(2025-07-27) Denning Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsoleteby Solving The Wrong Problem

Steve Denning: Millions Of Managers Are Becoming Obsolete—By Solving The Wrong Problem. 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.”

*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.*

**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.
The team level may be where most of the work gets done, but not necessarily where most of the problems are caused.

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.

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 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. (customer value)