Do you want to learn more about Psychological Safety? These resources will give you a deep dive into the concept and give you tools to apply what you are learning. From ebooks to webinars, podcasts, and articles it's all here.

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What is Psychological Safety Ebook

When our vulnerability is rewarded, we engage, contribute meaningfully, and enter an offensive mode of performance. We give of our discretionary effort and spend our time creating value. Where you have Psychological Safety you have high performing & inclusive cultures.

21 Webinars About Psychological Safety

Employee Engagement and Psychological Safety

Organizations spend millions of dollars every year in the pursuit of employee engagement. They launch all kinds of employee engagement campaigns and deploy a variety of employee engagement surveys. In fact, employee engagement has become its own industry. That's not surprising because research shows that employee engagement directly correlates with outcomes like productivity, quality, retention, and customer loyalty.

But what if employee engagement is actually a symptom of something else? What if there's another factor further back in the causal chain, something that explains employee engagement?

In this webinar, Dr. Timothy R. Clark will make the case that employee engagement is primarily the result of psychological safety, which refers to an environment of rewarded vulnerability. When there's high psychological safety employee engagement almost always follows as a natural consequence.

Why Psychological Safety is Oxygen to the Agile Movement

Twenty years ago, 17 software engineers published the “Manifesto for Software Development”--also known as the “Agile Manifesto.” As a response to top-down, command-and-control management, the Manifesto ignited a global movement, enlisting thousands of organizations and millions of employees. Unfortunately, most attempts to implement Agile have been false starts, and most organizations that have pursued Agile transformation are agile in name only. Why? The answer lies in psychological safety.

The Manifesto lays out four basic principles, the first of which reads, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” The authors had it right, but unfortunately, from the beginning, the Agile movement obsessed on processes and tools and neglected this first principle. The heart of agile is culture, and the heart of culture is psychological safety. Without the primary enabling condition of psychological safety, agile transformations fail--every time! Why? Because the processes and tools are scaffolding. They support and accelerate the effort, but it’s psychological safety--an environment of rewarded vulnerability--that is the foundation.

In this webinar, we will discuss how and why psychological safety is oxygen to the Agile movement and what your organization can do to nurture psychological safety and accelerate it’s Agile efforts.

Becoming a Cultural Architect

Leaders in the past were taught an “imperial” model of leadership in which they were asked to become the oracle, the command center, and repository of answers. This antiquated model has become a costly liability in the 2020s. Now what?

Welcome to the decade of culture. At least, that’s what many people are calling it. With the pandemic, the eruption of racial tension, and the flood of Millennials and Zoomers entering the workforce, the emphasis on culture has never been greater.

In short, leaders are being asked to become cultural architects. What exactly does that mean? It means that leaders in the 2020s must do four things:

1) Inclusion Modeling: Model behaviors that create inclusive and innovative environments based on psychological safety.

2) Microcoaching: Coach their team members based on short cycle, bite-sized, in-workflow coaching conversations.

3) Learning Agility: Facilitate team learning at or above the speed of change.

4) Cultural Accountability: Hold team members accountable not only for performance, but also for cultural contribution.

What Psychological Safety is Not

Interest in psychological safety around the world has exploded during the pandemic. That’s a good thing if you know what psychological safety is and how to increase it. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t fully grasp the concept or misunderstand it altogether. As a result, their efforts to cultivate it fail and they lose credibility. At its core, psychological safety is about creating an environment of rewarded vulnerability--the essential condition that allows people to be themselves, learn, contribute, and change and innovate. Without rewarded vulnerability, you can’t do those things, at least not well. Psychological safety is not about false harmony and superficial niceness. It’s not about being politically correct and coddling people who want to play victim. Nor is it about being soft, permissive, or indulgent.

What is it then? It’s about giving others respect and permission, and then holding them accountable. It’s about appreciating and protecting differences, not trying to remove them. It’s about tackling tough issues with high intellectual friction and low social friction. It’s about creating conditions where humans can be themselves, do their best work, and achieve their aspirations.

How to Create a Deeply Inclusive Culture

Why do humans exclude each other? Insecurity, arrogance, greed, fear? Yes, but here’s another reason: Because that’s what we’ve been taught. People usually believe what they’re taught. It’s called acquired socialization.

Here’s a second question: How do humans justify excluding each other? What criteria do we use? Race, age, gender, religion, culture, socio-economic status, political ideology, tribe, ancestry, geography . . . The list is very long. Are these legitimate factors? No, but we use them anyway to create junk theories of superiority. Nothing new.

