Amanda Fornal on psychological safety and innovation, the risk gap between founders and employees, and why kindness is truth delivered with compassion.
Amanda Fornal, founder of Orange SFM and creator of the Investing in Kindness initiative, on why psychological safety is the precondition for innovation, and why punishing mistakes quietly kills the ideas you asked for.
Speaking with Stephen Sakach and Tullio Siragusa, Amanda separates kindness from niceness. Kindness is truthfulness delivered with compassion: naming what went wrong and how to fix it, without humiliation. That is what makes it usable as a management practice instead of a personality trait.
In this conversation:
• Psychological safety as the condition that makes risk-taking possible
• The risk gap: founders can absorb a failed bet, employees often cannot
• Why listening is one of the most powerful things a leader can do
• Kindness as a performance multiplier, backed by the academic research
• Revisiting processes as a company grows from one founder to thousands
Her origin story is worth the watch on its own: the initiative began when someone told her they would rather invest in sociopathic founders than kind ones.
Listen to the full episode: https://www.theblisspodcast.com/sustainable-business-practices-and-ethics-with-amanda-fornal/
More from the series: https://www.theblisspodcast.com/categories/bliss-businesses-series/