Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / Make It Safe to Take Risks: What Ed Catmull Got Right About Leadership
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled Make It Safe to Take Risks What Ed Katmull Got Right About Leadership. Here we go. Think about the last time someone on your team brought you a bad idea. Not a half baked one. A genuinely risky one, something that could have gone sideways. Now think about how that conversation ended. Did they leave the room with more courage or less? How you answer that question tells you more about your leadership than most performance reviews ever will. Ed Katmall, co-founder of Pixar, said something that has stayed with me since the first time I read it. He said, It's not the manager's job to prevent risks, it's the manager's it's the manager's job to make it safe to take them. It's short sentence with a long shadow. Most leaders think their value is in the screening, in catching what could go wrong before it does. Catnall is saying the opposite. Your value is in what you make possible. Pixar didn't produce film after film of original, emotionally resonant storytelling because they hired geniuses and got out of the way. They built a culture where creative risk was not just tolerated, it was expected. And the leadership structure was designed to catch people when they fell. Not to prevent them from leaping. That is a fundamentally different orientation. Most organizations are built to manage the downside. Great organizations are built to enable upside. The distinction matters at every level of leadership. Now here's where I see leaders going wrong with this. They hear make it safe to take risks, and they think it means lower the stakes, remove accountability, let people try things without consequence. That's not what Katnell is describing. Psychological safety is not the absence of standards. It's the presence of trust. Your people still need to perform. Outcomes still matter. What changes is whether a person who swings and misses gets coached or gets quietly sidelined. One of those produces growth. The other produces caution. The real question isn't whether your team takes risks. They're taking them every day, in every decision they make or don't make. The question is whether those risks are visible to you. When people feel unsafe, they hide their bets. They do what's approved. They optimize for not being wrong rather than for being right. And that's when organizations start to move slowly, not because they lack talent, but because the talent has learned to stay small. When you make it safe to take risks, you don't lower the bar, you raise the ceiling. I want you to take one thing into your week. Not a framework, not a policy, just a conversation. Find someone on your team who took a swing recently and didn't land it. And before you review the outcome, ask them what they were trying to solve, what they were betting on, what they would do differently, not as an audit, but as a genuine inquiry. That conversation, done well, teaches your entire team more about who you are as a leader than any all hands meeting ever will. Catnell's insight isn't about being permissive, it's about being intentional. The organizations that build something lasting aren't the ones that minimize failure. They're the ones that know how to learn from it without destroying the person who experienced it. Psychological safety is not a culture initiative, it's a leadership discipline. It's built in moments, not memos. And it starts with what you do the next time someone walks into your office with something that might not work. How you receive that person is how your team will define your leadership. Make sure you're building the culture you actually want.