When we use junk theories to create and perpetuate divisions and rationalize exclusionary behavior, we apply a worthiness test rather than a worth test to each other. If we turn that around and apply a worth test instead of a worthiness test, we have the stunning opportunity to create a deeply inclusive culture.

The Catastrophic Consequences of a Nice Culture

Being nice is a good thing until it’s not. Sometimes, in an effort to create a culture of collegiality, we go too far. When our niceness turns into false harmony, we create barriers to honest, hard-hitting dialogue. We smile and nod and act agreeable when we disagree. The meeting isn’t the meeting so we commiserate in side-bar discussions and hold kangaroo courts.

What a colossal waste of time! More than that, we’re putting ourselves and our organizations at risk because we can’t debate issues on their merits and make wise and timely decisions. In the worst cases, leaders spread a thin layer of nice over a thick layer of fear.

It’s a respectable patina that attempts to hide the fact that we are pretending, engaged in a charade, and unwilling to tackle the tough issues. We lose our ability to self-diagnose and self-correct. Ultimately, the pattern can have catastrophic consequences. Remember, the problems we don’t solve offensively, we must eventually solve defensively.

Diversity is a Fact, Inclusion is a Choice

Diversity is a matter of makeup and composition, whereas inclusion is a matter of belief and behavior.

Diversity produces nothing and blesses no one unless its power can be unleashed. How does that happen? It happens through inclusion. Inclusion activates and releases the power of diversity.

Unfortunately, many organizations that have made great strides to create a more diverse employee population congratulate themselves, but they are no more inclusive than they were before. What can they do?

In this webinar, we will discuss the socialization of exclusionary bias and how to accelerate its removal. We will also discuss the difference between bonding and bridging behaviors and conduct a global brainstorming session to identify specific bridging behaviors that organizations can implement to create sanctuaries of inclusion.

How to Fix a Toxic Culture

Every organization—indeed every team—has a culture. That culture will fall somewhere on a spectrum that ranges from healthy and productive at one end to unhealthy and destructive at the other end. The destructive, far side of the spectrum is where we find toxic cultures.

A toxic culture is one that has deteriorated to patterns that are not only unproductive, but also harmful. A toxic culture is normally characterized by infighting, drama, manipulation, abuse, and other forms of immoral and unethical behavior. Toxic cultures threaten the psychological and physical health of team members and often the very viability of the organization. A team or organization suffering from a toxic culture rarely has the ability to self-diagnose and self-correct. In almost every case, an outside intervention is necessary to remove or repair the sources of dysfunction.

Psychological Safety: Where We Are and Where We're Going in 2021

Agenda: Why the exploding demand for Psychological Safety?

Trend 1: Psychological safety as the backbone of DEI

Trend 2: Government legislation and regulation: Australia & Canada

Trend 3: The devastating toll of the pandemic

Trend 4: A holistic approach to workplace wellness

Trend 5: Workplace safety: Linking the physical to the psychological

Trend 6: Gen X & Gen Z expectations

Transforming Your Culture Through Psychological Safety

Agenda:

1. The EPIC Stages of Change

2. The What & Why of Psychological Safety

3. Making the Case for Change

4. Beginning with Concrete Behaviors to Shift Norms

5. Creating Early Wins

6. Avoiding a Regression to the Mean

Increasing Intellectual Bravery Through Psychological Safety

Agenda:

1) Punished vs. Rewarded Vulnerability

2) The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

3) 7 Ways to Invite Intellectual Bravery

140 Ways to Increase Psychological Safety

Agenda:

1) The 2 Forces Driving Psychological Safety

2) Interpersonal Threat Detection & Psychological Safety

3) Vulnerability & Psychological Safety

4) The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety Framework

5) Practical Ways To Create Psychological Safety

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, Avoiding Paternalism & Exploitation

Agenda:

1. The 4 stages of Psychological Safety

2. Psychological safety as a function of respect & permission

3. Failure pattern #1: Paternalism: High respect & low permission

4. Failure pattern #2: Exploitation: Low respect & high permission

5. Climbing the ladder of vulnerability with your team

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, Avoiding Paternalism & Exploitation

Agenda:

1. The 4 stages of Psychological Safety

2. Psychological safety as a function of respect & permission

3. Failure pattern #1: Paternalism: High respect & low permission

4. Failure pattern #2: Exploitation: Low respect & high permission

5. Climbing the ladder of vulnerability with your team

Emotional Intelligence and Psychological Safety

Agenda:

