often have to model it! If I’m unwilling to tell you I messed up, how can I expect you to do the same?
3. Monitor your responses: How do you respond to a mistake? How do you respond to honest feedback? The way we respond can encourage safety. Inviting input enjoins problem-solving: Is the response productive? Even if critical?

For example, the Grinnell team has a philosophy of discussing mistakes in progress rather than focusing on outcomes. Tensions are seen as a source of fuel. The point is not to be the best of friends (or fake friends) but to promote continuous feedback.

Coyle and the podcasters wind down by posing the question: How do you build a safe environment? The science points to the signals that are sent through action and behavior. It is essential to send and resend behavioral signals of safety: you matter, you belong, we’re in this together — for example, the meals we eat together, our travels together on the road.

A final takeaway is the need to welcome newbies into the culture on day one without putting them through a process of proving themselves or some sort of initiation. As Coyle suggests, for new and veteran team members, it’s like lighting and relighting a candle. I am able to say to a great coach who sparks that light: You see me the way I see me. The best coach believes in me and gives me a sense of individualized belief.

This podcast episode provides powerful evidence that we have to invest in our culture of learning if we want to succeed. The way to do this is through the cyclical stages of building psychological safety.

That's why, when I thought about all this research, I titled this blog post "Getting Candid," as these discussions remind me of Kim Scott's radical candor that Katie Martin outlines in her book, Learner Centered Innovation. Indeed, the learning culture principles of candor and safety apply equally well to schools and classrooms! As I have learned, a product is only as good as the human relationships behind its creation. It is the bond between people that endures—our teamwork, our agency, our empowerment.