MAKE IT SAFE TO BE DIFFERENT—BUT DON’T STOP THERE

Abstract

AbstractFrances Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School, and was also Uber’s first Senior Vice President of Leadership and Strategy. Anne Morriss is the founder of the Leadership Consortium, which she describes as “a first‐of‐its‐kind leadership accelerator that works to help emerging leaders thrive.” They write about the many nuances of how employees feel safe (or otherwise) in the workplace. They include information about how inclusion is impacted by safety, partly with the use of what they call the Inclusion Dial. They write that their colleague “Tina Opie, a management professor at Babson College, challenges us in her own scholarship, it’s our collective and individual responsibility—and opportunity—to be great allies and partners to our teammates with different experiences of safety, and we must bring grace, humility, and urgency to the task.” They also cite their Harvard Business School colleague Amy Edmondson, and her groundbreaking work on psychological safety. Frei and Morriss write that “an organization that celebrates uniqueness assumes that difference is a source of creativity, innovation, and strength. It is not just something to watch out for as it may get in the way of some people’s contribution.”