1) EQ as a multidimensional variable

2) The Traditional Model: Awareness & Regulation

3) Manipulation & the Importance of Intent

4) Adding Self-Regard & Social-Regard

Why Psychological Safety is Impossible Without Emotional Intelligence

Agenda:

1) The What & Why of Emotional Intelligence

2) Fixed Traits vs. Learnable Skill

3) How EQ Enables Psychological Safety

4) The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

DEI & Psychological Safety Why Most Companies Get It Wrong

Agenda:

1) DEI Diagnostic Framework

2) Characteristics of DEI

3) What Is Vital To DEI Success

4) How Companies Get DEI Wrong

5) The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

How to Measure Psychological Safety

Agenda:

1) How to Measure Psychological Safety

2) The Story of Psychological Safety

3) 2020: Why The Explosion of Interest

4) Delicate & Dynamic

5) The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety Framework

6) The 4 Stages Team Survey Platform

Stage 4 Challenger Safety: Making it Safe to Challenge the Status Quo

Agenda:

1) The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety Framework

2) Stage 4: Challenger Safety

3) The Social Exchange

4) Intellectual & Social Friction

5) 3 Global Best Practices For Creating Challenger Safety

Stage 3 Contributor Safety: How to Unleash Contribution through Psychological Safety

Agenda:

1) Stage 3: Contributor Safety

2) The Human Need To Matter

3) The Coaching & Accountability Matrix

4) The 3 Patterns of Deflection

Stage 2 Learner Safety Without Psychological Safety, Learning Dies

Agenda:

1) Learning Agility

2) Stage 2: Learner Safety

3) Learning As Intellectual & Emotional

4) Healing Emotionally Bruised Learners

5) Creating Aggressive, Self-Directed Learners

Stage 1 Inclusion Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion

Agenda:

1) Inclusion & The Culturally Flat Organization

2) Threat Detection & Fear

3) The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

4) Stage 1: Inclusion Safety

5) How To Create A Deeply Inclusive Culture

22 Articles About Psychological Safety

The Hazards of a "Nice" Culture

In far too many companies, there is the appearance of harmony and alignment but in reality, there’s often dysfunction simmering beneath the surface. The intention behind cultivating a nice culture is often genuine. Leaders believe they’re doing a good thing that will motivate people and create inclusion. But often it has the opposite effect.

To Foster Innovation, Cultivate a Culture of Intellectual Bravery

If you want your team to innovate, you need to create a culture of intellectual bravery, in which team members are willing to disagree, dissent, or challenge the status quo even when it requires they risk being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished

8 Ways to Manage Your Team While Social Distancing

Managing a remote team is tough, but add to that pressurized conditions, heightened uncertainty, and an overall sense of dislocation, and your job just got even harder. The author shares several tips for supporting continued learning and the emotional well-being of your employees.

What Psychological Safety is Not

Psychological safety is not a shield from accountability. It’s not niceness, coddling, consensus decision making, unearned autonomy, political correctness, or rhetorical reassurance. Before we talk more about what it is not, let’s get on the same page about what it is.

How to Spot a Toxic Culture in a Job Interview

How do you spot a toxic culture in a job interview? It may sound cliché to say that a job interview is a two-way audition, but when it comes to discerning the culture of a potential employer, it’s true. Let’s not forget that the balance of power is not in your favor.

Diversity is a Fact, Inclusion is a Choice

Diversity is a matter of makeup and composition. Inclusion is a matter of belief and behavior. Diversity benefits no one unless we can unleash its power; simply putting diverse people together doesn't tap their creative potential. Inclusion does that.

Is Your Toxic Boss Actively Toxic or Passively Complicit

Every organization has a culture, and every culture is shaped by the modeling behavior of its leaders. If we think about culture on a continuum, we might label one end “healthy and constructive” and the other “unhealthy and destructive.”

The Accelerating Transformation of Employee Mental Health & Safety

We have moved from an (1) agrarian to an (2) industrial to a (3) service, and finally to an (4) experience economy, yet it took more than 250 years to fully acknowledge the need for physical health and safety and build a management system to sustain it.

How to Lead Brilliant People: A Conversation with Conductor Roger Nierenberg

Brilliant people tend to be more demanding, more impatient, and more ferociously driven. They are often disdainful of hierarchy and suspicious of leadership, viewing authority as an obstacle and hierarchy as a necessary evil. How, then, do you lead brilliant people?

How to Smash the Psychological Barriers to Innovation

Innovation should be a team sport, but in many organizations it’s still an elitist game—reserved for R&D, the executive suite, or those with highly specialized skills.

