The Fearless Organization by Amy C. Edmondson

Author:Amy C. Edmondson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi
ISBN: 9781119477266
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Extreme Candor

In 1975, a twentysomething Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater Associates in his two-bedroom New York City apartment. Since then, the firm has grown to over 1500 employees, earned consistently high returns (even during the 2008–2009 financial crisis), and been the recipient of dozens of industry awards. Dalio has been on the Forbes 400 list and TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people. He attributes Bridgewater's success to its culture of “valuing meaningful work and meaningful relationships,” which has been achieved through “radical truth and transparency.”15 In 2011–2012, as part of a plan to preserve the firm's culture, Dalio created a document titled Principles to record the tried-and-true ideas, methods, and processes that he'd developed.16 Now a best-selling book,17 Principles provides a detailed and extensive guide to one way – by no means the only way – that psychological safety can work to promote learning, innovation, and growth.

Dalio's extreme candor begins with his principle that leaders must “create an environment in which…no one has the right to hold a critical opinion without speaking up about it.”18 Note the use of the word “right.” The framing here is an ethical one. At Bridgewater, if you think it, you must say it. No holding back. In Dalio's view, candor is always in service to the truth, no matter how painful, because only by facing the truth can you take effective action to produce good outcomes. By way of example, he points out that if a person has a terminal illness, it's better to know the truth, no matter how frightening, because only then can one figure out what to do.19 In framing silence as an unethical choice, Dalio is taking a more extreme stance than I have adopted. But it's worth reflecting on this idea, which to me implies that you owe your colleagues the expression of your opinion or ideas; in a sense, those ideas belong to the collective enterprise, and you therefore don't have the right to hoard them.

Candid feedback at Bridgewater is thus constant and detailed. Every employee is required to keep an Issue Log, which records individual mistakes, strengths and weaknesses, and a “pain button,” which records the employee's reaction to specific criticisms as well as their changes in behavior to remedy weaknesses, and whether those changes were effective.

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