Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsolete—By Solving The Wrong Problem

Forbes

27-07-2025

Psychological safety, problems at work, mistake, fatigue, dismissal, stress and overwork.
Two months ago, Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson and associate professor Michaela J. Kerrissey wrote an eloquent article in the May-June issue of Harvard Business Review., 'What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety.'
A Massive Effort To Enhance Psychological Safety With Little Effect
'Psychological safety' was once an obscure term in psychology and management research. Professor Edmondson changed all that with her best-selling book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (2017) HBRP. According to her recent article, 'Today the concept is downright popular. Countless managers, consultants, and training companies have worked hard to create psychologically safe workplaces, and thousands of articles have been devoted to the topic.'
In 2017, the need for the effort was obvious: 'A 2017 Gallup poll found that only 3 in 10 employees strongly agree with the statement that their opinions count at work.'
Yet today, 8 years later, those Gallup numbers have hardly budged. What went wrong?
According to the 2025 article, 'As the popularity of psychological safety has grown, so too have misconceptions about it.' The authors identify six common misperceptions: 'Psychological safety means being nice; it means getting your way; it means job security; it requires a trade-off with performance; it's a policy; and it requires a top-down approach.' They explain why each misperception gets in the way and give advice on how to counter it.
The Key Problem: What Is The Problem?
What is the problem that this massive effort is trying to solve? One useful insight sometimes (unreliably) attributed to Albert Einstein is to rethink fundamentals. 'If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend the first 55 minutes defining the problem and the last five minutes solving it." The effort on psychological safety may be doing the opposite.
Thus, a closer look at the lack of progress on enhancing psychological safety points to another possible cause: a focus of the effort on the team level of the firm. As Professor Edmondson's 2017 book stated, 'My field-based research has primarily focused on groups and teams, because that's how most work gets done.' So too, the 2025 article focuses almost exclusively on leaders trying to enhance psychological safety at the team level. The team level may be where most of the work gets done, but not necessarily where most of the problems are caused.
The Real Problem Behind Lack Of Psychological Safety
Guess what? In many other aspects of management, the principal problem today is not at the team level, and rather in the way the whole organization is run.
For the last half-century, the central problem addressed by management was how to cut costs so as to maximize shareholder value and enhance bonuses for the executives. That was the official position of the U.S. Business Roundtable for several decades. Business schools still teach it. Most of the processes, systems, and mindsets that support it are still in place in many big firms.
So that is the problem that managers are required to address, whether they agree with it or not. Is it any wonder that there is a lack of psychological safety in such settings?
The Shift From Cutting Costs To Creating Value For Customers
The good news is that in a smaller group of public firms—perhaps 20% of public companies-- the primary dynamic of a business has shifted from cutting costs and extracting value to creating more value for customers.
Value-creating enterprises emerged from the combination of two elements: first, entrepreneurs began using digital technology and AI to deliver exponentially more value than traditionally-managed firms; and second, digital technology gave customers the power to demand more value from businesses.
The killer insight: value-creating enterprises not only satisfy customers: they make much more money than firms focused on making money. Workplaces devoted to creating value for customers are also likely to be more congenial as workplaces than those focused on extracting value from customers and boosting executive bonuses.
Meanwhile, profit-seeking firms that still focus primarily on improving efficiency and cost-cutting are generating below-average value and are having difficulty in surviving. Two-thirds of the famous blue-chip firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Average are now performing below average (See the table below). The performance problems that these firms are facing of course aggravates even further the problem of workplace psychological safety, as workers in those firms are likely to be blamed for shortfalls in performance.
Thus, many of the managers in struggling efforts to enhance psychological safety may be trying to solve the wrong problem. If they shifted the focus of their efforts to updating the goal of their firms and creating more value for their customers, their workplaces could transition from the dispiriting goal of extracting value from customers to the potentially inspiring purpose of creating value for them.
And read also
Why Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsolete—It's Not Rocket Science—Or AI
Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsolete: Master Value Creation Now
5-Year Total Returns of firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Average as of July 2025