Behave Until You Believe: How To Shed Racism And Build A Deeply Inclusive Culture

Behave Until You Believe A better way to approach inclusion is to work from both sides of the inclusion spectrum, beginning with awareness at one end and behavior at the other.

To Pass The Test of Civilization Americans Must Learn To Have Marvelous Disagreements

“Our ability to reach unity in diversity,” Ghandi said, “will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.” That test is neither new nor uniquely American. What is new is the intensity of the test—a test we will take again this week.

Is It Expensive to Be Yourself? How This Golden Question Reveals Psychological Safety

What is the single most important question you can ask to reveal the level of psychological safety on a team?

Crisis Leadership: How to Give People Psychological Safety

As the COVID-19 pandemic forces people around the world to work remotely, some team members may feel anxious and disoriented. Here’s how to help your employees feel psychologically safe.

Book Excerpt: The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety -Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation

The absence of physical safety can bring injury or death, but the absence of psychological safety can inflict devastating emotional wounds, neutralise performance, paralyse potential, and crater an individual’s sense of self-worth. It can also destroy organisations.

3 Keys to Move From Diversity to Real Inclusion

Many organizations have made great strides in creating diverse organizations, but most fall short when it comes to inclusion and fail to realize the full potential for increased creativity, better decisions and higher productivity.

When it Comes to Inclusion Worth Proceeds Worthiness

“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” You probably know those immortal words from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” by heart. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr made a similar observation when he said, “We are admonished to judge men by their fruits, not by their roots.”

Want to Spark Innovation? Bring in the Red Team

What’s the number-one enemy of innovation? A workplace filled with homogenized thought. How do you protect against it? By assigning—and encouraging—dissent. It’s not enough to model better behaviors for your employees or push them through tired groupthink or old norms; you must formally and officially assign people to shake things up. You must bring in the red team.

Virtual Training for Executives: 5 Timeless Best Practices

Establish ground rules of candor and civility to foster psychological safety. You can do so by setting a tone of humility and pushing thinking in that context. Psychological safety is the intersection of respect and permission. If you model it, your learners will most likely accept those terms of engagement.

You Can't Check in Too Often With Your Remote Employees

"Short and frequent is the pattern that works." says Timothy Clark, chief executive officer of LeaderFactor, a training and consulting organization. "Employee engagement is dynamic and delicate. If you don't communicate frequently, people disengage and lose productivity."

Why Google and Microsoft Obsess Over Psychological Safety

Google and Microsoft know something a lot of other companies simply refuse to acknowledge—that organizations lacking psychological safety are galloping their way to extinction. Psychological safety is a social condition in which you feel included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo—all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way.

Why Google and Microsoft Obsess Over Psychological Safety

Google and Microsoft know something a lot of other companies simply refuse to acknowledge—that organizations lacking psychological safety are galloping their way to extinction. Psychological safety is a social condition in which you feel included, safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo—all without fear of being embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way.

27 Podcast Episodes About Psychological Safety

Mindvalley How Psychological Safety Can Create High Performing Teams

In this episode we’re joined by founder and CEO of LeaderFactor Timothy R Clark, where we’ll be exploring the revolutionary concept of Psychological Safety in the workplace. By the end of this podcast you’ll know just how to use it to jumpstart your own and your employee’s performance in the office.

Avoiding a Culture of Fear | The Culture Hacks Podcast

Nothing destroys innovation and engagement more than fear. Dr. Tim Clark is a master of detecting and rooting out fear in an organization's culture. His book is absolutely awesome in helping us know what we need to do as leaders to create a culture of trust. The book is called The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation.

Be Brave At Work

Join us on Be Brave at Work as we hear from Timothy Clark, founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, a training, consulting, coaching, and assessment organization. Timothy is the author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, and he chats about the impact of psychological safety and bravery in the workplace.

It Shouldn't Be Expensive to Be Yourself

Join us on Be Brave at Work as we hear from Timothy Clark, founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, a training, consulting, coaching, and assessment organization. Timothy is the author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation, and he chats about the impact of psychological safety and bravery in the workplace.

Dan Hill's EQ Spotlight The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

How does any organization invite the true, full participation of its members? In his new book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2020), Timothy Clark explains.

Mark Botros The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

The 4 Stages, Maslow, and other Needs-Based Psychological Models. Corporate Cautionary Tales – Companies that died…and why. How leaders can kill an organization. The Fear Button” and what it does to an organization. Psychological Safety at scale and How to change culture in an organization

The Importance of Psychological Safety

Employee safety is being redefined. We write volumes of standard operating procedures about it. We measure it, regulate it, and insure against its risks. In the U.S. alone, organizations funnel billions into creating workplaces and environments in which employees are safe to bring their best talents.

The Bregman Leadership Podcast | The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

How can you mitigate feelings of fear and uncertainty at work? Timothy Clark, founder and CEO of LeaderFactor and most recently the author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, seeks to understand why and how people manage the “expense” of this kind of safety. Discover the four stages and how they compound, whether or not we can have an intellectual disagreement without making it personal, and how empathy can diffuse defensiveness.

Key Ways to Build Psychological Safety as a Leader

“So if you really want to incubate innovation, you cannot ignore the culture. You do so at your peril, because there is no way that you can ignore the culture. I understood that before, but not at the depth that I understand it today.”

WGVU Public Media | The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

We talk to Dr. Timothy R. Clark, his topic, the 4 stages of Psychological Safety. We talk all things stages and safety.

How Psychological Safety Can Fuel Growth and Innovation

Psychological safety in today’s workplaces has been garnering a lot of attention as leaders and organizations look for ways to boost productivity and retention in their workplace. But is our understanding of this concept too narrow?

Psychological Safety: The Path to Inclusion and Innovation

Psychological safety is the bedrock of inclusion. But the behaviors you need to practice to build it in your team go against your instincts: being vulnerable, admitting you don’t know, embracing failure, giving others candid feedback, asking for feedback yourself.

Making Positive Psychology Work

In this week’s podcast, we explore The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety and how we can shape our wellbeing and performance at work.

The Hidden Why | The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

he book is a practical, hands-on guide that shows how leaders can build psychological safety in their organizations, creating an environment where employees feel included, fully engaged, and encouraged to contribute their best efforts and ideas. What I found most insightful about our discussion is the parallel these stages have on all social situations and therefore relevant to us all.

Performance Matters | Leading Change

This episode focuses on a critical leadership matter--leading change. Listen to Conrad discuss this 'gateway competency' with Dr. Timothy R. Clark, the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, who shares his work and counsel on how we can effectively take on, and lead, change within our organizations.

Millennial Manhood | The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Timothy R. Clark as he talks about his latest book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Is it Safe to Fail?

What is that special place where team members aren't afraid to step out and try something new?  It can be hard to create but it's the space where we'll enjoy more success.

Creating a Culture of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is an absolute necessity in order to have innovative, high achieving teams. According to today’s guest, Dr. Timothy Clark, founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, a team’s leader is the cornerstone in creating and fostering this multifaceted safety within its culture.

Psychological Safety to Innovate Your Company

In this episode we’re covering: How to ensure your company doesn’t fall. How to be a good leader for your team’s success. How psychological safety plays a role in companies’ existence  And so much more!!

How to Lead Your Team Through The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

In order to perform to their potential, employees have certain work environmental needs, aligned to commonly understood human needs. If that all sounds a little academic, it’s because we’ve got an eminently qualified guest teacher this week: author, entrepreneur, and Oxford doctor of social sciences Timothy Clark.

How to Foster a Culture of Innovation

In this episode of the Strategy & Leadership Podcast, we were joined by Timothy Clark, author of The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, and founder/CEO of Leader Factor - a boutique consulting firm focused on creating innovative cultures and organizational change.

A Framework for Psychological Safety

We explore ideas about impacting and improving the way people lead and work together in organizations today. For all of you out there who are open to new views, visions and dreams.

Love in Action | Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is inexpensive authenticity: being yourself without any economic, emotional, social and political expense. Safety is holistic, Tim says. After a devastating experience early in his career, he realized it was his stewardship to help create, curate and protect a culture that would provide psychological safety to the members of an organization. It’s a sacred stewardship every leader has, he adds.

The Burden of Command

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Timothy R. Clark of LeaderFactor. We discuss his new book, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety.

Creating Incubators of Innovation

How can we enhance inclusion, integration and innovation? To explore these topics and a lot more, Thomas Mulhern joined with world renowned expert on psychological safety, best-selling author and CEO of LeaderFactor, Timothy R. Clark, took a deep dive into Tim’s new book, “The Four Stages of Psychological Safety.”

4 Stages to a Psychological Safe Workplace

Are you ready to learn the 4 stages of a psychologically safe workplace? Safety is not a flat topic–there are layers to a person’s sense of safety. Psychological safety is also something we have to work to achieve and maintain. As leaders, we have the privilege and responsibility to create safe spaces. Today’s guest is Dr. Timothy Clark.

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